Digital Childhoods

A profusion of terminology has been coined to link children and youths to digital and information technologies, including net generation, screenagers, and digital natives, to name but a few. In European thinking, from the 19th century onward, representations of child development have been enduringly invested with the preoccupations of modernity and its economic model of development. The mass media played an important part in the earliest advent of such notions, in particular, how technological developments were represented during the emergence of Western consumerism and modernity after World War II. With the shift to consumerism and a greater focus on the accumulation of wealth, there was a need to reimagine these alien machines and technologies, previously associated with destruction and fear, due to their role in ...