Climate activism has become more and more relevant in recent years, with the FridaysForFuture movement (hereinafter FFF) at its forefront. Incipient literature on FFF has observed how especially young activists join the movement to safeguard the interests of their own generation, since older generations have doomed the planet and taken the future away from younger people. In this context, social media are privileged platforms for FFF-activists, who mainly resort to them for advocacy and awareness-raising while recruiting adhesion to the movement. FFF-activists' social media usage practices can therefore open windows in the unique ways young people make sense of social media as environments for both digital activism and generational identity-building processes.
Building on literature addressing youth social media activism, generational identity and `we sense', and climate activism the research will investigate the interplay between generational identity and youth social media activism focusing on FFFRome as an example. Through semi-structured interviews, it will address the following research questions:
RQ1: How do FFF-activists combine their generational identity with being FFFRome activists, if they do?
RQ2a. How do social media usage practices shape FFFRome's identity, if they do?
During the preliminary literature review, some understudied areas have been identified.
First of all, a great part of the literature concerned with youth social media activism is derived from US-based movements and thus unsuited to address the specificities of many geographically different youth political realities. In choosing to focus on a Roman based social movement, this research is addressing an understudied branch of youth social media activism, contextualizing the fight of FFF-Rome within the complex cultural, social, and economic environment that characterizes youth's condition in Italy (i.e. a lack of effective policies to support youth's transition into adult life, high unemployment rates, an uncertain job market, the inadequacy of the school system... Cuzzocrea et al. 2020; Visentin 2018) and shedding light on unique characteristics of this social movement (such as its connection with the Roman student movement) when compared with other international social movements, be they climate related or not. Additionally, current studies on Italian environmental movements have not shown age-specific characteristics to be a central element (Bertuzzi 2018). This research will contribute to challenging this hypothesis.
Additionally, literature on youth political participation has given little insight into the influence networked political participation has on young people's relationship with traditional political practices. Current scholarship branches into two main traditions (see Bennett 2008; Klingler-Vilenchik & Literat 2019): one concerned with a decrease in youth traditional political engagement, and the other with studying the new ways young people express their political voice, usually emphasizing the role of social media. Both branches tend to point at a deep disconnect of young people from traditional politics, downplaying the impact of digital activism in the first case and risking disconnecting digital practices from broader grassroots politics in the second. The research is therefore positioned in the field of study that focuses on the interplay between the two realms of online and offline activism, as young activists seamlessly move from one context to the other (Trerè 2019), emphasizing the mutual shaping relationship between culture and technology (Vaccari 2015).
Finally, the research will more generally contribute to the strands of literature it draws upon, by addressing how social media usages, political struggles, and generational identity are concretely intertwined. Current literature on social media activism and identity development suggests that social media activism has a role in mediating young people's development as activists (Bishop 2015; Fullam 2016). By addressing this topic under the light of a generational understanding of identity, this research will contribute to shed light on how political actions and `identization' processes (Kavada 2015) are built through a generational use of social media, as well as on the ways FFFRome activists set themselves apart from other social movements through generational-based practices and identifications. The study will therefore provide a deeper understanding of how being young and being social media users affect the interplay between youth participatory culture and politics, providing a baseline for future research in and beyond FFF and Italy.