Abstract
In a socio-political moment characterised by culture wars and epistemic disjunctures, largely facilitated by the filter effects and algorithmic logics of modern social media technologies, researchers are increasingly turning their attention to the role of social media in political belief formation, rising populism, and polarisation. Understanding how these dynamics inform the developing political identities of young people coming of age online is, however, under-explored. This thesis seeks to fill this gap by applying Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition to explore how the desire for recognition drives identity articulation and political affiliation—both online and offline—for young New Zealanders. It asks: How do the affective experiences of recognition, misrecognition, and non-recognition in hybrid social worlds inform the developing political identities of adolescents in Aotearoa New Zealand? To explore this research question, I surveyed 494 teenagers aged 16 to 19 across five schools in Aotearoa New Zealand, asking respondents to reflect on their social media habits, subjective experiences of belonging and non-belonging, and emerging worldviews and beliefs. I further conducted 21 in-depth interviews to capture a more contextualised sense of how adolescent New Zealanders navigate belonging and identity formation, and how this process is informed by the available online resources. I analyse the qualitative survey and interview responses using reflexive thematic and interpretive phenomenological analysis and conduct statistical analysis on the quantitative survey data to test for generalisability.
My findings demonstrate that the political identities of adolescent New Zealanders are informed by their relationships—that their affective experiences of recognition and non-recognition influence the ways they make sense of the world and develop their own worldviews. These dynamics are mediated by social media insofar as these technologies play a vital role in the lives of young New Zealanders as tools for self-discovery, interpersonal connection, and information seeking. As a key site for young New Zealanders to develop personal and interpersonal identities and to cultivate a sense of self I conceptualise social media adoption as a rite of passage for young New Zealanders and explore its capacity to facilitate recognition during this transitional life phase. I identify that the algorithmic logics and filtering effects of digital media platforms have the capacity to mediate and augment individuals’ orientations, perceptions, and interpretations, and it emerges that these technologies can be both autonomy-enhancing and autonomy-inhibiting. Importantly, my findings show that capacities for autonomy, agency, connection, and recognition are fostered within symmetrical epistemic environments which facilitate open dialogue, whereas more asymmetrical environments inhibit these capacities, undermining reciprocal recognition and signalling potential distortions in the recognition order. The thesis contributes to the scholarly literature by exploring how the developing political identities of adolescent New Zealanders are informed by the dynamic and rapidly evolving digital technologies that mediate both their information ecosystems and their relationships with others. It also contributes to the political theory of recognition by demonstrating the theory’s usefulness and relevance to modern social research.