Rhythms and Flow: Timing and Spacing the Digitally Mediated Everyday

Time and space are better understood as verbs, conveying action, instead of nouns. They are not just frames to understand youth experiences, as youth experiences, practices, and relationships produce particular times and spaces. These experiences, practices, and relationships involving people and their material environment reconfigure everyday rhythms and biographical times, as well as different places and spaces, from domestic environments to urban public places. Objects and bodies, with their trajectories and their senses, constitute and specify spaces, producing particular rhythms and assemblages of continuities and discontinuities, in a dynamic and changing process, where controversies and conflicts can emerge when the features, movements, and intentions of this plurality of bodies and objects clash. This chapter discusses two examples of time and space dynamics of young people’s everyday, drawing on research on digital uses and practices in Spain and other European countries. Time has many dimensions. An important element that is often overlooked in academic study of childhood and youth is rhythm. A rhythmic analysis of young people’s everyday lives can highlight the similarities and differences with results of research on young people’s temporalities in the 1990s regarding to the emergence of a new digital material environment. Topics explored are some examples of rhythmic behavior, such as rhythmic crowds in leisure and politic activities, and their role in the shaping of public spaces; the complex articulations between the public, privacy, and intimacy; and the forms of synchronization and desynchronization regarding times and rhythms given by the obligations, habits, and expectations set by the family, institutions, and peer groups.