ABSTRACT
This chapter explores children’s engagements with the digital and this has prompted to productively call into question what can seem like a relentless steer to focus on the new. It examines task of researching children’s play in the digital age and how this play becomes a site for the performance and negotiation of identities. The chapter outlines social norms can certainly be read into the toys, popular culture and digital media made for children, but that these meanings can be contested and even subverted in children’s playful engagements with them. There have been a number of attempts to understand children’s play with, and participation in, digital media intersecting with other influences and relationships as an ecology. The girls’ digital media habitus along with their shared experiences of family life were rich resources for their play, which was layered around multiple meanings and texts. Play has long been acknowledged as an important context for the development of early literacies and identities.
