A new book explores how teenage boys use smartphones to connect, create, and make sense of who they are.
What does it mean to be a teenage boy in the age of the smartphone? A new book by assistant professor John Magnus R. Dahl, Teen Boys and Their Smartphones as Worldmaking Devices, offers an in-depth exploration of how smartphones shape the social worlds of adolescent boys.
Grounded in two years of ethnographic fieldwork, the study follows six boys both online and offline to examine the social, cultural, and technological contexts that frame their digital practices. Dahl conceptualises the smartphone as a worldmaking device, inspired by the thinking of Hannah Arendt. “My key argument is that young people create their worlds through mobile use”, he writes, emphasising how digital practices are shaped both by technological affordances and by social and cultural patterns.
The study shows how boys connect with others, express themselves, and negotiate belonging. A central finding is that worldmaking becomes especially important for those from ethnocultural or sexual minorities. For these boys, smartphones provide new opportunities for connection and agency, allowing them to navigate the tension between “being different” and “being normal”.
Rather than treating online life as secondary, Dahl argues in the book against the media “impoverishment” and “substitution” theses, showing that online and offline experiences are deeply intertwined. Phones creates “new opportunities for care, intimacy, and personal freedom”, but also for social boundary-making and potential exclusions.
“Teenagers care little about the phone in itself”, Dahl notes. “They care about how it can connect them to other people, and how they can show these people who they are and want to be. The smartphone is a world in the palm of their hands”.
The book is available for purchase here.
Image credit: John Magnus Dahl.