Abstract
Mobile and social media are blurring the social spaces in which teens construct and disseminate representations of identity to their peers. We refer to these representations as identity tableaux. In this paper, we present an unexpected finding from a long-term study investigating the use of mobile media, visual art, and civic engagement to reconnect at-risk youth with their education. Using a framework of hybrid spaces and multimodal media literacies, for our analysis, we looked at the processes adolescents utilize to create and share representations of their identity within the social and intimate spaces that they inhabit. From our analysis of social media posts and interviews, we saw that the participating teens defined their social relationships through representations of affective experiences using context-specific multimodal media literacies. Youth identity formation using mobile and social media is a synergetic relationship between the individual and the collective online.
