ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the personal investment that young people make as part of their process of grounded aesthetics. Young people’s personal investment reflects Bourdieu’s concept of libido sciendi – the embodied investment integrated into the individual’s habitus as cultural capital. It is also reflected in the notion of shared specific generational experiences and, importantly, the memories of these shared experiences. These shared generational experiences lead to the creation of social identity as members of a ‘social in-group’. Each social in-group then evolves its own sense of a group prototype. Finally, the chapter outlines how the advent of social media and the emergence of an ‘online presence’ has fundamentally changed not only the way young people engage with the social world but also notions of identity curation.
