Growing Up in the Digital Era

Abstract

Since the 1990s, scholars working in disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, law, information studies, and medicine have been investigating what it means to grow up in a digital era. Much of the earliest research published on children and youth in a digital era focused on the potential dangers of digital technologies and online life. Persistent themes included the Internet’s potential to put children and adolescents at risk of being prematurely exposed to pornography, sexual predators, extremist politics, and deviant subcultures. Yet, as American media studies scholar Henry Jenkins observed in an early article on growing up in a digital era published in Radical Teacher, “There has been no point in the twentieth century when childhood was not seen as under threat from one or manifestation of other of mass culture (comic strips, joke books, pulp fiction, radio, comic books, rock music, television, video games, etc.) (p. 33).” Jenkins didn’t simply argue that the moral panic about children’s access to the Internet may be woefully predictable but also suggested that young people’s access to emerging digital technologies and platforms was inevitable and would ultimately prove to be “central to their political participation” (p. 33). By the early 2000s, it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore Jenkins’ position that there was no way or legitimate reason to stop children and adolescents from exploring the Internet and embracing new digital tools and platforms. As children, tweens, and teens came to dominate many online spaces, including most emerging social media platforms, earlier calls to censor the Internet for minors waned, new concerns and research questions arose, and a more nuanced perspective in growing up in a digital era began to emerge. Although some researchers continue to grapple with the dangers online networks pose to children and adolescents, in the 2020s, there is widespread recognition that digital technologies and platforms have transformed young people’s lives for the better. Indeed, much of the research on growing up in a digital era now focuses on how digital technologies and platforms have given rise to a generation of children and teen influencers, activists, media makers, and entrepreneurs who are using their unprecedented social, political, and even economic capital to reposition young people as critical power brokers in the world.