Mediating Young People’s Bedrooms: ‘Zoning’ Bedroom Cultures

Abstract

Material ‘things’ in bedrooms are made meaningful in a number of different ways by young people and as I considered in the previous chapter, they acquire their meaning with reference to a variety of contexts that are both unique to the life-worlds of individual young people as well as through discourses of wider ‘public’ cultures of media, consumption and identity that govern and shaped this materiality. In examining the meaning of things in Chapter 4, I considered the constant interplay of the public and the private realm, concluding that as a ‘container of meaning’ a young person’s bedroom is rarely stable, its variation in content potentially being as fluid and interchangeable as the life of the young person who occupies that space. However, I argued that within this context of flux and change young people use material ‘things’ in their bedrooms as a way to ‘cement’ their identities, or elements of it, and make their personal space meaningful, and in many ways more fixed, in what feels like an ever-shifting cultural world, particularly one characterised for young people by a new social media environment.