Mozilla is running a free online collaborative course to explore new ways of teaching digital literacies through making and learning together. It’s called Teach the Web.  This leads up to the Mozilla #makerparty, which celebrates the web and making, two of my favourite things.

I’ve joined a group who are discussing ‘Creative Coding with Canvas’ and so am hoping to get some new ideas and tips about how to teach coding-shy design students and newbies about the HTML Canvas element. As my contribution to this group, I thought I’d share an introductory programming course that I’ve been running with a group of teens at the Ikamva Youth branch in Makhaza, Cape Town.  They call themselves the Ikamvacoders – what an inspiring group of young people.

Hard-working Ikamvacoders take a break

The course introduces some basic programming topics using Processing and Processing.js, a language designed for visual expression. Processing is based in Java, but now makes it easy to export procedural art, interactive sketches, simple games and animations to Javascript, via processing.js, which uses  the HTML5 canvas element. Processing now also provides a very effective and easy Android mode.

Learning Processing from Pacman

Processing comes with absolutely beautiful tutorials, clearly explained examples and extensive online resources. In my experience, although these resources are aimed at non-programmers, they are generally pitched a bit high for absolute beginners, particularly for kids. The Ikamvacoders asked whether they could learn how to build a simple 2D game. This led me to develop some absolute beginner Processing tutorials around a Pacman theme.

• Introduction to Processing – make a nametag
• Understanding shapes and coordinates
• Colours in RGB
• Mzansi messages - shapes, colours and text
• Variables – custom-made Pacman
• Functions
• If statement
• Pacman in functions
  
• Pacman portraits
• Keypress interactions - Pacman moves around
• A new Pacman game by Robin, age 12

As you’ll see the tutorials are still quite sketchy, and I hope to have some time to put in some extra explanatory details which I handle verbally in my classes. But the examples all work and they should provide a good starting point for anyone who wants to take this visual approach to teaching programming.

The Ikamvacoders also want to make web portfolios and I’m looking forward to introducing them to some of the new Mozilla tools, so that they can start publishing their own work using tools such as Thimble and Popcorn Maker, which look perfect for kids and teens working at this introductory level.

Future goals – mobile Processing

I’m extremely impressed with how the Ikamvacoders have taken to  Processing, but its frustrating that they have so little access to computers, so little time to practice their skills. Overall my objective is to investigate mobile interfaces to developing Processing sketches. These need to work on the phones even when they are out of airtime (this happens a lot of the time). This kind of app will allow them to tinker and mess around more,  even when they’re not at the computer.

If I have time, I’ll also post about a similar course I run with media students at the University of Cape Town, where the focus is on webmaking for journalists.

What do protestors say during South African ‘service delivery’ protests? Burning tires and violent actions make the news, but protesters’ perspectives are seldom heard in the media.  After the crowd has dispersed, what happens to the protesters and their demands? Unlike in other countries, where social media can be used to mobilise and bring issues to the attention of a wider public, in South Africa, social media are expensive and inaccessible to many. Police records describe the protests as ‘crowd control incidents’, they note whether the crowd was peaceful and lump a wide range of issues, grievances and campaigns together, categorising them as ‘Dissatisfied with service delivery’.

Police crowd control data – Map of protests in South Africa 01/01/2009-30/11/2012

This visualisation project uses police data to represent the number of service delivery protest incidents in South Africa, during 2009-2012.

This visualisation shows how many protests are recorded in the police crowd control data for the period 01/01/2009-30/11/2012, The red circles indicate which areas have experienced more protests than others. We’ve also included links so that you can check Google to see which incidents received attention from South Africa’s media.

The project is work in progress by Marion Walton and UCT’s Interactive Media class. The class is taking their first steps in data journalism, and are learning about JSON data and the Google Maps API. We are currently cleaning the data and exploring visual techniques to show the frequency of protests and the nature and distribution of media coverage.

Code  adapted from Gabriel Svennerberg.

Peter Olsthoorn showed us how to work out and claim our value to Facebook:

What is your Facebook value? Work it out here

Benjamin Grosser introduced everyone to his Facebook Demetricator
Facebook Demetricator and the Easing of Prescribed Sociality

Karlessi from Ippolita unpacked Religions 2.0 or the rituals of the participation society and how they feed the friendship algorithm
Ippolita

There was a Skype video of Richard Metzger challenging Facebook’s strategy to get publishers to pay for ‘sponsored stories’

 Facebook I want my friends back

Hester Scheurwater shot back after her fantasy self-portraits fell foul of Facebook’s censorious gaze

Shooting back

For a world where Facebook is our passport, Tobias Leingruber offered us a Facebook ID

FB Identity

There were also some great links shared in Simona Lodi’s presentation: Art as Networked Machinery: When Art Becomes Anti-Social for Being More Social

Anti-social blocks social sites

IOCOSE

A crowded apocolypse  draws on crowdsourcing to generate a multitude of conspiracy theories

Rui Guerra and David Jonas

Uncloud: Control your own cloud

Les Liens Invisibles

15 MINUTES, ANONYMOUS

I teach an MA course in Advanced Media Methodologies at the University of Cape Town. This  year I’m presenting an elective which introduces Media students to Social Network Analysis. I’m really looking forward to teaching the course and seeing how a conceptual grounding in social network analysis and the  techniques of visualisation will change the work my students are able to produce for their dissertations.

We don’t have much class time and there are so many new skills to be learned.  I decided to design the course around a series of exercises and readings that students can use to prepare before class.

Here is a first draft of the outline with the course readings and exercises. Any feedback welcome!

Analysing Social Media: Text, image, network

Early adopters (joined pre Dec 2007) in my own Twitter network

Week 1: Reading and exercise

Garton, L., Haythornthwaite, C., & Wellman, B. (2006). Studying Online Social Networks. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3(1).

1. Create a blog (if you don’t have one already). You can use a free site such as wordpress.com. You’ll be posting your answers to the class assignments on the blog.
2. After reading the Garton et al (2006) reading for this week, prepare and pilot a short interview. Your interview should explore a research participant’s use of social media to communicate with his/her strong ties and should be designed to yield both quantitative and qualitative data. Post a short rationale for the interview questions on your blog and bring the questions to class next week.

Spreadsheet listing connections in our class

• Complete the Connections spreadsheet We will use this to map social networks during class.
  1. Click through to the editable spreadsheet on Google Drive
  2. Add your details to the final line of the spreadsheet.
  3. I have already added my details and the fact that I know all of you.
  4. Add your details by putting your name below the final line of data in the first column. In the second column, (next to your name), add the name of any other student you already know in the class, one per line. (I have already added the connections between the Interactive Media production students.
  5. In the third column, indicate from which class you already know that student.
  6. If you know the student from more than one class, add another line with your name, the student’s name and the name of the additional class.

Week 2: Readings and exercises

Hansen, D., Shneiderman, B., & Smith, M. A. (2010). Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL.  Morgan Kaufmann. (Chapter 3) Chapter 10)

Bruns, A., & Burgess, J. (2012). Researching News Discussion on Twitter. Journalism Studies, 13(5-6), 801–814.

1. As shown to you in class, and using the vertex data from the Connections spreadsheet:

• Download NodeXL and follow the installation instructions. You will need a Windows PC with Excel (or Windows and Excel installed on your Mac). You will also need internet access on the machine. NodeXL will not work on the UCT network behind the firewall.
• Work through the NodeXL tutorial
• Create a NodeXL sociogram to depict the relationships recorded in the Connections spreadsheet
• Calculate the graph metrics. What are the various centrality measures? What do these numbers mean? What does this suggest to you?
• Are there any clusters? What do you notice about them? What does this mean?
• What is the graph density? What does this tell us?
• How can you make the graph more readable?
• Create a matrix to depict the relationships..
•  How would you go about showing how everyone in the class communicates with fellow students and tutors about the social media assignments?
• Do you have any criticism of the data we collected or how NodeXL represents it? How could we improve the data in the graph?

2.      Advanced (for students who want to use social network data for creative projects)

• Download R  http://r.adu.org.za/ and download R studio http://www.rstudio.com/ide/download/ and install both packages.
• Read Chapters 1-5 Stanton, J. (2013). Introduction to Data Science. http://jsresearch.net/groups/teachdatascience/
• Use R data frames and data downloaded from the Statssa website to work out the median unemployment rate for South African municipalities.

Week 3: Readings and exercises

Hansen, D., Shneiderman, B., & Smith, M. A. (2010). Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL.  Morgan Kaufmann. (Chapter 10)

1. Read Hansen et al. Chapter 10 and download your own set of Twitter data to explore and graph your own personal network on Twitter.

Optional (for creative projects):

1. Read Chapters 6-11 Stanton, J. (2013). Introduction to Data Science.
   http://jsresearch.net/groups/teachdatascience/
2. Conduct your own popularity contest to compare and graph Twitter activity around two words or phrases which are in the news right now.

When teaching my students at UCT’s Centre for Film and Media Studies how to visualise geographical data, I’ve previously used Mapstraction, along with a good textbook by Adam DuVander and his excellent Twitter geosearch example.

The Mapstraction lesson only required a couple of small updates to form the basis of an assignment where the students created their own custom version of a visualisation of geocoded tweets. It worked well, providing an excellent example of how to mashup social media data with a map. I also like the tutorial because it provides a relatively simple research tool for my postgrad students (who are usually not web developers). For example, I used it recently to research the applications used by journalists and delegates at the ANC’s December 2012 conference in Mangaung. It was also helpful as a way of showing students what a tiny proportion of twitter data is geocoded (usually lower than 1%), which smartphones are in use in various countries, and (perhaps most important) the dangers of assuming that the comments and activities of Twitter users in South Africa reflect the preoccupations of the population as a whole. As one of the delegates to the Mangaung conference tweeted ‘ANC’s masses are not your Twitter people. So Social Media Hype will mislead you’.

Geocoded tweets at ANC’s Mangaung conference in December 2012.

Applications used to post geolocated tweets from ANC Conference, Mangaung, 2012

Mapstraction always appealed to me because of the ability to use it for open data providers, and the ease it promises if you want to switch from one map provider to another.

Unfortunately, it’s the nature of the game in this field that you have to keep running just to stand still. Preparing the new version of my course, I realised that I needed to update the tutorial as my exercise and the textbook builds on v2 of the Google Maps Javascript API. This is now deprecated and apparently won’t be available for much longer (until May 19 2013 to be precise). Given that I’d used Mapstraction, I didn’t think that it would be too difficult to make the switch, but sadly this was NOT the case.

Geocoded tweets about the beach posted near Durban, Janauary 2012, now using Google Maps API v3

The new version of the mashup (you can try it out here) allows you to search Twitter for geocoded tweets, and after searching you can summarise and view the twitter data.

I’m now using Gabriel Svennerberg’s textbook, and his Google Maps API v 3 JSON tutorial.

I still use the Twitter API and most of DuVander’s code for mining the JSON data, but I (reluctantly) abandoned Mapstraction, as I struggled a bit to get it to work, and I’m a bit short of time. I now display the data directly via Google Maps Javascript API v 3 instead of using the Mapstraction layer.

I’ve added a couple of features which I believe may be useful to researchers, and which I hope will spur my students to engage with the Twitter data in a more focused way. (I’ve found students like to decorate the maps but are overly cautious when it comes to making use of the additional data available from the tweets). The new version is just a start, but it provides a list of geocoded tweets, allows the user to see all the query results in JSON format or download the data as a JSON text file (although this requires browser popup windows to be enabled).

I tried updating the example to use the new version of Mapstraction and the Google Maps Javascript API v3 but ran out of time. I wondered whether anyone else has seen working examples which use Mapstraction together with Google API v3 and Twitter data? Please do let me know! Comments on the mashup example are welcome, though it is very much work in progress.

We’re hosting the following public lecture at the Centre for Film and Media Studies next week:

The Remaking of Citizens: Media, Civic Participation and Learning.

David Buckingham

Loughborough University, UK

In most Western democracies, young people are seen to be disaffected from civic and political life. Yet while television has been accused of contributing to apathy and alienation, the internet has been proclaimed as a means of stimulating participation and regenerating public debate. In this presentation, I will look back to some older research on children and television, and draw on some more recent work on a large pan-European research project about young people, the internet and civic participation. I will be taking a critical look at the evidence for such claims, but I also want to challenge the terms of this debate, in terms of the dominant constructions of young people, of technology and of citizenship. I will suggest that technology alone will not address the fundamental causes of young people’s disengagement: rather, we need to address more basic issues of social power and inequality, and identify the forms of motivation and competence that young people need to develop if they are to become active citizens.

DATE: 28 AUG

TIME: 4.00PM – 4.45PM

VENUE: ROBERT LESLIE SOCIAL SCIENCE 2D, UPPER CAMPUS, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

David Buckingham is Professor of Media and Communications at Loughborough University, UK. His research focuses on children and young people’s interactions with electronic media, and on media education. His recent books include Beyond Technology: Children’s Learning in the Age of Digital Culture (2007); Global Children, Global Media; Migration, Media and Childhood (2007); Video Cultures: Media Technology and Everyday Creativity (2009); and The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture (2011).

Professor David Buckingham will be a visiting Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at the CFMS for the most of August. David is a leading researcher on children’s and young people’s interactions with electronic media, and on media literacy education.

Media education, digital literacies and young people

August 3 9-4pm

Venue: TB Davie Seminar Room, Postgraduate Centre, Otto Beit Bldg, Upper campus.

South Africa has had its share of panics about young people and digital media – most recently by placing age restrictions on Brett Murray’s controversial portrait of Jacob Zuma, The Spear of the Nation, while scandals involving abusive uses of mobile media have contributed to calls for cellphone bans in schools. At the same time there’s a belief that new technologies will allow young people to bypass the massive shortcomings of the educational system or that disgruntled young people will use new technologies to express themselves and transform their societies through civic action. This workshop will be a great opportunity to open a broader discussion about digital literacy and media education in South Africa, at what seems a key moment, when South Africa has more cell phones than people, and when rapid adoption of social media is redefining ‘private’ and ‘public’ and challenging the ways local broadcasters, politicians, educators and researchers engage with young people.
This workshop aims to develop a more nuanced view of young people’s relationships to digital media and technologies by addressing the following issues:

• The diversity of technologies in use, and their relationship to different social contexts
• The variety of ways in which young people are introduced to technology use at home, school and university,
• What digital media means from young people’s perspectives, and distinctive appropriations in peer and interest groups
• How distinctions in access to technology contribute to young people’s experiences of growing up in a highly unequal society.
• How the rise of user generated content and social media affects the practices and mandate of teachers, public broadcasters and community media catering for young people,
• The challenges of multimodal and networked communication to traditional print-centred curricula, and
• How young people’s evolving practices and use of new media genres challenge existing research methods.

We hope to create a dialogue which will allow researchers and teachers to address the meaning of media literacy in relation to the violence, commodification, inequalities and surveillance young people live with, but also to account the new forms of connectedness, the pursuit of fantasy, intimacy and play, and the shifting possibilities emerging as young people engage with and imagine the world.

Here is a full programme for the day.

Here is a map of upper campus to help you find  the venue. Otto Beit building is C7 on the map.

Fascinating mobile stats from +Arthur Goldstuck and World Wide Worx reflect dramatic increases in extent and intensity of mobile internet use in South African cities and towns (in an URBAN >16 sample) with data spend increasing by half to 12% of airtime budget.

According to their findings, 41% are browsing the web now, Facebook use has almost doubled to 38%, instant messaging app for smartphones Watsapp is now used by 25%, Blackberry grew fourfold to 18%.

Now that the internet adoption curve for South Africa is well into the early majority stage things should get very interesting indeed.

Read the article on Times Live

I was part of this very enjoyable panel  at IAMCR2012 on on 17 July in Durban, South Africa

Chair: Milagros Rivera

Respondent: Herman Wasserman

Over the past decade, Southern Africa has witnessed rapid growth in access to mobile communication and, more recently, the expansion of mobile internet has introduced a prolific variety of affordable messaging genres. Young people in Southern Africa have claimed mobile messaging as a space for everyday gossip, flirtation, friendship, youth culture and media-sharing. Like other young people around the world, the early adopters of mobile internet in these countries increasingly use their mobile phones to browse news shared by their friends, deciding whether to pass on news-related links and occasionally sharing cartoons, videos and visual mashups with political themes. Search, social media aggregators and mobile instant messaging and chat platforms are new political players, with roles as both gate-openers and gate-keepers to content, participation and mobilisation. As local print media circulation falls, mobile and online channels are important sources of political news, functioning often as a back-channel to young people’s use of mass media, as a form of viewer and listener participation in broadcast programmes or social media pages of stations and programmes. Political parties and organisations have responded to the accessibility of mass mobile audiences with a range of mobile-centred campaigns, although official attempts to engage interaction via mobile phones have met with uneven success.

While a range of activist projects involve the use of SMS, users of basic phones remain limited by the costs of SMS, those who can afford slightly more expensive feature phone handsets have rushed headlong to adopt messaging platforms such as MXit, Facebook, and (to a lesser extent) Twitter.  Further up the commodity scale, the more complex functionality and greater affordability of smartphone messaging applications and the Blackberry internet service provides access to higher volumes of visual and audio media along with better privacy.

In the context of this massive expansion of access and functionality, young people in Southern Africa are growing up in some of the most unequal societies in the world, and are confronted by a wide range of political and social challenges. Our panel will refer specifically to examples of young people’s political and civic engagement in the inter-generational dynamics of the clashes between the ANC Youth League and the party in South Africa, Zambia’s 2011 elections and the failed April 12 Uprising in Swaziland. All the presentations will consider the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies for understanding young people’s use of mobile media, and their participation in social media sites.

From the street to Facebook: mobile publics, urban sociability and civic engagement during Zambia’s 2011 elections

Wendy Willems

Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Mobile phones have either been conceptualised as technologies of freedom crucial in the mobilisation of demonstrations and protests globally or as ‘middle class fads’. The role of new media (and social media in particular) in political change has of course become even more hotly contested in recent protests part of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, which led to debates on whether or not the revolution was/would be tweeted. However, what has marked recent debates is the tendency to analytically separate virtual and physical spaces. The political implications of mobile phones have insufficiently been contextualised within the broader configuration of offline spaces. Furthermore, as Judith Butler (2011) has recently argued, we often consider public spaces as spaces that are already public, hereby ignoring the processes in which these spaces are claimed and constituted as public.

Butler’s call for a deeper understanding of the politics of the street is particularly pertinent in the context of Zambia’s recent general elections. The relatively smooth change of power from the ruling Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) to the opposition Patriotic Front (PF) represented a crucial moment in Africa’s political history, and was accompanied by mass celebrations in the street which evoked the atmosphere of a low-level revolution. However, the celebrations (which were largely ignored in global media) following the announcement of the results were preceded by a tense atmosphere in which Zambians were urged to stay put at home and not move. The call not to move turned the street into a space of unsociability, an abnormal situation given the crucial role of public talk in Zambia also known as ‘radio trottoir’, the everyday discussion of political affairs on pavements, in public transport and beer halls. Moreover, the limitations on physical mobility coincided with a court injunction on private media which were accused of publishing “speculative stories” on the election results.

The information black-out led particularly middle-class Zambians to resort to their internet-enabled mobile phones for updates on the elections on social media.  The Facebook page of the private television station Muvi TV in particular came to constitute an important, lively public space where Zambians actively discussed the elections. Within seconds, updates on the page elicited hundreds of responses. Muvi TV’s page is largely unmoderated and highly interactive which syncs with the station’s broader aim of providing a voice to Zambia’s working class as opposed to the heavy focus on hard news and political elites on the state-controlled Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation.

Drawing on an analysis of Muvi TV’s Facebook page coupled with participant observation and interviews in an up-market shopping mall and an informal market in Lusaka, this paper examines the fluid movement between online and offline spaces in the context of Zambia’s hotly contested elections. Echoing Sheller’s (2004) understanding of publics as fluid, momentary spaces and Butler’s (2011) work on the politics of the street, I argue that a more location-aware understanding of mobile phone use in civic engagement enables us to gain a better grasp of the shifting nature of urban sociability between virtual and physical spaces.

Prepaid social media and the mobile internet in Southern Africa:  Patterns in young people’s mobile discourse

Marion Walton and Pierinne Leukes

Young South Africans are growing up in one of the most unequal societies in the world, and are confronted by a wide range of political and social challenges. Poor service provision is a simmering cause of discontent around the country. Youth unemployment has soared by 20% since the economic crisis of 2008, exacerbating discontent about the lacklustre performance of the schooling system. In January 2012, young people caused fatalities by literally storming the gates of a university in a stampede to claim the few available places. Racial discourses have gained increased traction as South Africa’s post-democracy ideals of equality and opportunity prove stubbornly difficult to attain.

Mass appropriation of mobile messaging by young people in South Africa has placed texting and (more recently) many-to-many communication via the internet within the reach of many young people. This paper will tackle ongoing issues of differentiated access to and use of mobile communication, and particularly of access to the mobile internet. These differences have important implications for the mediatisation of talk in general and political talk in particular, given the role of aggregation and visual communication in new interfaces to political discourse.

We review some recent qualitative studies of youth mobile participation in South Africa, highlighting the specific local patterns of adoption and participation, in particular the influence of differential commodification of mobile communication, the tiered functionality of phones and local preferences for Bluetooth over more costly forms of online media sharing. We contextualise these case studies with public data from Facebook and Twitter to show distinctive patterns of participation in social media. We consider case studies of the failed April 12 uprising in Swaziland and the discourses of inter-generational confrontation activated in the clashes in South Africa between the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress and the organisation’s Youth League. These reveal the dynamics of attention ecologies in mainstream media and online media aggregation in relation to the varied affordances of social networks and instant messaging or chat interfaces.

While access has expanded in comparison to other contexts, production, editing and distribution of user-generated content remains limited in this context by the high cost/bit for data. Young people who have easy access to desktop computers, cheaper forms of broadband and media production software remain at a distinct advantage.

Perceptions about Mobilising the Youth for Political Purposes through Mobile Technology: A South African study

Nathalie Hyde-Clarke

Social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook have become platforms for the mobilisation of social and political forces, allowing the previously disenfranchised to voice their concerns and aspirations. In South Africa, there is renewed and increased interest in the opportunities that new media offers citizens to engage with and challenge existing political leadership. This paper explores the potential that mobile technology offers youth to participate in the political process, and to what extent the youth would actually use it for this purpose. Findings are based on a survey conducted in May 2011 with 200 university students registered in second year Communication Studies at the University of Johannesburg, and a subsequent focus group discussion with postgraduates on those findings, and their own perceptions and experiences. While the results may not be generalised to the greater South African population, it does provide an insight into perceptions and uses of this technology for political purposes among young voters. Interviews have also been held with the two major political parties, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA), to discuss their mobile phone strategy and the methods they have used to target the youth to encourage more engaged voter behaviour. In this way, the research is an interesting combination of authorial intent and audience reception via a vis the use of political text messages in an emerging democracy.

Facebook and youth political participation in South Africa

Tanja Bosch

Online social networking sites, Facebook in particular, are growing in popularity in South Africa. With the increasing affordability of mobile handsets, users are able to access the mobile internet and connect via mobile social networking applications. The proposed paper explores how Facebook is used by South African youth, with particular reference to their political participation and involvement. Research has shown the declining involvement of young people in political processes, particularly since democratic elections in 1994. This is an international trend, with a general global rise of political apathy and decreased news consumption among youth. However, Facebook and other new media applications widely used by young people have been seen as a potential vehicle to re-engage youth in political debate. The potential usefuless of such applications for creating networked publics and mobilizing political action was highlighted recently during the Arab Spring; and conversely, Facebook and Twitter have been used (e.g. in the United States) to target potential youth voters. The notion of e-democracy has raised the potential of the internet to enhance political action and activism.Through a qualitative content analysis of Facebook pages, together with interviews and focus groups with South African youth, this paper explores the links between Facebook and political participation.

Exploring the Relationship between South African Youth, News Media and Online Political Participation

Musa Ndlovu and Chilombo Mbenga

Political knowledge and participation have steadily declined in recent years, particularly among youth. In popular and academic discussions of youth culture, youth are regularly presented as politically ignorant, cynical, and apathetic. Various public institutions view this abandonment of politics by young people as a threat to the survival of the public sphere and democratic process.  This paper challenges conventional conceptions of political ‘knowledge’ and ‘participation’ by also exploring South African youths’ use of social media for political participation and knowledge. The article then draws from relevant popular and academic literature to identify some of the causes of young people’s declining levels of political participation and to examine youths’ relationship with mainstream politics. The article also examines the relationship between politics and young people’s cultural spaces in the context of global capitalism.