Man-i-pulation? Becoming creative with the ‘information folds’ of post-digital youth masculinity assemblages

This article explores how masculinity assemblages are composed within postdigital youth landscapes where gender is in a state of epistemic crisis and the digital is assumed to operate primarily as a coercive force. Building on queer and feminist posthuman praxis, we conceptualize the postdigital through Laura Marks’ information fold alongside Celia Lury’s notion of platformization and problem space where we share a compositional methodology that treats methods as generative practices that surface and transform problems in their becoming. Our analysis draws on three arts-informed projects with children and young people (ages 9–18) that used talking, writing, drawing, poetry, sculpting and film. We get creative with manipulation as man-i-pulation across three information folds: an altright ‘algo-rhythm’, a government hashtag campaign and feminist instapoetry. Together, they explore how masculinities are unstable, pliable, multiply entangled and always in motion. We go on to show how such data, re-created in moments of connection with multiple audiences, can come to resonate as posthuman participants beyond the fieldwork encounter. Postdigital information folds, animated through creative praxis, open resource-full spaces for unpredictability, invention, and transformation.