This paper critically examines the sociality of young people who are seen as withdrawing from society. By adopting a digital sociological approach to the concept of “sociality”, the paper argues the states of their interactions with society could be seen as more complex and pertinent to a range of varying interactions in the digital age.

Research and debates on young people at risk of being disengaged from society have been growing rapidly across Europe and the world. There have been mounting interests recently in the concept of “social withdrawal” and its relevance to discussions regarding the importance of young people being an active part of society.

The concept of social withdrawal refers to young people who are disconnecting from society and persistently confining themselves at home. Recent work demonstrates that there has been an increasing number of young people “hiding” themselves in this way from months to years. The young people are assumed to be self-isolating and rejecting interactions with society. The emerging body of research conceptualises their isolation by highlighting they are not engaged in traditional collective social structures, focusing on the education system, labour market and local communities. Thus, researchers have assumed socially withdrawn young people are in an “acute” form of social disengagement and exclusion. The preoccupation with their states of interactions with society has however been uncontested, thereby a critical engagement with the concept of sociality has been absent.

This paper draws on recent theoretical discussions in digital sociology, particularly studies of youth identity in the digital age, in order to adopt a critical perspective on the concept of sociality. It has been argued that patterns of sociality in today’s world involve more fluid and diverse forms of social interactions. Moreover, the primacy and predominance of physical social interactions have been questioned. With the rise of the digital age, technologies have rapidly expanded and diffused into our everyday social interactions. Interacting with society could thus involve a range of interactions in not only physical but also digital social sites. Digital scholars have hence challenged imaginations of individual sociality that assumed it to be a binary concept.  It has been proposed that researchers should reimagine individuals as a “networked Self”, and approach sociality as pertinent to multiple elements that are interconnected in a complex relationship. Moreover, one's sociality could be “re-mixable” across multiple, intersecting social sites based on one's agency.

This study supports these critiques and attempts to address the sociality of socially withdrawn young people with a digital sociological framework. It will be shown their interactions with society could be described through a range of varying interactions. Importantly, a focus on the possibilities of multiple sites of social interactions—in both physical and digital environments—provided an analysis that revealed the complexity and fluidity of their sociality, despite them being physically confined at home. The digital sociological approach constructed also placed the analytical focus on young people’s agency. It has been argued that individual agency could play an important role in managing and adapting one's interactions in multiple social sites and with different audiences. This paper thus aims to reflect on the potential to further understand how socially withdrawn young people could interact with society, and critically approach the complexity of their sociality in the digital age.

The study raises the following research questions:

1) How can the sociality of socially withdrawn young people be described? What kinds of social sites do they perceive themselves to be interacting in?

2) How do they perceive and manage their sociality in different social sites? In what ways do their interactions with people and sociality differ across such sites?

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