Young Children and Mobile Media: Producing Digital Dexterity

This book investigates young children’s everyday digital practices, embodied digital play, and digital media products – such as mobile applications, digital games, and software tools. The book provides a critical and collective perspective on the ways young children’s mobile media culture is currently being reshaped.
The chapters draw on research that extends from the household to social media platforms and public spaces. Moving across these interconnected sites, this book explores how young children are currently configured as consumers, users, and subjects of mobile media technologies. These arrangements of media use are analysed through a conceptual lens of digital dexterity, which locates children’s capacities to use mobile media interfaces and digital products not simply in terms of physical skills or developmental capacities, but importantly, through the design and affordances of mobile technologies and touch-based interfaces, cultures of interactive play and digital parenting, and economies of digital platforms and technology product design.
Bjørn Nansen is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely across studies of technology innovation and adoption, digital media industries, and cultural practices of media use in everyday and family life. His work often focuses on emerging and marginal digital practices, and is based in interdisciplinary approaches to research. His current projects investigate children’s YouTube, digital memorialising, and sleep management technologies.