ABSTRACT

The early twenty-first century witnessed the emergence of a new form of children’s culture. Children’s internet culture is, in one sense, a form of children’s media culture like any other, yet it now intersects all dimensions of childhood, at least in developed countries. In recent years, children’s homes, timetables, relationships, education and entertainment have been rearranged such that everyday activities are conducted on and through the internet. While, traditionally, children were expected to accommodate to adult cultural norms, in relation to the internet they are celebrated for their pioneering exploration – sanctioned or otherwise – of the unfolding digital opportunities for identity, sociality, learning and participation. However, the highly combustible mix of rapid change, youthful experimentation and technological complexity has reignited the moral panics that typically accompany media change, amplifying public uncertainty, parental anxiety and policy attention to the risks accompanying children’s internet use. In the UK, for example, internet adoption has risen with astonishing rapidity from just 13 percent

of 7 to 16-year-olds accessing the internet at home in 1998 to 41 percent in 2000 and plateauing at 87 percent in 2011 (ChildWise, 2012). Although the pace and nature of change vary across cultures, in many countries children, parents, teachers, youth work professionals, marketing companies and media providers have all responded energetically by incorporating the internet into their activities with children. In developing countries too, children are gaining internet access, often via a mobile phone rather than a computer, swept along in the apparently relentless global trend towards personalized, portable, networked media ownership (Gasser et al., 2010; Ito et al., 2005). But as technology becomes differentiated, with ever more devices becoming internetenabled, content appears increasingly mainstreamed. Notwithstanding public hyperbole regarding the internet’s extraordinary breadth, children devote their energies to a few highly corporate sites developed for adults: among UK 7 to 16-year-olds, for example, the top websites are Facebook, YouTube, and Google (ChildWise, 2011). How shall we analyse children’s internet culture? A few years ago, Corner (1995, p. 5)

observed ‘the powerful capacity of television to draw towards itself and incorporate (in the

process, transforming) broader aspects of the culture’ and also ‘to project its images, character types, catchphrases and latest creations to the widest edges of the culture, permeating if not dominating the conduct of other cultural affairs’. Today we might say the same of the internet, for these centrifugal and centripetal forces seem to be rewriting the values, practices and ambitions of a generation. Faced with clamorous voices on all sides – from the sceptics (children are still children, there’s nothing new under the sun), to the anxious (our children are under threat, the good old days are gone) and the optimists (children are leading the way into a bright new dawn, existing institutions must reshape themselves for the digital future) – it is a timely moment to examine children’s internet culture critically in relation to the emerging evidence base (Livingstone, 2009).