ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the categorizations and characterizations of children that online marketing surveillance practices are simultaneously called upon to legitimate these practices. The focus of this chapter is on advergaming, the uncomfortable amalgam of branded online games blending childhood fun with commercial interests. Finally, it also presents an overview of key concepts such as double edged relationship of children to digital systems, digital practices connected with potentials for deviant behaviour, area of digital identification dense with global socio-political that are discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Deeply committed to an anti-essentialist and empirical constructivist epistemology, science and technology studies (STS) approaches to digital identities and identification technologies emphasize the need to study situated instances of implemented technologies to make sense of their transformative agency. Another key discourse on identity informing the chapter is that of surveillance studies, an interdisciplinary field of research focusing explicitly on information technologies, in particular on practices of digital monitoring of the people.
