Growing Up in the Digital Era
- LAST REVIEWED: 29 November 2022
- LAST MODIFIED: 29 November 2022
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0268
- LAST REVIEWED: 29 November 2022
- LAST MODIFIED: 29 November 2022
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0268
Introduction
Since the 1990s, scholars working in disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, law, information studies, and medicine have been investigating what it means to grow up in a digital era. Much of the earliest research published on children and youth in a digital era focused on the potential dangers of digital technologies and online life. Persistent themes included the Internet’s potential to put children and adolescents at risk of being prematurely exposed to pornography, sexual predators, extremist politics, and deviant subcultures. Yet, as American media studies scholar Henry Jenkins observed in an early article on growing up in a digital era published in Radical Teacher, “There has been no point in the twentieth century when childhood was not seen as under threat from one or manifestation of other of mass culture (comic strips, joke books, pulp fiction, radio, comic books, rock music, television, video games, etc.) (p. 33).” Jenkins didn’t simply argue that the moral panic about children’s access to the Internet may be woefully predictable but also suggested that young people’s access to emerging digital technologies and platforms was inevitable and would ultimately prove to be “central to their political participation” (p. 33). By the early 2000s, it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore Jenkins’ position that there was no way or legitimate reason to stop children and adolescents from exploring the Internet and embracing new digital tools and platforms. As children, tweens, and teens came to dominate many online spaces, including most emerging social media platforms, earlier calls to censor the Internet for minors waned, new concerns and research questions arose, and a more nuanced perspective in growing up in a digital era began to emerge. Although some researchers continue to grapple with the dangers online networks pose to children and adolescents, in the 2020s, there is widespread recognition that digital technologies and platforms have transformed young people’s lives for the better. Indeed, much of the research on growing up in a digital era now focuses on how digital technologies and platforms have given rise to a generation of children and teen influencers, activists, media makers, and entrepreneurs who are using their unprecedented social, political, and even economic capital to reposition young people as critical power brokers in the world.
General Overviews
Most articles and books on growing up in a digital era focus on specific challenges, demographics, technologies, or platforms. Still, there are a few general overviews dating back to the 1990s. Although most of these overviews were published before 2010, even early publications, dated as they may appear, remain valuable research documents to the extent that they offer insight into how the challenges and potential benefits of growing up in a digital era were once framed. Among the general overviews of growing up in a digital era that remain particularly significant are those by a Canadian business analyst and writer in Tapscott 1997, a British social psychologist in Livingstone 2002 and Livingstone 2009, and a Japanese-American anthropologist in Ito, et al. 2008. Tapscott, Livingstone, and Ito were among the first researchers to publish or edit book-length studies on growing up in a digital era. Livingstone and Ito have both continued to focus on this subject over the course of their careers. In addition, a notable recent overview is the companion guide Green, et al. 2020.
Green, Lelia, Donell Holloway, Kylie Stevenson, Tama Leaver, and Leslie Haddon. The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children. New York: Routledge, 2020.
This companion guide includes essays on a wide range of topics related to growing up in a digital age, including essays on early childhood interactions with digital media, children’s digital play, and children’s rights in an online world.
Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Horst, Matteo Bittanti, et al. Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Based on a three-year ethnographic study sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, this 2008 report was an ambitious attempt to track the impact of social networking sites, gaming, video-sharing platforms, and mobile devices on youth, and more specifically, explore how these new technologies were impacting children’s and adolescents’ communications, friendships, self-expressions, and experiences of play at the time.
Livingstone, Sonia. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: SAGE, 2002.
Among the first book-length studies on growing up in a digital age, Livingston’s 2002 study on children and digital culture offered insight into the key challenges and possibilities presented by the new media landscape in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Livingstone, Sonia. Children and the Internet. London: Polity Press, 2009.
Building on earlier studies, Livingstone’s 2009 study on children and the Internet offered a critical assessment on some of the emerging challenges facing children and youth in a digital era and how to manage these challenges and risks without closing off access to the Internet’s emerging opportunities.
Tapscott, Don. Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.
In this early contribution to literature exploring the impact of digital technologies on children, business analyst Don Tapscott identified how young people were using digital technologies to quickly make inroads into all areas of society, including business.
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login.
How to Subscribe
Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here.
Article
- Abduction of Children
- Aboriginal Childhoods
- Addams, Jane
- ADHD, Sociological Perspectives on
- Adolescence and Youth
- Adolescent Consent to Medical Treatment
- Adoption and Fostering
- Adoption and Fostering, History of Cross-Country
- Adoption and Fostering in Canada, History of
- Advertising and Marketing, Psychological Approaches to
- Advertising and Marketing, Sociocultural Approaches to
- Africa, Children and Young People in
- African American Children and Childhood
- After-school Hours and Activities
- Aggression across the Lifespan
- Ancient Near and Middle East, Child Sacrifice in the
- Animals, Children and
- Animations, Comic Books, and Manga
- Anthropology of Childhood
- Archaeology of Childhood
- Ariès, Philippe
- Art History, Children in
- Attachment in Children and Adolescents
- Australia, History of Adoption and Fostering in
- Australian Indigenous Contexts and Childhood Experiences
- Autism, Females and
- Autism, Medical Model Perspectives on
- Autobiography and Childhood
- Benjamin, Walter
- Bereavement
- Best Interest of the Child
- Bioarchaeology of Childhood
- Body, Children and the
- Body Image
- Bourdieu, Pierre
- Boy Scouts/Girl Guides
- Boys and Fatherhood
- Breastfeeding
- Bronfenbrenner, Urie
- Bruner, Jerome
- Buddhist Views of Childhood
- Byzantine Childhoods
- Child and Adolescent Anger
- Child Beauty Pageants
- Child Homelessness
- Child Mortality, Historical Perspectives on Infant and
- Child Protection
- Child Protection, Children, Neoliberalism, and
- Child Public Health
- Child Trafficking and Slavery
- Childcare Manuals
- Childhod, Agency and
- Childhood and Borders
- Childhood and Empire
- Childhood as Discourse
- Childhood, Confucian Views of Children and
- Childhood, Memory and
- Childhood Publics
- Childhood Studies and Leisure Studies
- Childhood Studies in France
- Childhood Studies, Interdisciplinarity in
- Childhood Studies, Posthumanism and
- Childhoods in the United States, Sports and
- Childism
- Children and Dance
- Children and Film-Making
- Children and Money
- Children and Social Media
- Children and Sport
- Children and Sustainable Cities
- Children as Language Brokers
- Children as Perpetrators of Crime
- Children, Code-switching and
- Children in the Industrial Revolution
- Children with Autism in a Brazilian Context
- Children, Young People, and Architecture
- Children's Humor
- Children’s Museums
- Children’s Parliaments
- Children’s Reading Development and Instruction
- Children's Views of Childhood
- China, Japan, and Korea
- China's One Child Policy
- Citizenship
- Civil Rights Movement and Desegregation
- Class
- Classical World, Children in the
- Clothes and Costume, Children’s
- Collective Memory in Latin America, Childhoods and Collect...
- Colonial America, Child Witches in
- Colonialism and Human Rights
- Colonization and Nationalism
- Color Symbolism and Child Development
- Common World Childhoods
- Competitiveness, Children and
- Conceptual Development in Early Childhood
- Congenital Disabilities
- Constructivist Approaches to Childhood
- Consumer Culture, Children and
- Consumption, Child and Teen
- Conversation Analysis and Research with Children
- Critical Approaches to Children’s Work and the Concept of ...
- Crying
- Cultural psychology and human development
- Debt and Financialization of Childhood
- Disability
- Discipline and Punishment
- Discrimination
- Disney, Walt
- Divorce And Custody
- Dolls
- Domestic Violence
- Drawings, Children’s
- Early Childhood
- Early Childhood Care and Education, Selected History of
- Eating disorders and obesity
- Education: Learning and Schooling Worldwide
- Environment, Children and the
- Environmental Education and Children
- Ethics in Research with Children
- Eugenics
- Europe (including Greece and Rome), Child Sacrifice in
- Evolutionary Studies of Childhood
- Family Meals
- Fandom (Fan Studies)
- Fathers
- Female Genital Cutting
- Feminist New Materialist Approaches to Childhood Studies
- Feral and "Wild" Children
- Fetuses and Embryos
- Filicide
- Films about Children
- Films for Children
- Folk Tales, Fairy Tales and
- Folklore
- Food
- Foundlings and Abandoned Children
- Freud, Anna
- Freud, Sigmund
- Friends and Peers: Psychological Perspectives
- Froebel, Friedrich
- Gangs
- Gay and Lesbian Parents
- Gender and Childhood
- Generations, The Concept of
- Geographies, Children's
- Gifted and Talented Children
- Globalization
- Growing Up in the Digital Era
- Hall, G. Stanley
- Happiness in Children
- Hindu Views of Childhood and Child Rearing
- Hispanic Childhoods (U.S.)
- Historical Approaches to Child Witches
- History of Childhood in America
- History of Childhood in Canada
- HIV/AIDS, Growing Up with
- Homeschooling
- Humor and Laughter
- Images of Childhood, Adulthood, and Old Age in Children’s ...
- Infancy and Ethnography
- Infant Mortality in a Global Context
- Innocence and Childhood
- Institutional Care
- Intercultural Learning and Teaching with Children
- Islamic Views of Childhood
- Japan, Childhood in
- Juvenile Detention in the US
- Key, Ellen
- Klein, Melanie
- Labor, Child
- Latin America
- Learning, Language
- Learning to Write
- Legends, Contemporary
- Literary Representations of Childhood
- Literature, Children's
- Love and Care in the Early Years
- Magazines for Teenagers
- Maltreatment, Child
- Maria Montessori
- Marxism and Childhood
- Masculinities/Boyhood
- Material Cultures of Western Childhoods
- Mead, Margaret
- Media, Children in the
- Media Culture, Children's
- Medieval and Anglo-Saxon Childhoods
- Menstruation
- Middle Childhood
- Middle East
- Migration
- Miscarriage
- Missionaries/Evangelism
- Moral Development
- Moral Panics
- Mothers
- Multi-culturalism and Education
- Music and Babies
- Nation and Childhood
- Native American and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood
- New Reproductive Technologies and Assisted Conception
- Nursery Rhymes
- Organizations, Nongovernmental
- Orphans
- Parental Gender Preferences, The Social Construction of
- Parenting
- Pediatrics, History of
- Peer Culture
- Perspectives on Boys' Circumcision
- Peter Pan
- Philosophy and Childhood
- Piaget, Jean
- Play
- Politics, Children and
- Postcolonial Childhoods
- Post-Modernism
- Poverty, Rights, and Well-being, Child
- Pre-Colombian Mesoamerica Childhoods
- Premodern China, Conceptions of Childhood in
- Prostitution and Pornography, Child
- Psychoanalysis
- Queer Theory and Childhood
- Race and Ethnicity
- Racism, Children and
- Radio, Children, and Young People
- Readers, Children as
- Refugee and Displaced Children
- Reimagining Early Childhood Education, Reconceptualizing a...
- Relational Ontologies
- Relational Pedagogies
- Rights, Children’s
- Risk and Resilience
- Russia
- School Shootings
- Sex Education in the United States
- Sexuality
- Siblings
- Siblings, Learning Disabilities and
- Social and Cultural Capital of Childhood
- Social Habitus in Childhood
- Social Movements, Children's
- Social Policy, Children and
- Socialization and Child Rearing
- Socio-cultural Perspectives on Children's Spirituality
- Sociology of Childhood
- South African Birth to Twenty Project
- South Asia
- South Asia, History of Childhood in
- Special Education
- Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence
- Spock, Benjamin
- Sports and Organized Games
- Street Children
- Street Children And Brazil
- Subcultures
- Sure Start
- Teenage Fathers
- Teenage Pregnancy
- Television
- The Bible and Children
- The Harms and Prevention of Drugs and Alcohol on Children
- The Spaces of Childhood
- Theater for Children and Young People
- Theories, Pedagogic
- Tourism
- Toys
- Transgender Children
- Tweens
- Twins and Multiple Births
- Unaccompanied Migrant Children
- United Kingdom, History of Adoption and Fostering in the
- United States, Schooling in the
- Value of Children
- Views of Childhood, Jewish and Christian
- Violence, Children and
- Visual Representations of Childhood
- Voice, Participation, and Agency
- Vygotsky, Lev and His Cultural-historical Approach to Deve...
- War
- Welfare Law in the United States, Child
- Well-Being, Child
- Western Europe and Scandinavia
- Western Literature, The Urban Child in
- Witchcraft in the Contemporary World, Children and
- Work and Apprenticeship, Children's
- Young Carers
- Young Children and Inclusion
- Young Children’s Imagination
- Young Lives
- Young People, Alcohol, and Urban Life
- Young People and Climate Activism
- Young People and Disadvantaged Environments in Affluent Co...