ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a 2015 UK survey examination of the relationship between Internet usage and the formation of neoliberal subjectivities (N = 271, ages 18–29). First, I review the literature on the effects of new media on youth political participation and identity development that informed this study’s methods and hypotheses. Then, I detail its novel web-survey design, which incorporated simulated Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds. These enabled the capturing of participants’ real-time content selections and corresponding attentive-cognitive expenditures, and thus provide improved reliability and ecological validity over standard self-reported measures. This is followed by a hierarchical regression analysis that identifies the potential political attitudinal and behavioural effects of frequent social media consumption and attention to materialism-related digital content. The results are interpreted via a reading of media framing, priming, and online selective-exposure theories, and provide empirical support for this book’s model of micro-level neoliberal reproduction.
