Young Men’s Online Lives: Cultivating Critical Digital Dispositions for Gender Justice

In Australia and globally recent media and public discourse has expressed strong concerns about the gender-based harms arising from young men’s online behaviours—from revenge porn and the circulation of AI deepfake pornography to anxieties about schoolboys being radicalised into misogyny through their engagement with the manosphere. These concerns have prompted renewed scrutiny on boys and masculinity and produced a sense of urgency around addressing these online harms. They have provided a strong warrant for research that seeks to better understand how young men are navigating their online worlds. This book presents findings from a qualitative study of 117 young men in Australia. The book provides comprehensive and in-depth insights into the factors that influence, motivate and inform young men’s online experiences. In foregrounding a diversity of young men’s voices, the book responds to calls for more nuance and care in how we debate the gendered impact of social media on young men’s lives. As such we draw attention to the tensions and complexities in how young men navigate negative and positive online experiences, including their critical engagement with harmful online content. Against this backdrop, the book presents a case for fostering young men’s critical digital dispositions towards more gender just engagements online. It provides a conceptual framework and series of activity ideas for fostering these dispositions through curatorial intentionality, scepticism, ethical engagement and reflexivity. Towards gender justice, this framework seeks to support young men to critically engage with and transform gendered digital harms.