'It gets better': Redefining GLBT youth through digital technologies

This paper explores how the 'It gets better' campaign, a digital social activism campaign against sexually oriented bullying started by writer Dan Savage, has helped to redefine LGBT youth in America. The campaign, in which gay, lesbian and transgender adults speak directly to young people via You Tube videos, represents a dramatic reconfiguration of the role of GLBT adults in socializing GLBT young people. Heretofore in America, discourses of seduction, abuse, and 'recruitment' made this kind of interaction politically and socially untenable. The paper draws on concepts from mediated discourse analysis to explore how the participants in this campaign appropriate various technological and semiotic tools, and how these tools act to amplify and constrain different kinds of social actions social identities. Digital technology, it is argued, has created a host of opportunities for the production of new representations of youth, made possible through the new forms of subjectivity, social interaction and agency which social media provide. These new technologies, however, still depend on the 'old technology' of narrative, which participants exploit as a tool for claiming and imputing identities, drawing from a cultural archive of stories of suffering, resistance and redemption. Finally, the redefinition of GLBT youth in America is examined in the broader context of the recent 'evolution' of social attitudes when it comes issues surrounding sexuality. Such dramatic shifts in social attitudes, it is argued, cannot be fully understood without taking into account the effect of communication technologies on the formation of social relationships and the construction of social identities.