The digitization of children’s public play spaces

Abstract

This chapter explores the collision of digital technology and children’s public play spaces, as part of the broader trajectories of the communicative city in which the historical distinctions between the digital and the non-digital are blurred through mobile, locative, and ambient urban media. The digitization of children’s public space is, in common with many other social contexts, predominantly occurring through the widespread and often incidental use of personal mobile devices that occurs around children’s public play. Public playgrounds, which grew in number and popularity in the early twentieth century in response to the street as the default public space of children’s play making way for the car, were from their origins associated with children’s safe outdoor recreation and physical health. The penetration of mobile media infrastructures into playgrounds disrupts this understanding of the playground as a site that is “unmediated” by technological media.