Tethered compliance: Exploring the role of the smartphone in online civic engagement among low-income US young people through two pandemic-era case studies

Abstract

This article considers the roles that smartphones play as young people living in low-income communities navigate everyday activities, including those of online civic engagement. Drawing on ethnographic data collected during the COVID-19 lockdown, we offer empirical and methodological support for Hartmann’s concept of mediated mobilism, highlighting smartphone-related frictions and tensions that emerge at the intersections of social and political mobilities and immobilities. Specifically, our data demonstrate that as smartphones kept young people on call for parents, caregivers, siblings and others who might need them to help negotiate the heightened demands that characterized family life during the pandemic, young people found themselves in situations that we term tethered compliance, torn between the desire to participate in online civic engagement and political mobilization and the need to fulfill various exigencies of family life that emerged as a result of physical and social immobilities. Whereas scholars previously argued that mobile media held promise for mitigating structural inequality and enhancing youth online civic engagement, our findings suggest that these technologies are instead adding a new layer to be managed.