Researching Young Children and Mobile Media

Abstract

Researching young children and mobile media unpacks the concept of digital dexterity. This chapter draws on literature that recognises the diverse cultural, social, and material contexts that help to shape childhood development of digital skills and competency in an ongoing, uneven, and distributed process. And so, as this book explores through various spaces and products of young children’s mobile media practice, digital dexterity is not simply a purely physical or bodily capacity, but instead something that is produced and distributed through a diversity of relations in the ways mobile media technologies are imagined, mobilised, and mediated. That is, how mobile media are imagined through popular discourses surrounding both interfaces and children’s digital literacies, mobilised through the environments in which children encounter and engage with media, and mediated by parental norms as well as the design and affordances of digital products in, for example, codifying touch and gesture. These imaginaries, mobilisations, and mediations of young children’s digital dexterity map onto broad areas of academic interest—discourses of digital interfaces and associated literacies, affordances, and ecologies of household media, and the governance or mediation of children’s media practices—which are discussed in this chapter.