With a focus on mobile devices and touchscreen or haptic interfaces, this book investigates young children’s everyday digital practices, embodied digital play, and commercialised digital culture. The book draws on a range of data sources gathered since 2013, including qualitative research in homes with families and children, analysis of online representations and discussions, and case studies of children’s digital media products—such as mobile applications , digital games, and software tools—in order to provide a critical and collective perspective on the ways young children’s digital media culture is currently being reshaped.
The context of the research extends from household spaces, involving family negotiations and digital parenting around the use of tablets, touchscreens, apps, and digital toys; to social media spaces, such as YouTube and Instagram, where children’s digital play is shared and publicised within wider online cultures and economies of communication; to public spaces, such as parks and playgrounds in which digitally augmented and embedded infrastructures are reconfiguring meanings of and possibilities for children’s play. Moving across these interconnected sites, this book explores how young children are currently configured as consumers, users, and subjects of mobile media technologies. These arrangements of media use are analysed through a conceptual lens of digital dexterity, which locates children’s capacities to use mobile media interfaces and digital products not simply in terms of physical skills or developmental capacities, but importantly, through the design and affordances of mobile technologies and touch-based interfaces, cultures of interactive play and digital parenting , and economies of digital platforms and technology product design.
Digital media use by young children aged below five, beginning from newly born children through to toddlers and pre-school aged children, is a relatively under-explored area of digital media, communication, games, and internet research. This is, in part, a consequence of young children’s historically limited engagement with, or capacity to use, desktop devices and their associated interfaces. Yet, transformations in mobile devices and especially touchscreen interfaces on smartphones and tablets in the wake of Apple’s release of the iPhone and iPad in the late 2000s have lowered thresholds of usability and reshaped possibilities for young children to engage with media technologies. These technological shifts have been accompanied by an ever-expanding range of entertainment and educational content directed at young children—including streaming services, digital games, and mobile applications—enabling expanded modes of both media consumption and digital participation. In addition, digital infrastructures and connectivity are augmenting physical toys, spaces, and environments—in what has been termed a ‘postdigital’ landscape—to reshape young children’s media practices in ways that make both digital play and its data traces more embedded, embodied, and distributed across everyday play spaces and activities.
These rapidly changing technologies in young children’s lives unsurprisingly raise challenges for both researchers and families. For families, decisions about how best to introduce and manage digital media in their young children’s lives are subjected to often vocal and competing claims about their impacts, both positive and negative. Whilst, for researchers, there are challenges in studying newer technologies, and their use and implications in the lives of young children. Studies of school aged children —see, for example, the EU Kids Online project—along with teenagers and adolescents are well established (e.g. boyd 2014; Haddon and Livingstone 2012; Livingstone and Sefton-Green 2016). Nevertheless, research on digital media use by young children, aged from birth to five, has only begun to gather momentum over the last few years (e.g. Leaver and Nansen 2017; Nansen and Leaver 2015). It is understandable that the research agenda has in the past disproportionately focused on older children’s modes of media engagement, given they display a greater diversity and intensity of media use. Yet, it has also been noted that older children are more ‘researchable’ (i.e. considered to be more reliable respondents, do not necessitate special ethical or methodological procedures) (Staksrud et al. 2007). There is, however, a growing body of research responding to the changing media contexts and practices of young children, in which more and more devices circulate in and through young children’s everyday spaces of play, and which have interfaces that are responsive to haptic modes of input, such as touch, gesture, or movement that are more accommodating of young children’s bodily capacities, and which are designed to accommodate young children’s sensory-motor and cognitive development over these early years of rapid growth.
The growing literature on young children includes: research from interaction design assessing young children’s gestural capacities to interact with touchscreen interfaces in order to inform the development of software applications (e.g. Buckleitner 2011; Hourcade et al. 2015); to education research exploring how mobile devices and software applications can be incorporated into early childhood education settings to support children’s learning and development (e.g. Danby et al. 2018; Marsh et al. 2018; Plowman et al. 2008, 2010); to health research focused on risks of mobile and touchscreen media associated with physical, social, and emotional development, in order to inform children’s media policies and guidelines (AAP 2016; ECA 2018; Strasburger and Hogan 2013; Vandewater et al. 2007).
Alongside a focus on what digital media does to children is a growing body of social and cultural research aiming to understand what children do with digital media. Within media and communication studies, for example, are a range of studies investigating young children’s media practices, digital participation, and mobile media play. These include efforts to quantify the devices, activities, and time spent by young children with mobile and touchscreen devices at home (e.g. Rideout 2013; Ofcom 2019, 2020), to understand parental attitudes towards and mediation of their children’s mobile media use (e.g. Marsh et al. 2018), and to understand young children’s embodied relations with mobile media (Giddings 2014; Nansen and Jayemanne 2016; Nevski and Siibak 2016b). This research extends from studying young children’s mobile media in domestic spaces, to exploring children’s cultures of use on social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram (Lange 2014; Marsh 2016; Nicoll and Nansen 2018; Trezise 2017), to analysing digital content shared about babies on social media platforms like Facebook (Leaver 2015; Kumar and Schoenebeck 2015), to considering young children’s emerging play practices with connected toys and smart digital products (Berriman and Mascheroni 2018; Chesher 2019; Holloway and Green 2016; Giddings 2019; Marsh 2017). This growing and rich body of research provides evidence for t...