Young People, Algorithmic Resistance and ‘Doing Nothing’ As Slow Digital Citizenship

Traditional conceptualisations of youth citizenship prioritise public expressions and acts, and doing nothing is associated with disengagement, passivity and civic deficit. Digital citizenship is no exception; with the measure of good digital citizenship being the ability to actively participate in society and have one’s voice heard online. Young people are often celebrated as those most able to enact digital citizenship through digital competencies, visibility online, and acts of advocacy and activism in online publics. However, more recently, discussions in this field have moved away from how digital technologies are enhancing youth civic participation to a focus on how individual and collective agency is undermined by platform business models and technical design, which is directed toward “systematic collection and processing of massive amounts of data generated through the traces we leave behind” (Hintz et al, 2019:1). In platform societies, civic and political expression is often algorithmically channelled, instant, public, emotive and susceptible to error. Moreover, platform societies reward immediacy, speed, action and reaction to feed the algorithm, thereby aligning with new accelerated generational temporalities. In this paper we consider how young people who are highly aware of and concerned about social and political issues engage in digital practices of ‘doing nothing’, such as refusing to comment or share, as a critical and mindful civic response to platform societies. Drawing on a study of digital citizenship amongst Australian youth, we demonstrate how young people are engaged in different purposeful practices of algorithmic resistance that look like ‘doing nothing’ but in fact constitute forms of what we conceptualise as ‘slow’ digital citizenship. We seek to understand how young people enact ‘slow’ everyday digital practices to navigate platform societies which demand a certain speed of engagement, rob them of attention and compromise their ability to think freely and critically.