ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews how sociability is discussed across three literatures—the one on the internet, the one on the mobile phone, and the one on parental concerns about children’s experience of information and communication technologies (ICTs). It focuses on empirical evidence from the Net Children Go Mobile project about parents’ and children’s perceptions of smartphones and tablets. There is a long history of concerns about ICTs and children, both in the academic literature and in more general societal discourses. The smartphone may be ‘new’ ICTs, but Stan refers here to continuities from children’s use of the basic mobile phone that has been available to young people for much longer. Some parents acknowledged that being social was also becoming manifest in new forms because of a range of ICTs. While being generally more positive than parents about the mediated social communications, children could also critically assess changes brought about by smartphones and tablets.
