Abstract
While participation in social media has become everyday practice among young people, there have been few studies examining how youth as social media users are represented in the media discourse. Focusing on the promotional materials of an award-winning and widely-viewed documentary film, The Social Dilemma, this paper examines the media depictions of youth that attract the public’s attention. Through a social semiotic analysis, we analyzed the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings in the poster and trailer to identify how young people have been represented in the media discourse. Our findings show that they are constructed as vulnerable social media users who are manipulated by social media companies. We argue that such depictions of youth not only negate their sense of agency but also ignore their active engagement in the participatory culture afforded by social media. The implications of such depictions propagate a protectionist perspective of youth. This can undermine efforts towards the development of an empowerment approach in digital literacy education.
1 Introduction
The ubiquity of social media has brought about a new social landscape in the contemporary digital age. According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), social media as a participatory and collaborative Web 2.0 platform is built on user-generated content. Hence, a participatory culture has emerged as networked individuals not only consume information but also produce and share information with each other on social media (Jenkins 2009). With the initiation of various social media technologies such as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, participating in social media communities has become the everyday practice of people today. The number of social media users has also grown rapidly, with more than 10 % growth in the number of users between 2021 and 2022; that is, there were 424 million new social media users in the year of 2021.[1]
Compared to other age groups, statistics showed that young people aged between 16 and 24 spend the most time using social media, with around 3 h of daily use (We Are Social & Hootsuite 2022). Among a variety of social media, a recent “Teens, Social Media, and Technology” report conducted by Pew Research Center showed that the top five most popular social media platforms among American youth aged 13–17 are YouTube (95 %), TikTok (67 %), Instagram (62 %), Snapchat (59 %) and Facebook (32 %). In particular, TikTok and Snapchat users are especially engaged with the apps, as a quarter of them reported that they use these apps regularly (Vogels et al. 2022). In this paper, the term “youth” is used to describe Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012; Seemiller and Grace 2016). They are growing up in a world shaped by digital technologies and are actively participating in social media, exercising agency, in terms of giving voices, taking actions, or making changes through their engagement (Goldman et al. 2008).
Focusing on the high engagement of youth in social media platforms, a recent documentary film released by Netflix, titled The Social Dilemma, identified the struggles that youth have been experiencing with their use of social media. It also as sought to unveil the manipulating mechanism behind the social media platforms. Through interviews with former technical experts from popular social media platforms as well as narrating young people’s everyday life with social media, the documentary film aims to propagate the message that social media use brings negative consequences – including adversely affecting individuals’ mental health, encouraging conspiracy theories, and resulting in chaos for society. Significantly, the publicity around the documentary film through the poster and trailer has successfully attracted the public’s attention and received more than 380 million views in the first month of its release.[2]
We focus on the promotional materials of this documentary film for our analysis in this paper. Promotional materials reach a broader range of viewers than the actual film (Ghaznavi et al. 2017) and are often depicted and presented in a deliberately attractive and persuasive manner in order to shape consumers’ expectations and encourage their selection of film (Febrianti 2019; Finsterwalder et al. 2012). With the aim of marketing the film, promotional materials tend to highlight the main ideas in the film in a more provocative manner to attract viewers. Scholars have observed a recent paratextual turn, in which academic interest towards the promotional materials of films has increased (Johnston 2019). This includes studies which have compared and contrasted the cultural differences shown in the posters and trailers (e.g., Carter 2018), studies which have examined how semiotic choices are orchestrated to promote the film (e.g., Nguyen 2021) and studies on gender stereotypes in promotional materials (e.g., Aley and Hahn 2020).
In this paper, we are interested in how the depictions of youth as social media users are constructed in a selective way so that the promotional materials of this documentary could evoke curiosity and draw the potential audience’s interest in what “social dilemmas” youth are struggling with. More importantly, examining the depictions of youth using social media in these promotional materials could help us understand how youth are often depicted in the mainstream mass media to arouse the public’s attention. Hence, the research question guiding our study is how young people, as social media users, are represented in the promotional materials to draw the attention of the public. To address this research question, this paper has adopted a social semiotic approach to analyzing both the poster and the official trailer of The Social Dilemma. Through the analysis, we aim to elicudate the ideologies that shape the understanding of young people’s social media practices in the public discourse.
2 Literature review
2.1 Understanding young people’s social media use
How young people use social media has been studied extensively across multiple disciplines around the world. Many of these studies have a specific focus on the relationship between young people’s social media use and their mental health or well-being (e.g., Abi-Jaoude et al. 2020; Alonzo et al. 2021; Yang et al. 2022). However, a literature review conducted by Schmeichel et al. (2018) found that most qualitative research examining young people’s social media use often positions youth in a stereotypically problematic way. The discussions on the harmful effects of social media on young people have often outweighed that of the positives. For example, Steinsbekk et al. (2021) found that other-oriented social media use often reduced young people’s self-esteem, as they were exposed to the ideal presentation of others without receiving positive feedback for themselves. Similarly, while young people are constantly comparing themselves with others on social media platforms, a variety of mental problems such as depression, anxiety, and distress brought about by social media have also been widely examined throughout the world (Keles et al. 2020; Vidal et al. 2020). Moreover, the issue of cyberbullying through problematic social media use and its effect on youth such as suicidal ideation have also received wide scholarly discussions (e.g., Abaido 2020; Craig et al. 2020; Giumetti and Kowalski 2022). Scholars have also argued that social media brings harm to youth through social media addiction (Sun and Zhang 2021), increases the sense of social isolation (Primack et al. 2017), and encourages the fear of missing out (Roberts and David 2020).
Young people often consume news through social media such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube rather than mass media.[3] There has also been a growing concern about online disinformation since the circulation of fake news during the 2016 US presidential election (e.g., Grinberg et al. 2019) and the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Rocha et al. 2021). The widespread dissemination of fake news on social media has been an issue of concern as youth might consume, produce, or share the news without considering its credibility (Middaugh 2019; Pérez-Escoda et al. 2021). In response, schools usually take a protectionist perspective by advocating digital/media literacy education as a solution to address the media “problems” (Buckingham 2020). Weninger (2020) indicated that the protectionist approach to digital literacy often fosters the idea of cyber safety through a singular focus on protecting youth from harmful media content such as fake news.
2.2 Depictions of youth as social media users
Youth are often considered vulnerable and need to be protected in their social media usage (e.g., Hamm et al. 2015; Nesi 2020). This paper is concerned with how such a perspective might have been perpetuated by the ways in which youth using social media are widely represented in public discourse. How young people are depicted in relation to social media could contribute towards shaping the public’s perception of youth as vulnerable social media users. According to Hall (2020), representation refers to the social process of making meanings through language, signs, images, and so on. Carah (2021) argued that reality is not just mirrored by media, instead, it is socially constructed by media as media depictions. More importantly, such media depictions are able to shape how people think, feel, and act as well as affect people’s emotions and attitudes. While the media plays an important role in shaping the public’s perceptions, it has often been criticized for constructing biased or stereotypical depictions of certain groups of people. For example, studies indicated that older people are often represented in media with a passive, ageist, and vulnerable stereotype (e.g., Zhang and Liu 2021). In terms of the media depictions of youth, studies have found that they are predominantly portrayed negatively with a troubling image in relation to crimes or accidents (e.g., Bernier 2011).
While most studies have explored young people’s use of social media, there has been less research analyzing how their depictions as social media users have been constructed in media discourse. A notable exception is a recent study that analyzed how young people and their digital practices are visually depicted in stock photography (Thurlow et al. 2020). This study identified the importance of stock photography from the commercial image bank since it is widely used in newspapers and thus plays an important role in the visual economy. The authors argued that the ideologies promoted through the visual depictions of “teens and technology” in stock photography could be powerful and influential (Thurlow et al. 2020: 533). Through a multimodal analysis of the image bank data, this study found that youth using digital media are usually depicted as “techno-slaves” who are “de-socialized” (Thurlow et al. 2020: 544).
There are also documentary films on the impact of digital technologies. These include documentaries such as Coded Bias, The Great Hack, In the Age of AI, and The Social Dilemma. The Social Dilemma has a specific focus on youth and social media. And it has received an estimated 100 million viewers across 190 countries in 30 languages (see footnote 2). With such success, we are interested in how the promotional materials of this documentary film have depicted the relationship between youth and social media in a way that has attracted the public’s attention and concern.
According to Karray and Debernitz (2017), movie advertising plays a crucial role in influencing the potential audience’s movie selection behaviors and impacting the success of the movies. As a form of advertising, promotional materials such as posters and trailers are often considered “para-texts.” As the texts that surround and support the main texts, para-texts affect the reception and interpretation of the main text (Carter 2018). Promotional materials are effective and powerful in communicating and conveying “a one-shot representation” of the film to the mass audience (Aley and Hahn 2020: 500). In their study analyzing the depictions of male characters in the posters of children’s animated films, Aley and Hahn (2020) examined the construction of gender role stereotypes in the posters and its effect on children’s gender role expectations in real life. Similarly, another study conducted by Ghaznavi et al. (2017) analyzed how lead female characters are depicted in sexualized or aggressive ways in the posters and trailers of Hollywood and Bollywood films. They concluded that promotional materials are strategically designed in a rather brief (e.g., trailer) and limited (e.g., poster) format to capture viewers’ attention and persuade them to watch the film.
The accessibility and ease in the transmission of promotional materials online have enabled these materials to reach an even wider audience than actual films. In fact, the 2.5-min official trailer of The Social Dilemma has received more than 100 million viewings and almost 10,000 comments on YouTube. The posters for The Social Dilemma can also be openly accessed by anyone through Google images and are reproduced on many websites. With the advancement of digital technologies, Johnston (2008) argued that the dissemination of trailers has increased. Trailers are easily accessible across various portable digital devices such as mobile phones, laptops, and tablets. Viewers can also download, replay, and add their comments to the trailers. Our paper responds to Johnston’s (2019) call for a fine-grained analysis of promotional materials by examining how young people as social media users are represented in the poster and the official trailer of The Social Dilemma.
3 Methods
This study adopts a social semiotic approach to examine the depictions of young people as social media users in both the poster and trailer of The Social Dilemma. A social semiotic approach focuses on the design of semiotic resources in meaning-making (Kress 2011). Building on Halliday’s recognition of language as social semiotic, in that language is a resource for making meaning in the social context (Halliday 1978), scholars have developed the concept of social semiotics (Kress and Hodge 1979) to study multimodal meaning-making (Andersen et al. 2015). Starting from images (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996), social semiotics have been applied to examine the meanings made across a range of modes in various texts. For example, social semiotics has been used to analyze the meaning made in the mathematical videos produced by students to show how the modes, such as gesture, sound, image, and language, could support students’ communication of mathematical knowledge in video production (Oechsler and Borba 2020).
The goal of social semiotics is to understand the agency and interest of the sign makers, the use of modes and their affordances, the design of these semiotic resources in the social context, and to uncover the ideologies embedded in the discourse (Jewitt et al. 2016). For instance, through conducting a social semiotic analysis, a recent study has demonstrated how the visual and semiotic depictions of Saudi women’s challenges and opportunities towards the right of empowerment have been portrayed in caricatures (Al-Ghamdi et al. 2022). As texts are never constructed “by accident” (Iedema 2001: 201), ideologies are often considered by social semioticians as the premise of a text (Aiello 2006). As such, social semiotics seeks to uncover the often taken-for-granted ideologies embedded in the discourse (Nöth 2004).
To achieve this, social semiotics (Kress 2011) involves analyzing the representational, interactive, and compositional meta-functional meanings made in a text (Halliday 1978). Representational meaning relates to the expression of ideas and experiences. Interactive meanings focus on the relationship between the participants in the text and the viewer. Compositional meaning is expressed through the organization and placement of participants in the text.
In this paper, we analyze the poster using the social semiotic analysis of visual communication, developed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) and adapted by Jewitt and Oyama (2001) to understand the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings represented through the image (see Figure 1). Compared to images, the film involves a continuous flow of various modes working together to construct the meanings of the whole (Aiello 2020). For example, the voiceover, subtitles, images, and soundtrack often complement each other to present meanings in the film. Through the use of continuity-editing techniques, films could shape and construct realities by naturalizing what is kept and what is left out in the film (Iedema 2001). We adopt the social semiotic analysis of telefilm adapted by Iedema (2001) to analyze the meanings made in the trailer in terms of individual frames and shots, scenes, and sequences, and stages and texts as a whole (see Figure 2). Our study seeks to identify the semiotic choices made in the poster and trailers and understand how they express specific ideologies about youth and social media in relation to the interest of the creators of these texts.
The social semiotic analysis of visual communication (Jewitt and Oyama 2001; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996).
The social semiotic analysis of telefilm (Iedema 2001).
4 Analysis
4.1 Analysis of the poster
By adopting the social semiotic analysis of visual communication, we analyze how the semiotic modes in the poster were used in the expression of representational, interactive, and compositional meanings. In terms of the representational meanings in the poster (Figure 3), we see an image of a male using a smartphone. Such an image is represented in a conceptual style and we could only identify the male as a youth from the hoodie he wears without knowing what he is actually doing with the smartphone. On closer examination, viewers will notice that the youth’s eyes are blocked by a flame from the smartphone and his wrists are tied to four red strings coming from above. In the narrative representation, the flame and the strings as two strong diagonal vectors serve to arouse viewers’ curiosity. The rising flame depicted as an upward vector suggests that the smartphone is an actor who is doing something to the youth as its goal. It is also so strong that it blocks the youth’s eyes and appears to even penetrate his head. The transactive action further suggests the smartphone’s domination and control over the youth. At the same time, other downward vectors depicted with the four red strings are tied to the youth’s wrists, which also suggests a certain manipulation and control over the youth. Interestingly though, these downward vectors show non-transactive action as the actor, that is who is pulling the strings, is not revealed in the poster.
The poster for The Social Dilemma.
In terms of the interactive meanings, that is, the relationship between the participants in the poster and the viewers of the poster, we can tell that the youth is depicted as isolated as he is presented as an offer without direct eye contact with the viewers. He is shown with a medium shot distance, which suggests a social relationship between the youth and the viewers. Moreover, the eye-level point of view suggests that the youth is presented as equal to the viewers. Therefore, although the youth seem to be isolated from others, the equal and social relationship with the viewers expressed through the semiotic choices may make it easier for the viewers to identify with the youth. Through such relatedness, the viewers are positioned to empathize with the represented youth.
The image of the vulnerable youth is also strengthened through the compositional meanings of the poster. Being visually blinded by the flame and physically restrained by the strings, the vulnerable youth stands out as having high information value since he is positioned in the centrality of the text. The left-right placement also suggests that the youth is considered as given information, whereas the smartphone is new information. Such placement could either refer to the youth’s new exposure to the smartphone or refer to the impact that the new technology is having on young people. Based on the top-bottom placement, the slogan shown at the bottom of the poster “the technology that connects us also controls us” hints that technology is a double-edged sword. In addition, the threatening flame and manipulative strings are also made salient through the color red, which could arouse the viewers’ emotions such as excitement, desire, passion, danger, aggression, or anger. While the high saturation of red color presented as sensory modality might make the image less realistic, the strong contrast between the vectors in red and the youth in gray could convey a message of warning to the audience.
The analysis shows how the poster depicts the youth as a vulnerable victim who is blinded by the flame from the smartphone and controlled by strings pulled by an unknown agent. Such a depiction could arouse the viewer’s curiosity to know more about what could have happened to the youths depicted in the poster. The viewers may thus have questions that they hope to be answered in the documentary. For example, what exactly does the flame from the smartphone represent? Who is the agent pulling the four red strings that manipulate the youth as if a puppeteer controlling a puppet? The poster has represented young people as vulnerable smartphone users to arouse the viewers’ interest in watching the film. In the following analysis, we will describe how a similar depiction of the youth as vulnerable is also made in the trailer.
4.2 Analysis of the trailer
The most significant difference between the poster and the trailer of The Social Dilemma lies in the appearance of the social media experts. For example, while viewers might be wondering who the agent controlling the strings that the youth is tied to in the poster is, the following extract (see Figure 4) from 1:12 to 1:25 of the trailer reveals that several pairs of hands are manipulating the strings. A mid-tempo background soundtrack that conveys a sense of suspense starts from shot 1, where a close shot shows several pairs of hands typing on the keyboards. As the camera zooms out to a medium shot showing the hands manipulating strings through the computer keyboards in shot 2, the accompanied expert’s voiceover uncovers that “Facebook” is one of the agents of these hands. The voiceover reveals that these hands are metaphors for social media platforms such as “Facebook” as it was “able to affect real-world behaviors and emotions.” The extract further zooms out from a medium to a long shot in shots 3, 4, and 5 to show how these platforms manipulate the users without them knowing. Shot 6 reveals the person giving the voiceover as she makes direct eye contact with the audience and stated that “they (social media users) are completely clueless.” In so doing, the trailer reveals that the agents pulling the strings to control the unsuspecting youths are the social media companies behind the platforms.
The actors in the manipulating process.
In order to understand the social semiotic account of the trailer, this paper examined it at different levels – individual frames and shots, scenes, and sequences, and stages and texts as a whole. We analyzed how representational, interactive, and meanings were made through the representational, interactive, and compositional meta functions. According to Iedema (2001), the representational metafunction as ideation refers to what meanings are about, the interactive metafunction or orientation involving inter-personality shows how meanings are positioned, and the compositional metafunction or organization is about textuality and how meanings are arranged. When it comes to representational meanings, the trailer featured experts who were purportedly involved in the design of social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Google, Twitter, and Instagram to have them reveal the manipulation of users on social media. The viewers could observe that in individual frames and shots, the experts are shown in actions such as talking to the camera, typing on keyboards, and monitoring the social media users in the trailer. On the contrary, youth as social media users are mostly presented as passive users of social media who would often surf the platforms or take selfies. For example, while social media experts are shown to have active interaction with their colleagues, the youths mainly interact with their smartphones individually (see Figure 5). When it comes to representation in scenes and sequences, it is shown that each voiceover of the individual expert is presented in a sequence, while the youths are only shown in short clips which served as supplementary visuals to complement the talk from the experts. As we analyzed the stages and texts as a whole, we found that the experts’ voiceover is heard throughout the trailer as they present a narrative that they are worried about the impact that social media has on youths and society. On the other hand, the youths are shown using their smartphones in isolation and are represented without a voice.
Structure.
In terms of interactive meanings that show the inter-personality between the actors and the viewers depicted in the trailer, it is found that the social media experts construct a greater sense of involvement with the audience through their direct eye contact in individual frames and shots (see Figure 6). Moreover, in most scenes and sequences, these social media experts are often talking directly to the camera to express their concerns about the potential harms that social media can bring to society as well as signal their sense of moral responsibility to expose the social media companies by offering an “insider perspective” of what the companies are doing to manipulate their users. In contrast, the youths are represented mostly with no direct eye contact with the audience in individual frames and shots (see Figure 6). Instead of interacting with the audience, the youths are shown to be facing the digital devices in their hands in most scenes and sequences. The depictions of the youths suggest that they are immersed in the virtual world and seem to have lost connection with society.
Contact.
Finally, the dominant role of social media experts is evident in the compositional meanings, that is, the placement of shots and the rhythmic segments of the trailer. In most individual frames and shots, the youths are often placed on the left side of the shot whereas the experts are often positioned on the right side of the shot when they are doing the interviews. Unlike the youths who represent given information, the experts seem to represent new information by offering an insider perspective that reveals the harms of social media platforms to the world (see Figure 7). In addition to the different information values presented through the placement of shot, how each specific piece of soundtrack unit is matched with each social media expert’s talk in a rhythmic segment also shows the dominating role of experts. Take an extract from 0:55 to 1:05 in the trailer for example (Figure 8): each new piece of soundtrack often starts with a voiceover from one of the social media experts as s/he elaborates on the impact of social media on youth. Such voiceover is often complemented with a visual movement showing how a youth interacts with the virtual world through social media platforms as well as how the youth is emotionally triggered by the happenings in the virtual world. In this extract, while the girl is engaging with the social media communities (shots 1–4), an upbeat electronic soundtrack playing in the background brings out feelings of anxiety and aggressiveness. In the middle of the visual movements (shot 5), it is shown that the owner of this voiceover is one of the experts. As he describes how social media users conflate the information online with value and truth, the consequences he speaks of are depicted through the depiction of the girl’s depression shown in shots 7 and 8. Similar sequences are observed throughout the trailer and reinforce the perception that experts’ views are privileged against the voiceless youth.
Information value.
An example of a rhythmic segment.
5 Discussion
This study seeks to investigate how youth are represented in the promotional materials of The Social Dilemma. The social semiotic analysis of the poster and trailer enabled us to understand how a certain kind of social reality is constructed and represented by the sign makers of The Social Dilemma. In addition to what is being represented, the analysis also informed us on what values are taken for granted, and thus, uncovered ideologies that have been constructed and embedded naturally in the media discourse (Iedema 2001; Jewitt et al. 2016). By analyzing the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings made in these two multimodal texts, we observed that young people have been represented as vulnerable social media users manipulated by social media companies. Such depictions of youth may be because the purpose of the film advertisements is to attract attention from the audience and to ignite their interest to watch the documentary. In this section, we discuss how youth have been depicted as vulnerable social media users. We reflect on how such depictions are aligned with the protectionist ideology underpinning digital literacy education. Finally, we argue how such selective depictions of youth in film advertisements might perpetuate the protectionist stance in digital literacy education.
According to Zuboff (2015), social media has given rise to “surveillance capitalism,” which refers to a new logic of accumulation through the commodification of personal information. Social media companies make a profit from data extraction and commodification. These companies are identified as “Big Other” and now have the power to affect human behaviors. As our daily online and offline lives are interwoven and overlapped in the current age of surveillance capitalism, Zuboff (2015) argues that there is no escape from these “Big Others.” Based on the analysis of these promotional materials, we found that young people are represented as vulnerable social media users against the backdrop of surveillance capitalism. Youths presented in the poster and trailer are always alone, with their eyes focusing on the smartphones in their hands all the time. The image depicts youths as being indifferent to the physical world and suggests that they are not in connection with the people physically around them. This finding is aligned with the earlier analysis on stock photography that youth are often represented negatively as “de-socialized,” given that public digital media discourses often center technologies over relationships (Thurlow et al. 2020: 544). Young people are also depicted as being manipulated by social media technologies. For example, the salient red flame that penetrates the youth’s eyes and the strings that tie his wrists convey to the viewers the sense of the youth’s powerlessness. Similarly, the trailer reveals that the big companies behind social media are controlling youth like puppets. While viewers are able to observe such manipulation, it seems that youths in the poster and trailer are unconscious of it. In fact, they are depicted as totally immersed in the virtual world with their eyes staring vacuously at the smartphone screens. The youth in the poster also seems unaware of the harmful flame and strings controlling him. Young people are also portrayed as passive as they are completely voiceless throughout the trailer. In fact, the experts’ voiceover that leads the flow of the trailer dominates the narrative. In addition, young people are shown to be vulnerable as the trailer shows them to be emotionally distressed by the content they receive on social media. The depictions of young people as vulnerable social media users contrast with the depictions of social media companies and experts as the dominant actors. On one hand, the poster and trailer show how social media companies manipulate youth through the algorithms embedded in social media platforms. On the other hand, while the social media experts attempt to reveal the dangers of social media technologies, their narratives throughout the trailer dominate the narrative with the youths rendered voiceless. While the narration from these social media experts seems to be constructed naturally, it is worth noticing that such design of semiotic modes in the trailer is actually serving the interest of the experts, just like how the voice of medical clinicians is privileged in the telefilm studied by Iedema (2001).
Through the design of semiotic resources in the poster and trailer, it is shown that the purpose of these promotional materials of The Social Dilemma is to propagate the idea of youth being vulnerable social media users. The ideology embedded in the discourse is the protectionist stance in digital literacy education to protect innocent young people from online dangers (Buckingham 2020; Bulger et al. 2017; Greenhow and Lewin 2016). The protectionist ideology of digital literacy is premised on online users as passive users who are vulnerable to harmful media effects. Therefore, such an approach often has less emphasis on the development of critical analysis skills of youth in their engagement with social media. Under the influence of the protectionist approach, even the increasingly advocated digital citizen education is also distilled into the teaching of Internet safety, privacy, and responsibility as many teachers still consider digital media activities as distractive to learning (Andersson et al. 2014).
While the protectionist ideology remains prevalent in the public discourse, recent research has shown that young people are able to exercise agency by expressing their views and influencing public issues through their digital participation (Chan et al. 2021; Gleason and von Gillern 2018; Lee 2018; Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik 2019; Zhao and Zappavigna 2017). Bulger et al. (2017) argued that the educational policies prioritizing the protectionist approach have inevitably suppressed and ignored the youth’s agency of participation and free expression. Similarly, Jones and Mitchell (2016) showed that a fear-based ideology can often result in unfocused and ineffective teaching to protect students from online risk. Scholars have also advocated a move from a protectionist approach toward the empowerment approach (Hobbs 2011; Simons et al. 2017; Weninger 2017) that focuses on young people’s active roles in engagement on social medial as creators or reviewers involved in public issues.
Even though the depictions of vulnerable youths made in the poster and trailer of The Social Dilemma may attract viewers to the documentary, it is important to recognize how such a message can perpetuate stereotypes and reinforce the protectionist approach towards young people in digital literacy education. In reality, are youth really naïve and ignorant about their social media use? How will they react when they realize that they are manipulated? And what actions could they take to fight against such manipulation? These are the questions that the poster and trailer have not addressed. Such biased depictions of young people as vulnerable social media users in the public discourse ignore the sense of agency that youth have in their engagement with social media. As young people are participating in the digital environment as both consumers and producers (Buckingham 2012), it is important to acknowledge the agentive aspect of youths who exercise their choices and engage in content creation through multimodal composing (Yarosh et al. 2016). Moreover, even under authoritarian political regimes, such as in Cambodia, it was found that, through the strategic use of social media, young people could express their views and influence public issues (Lee 2018). While research has advocated the shift from the protectionist approach to the empowerment approach in digital literacy education, perpetuating the ideology of young people as vulnerable social media users can hinder the advancement in this direction on policies and practice.
6 Conclusions
This study has adopted a social semiotic approach to understanding how young people are represented in the promotional materials, i.e., the movie poster and the official trailer, of the popular Netflix documentary-drama, The Social Dilemma. By identifying the semiotic choices made in these two multimodal discourses, we found that the depictions of youth have been constructed as being vulnerable social media users who are manipulated by social media companies. While the analysis of promotional materials of one documentary could not be representative of all mass media production, such depictions of youth are aligned with studies reporting similar depictions of youth on social media (Thurlow et al. 2020). We argue that such depictions of youth not only negate their sense of agency but also ignore their active engagement in the participatory culture afforded by social media. The negative depictions of youth propagated by mass media, in this case, through popular documentaries, also promote the unhelpful protectionist perspective of digital and media literacy education.
Given that there have been few studies examining how youth as social media users are represented in mass media, the significance of this study is in demonstrating how meanings are made in public discourse, which can shape our perceptions of the relationship between young people and social media. In fact, the influence of promotional materials as public discourse cannot be underestimated as recent research analyzing decades of government posters in Hong Kong found that posters have served as powerful and persuasive means to shape the public’s opinions and social actions in society (Wong 2022).
Future studies could examine other mass media depictions of youth in social media. As our analysis of the trailer reveals that only the social media experts’ points of view were presented while those of the youths were absent, it is important for the audience to reflect on the motivation of the experts in constructing depictions of youth as vulnerable social media users. According to the notion of “culture industry” proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno (2017), mass media can shape the beliefs and values in our culture. It is thus important to understand how our perception of young people as vulnerable social media users could be shaped by the media discourse insidiously. Such a perception of youth could also affect how policymakers design educational programs for them. It is thus critical to recognize the ideology of youth as vulnerable social media uses, perpetuated by mass media, can be detrimental towards the progress of an empowerment approach in digital literacy education. We argue that highlighting the depictions of young people as vulnerable social media users in public discourse can propagate the unhelpful protectionist perspective of youth as being limited in their agency on social media. In offering more balanced and more representative depictions of young people as social media users, we opine that is equally important to draw attention to the agency youth have in using social media to express their ideas and identities, collaborate and connect with others, as well as advocate for meaningful social issues online.
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Competing interests: The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.
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