You see, Tomā¦ the world goes on at a smarter pace now than it did when I was a young fellow. (Mr. Deane to Tom Tulliver in George Eliotās, The Mill on the Floss, 1860)
In this bookās discussion of young peopleās encounters with the digital, we, the authors, speak as and primarily with those who identify or are interpolated as adults; subjects whose sense-making, like that of Mr. Deane, is always already structured by our discursive positioning in linear time as āno longer youngā. We choose to address adults not because we consider conversations with young people unimportant. To the contrary, we will argue throughout this book that intergenerational dialogue is crucial to navigating the challenges that confront us. Nor, in addressing our audience, is our invocation of the first-person plural (āweā) intended to gloss the differences that shape diverse groupsā and individualsā conceptualizations of, access to and use of technology. Rather, the desire is to assert a heterogeneous āweā that nonetheless shares the experience of ābeing adultāāor, at least, of being no longer youngāand, generationally speaking, enjoys the privilege of the unmarked case (Livingstone and Third 2017, 661). Acknowledging this, the book draws upon the attitudes, experiences and feelings of a diverse range of young people, who played a central role in the research that is elaborated here. This is deliberate, because adult ways of being have dominated, for too long, how young people and the digital are configured in mainstream debates.1 We contend that alternative ways of thinking and doing are urgently demanded, and that young peopleās insights and experiences are a powerful and necessary resource for such a reorientation.
In the twenty-first-century English-speaking world, mainstream ideas about āyoung peopleā are interwoven with and framed by the idea of āthe digitalā.2 We designate this coupling of young people and the digital as young+digital , to signal their construction as mutually constitutive categories. Despite the growing interest of contemporary policymakers, technology providers and youth-focused organizations in the benefits and opportunities for young people online, both āyoung peopleā and āthe digitalā continue to be constructed as sites of social and cultural anxiety requiring containment and control. The ācrosswiringā (Third 2014) of young people and the digital as young+digital has resulted in a policy and practice environment that turns upon deficit framings of āyoung peopleā and that, until very recently, has been strongly focused on risks, harms and forms of behaviour change that misrecognize, dismiss or demonize young peopleās digital practices and the meanings they attach to them.3
This ācontrol paradigmāāthe various forms and effects of which we will elaborate across the chapters of this bookāis problematic, because it is not necessarily leading to safer online environments for young people and, perhaps more importantly, is not enabling young people to maximize the broad range of opportunities online (Third 2016a).
The stakes are high. We have entered what mightāloosely and reflexivelyābe called āthe digital ageā, āreferring to the profound shift from the internet as a useful tool to societyās reliance on global digital networks for its very infrastructureā (Livingstone and Third 2017, 658). And unless we move beyond the confines of the control paradigm, we risk closing down opportunities for young people online, and may also miss the chance offered by the emergence of the digital to reimagine society as we know it.
It is contentious to claim that current approaches are inadequate, not least because young people can and do navigate a range of risks online, and some of these risks can and do, under certain circumstances, translate into harm (see, for example, Livingstone and Bulger 2013; Third 2016a; Gasser et al. 2010). Young peopleās safety online represents a challenge that spans both global North and global South contexts, although this challenge manifests in different modalities and with uneven and often little-understood effects.4 We acknowledge that a wide range of organizations internationally have been innovating and working hard over a long period, many in environments characterized by severe resource restrictions or demands for urgent action over considered responses, to support young people to navigate such risks successfully. Some are also mobilizing to promote digital media as key to harnessing health, educational, employment and other opportunities for young people. However, our work with both young people and a range of youth-focused organizations and technology providers over the past ten years has convinced us of the need to radically reassess the discursive contours through which adult researchers, policymakers and practitioners approach, evaluate, monitor and regulate young peopleās digital practices.5
Thus, adopting a critical youth studies approach and theorizing the digital as a key feature of the contemporary everyday, this book analyses how dominant policy, practice and popular discourses have overwhelmingly constructed young peopleās digital engagements in relation to a logic of control. We argue that young peopleās digital practices are constituted through a series of double movements, oscillating between the dystopian and the utopian, between risk and opportunity and between control and liberation. These double movements are the ābinary codeā through which young peopleās digital practices are discursively produced as the objects of (sometimes benevolent or well-meaning, and sometimes authoritarian) forms of control. Further, as we discuss in more detail later, the impulse to control is exacerbated by the imagining of young people as inhabiting a crucial position at the nexus between past and future.
Problematizing these binaries, this book thus analyses young peopleās relationship to a series of digital-, online-, e- or cyber-prefixed concepts that have dominated recent debates in the field of young peopleās technology use, including online risks (such as cyberbullying), cybersafety and digital resilience , digital inclusion and digital citizenship . To do so, we juxtapose public policy and popular educational and parental framings of young peopleās digital practices with the findings from fieldwork conducted with young Australians aged 12ā25. We argue that, by centring young peopleās insights and experiences and working intergenerationally, we can enact a shift beyond the control paradigm, opening towards a deeper understanding of the capacities generated in and through digital life for a broad range of users, young and old alike.
Historicizing the (Digital) Present
Almost two decades ago, prior to the advent of social media but just as English-speaking countries were beginning to come to terms with the changing cultural order of āthe information ageā, Gill Valentine and Sarah Holloway (2001) conducted a survey in the United Kingdom with over 750 high-school students, and follow-up interviews with a further 30 young people and their parents and siblings, regarding their attitudes towards and engagement with emerg...