Several recent studies on youth culture have demonstrated the political radicalization of young adults. It is also known in the light of previous researches that young adults are neither motivated to identify themselves with communities nor readily participate in them. Apart from small groups of radical actors, Hungarian young adults are lost between the plurality of social life-worlds and the political subsystems with one of the lowest participation rate in Europe.  To see more clearly in respect of democratic processes in youth culture the the Campus-life project at the University of  Debrecenhttp://campuslet.unideb.hu) and the Connected Communities research project at the University of Birmingham http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/education/connecting-communities/index.aspx aim to explain how the changing forms and spaces of connectivity and privacy contribute to civic and professional education. Within this framework the research seeks to answer the question what implications the private/public “boundary setting” practices carry for the forms of civil engagement and self-governance. While many rely on macro perspectives in their account of how institutions impacts political behaviour and connectivity in a community, social scientists have rarely looked at the way how the seemingly irrelevant micro processes of the evolution of democratic culture leads to significant outcomes among young adults in Hungary. To reach this aim the research clarifies how different cultural elements (stories, styles, identities etc.) determine, fixate and change connectivity within and between communities and in this way facilitates or hinder collective action. In order to address this question stereotype stories, rumours, anecdotes and slangs are gathered through 150 mini focus group interviews carried among roommates of two student houses at the University of Debrecen.

The alteration of private and public is in lockstep since one discursively constructs the other. In that case without the careful consideration of the newly prominent private it is impossible to understand the shape and the formation of public realm within student communities. The management of educational institutions also begins to reflect to contemporary private as response to “public failures”. Privacy from educational perspective is considered to be a training ground where social relations forged, reproduced and changed.

Student houses were chosen as the field of our research on three preliminary considerations; their community initiatives, their intention to be a “hotel” or “home” and their notion on the satisfactory level of surveillance. Institutions operating like hotel with strong market principals make it possible to buy privacy as the right of exclusion. Therefore these institutions offer an opportunity to describe the practices of exclusive secrecy, the virtue of immunity from interference or taboo creation, which deprives others from access or participation. The dynamics and formation of public/private distinction under ever- present surveillance technology can also be detected. Whereas other institutions with strong community initiatives try to upkeep the collective activities, and enhance enough solidarity to protect the collective goods within roommates in their “home”. In such context the key issue for discourse and sophisticated theorizing is the separation and the transitory forms between “hotel” and “home” with the possible consequences of the surveillance technology implemented in these institutions. 

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