ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on texts created by digital technologies. In recent years such texts have become ‘embedded in the everyday fabric of … society’ (Carrington and Robinson 2009: 1). Producers of these texts are able to distribute them amongst a wide range of friends, family and acquaintances and this notion impacts on our understanding of the concept of audience. A recent report in The Guardian newspaper (Sweney 2010) stated that a quarter of UK internet users aged between eight and 12 years had profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, despite the minimum age for registration being set at age thirteen. This means that primary-aged children can now be considered as ‘motivated producers and consumers of digital texts’ (Dowdall 2009a: 50).
