Digital Media Essay

Within the universal landscape of childhood there exists an ideal metaphor for understanding the impact of digital technologies on youth cultural engagement; the playground. Developmental Psychology studies have found that children use the playground to perform approximations of adult behaviour; using this landscape as their training ground for navigating the adult world (Bers, 2012). However, these days the proverbial playground can be found within a digital world. Examples of these new information-communication technologies include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr but can span to include many other forms of technological communication. Using new-information technologies young people can develop and master skills, communicate with peers, and construct

Traditionally, social anxiety over perceived risks has not targeted a single group or class, instead it describes the universal and pervasive sense of anxiety about children and the general state of childhood. This anxiety has shifted through the introduction of digital youth cultures. There are two traditional discourses for conceptualising youth interaction with digital media; Henry Jenkins (2004) uses the terms “Digital Generation” (as a utopian discourse) and “Columbine Generation” (as a discourse of risk) to describe these opposing perspectives. The “Columbine Generation” expounds the idea that interaction with “risk factors” such as violent video games prompts aggressive deviance through this media (Jenkins, 2004). Online spaces, therefore, are becoming sites of new moral panics regarding children’s safety, and are generating governmental imperatives to protect and regulate young people (Wyn, 2014). Today, youth are described as having created a bedroom culture that facilitates their media consumption without parental supervision or limitation (Mesch, 2009). Sandywell (2006) proposes that one of the concerns surrounding the Internet is that it is reconfiguring boundaries. The Internet further erodes borders previously breached by telegraph and telephone. Historically, the ways in which we enter into and maintain relationships and communication has been irrevocably changed by technology. However, these new cultural forms of risk society are still pervaded by traditional inequalities, such as gender. Discourses of “Sexting” predominantly frame young women as more vulnerable, while ironically depicting those who engage with it as more deviant relative to males (Burkett, 2015). The rapid development of technology has contributed to ‘new pornographies’ (Hardy 2009) which have been made easily accusable for youth through the blurring of lines between