Children and the digital environment

Jun72021

Featured Image Header WP7 webinar 09 June

Authors: Sonia Livingstone & Mariya Stoilova – CO:RE WP5-Theories at LSE | follow-up to the CO:RE Theories Webinar “Children and the digital environment” on Friday, 07 May 2021.

Technologies are spreading into all aspects of our lives via smart devices, internet of things, augmented reality and data profiling. Children’s lives have become digital by default, with digital technologies the taken-for-granted means of playing, seeing family, doing schoolwork, hanging out with friends in a post-COVID world. But where does the digital begin and end, what does it include? Is it really the case that we can no longer distinguish between the offline and online? Should we talk of digital technologies, or the digital environment, or the digital era, or the digital world? Or, just, the digital?

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recently adopted a General Comment on “the digital environment,” as the drafting team finally called it. In trying to future-proof the text for at least the next 5-10 years, we came up with this definition:

“The digital environment is constantly evolving and expanding, encompassing information and communications technologies, including digital networks, content, services and applications, connected devices and environments, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, automated systems, algorithms and data analytics, biometrics and implant technology.”

As a definition, it is primarily a list of digital technologies to be included, prefaced by a caution that the items on the list keep changing. The definition implies that, since they increasingly work together, these technologies constitute an “environment.” So “the digital” is not as simple as digital means noughts and ones, nor as all-encompassing as to include every technology or technique by which humans are governed or by which power is mediated. Nor, by comparison with the news headlines that focus predominantly on social media platforms, does it leave out the many crucial digital technologies that are not user-facing, but arguably are now part of the societal infrastructure.

Still, there is an unease in how the digital is discussed, and a reluctance among researchers to define it that can seem obfuscating to the wider public. We recently selected “the digital” as one of the keywords to be interrogated in our CO:RE webinars because it is central to the work of many of us. But perhaps we use the term differently, depending on our disciplinary training or research purpose or theoretical preferences? Let’s discover how our webinar speakers illuminated our thinking.

The digital is best conceptualised through its affordances

“The walls of the digital environment are much stickier, much more responsive and expansive. They attend to the person moving through the digital space, they take note and ultimately contribute to changing that very space in a very performative manner.” (Taina Bucher)

Taina Bucher, Associate Professor in Screen Cultures at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, argued for a conceptualisation of “the digital” through an analysis of its various apps, platforms, devices and networks. We too often construct it in an opposition to “the analogue,” creating an artificial differentiation between an online and an offline environment. In such distinctions, “the digital” connotes futurity, innovation, cultural transformation, the new risks and opportunities. Instead, sidestepping such polarised thinking, it’s helpful to think about the digital through the parameters of what it offers to us – its affordances.

Originally developed by Gibson (1979), the concept of affordances allows us to “furnish” the (natural, material, digital) environment and think of the activities it enables (or impedes) and how these might be different for different users including children. As with the design of material environments, which govern our ways of moving through them, the architecture of digital spaces is also environmental, albeit that data, algorithms and infrastructure are used to construct these affordances and produce these possibilities for engagement. Arguably, in comparison to the physical environment, the digital environment is ever more expansive.

The digital is embedded, embodied and everyday

“We move through complex and unpredictable social landscapes that span face-to-face and the digital, where people are continuously repurposing digital technologies in unexpected ways… These digital spaces vary in how much they are accessible to both children and adults.” (Christine Hine)

Christine Hine, Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey, called on us to understand the digital through its embedding in specific contexts – technologies are rooted in our institutions, identities, and our ways of being accountable. Digital technologies are also embodied – they relate to our ways of being in the world, how we go about our lives. Thirdly, technologies are soaked into the texture of our everyday experience, normalised and often used without reflection.

Fundamentally, we need to focus on lived social experiences and what spaces people make significant within their own lives. At the same time, we can deploy other methods which allow us to hover above these spaces and study experiences, for example, though large-scale data analysis.

Webinar: Children and the digital culture, Friday, 07 May 2021

Digital infrastructures become visible through their failures

“When we keep focusing on contingent expression of technology, then there is a problem with temporality. If we ground our concepts in contingent technologies, then the life of our concepts will be pretty short… There is also a special aspect present. What we describe as technology reflects the standpoint of where we are in the world… We might describe it as universal but in doing so we shut off other expressions of this technology.” (Jean-Christophe Plantin)

Jean-Christophe Plantin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications, LSE, observed that during the pandemic we became much more reliant on digital technologies. Their very evident failures newly sensitised us to the numerous actors involved in building and supporting these services.

It is helpful, therefore, to think about “the digital” not only in terms of platforms or devices or contexts but as socio-technical infrastructures. This encompasses several levels – the network artefacts, such as routers, service providers and data centres; the invisible forms of often global labour that support these infrastructures, such as the engineers and call centre staff; and the data that are created and circulated through these networks. These digital infrastructures are not infinite. For example, our digital consumption is limited by bandwidth capacities within which digital services “compete.”

The mutual constitution of the digital, user practices and context

“When we talk about the blended nature of media, it is very hard to say: here starts the analogue, the real or the physical, and here starts the digital. The digital is present even in our most intimate zones, like our bodies. When we talk about the digital it is also very hard to have future-proof language because we don’t know what will be coming next” (Bieke Zaman)

Bieke Zaman, Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction, KU Leuven, criticised current approaches to media and technologies that adopt a social constructivist and culturalist line of enquiry, paying attention primarily to processes of meaning-making and cultural appropriation. Lievrouw (2014), on the other hand, offers a more comprehensive framework to conceptualise “the digital” which points also to the materiality of media and communication technologies.

Extending her earlier work on new media technologies, Lievrouw’s mediation framework articulates the intersection and mutual influence of artefacts (technological infrastructures), arrangements (social, cultural, regulatory contexts) and practices (uses and appropriation). It recognises that content and materiality mutually shape each other in specific contexts and helps us move beyond the dual silos of technological determinism and cultural appropriation.

Mediation framework, Lievrouw (2014)

Image credit: Damásio et al. (2015)

Finally, it is important to acknowledge the collaborative element in the design, production and consumption of media, as described by Löwgren and Reimer (2013). Here digital technologies are the enabling factor which mediates the cultural forms designed, produced and consumed by users.

Concluding comments

The insights from our speakers point us in the direction of understanding the digital in its relational context, as a mediator and enabling factor for the expression of agency. This transcends sharp distinctions between offline/online, analogue/digital, structure/agency and prompts us to consider the digital as “blended”, embodied, dynamic and co-constructed. This emerging analysis of the digital draws on ecological thinking and demand that we understand it in all its expanding and evolving socio-technological and contextually-embedded forms.