Children and the Internet

Sonia Livingstone

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745631950, 9780745631943
• eBook ISBN: 9780745657578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Is the internet really transforming children and young people's lives? Is the so-called 'digital generation' genuinely benefiting from exciting new opportunities? And, worryingly, facing new risks?

This major new book by a leading researcher addresses these pressing questions. It deliberately avoids a techno-celebratory approach and, instead, interprets children's everyday practices of internet use in relation to the complex and changing historical and cultural conditions of childhood in late modernity. Uniquely, Children and the Internet reveals the complex dynamic between online opportunities and online risks, exploring this in relation to much debated issues such as:

• Digital in/exclusion
• Learning and literacy
• Peer networking and privacy
• Civic participation
• Risk and harm

Drawing on current theories of identity, development, education and participation, this book includes a refreshingly critical account of the challenging realities undermining the great expectations held out for the internet - from governments, teachers, parents and children themselves. It concludes with a forward-looking framework for policy and regulation designed to advance children's rights to expression, connection and play online as well as offline.

1

Changing Childhood, Changing Media

In the past decade or so, almost every question long asked about society – about the nature of work, education, community, politics, family and identity – has been asked of the relation between society and the internet. Whether the internet is seen as the instigator or the consequence of social change, and whether it is seen as offering the potential for societal improvement or as introducing a new agenda of problems, the very breadth of questions asked and the multidisciplinary expertise already applied to answering them sets a daunting challenge to any attempt to review the present state of knowledge. The same may be said even for that subset of this emerging field of inquiry concerned with children and young people. For it is also the case that almost every question ever asked about children and young people – how they learn, play, interact, participate, encounter risks – has also been asked of the relation between childhood and the internet.

To focus on children may seem a specialized enterprise, even one that is somehow optional for the wider effort to understand the relation between society and the internet. Many pronouncements about ‘the population’ or ‘society’ and the internet turn out to refer to adults only, as if children constitute an exception. Yet not only do those younger than eighteen years old comprise one in five of ‘the population’ in developed countries (and nearly half of those in developing countries), but also every one of tomorrow’s adults is a child today. Children’s experiences, needs and concerns matter in their own right, requiring a critical analysis in the present. And, requiring an equally critical but also a more normative lens, they matter for the future. Since they are, with some justification, popularly dubbed the ‘digital generation’, it is also likely that understanding children’s use of the internet can provide a richer insight into that future than could equivalent attention paid to adults.

At the same time, research on children and the internet is indeed a specialized enterprise. Children should not be ‘lumped in’ with the adult population, though nor should differences between children and adults be routinely presumed. Thus, research must attend carefully to questions of age and development; it requires methodological sensitivity if it is to explore children’s experiences, and it should address some specialized questions regarding parenting, schooling, identity expression and risk-taking. Yet the same broad, multidisciplinary framework required to understand society and the internet is also required to understand children and the internet. In seeking to understand how children learn, laugh, interact, participate and encounter risks online, this book must draw on theories of learning, leisure, communication, participation and the risk society – just as is the case when investigating adults’ use of the internet. The payoff is that one may then understand the continuities and differences between adult and child experiences, in empirical and theoretical terms, and one may identify the implications of the activities of this so-called digital generation both for children in particular and for society in general.

Also distinctive to the focus on children is the high degree of public attention, speculation and contestation that the particular combination of children, media and social change attracts. Children and young people are widely perceived, on the one hand, as the youthful experts or pioneers leading the way in using the internet and yet, on the other hand, as peculiarly vulnerable to the risks consequent on failing to use it wisely. This book draws on a range of original empirical sources to examine how young people are striking a balance between maximizing opportunities and minimizing risks as they explore the internet. As we shall see, despite considerable enthusiasm for going online and becoming ‘youthful experts’, children and young people (like many adults) are finding that access and motivation are necessary but insufficient for using the internet in a complex and ambitious manner. First, there is only qualified evidence that the internet is bringing about any of the changes anticipated; the great expectations are not always met. Second, the emerging picture stresses the variable and complex social conditions that influence how we fit the internet into our lives, these strongly mediating any consequences for work, education, community, politics, family and identity; the realities of internet use can be genuinely challenging.

The polarized public debate that surrounds questions of children and the internet – does the internet make for any change at all or not, does the internet make things better or worse, are children media-savvy experts or newly vulnerable and at risk – inevitably invites a plethora of empirically grounded qualifications of the ‘it depends’ or ‘both/and’ variety. The result is an explosion of empirical studies which are largely descriptive, charting first access to the internet and then use of the internet across countries and, within countries, by age, gender, class and so forth, in a wide variety of circumstances. Arguably, this initial agenda has run its course (Lievrouw, 2004; Livingstone, 1999, 2003; Wellman, 2004). Now the challenge is to theorize people’s, including children’s, engagement with the internet more thoroughly, asking, for example, not who lacks access to the internet but whether it really matters; not simply noting who participates in online forums but identifying whether and how this contributes to civic participation; not simply worrying about the risks children encounter online but asking what is meant by online risk and how it relates to offline risk; not simply asking whether children have the skills to engage with the internet but whether these enable them to engage with their society in all its manifestations – local and global, public and private, serious and playful, enchanting and dangerous.

But clearly, this emerging set of questions widens the focus considerably, encompassing not only children as internet users but also the internet as a mediator of children’s participation in society. What do we hope for children in this regard? The following two contrasting quotations, the first from the UK’s media and communications regulator, the second from an academic critic, pinpoint my starting point in this book:

Through confident use of communications technologies people will gain a better understanding of the world around them and be better able to engage with it. (Ofcom, 2004b: para 3)

Despite the growth in the numbers of internet users, a rather small minority of these users has the capability to use the internet in ways that are creative and that augment their ability to participate effectively in today’s knowledge societies. (Mansell, 2004: 179)

As I shall argue, it is vital both to frame ambitious expectations for society and the internet, including for children and the internet but, also, it is vital to draw on rigorous empirical research to assess and critique claims that these ambitions are being realized. In other words, although as we shall see there is a considerable and growing body of evidence pointing to a substantial gap between the great expectations held out for the internet and the present realities of people’s experiences, it is not my intention to use the latter simply to dampen the ambitions of the former. Of course, to the extent that the internet is mooted as a quick technological fix to solve endemic problems in society, such hopes can only be disappointed. But, after the first decade or so of theory and research investigating the social shaping and social consequences of the internet in the lives of children, families and communities, we can surely identify some lessons from the recent past and some guidance for the future regarding how best to reformulate society’s ambitions for children and the internet and, thereby, better meet some of its present challenges.

To undertake this task, one could begin in either of two places. Many start with ‘the internet’. Here, one may discern that research, especially that conducted in developed countries, is shifting its focus from questions of access and diffusion to questions about the nature and quality of internet use, recognizing the diverse ways in which people are struggling to come to terms with this complex and changing bundle of technologies that, supposedly, can deliver new opportunities for information, communication, entertainment or even, more grandly, ‘empower’ them in relation to identity, community, participation, creativity and democracy. This starting point has produced much valuable research that I shall review in the chapters that follow. But it also leads us into difficulties. ‘The internet’ tends to be positioned as the key agent of change, encouraging questions about its ‘impact’ on society as if it had recently landed from Mars, masking the crucial importance of other ongoing changes in society, including those that are shaping the internet itself. As society expects more and more of the internet, the notion of ‘using’ the internet has become so unclear as to be wholly unhelpful as a description of an everyday activity. Moreover, this approach tends to position children as ‘users’, a new category of person with little history or cultural meaning, to be understood for itself and thus inadvertently divorced from such rival categories as family member, school pupil, young citizen or new consumer.

Instead, I shall start with ‘children’, understood both socially – through their positioning within and engagement with societal structures of home, family, school and community – and historically, for childhood is itself changing, and these changes have a far longer provenance and more widespread implications than any changes associated with the recent mass adoption of the internet, notable though these may be. My purpose in this chapter to identify the key currents of thought and debate that can contextualize a critical analysis of children and the internet so as to overcome the limitations of a technologically determinist approach and to open up a richer account of how and why the internet has come to occupy so much of children’s time and attention by understanding what else is going on in their lives.¹

Change and crisis in the post-traditional family

In popular discourse, children are staying younger longer, yet getting older sooner. It seems to many that, in some ways, they leave the safety and privacy of the home and enter the public and commercial world ‘too soon’; in other ways they delay taking on adult responsibilities for ‘too long’. While the sense of golden-age nostalgia in these discourses, along with the moral criticism of young people thereby implied, may be questioned, it is the case that historians and sociologists of childhood report strong evidence for significant social changes in childhood over the twentieth century. Following an earlier shift away from children having a productive role in the household and the wider economy (Cunningham, 1995; Cunningham, 2006), in recent decades Western industrial societies have seen the extension of formal education from early to late teens and a commensurate rise in the average age of leaving home, this pushing back the start of employment and delaying the traditional markers of adulthood. In many countries over recent decades, post-16 education has expanded while the youth labour market has remained stagnant, altering the school-to-work transition (France, 2007).The result is an unprecedented period of ‘extended youth’ in which young people stay at home and remain financially dependent on their parents for longer.

These historical changes to childhood over the past century or more have themselves been shaped by a series of profound social changes in, notably but not only, the structures of employment, the education system, increased urbanization, relations between commerce and the state, the growth of affluent individualism, the transformation of gender relations, the ethnic diversification of national populations and the reconstruction of household and family. These structural changes are repositioning children within society and altering, even impeding, their passage to adulthood (Hill and Tisdall, 1997; James, Jenks and Prout, 1998). As Coontz observes:

In some ways, childhood has actually been prolonged, if it is measured by dependence on parents and segregation from adult activities. What many young people have lost are clear paths for gaining experience doing responsible, socially necessary work, either in or out of the home, and for moving away from parental supervision without losing contact with adults. (1997: 13)

At the same time, these same structural changes have also enabled the world outside the home to make increasing incursions into what was once a private, largely non-commercial space defined by tradition and community norms. Ever younger children are now immersed in a consumer culture which emphasizes choice, taste and lifestyle as considerations not just for adults but also for children. The growth and scale of today’s child and youth market is equally unprecedented, being not only highly lucrative but also creative in its specialized targeting of young people and, moreover, highly sexualized in its framing of identity and sociality (Kenway and Bullen, 2001). As shown in research by the UK’s National Consumer Council (Nairn, Ormond and Bottomley, 2007), 34 per cent of 9–13 year olds would ‘rather spend time buying things than doing almost anything else’ and 46 per cent say, ‘the only kind of job I want when I grow up is one that gets me a lot of money’.

As youth culture has come to fill the growing space between childhood and adulthood, the result is children and young people’s growing autonomy in the realms of leisure, consumption, sexuality, appearance, identity, rights and participation (Osgerby, 1998).² Pressures towards independence and dependence are, in short, in tension with each other psychologically (hence the ‘discovery’ of adolescence and the teenager as fraught life-stages in conflict with adults; Abrams, 1959; Erikson, 1959/1980; France, 2007), socially (hence the notion of the ‘generation gap’ and its associated social conflicts) and historically (hence the sense that these are new problems and the adult nostalgia for the established traditions of hierarchy, authority and respect for one’s ‘elders and betters’). Further tensions also exist – the new youth market is largely funded by parents rather than by any growth in youth employment; efforts to increase youth participation now anticipate the voting age; protections for legal minors seem to constrain teenage rights (in relation to sexual experience, for example). In this new period of ‘extended youth’, children and young people are betwixt and between, caught in a series of cultural shifts whose effects are at times contradictory rather than complementary.

The economic and legal hiatus that opened up around teenagers over the past fifty years between dependent child and independent adult, exacerbating tensions between the discourses of needs and rights, is partly redressed by the new child-centred model of the family, for the task of tension resolution is transferred from society to parents. Parents must tread the difficult path between providing for their children economically for an extended period of time while simultaneously recognizing their independence in terms of sociality and culture. And it is mainly they who must oversee children’s phased entry into the world rather than, as before, the workplace (e.g. via apprenticeships) or community organizations (church, union, clubs). Their task is hardly eased by the fact that, as Gadlin (1978) argues, it is historically distinctive that parents can no longer rely on their own childhood experiences to guide them in managing the spatial and temporal structures of their children’s moral, domestic and family life.

These and other pressures together contribute to the process of de-traditionalization characteristic of late modernity. Giddens (1993: 184) argues that we are witnessing ‘a democratization of the private sphere’, a historical transformation of intimacy in which children, along with other participants in a relationship, are gaining the right to ‘determine and regulate the conditions of their association’ (p. 185) while parents gain the new duties: to ensure their children’s involvement in key decisions, to be accountable to their children and to respect as well as expecting respect. Parent–child relations are thus being reformulated, Giddens argues, according to the emergent cultural ideal of the ‘pure relationship’, this being ‘reflexively organized, in an open fashion, and on a continuous basis’ (1991: 91). Thus, by contrast with the Victorian conception of the family, based on status hierarchies and the associated values of authority, duty, hard work and security, today’s ‘democratic family’ (or ‘negotiated family’; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) prizes authenticity, intimacy, trust, reciprocity, recognition and role flexibility in support of a culture of self-fulfilment and individual rights.

In sum, contemporary families must negotiate a rapidly changing society without the traditional resources of established relations between the generations, with parents neither benefiting from the experience of their own childhood nor having the moral right to impose rules and sanctions without democratic consultation – no longer is a remote and authoritarian father expected to lay down the law and administer punishment on his return from work. Even what is referred to as ‘family’ has altered as the normative nuclear family is reconfigured (although in practice, it has always been more diverse than recognized by social norms). As Hill and Tisdall observe,

the idea of family is to some degree a fluid one, with a mix of concepts at its core – direct biological relatedness, parental caring role, long-term cohabitation, permanent belonging. (1997: 66)

Children too face significant challenges in late modernity. Drawing on Giddens’ notion of the ‘project of the self’, Buchner et al. (1995) argue that childhood increasingly includes the responsibility of constructing a ‘leisure career’ or ‘biographical project’, a responsibility that requires young people to anticipate future uncertainties and deal with risk and status insecurity in the context of a loss of traditional forms of family and community support. That loss is, as Coontz suggests above, a substantial one, though it is also liberating. Indeed, Qvortrup (1995) traces a series of paradoxical consequences for childhood as discourses and structures diverge. He argues that while society increasingly avows a positive view of children at the same time it systematically devalues, intrudes upon or excludes their needs and experiences; similarly, children are disenfranchised within the public sphere yet castigated for being apathetic or antisocial; they are subject to increasing surveillance yet seen as deceitful or subversive; their spontaneity and imagination is valued yet their lives are increasingly orga...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Changing Childhood, Changing Media
• 2 Youthful Experts
• 3 Learning and Education
• 4 Communication and Identity
• 5 Participation and Civic Engagement
• 6 Risk and Harm
• 7 Media and Digital Literacies
• 8 Balancing Online Opportunities and Risks
• Appendix
• References
• Index