Young Children and Mobile Media: Producing Digital Dexterity [1st ed.] 9783030498740, 9783030498757

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Young Children and Mobile Media Producing Digital Dexterity

Bjørn Nansen

Young Children and Mobile Media

Bjørn Nansen

Young Children and Mobile Media Producing Digital Dexterity

Bjørn Nansen Media and Communications program University of Melbourne Parkville, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-49874-0    ISBN 978-3-030-49875-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49875-7 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I want to thank Harvey and Lulu for their inspiration and experimentation, and the hours of joy we have shared on YouTube, Netflix, Minecraft, and playing together with myriad other kids’ media. I would like to acknowledge and thank the collaborators I have had the pleasure to work with in undertaking research studies and writing different papers that have informed this book: Darshana Jayemanne, Tom Apperley, Benjamin Nicoll, Chris O’Neill, Jane Mavoa, and Rowan Wilken. And thanks also to the many colleagues and friends who have in various ways helped in discussing and developing ideas in this book, especially folk in the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) community, the Melbourne University research team and Interaction Design group, the Children’s Lives Research Initiative, Digital Games Research Association Australia (DiGRAA), and the Digitising Early Childhood research network: Marcus Carter, Robbie Fordyce, Tamara Kohn, Scott McQuire, James Meese, Melissa Rogerson, Emily van der Nagel, Frank Vetere, Martin Gibbs, Michael Arnold, Jenny Kennedy, Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin, Wonsun Shin, Anthony McCosker, Milovan Savic, Karena Jessup, May Lwin, Jessica Balanzategui, Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, Giovanna Mascheroni, Andra Siibak, Ben Highmore, Luke Heemsbergen, Luke van Ryn, Dale Leorke, Mitchell Harrop, Kate Mannell, Suneel Jethani, Megan Richardson, Rhaisa Pael, Nate Tkacz, Suzy Edwards, Sue Grieshaber, Lisa Gibbs, Lauren Carpenter, and the wonderful Katrin Tiidenberg! v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I also wish to thank the many children and families who have given generously of their time, who have shared their insights and experiences, and who have been active research participants in the numerous projects that inform this book. At Palgrave Macmillan, thanks to Camille Davies for steering the project through review, and to Susan Jarvis and Sofie Onorato for the editing support. This book brings together findings from research funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC), Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130100735), some of which have been previously published in journals. I gratefully acknowledge the ARC’s generous financial support. I am also grateful for funding and research support provided by the Institute for a Broadband Enabled Society and the Melbourne Networked Society Institute, the Australian Institute of Family Studies, and the School of Culture and Communication.

Contents

1 Researching Young Children and Mobile Media  1 Defining and Historicising Digital Dexterity   7 Dexterity Imagined   8 Dexterity Mobilised  12 Dexterity Mediated  16 Notes on Research Contexts and Methods  19 Chapter Outline  22 References  24 2 Household Mobile Media Arrangements 35 Mediating Mobile Technologies at Home  37 Parental Dispositions Towards Mobile Media  44 Living with Mobile Media  46 References  50 3 A Touchscreen Media Habitus 53 Cultivating Children’s Touchscreen Media Habitus  55 Media, Habitus, Phenomenology  58 Configuring Habitus Through Interface Design  60 References  66 4 Parental Intermediation on YouTube 71 Digital Parenting: Mediation, Remediation, and Intermediation  72 iPad Baby Videos on YouTube  74 vii

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Contents

Naturalness: Touchscreen Interface Versus Digital Native  78 iPad Baby Video Reception  82 Technical and Cultural Intermediation in Video Editing  84 References  88 5 Digital Toys and Datafying Play 93 Postdigital Ecologies of Play  94 Interfacing with Amiibo  99 Locating Amiibo in Everyday Play Practices 103 Datafying Children’s Play 106 References 108 6 Postdigital Playgrounds113 Children, Public Space, and Mobile Media 114 Digitally Augmenting Playgrounds 119 Case Studies of Postdigital Play Products 122 Concluding 129 References 130 References135 Index153

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3

Photograph of child using touchscreen device at breakfast table 20 Photograph of child reaching for touchscreen device 39 Photograph of New Born Fame crib mobile. (Copyright Laura Cornet)49 Photograph of child swiping touchscreen 57 Touch Gesture Reference Guide. (Created by Vilamor, Craig, Dan Willis, and Luke Wroblewski. 2010. Available at: https:// static.lukew.com/TouchGestureGuide.pdf. Creative Commons) 62 Screenshot of YouTube video, “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work” 78 Screenshot of iPad Baby Mashup video compilation 86 Photograph of child playing with Osmo game 98 Photograph of Amiibo figurines (https://www.flickr.com/ photos/128984244@N02/32845296782/)100 Screenshot of the Disney Fairies Trail mobile application. 123 (Source: The Creative Shop, app designer and developer) HybridPlay sensor clip. (Copyright HybridPLAY Clara Boj and Diego Diaz 2015) 126 HybridPlay design scenario. (Copyright HybridPLAY Clara Boj and Diego Diaz 2015) 127

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CHAPTER 1

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. Keywords  Children • Mobile media • Screen time • Parental mediation • Household media • Digital interface • Affordances • Touchscreen

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Nansen, Young Children and Mobile Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49875-7_1

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With a focus on mobile devices and touchscreen or haptic interfaces, this book investigates young children’s everyday digital practices, embodied digital play, and commercialised digital culture. The book draws on a range of data sources gathered since 2013, including qualitative research in homes with families and children, analysis of online representations and discussions, and case studies of children’s digital media products—such as mobile applications, digital games, and software tools—in order to provide a critical and collective perspective on the ways young children’s digital media culture is currently being reshaped. The context of the research extends from household spaces, involving family negotiations and digital parenting around the use of tablets, touchscreens, apps, and digital toys; to social media spaces, such as YouTube and Instagram, where children’s digital play is shared and publicised within wider online cultures and economies of communication; to public spaces, such as parks and playgrounds in which digitally augmented and embedded infrastructures are reconfiguring meanings of and possibilities for children’s play. 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. Digital media use by young children aged below five, beginning from newly born children through to toddlers and pre-school aged children, is a relatively under-explored area of digital media, communication, games, and internet research. This is, in part, a consequence of young children’s historically limited engagement with, or capacity to use, desktop devices and their associated interfaces. Yet, transformations in mobile devices and especially touchscreen interfaces on smartphones and tablets in the wake of Apple’s release of the iPhone and iPad in the late 2000s have lowered thresholds of usability and reshaped possibilities for young children to engage with media technologies. These technological shifts have been accompanied by an ever-expanding range of entertainment and educational content directed at young children—including streaming services, digital games, and mobile applications—enabling expanded modes of both media consumption and digital participation. In addition, digital

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infrastructures and connectivity are augmenting physical toys, spaces, and environments—in what has been termed a ‘postdigital’ landscape—to reshape young children’s media practices in ways that make both digital play and its data traces more embedded, embodied, and distributed across everyday play spaces and activities. These rapidly changing technologies in young children’s lives unsurprisingly raise challenges for both researchers and families. For families, decisions about how best to introduce and manage digital media in their young children’s lives are subjected to often vocal and competing claims about their impacts, both positive and negative. Whilst, for researchers, there are challenges in studying newer technologies, and their use and implications in the lives of young children. Studies of school aged children—see, for example, the EU Kids Online project—along with teenagers and adolescents are well established (e.g. boyd 2014; Haddon and Livingstone 2012; Livingstone and Sefton-Green 2016). Nevertheless, research on digital media use by young children, aged from birth to five, has only begun to gather momentum over the last few years (e.g. Leaver and Nansen 2017; Nansen and Leaver 2015). It is understandable that the research agenda has in the past disproportionately focused on older children’s modes of media engagement, given they display a greater diversity and intensity of media use. Yet, it has also been noted that older children are more ‘researchable’ (i.e. considered to be more reliable respondents, do not necessitate special ethical or methodological procedures) (Staksrud et al. 2007). There is, however, a growing body of research responding to the changing media contexts and practices of young children, in which more and more devices circulate in and through young children’s everyday spaces of play, and which have interfaces that are responsive to haptic modes of input, such as touch, gesture, or movement that are more accommodating of young children’s bodily capacities, and which are designed to accommodate young children’s sensory-motor and cognitive development over these early years of rapid growth. The growing literature on young children includes: research from interaction design assessing young children’s gestural capacities to interact with touchscreen interfaces in order to inform the development of software applications (e.g. Buckleitner 2011; Hourcade et al. 2015); to education research exploring how mobile devices and software applications can be incorporated into early childhood education settings to support children’s learning and development (e.g. Danby et al. 2018; Marsh et al. 2018; Plowman et al. 2008, 2010); to health research focused on risks of

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mobile and touchscreen media associated with physical, social, and emotional development, in order to inform children’s media policies and guidelines (AAP 2016; ECA 2018; Strasburger and Hogan 2013; Vandewater et al. 2007). Alongside a focus on what digital media does to children is a growing body of social and cultural research aiming to understand what children do with digital media. Within media and communication studies, for example, are a range of studies investigating young children’s media practices, digital participation, and mobile media play. These include efforts to quantify the devices, activities, and time spent by young children with mobile and touchscreen devices at home (e.g. Rideout 2013; Ofcom 2019, 2020), to understand parental attitudes towards and mediation of their children’s mobile media use (e.g. Marsh et al. 2018), and to understand young children’s embodied relations with mobile media (Giddings 2014; Nansen and Jayemanne 2016; Nevski and Siibak 2016b). This research extends from studying young children’s mobile media in domestic spaces, to exploring children’s cultures of use on social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram (Lange 2014; Marsh 2016; Nicoll and Nansen 2018; Trezise 2017), to analysing digital content shared about babies on social media platforms like Facebook (Leaver 2015; Kumar and Schoenebeck 2015), to considering young children’s emerging play practices with connected toys and smart digital products (Berriman and Mascheroni 2018; Chesher 2019; Holloway and Green 2016; Giddings 2019; Marsh 2017). This growing and rich body of research provides evidence for the dramatic shifts in the use of mobile and digital media by young children, toddlers, and even babies, including the emergence of young children’s engagement with social media platforms and connected products. There is clearly a growing research literature focused on addressing mobile media in the lives of young children, approaching these relations from a range of cultural, economic, and technological perspectives to highlight various uses, meanings, and implications. Yet, this research is currently dispersed by disciplinary-, technology-, or site-related contexts. There is a need to bring together the wider set of perspectives, approaches, and debates addressing the emerging range of mobile media technologies and their use by young children into a single and coherent account. This book aims to provide such an account by exploring a number of media technologies that contribute to the production of mobile media practices and meanings in young children’s contemporary lives.

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Despite the increasingly diverse research literature, the popular reception of and guidance for parents on young children’s use of mobile media is overwhelmingly shaped by health research. Here, mobile media is positioned within the rubric of ‘screen time’ inherited from older broadcast models, cautioning parents about the dangers of ‘exposure’ to electronic screens (AAP 2016). Such claims are given public weight by media technology limitations recommended in health guidelines such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). In an updated 2016 statement, the first since the release of the Apple iPad, the AAP for the first time differentiated between different kinds of media devices and applications, acknowledging that interactive media such as tablets, smartphones, and mobile applications are not the same as broadcast media such as television, which have dominated their historical treatment of ‘screen time’. This statement acknowledged that interactive digital media platforms and applications were creative and engaging in ways that differed from simply consuming broadcast media content, with new media technologies in reconfiguring possibilities for children’s digital participation and practice. The updated guidelines also recognised the importance of social contexts and relationships that take place with, through, and around media in children’s lives, distinguishing between past recommendations by, for example, recognising issues such as shared media use and parental role-modelling. Despite the review and update by the AAP, however, these amendments largely remain underwritten by a restrictive approach, especially for younger children, with zero screen time for children under the age of two still recommended, apart from engaging in video calls—perhaps because this mode of use involves human interaction through a screen, rather than the perceived social isolation of attention focused on the screen. This cautionary approach is refracted through mainstream media, which largely emphasises the negative implications for an ever-younger cohort of children engaging with touchscreens, mobile devices, and digital content. Familiar and repeated themes appear in the popular press about the increasingly media-saturated lives of young children (e.g. Bilton 2013; Rosin 2013; Rowan 2014). This coverage often points to a generational shift in children’s media (e.g. ‘from click to tap’); identifies potential cognitive, social, or wellbeing costs; highlights the recommended guidelines for ‘screen time’; or details strategies for digital parenting in children’s increasingly intensive media lives. Popular literature emphasising various threats to children’s development includes specific concerns such as children losing their capacity to remember information (e.g. Goodwin 2015),

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to broader and generalised concerns about the potential long-term implications of widespread and intensive use of tablets by young children (e.g. Palmer 2016). These popular and public critiques often draw on previously established debates about the threats of television screens or toxic effects of social media on children’s physical and mental health (e.g. Palmer 2006). And, to support their arguments, these critiques are often selective in their evidence, citing prominent pieces of public information such as Steve Jobs not letting his children use iPads (Bilton 2014), or citing popular neuroscience narratives about the impact of technology on the vulnerable brains of young children and the impacts on learning and memory functions (e.g. Greenfield 2015). Nevertheless, as mobile media technologies have populated domestic spaces, reflecting not only media availability, but also the ease of using touchscreen interfaces (Buckleitner 2011), it is increasingly observed that living within such media environments the use of mobile and touchscreen media in early childhood is by now increasingly widespread, common, and unremarkable (Cristia and Seidl 2015). These contradictions reveal a critical tension between policy and practice, in which it is unsurprising that research has highlighted that parents are often left feeling ‘rudderless’ in managing their young children’s media use (Green and Holloway 2014). It is the issues of ordinary uses and everyday negotiations of mobile, touchscreen, and haptic media in the lives of young children that forms the focus of this book. This research is novel in teasing apart some critical seams that emerge between products, policies, and practices: the ways children’s digital play emerges through tensions and entanglements involving the reception of popular discourses around mobile media; the imperatives of technology products or designs to be used in particular ways; the materialities of media environments in which mobile media are located; and the cultural perceptions and practices that are embedded in and emerged from situated contexts of use. In doing so, this book develops an interwoven perspective of the role played by technologies, economies, and cultures in shaping young children’s digital dexterity with and through mobile media. As detailed below, the book draws on a range of empirical data sources, but also thinks critically and conceptually about the contexts of children’s mobile media practice. So, various studies and empirical strands of research are cited to provide descriptions and analysis of contemporary situations, whilst

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theoretical resources from areas of critical media theory are applied to conceptually develop the broader meanings and significance of young children’s changing mobile, haptic, and digital media lives.

Defining and Historicising Digital Dexterity Over the past 15 years, households in the developed world have undergone a drastic transformation in the population, diversity, and intensity of domestic digital media and communications technologies (e.g. Chambers 2016; Wilken et al. 2014), contributing to environments for children that are increasingly saturated by media. A fundamental development in these household media ecologies has been changed to user interfaces (UIs), with input devices such as keyboards amended by touchscreen interfaces. Such media interfaces have a number of implications for household media use, enabling more embodied, haptic, and gestural modes of interaction— what often falls under the paradigm of technology interaction known as natural user interfaces (NUIs) within commercial and computer design language. Touchscreen media, then, come to inhabit homes in ways that become readily available but also appealing and easy to use through the affordances of the interface. In addition, there is a growing range of interactive games, consoles, and internet-connected toys, which contribute to these distributed and augmented objects and spaces of digital play. This observable popularisation and ease of touchscreen and haptic media use leads to the concept of digital dexterity, signalled in the title of the book. The term dexterity ostensibly suggests the possession of physical skills in performing tasks, especially with the hands, in navigating digital interfaces and using digital media. In one sense, then, young children’s digital dexterity may be read as a purely physical capacity to use digital and mobile media, to navigate the screen and access applications and content, based on a combination of touchscreen interface design (Buckleitner 2011), and children’s sensory-motor and cognitive development (Piaget and Inhelder 1972). Yet, the concept of children’s digital dexterity is developed here not simply as a way of thinking about children’s physical capabilities in interacting with mobile media—that is, the required physical skill or agility in using hands or bodies to navigate a natural user interface. Instead, this concept is informed by child studies (e.g. James et al. 1998; Jenks 1996; Prout 2008), studies of children’s media history (Buckingham 2000; Postman 1994; Selwyn 2009), and cultural theories drawn from areas of phenomenology and media theory to highlight the ways childhood is constructed in historically and culturally specific

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contexts to emphasise that capabilities vary across age and experience, and in relation to specific media technologies and environments. Rather than posit a biological essentialism, or a straightforward developmental model, or even a familiar socially constructed position, this book 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 I discuss below. Dexterity Imagined Firstly, how digital dexterity is imagined can be situated in relation to popular perceptions, understandings, and discourses about innovations in technology, and particular computer interfaces and what they imply for the development of children’s digital literacy. Here, touchscreens materialise the possibilities of natural user interfaces (NUIs), which imagine a renovated experience of computer interaction by incorporating people’s natural modes of physical communication and movement (e.g. Widgor and Wixon 2011). NUIs are often celebrated for inaugurating a more intuitive, embodied, or natural mode of interfacing with computation, and thus lowering thresholds of usability to ever-younger populations, with the so-called Minimum User Competency (MUC) (Buckleitner 2011) reduced from somewhere around two and a half years with keyboards to somewhere around 12  months for touchscreens (Cristia and Seidl 2015; Hourcade et al. 2015).

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The supposed naturalness of NUIs thus informs ideas about children’s digital play, learning, and development (e.g. Plowman et al. 2008; Selwyn 2009). NUIs are imagined as renovating young children’s digital literacy by shifting the terrain of interaction from the keyboard and graphical user interface to a mode of interaction that comes more naturally through the use of touch, gesture, and movement (e.g. Widgor and Wixon 2011), with this making the skills required to access and use digital media easier. Digital literacy is understood in this discourse as primarily a functional capacity based on computer skills, such as typing, and using software applications (Hobbs 2008; Tyner 1998)—or in this case, young children navigating a touchscreen interface. Yet, as media scholars have long argued, media and digital literacy encompasses much broader sets of skills extending from “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms” (Aufderheide 1992; cited in Strasburger et  al. 2009, p.  509), to more cultural skills, or ‘soft skills’, relating to knowledge about navigating and creating content in digital environments (Jenkins 2006, 2009; Livingstone 2009), to critical skills associated with understanding the operations of online platforms as part of the political economy of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019) in which their personal data produces commercial value (Buckingham 2003; Livingstone and Haddon 2009; Holloway 2019). Livingstone and Haddon have previously noted that: children are largely unaware of how their personal data may be tracked, retained or used … that children rarely read or understand privacy policies, that the public/private boundaries of online interfaces are often opaque to them, that the tools provided to select privacy options are confusing or easily mismanaged by children. (Livingstone and Haddon 2009, p. 26)

Admittedly, there are clear limitations on young children developing such extensive forms of literacy. Nevertheless, the imaginary emerging around the ease with which young children use touchscreen interfaces obscures broader debates and problems around the definition and performance of digital literacy today. Research shows that children’s digital literacy varies considerably and is often more about “making the interface work rather than developing the broader and more ambitious critical and creative literacies that internet use affords” (Livingstone 2009, p. 41). A young child’s demonstrable ability to control a touchscreen interface says very little about what they are learning or their understanding of the

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applications they are using or content they are viewing. Nevertheless, commercial apps designed for and sold to parents and children are overwhelmingly labelled as educational (Shuler 2009). In addition, there are a range of online sites such as review sites (e.g. children’s technology review), YouTube channels (e.g. FunToyzCollector), and mummy-tech blogs (e.g. coolmomtech), which survey the latest gadgets and apps, ostensibly to assist parents in making informed purchasing decisions, though are geared to engineer or profit from children’s digital media consumption. Previous children’s media studies research has shown that commercial interests have shaped much of the look and feel of children’s opportunities to use the internet and digital media (e.g. Grimes and Shade 2005; Seiter 2005). The most popular children’s websites have been commercially owned and operated, and so primarily served corporate interests (Chung and Grimes 2005; Grimes 2008a, b; Seiter 2005). More broadly, the commercialisation of children’s media culture, especially television, is historically well established and acknowledged (Kline 1995; Seiter 1993). Yet, the emergence of the internet for children increased possibilities for marketing and advertising (Grimes 2008a, b), including branded platforms (e.g. Barbie.com), and embedded advertising within a game (e.g. Neopets. com) (Grimes 2008a, b). In relation to internet architecture and commercial content Seiter in her book, The Internet Playground, notes “the Internet is more like a mall than a library; it resembles a gigantic public relations collection more than it does an archive of scholars” (2005, p. 38). In the contexts of children’s mobile media, digital games, and the mobile app economy (Burroughs 2017; Goggin 2011), the opportunities for young children to participate or play are not only critiqued for branding of spaces, but also for the ways many apps and games are built around a logic and practice of exchange, accumulation, and ownership (Chiong and Shuler 2010; Shuler 2009; Nansen et  al. 2012), structuring digital play as a form of consumer socialisation (Seiter 2005), or surveilling young users as products of data generation and exploitation (Holloway 2019; Mascheroni 2018). Celebrations of NUIs for young children’s learning are, then, challenged by political economy research, in which they are located within a longer media history and broader media landscape of commercialising children’s media. These discursive formations and material tensions are explored in chapters of this book through discussion and analysis of representations and debates around young children’s use of mobile media, NUIs, and commercial software.

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A contrasting discursive framing of touchscreens in children’s lives focused on what media does to young children rather than what children do with media comes from health researchers and practitioners. This extends long-held media concerns about excessive screen time impacting on children’s levels of physical activity, or their exposure to harmful content. But we also see newer concerns associated with mobile and touchscreen technologies, including smartphones, tablet computers, and videogame consoles, impacting on children’s physical, cognitive, or social wellbeing (see ECA 2018). Such effects include: implications for posture and muscle activity in young children repetitively using touchscreen devices (Bonis 2007; Straker et al. 2008); the development of fine motor skills when engaging in gestural screen interactions like swiping or dragging, rather than using three-dimensional objects such as toys or utensils (Lin et al. 2017); and displays of emotional frustration in social settings associated with habituation to experiences of immediate feedback in games and apps (Hiniker et al. 2016). There has also been much attention on children’s use of mobile devices at night time leading to negative impacts on sleep habits and sleep quality (Carter et al. 2016), with blue light from screens influencing the release of sleep hormones, time spent on digital devices displacing time for sleep, and/or digital media content being overly arousing for children when they are trying to settle to sleep (LeBourgeois et al. 2017; Wahnschaffe et al. 2013; Buxton et al. 2015; Garrison et al. 2011; Arora et al. 2014). And, finally, concerns have been raised about the potential implications of screen time for young children’s brain development in areas, including language development (Hutton et al. 2019). Alternatively, however, there is interest in how mobile media, especially involving the use of motion-control or active video game interfaces—such as the Nintendo Wii, Sony Move for Playstation, and Microsoft Kinect for Xbox—may have benefits in replacing passive screen time with more active screen use (e.g. Daley 2009; Lieberman 2006; Wittman 2010). These technologies, which include physical activity as part of the action of computer game play, have been analysed for the levels of energy expenditure associated with their use, and evaluated them for their capacity to make children more active (e.g. Daley 2009; Graves et  al. 2008; Leatherdale et  al. 2010; Paez et  al. 2009). Similarly, whilst mobile media are positioned as deleteriously impacting on children’s sleep, there is a growing interest in the development of mobile software applications to produce better sleep through sleep management functions, including sleep

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tracking and monitoring, and relaxation therapies to encourage good sleep ‘hygiene’ (Liang and Ploderer 2016). And, whilst mobile media may be associated with emotional development issues in young children, there is also evidence to suggest that digital activities such as games are much like non-digital forms of play and structured in ways that help young children to develop emotional capacities, including persistence, resilience, and self-confidence (e.g. Warburton and Highfield 2017). The dominant discourses in children’s mobile media, however, continue to resonate with long-standing and widely circulated debates in the study of children and mass media (Wartella and Robb 2008), positioned within the rubric of ‘screen time’ as negatively affecting children’s health and wellbeing (Mavoa et al. 2017; Willett 2015). In contrast, messages from commercial advertising or educational literature encourage consumption and use for learning and play. As the chapters in this book explore, these imaginaries and discourses inform varying configurations of young children and mobile media in sites that extend from the home, to social media, to playgrounds. Clearly, children’s digital dexterity is not only shaped by how mobile media are imagined and understood within popular discourse, but also produced within material spaces of use. Young children’s digital dexterity expresses a capacity to adopt and adapt to mobile or haptic media, to embody them, and so points to the material environments in which mobile media are available to, encountered by, and embodied by young children. Dexterity Mobilised Secondly, then, children’s digital dexterity is mobilised—that is, assembled or organised, within particular contexts of media use. Primarily, young children’s mobile media use emerges within a history of technology domestication within the home, and the contemporary intensive ecology of digital media characterising contemporary home environments. The ways in which mobile media are encountered in the home, or made available to young children, and the ways in which touchscreen devices are used and embodied is built upon successive waves of technologies appropriated and standardised as part of home life. Historically, studies of household media have sought to understand how new technologies are adopted or domesticated within physical spaces, family relations, and social practices; how new technologies became physically, socially, and symbolically located within the home (Silverstone and

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Hirsch 1992; Silverstone and Haddon 1996). This tradition of research began with broadcast media such as television and its reception in the home (e.g. Morley 1986), and later evolved to consider a range of digital technologies, including the home computer (e.g. Lally 2002), the internet, and mobile phone (e.g. Haddon 2003). This research context has revealed that as successive waves of media technologies are domesticated in family homes, the spaces, uses, and meanings associated with children’s media practices have undergone significant change. A clear example is the shift from collective family television viewing, organised around a single and immobile broadcast box (Morley 1986), to the emergence of more distributed and individualised media practices (Turkle 2011), based on the affordances of multiple and portable devices connected to the internet via household Wi-Fi and the personalisation of online content delivery. Similarly, there is a long history of children’s media research extending back to the introduction and analysis of mass media (e.g. Himmelweit et al. 1958), and continuing through extensive studies of children’s relationship with viewing broadcast media content in the home (for overview, see: Messenger Davies 2010). This research has contributed to our understanding of the emergence and construction of children as media audiences, especially around the development of children’s programming and children’s advertising, in which children’s lives became increasingly characterised by media interaction over the last half of the twentieth century. Such interaction has been described as an ever-increasing “technologisation of childhood” (e.g. Plowman et al. 2010), in which both extensive and intensive patterns of media use are dominating and impacting on children’s culture. Much of this children’s media literature sought: to understand the amount of time children spent with particular media, and especially television; to investigate the effects of commercial advertising or violent content on children’s wellbeing; as well as to understand the viewing pleasure children derived from quality content or the cultural value of children’s media texts themselves (Messenger Davies 1989, 2010; Palmer 1986). Following the widespread adoption of the internet in the early twenty-­ first century, media scholars turned their attention to studying children’s use of the internet in the home. Much like analyses of television before it, studies of children and the internet investigated time spent online, perceived risks and benefits of internet content, as well as emerging issues associated with online communication (e.g. Livingstone 2009; Nansen et al. 2012). The hopes and fears associated with children’s media, then,

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migrated and widened to accompany the rapid growth in the number of mobile- and internet-connected devices in family homes, as well as the increasingly younger age of children using mobile devices and the internet (e.g. Clark 2013; Green and Holloway 2014; Plowman et al. 2010). Yet, Australian and international studies have shown that the places, patterns, and regulation of children’s internet use varies in relation to age and developmental capacities (e.g. ACMA 2007, 2011; Livingstone 2009), with younger children more likely to access the internet in a communal area, to have their access supervised, and to engage in more adult-directed use. Research has shown that younger children tend to visit few sites and often return to familiar sites, and are more likely to use the internet via touchscreen interfaces and mobile application content, especially gaming, learning, or video apps, which parents have selected and downloaded (Marsh et al. 2018; Ofcom 2019, 2020). There are, then, significant age differences in the way children use the internet. These established and extensive literatures on histories of children’s media in the home, particularly through the mediums of television and the internet, are significant in providing a background for understanding how children’s contemporary mobile media practices have taken shape through patterns of domestication, discourses of media impact, and practices of family media use. This book seeks to extend these traditions by focusing specifically on ordinary uses and everyday negotiations around mobile media technologies, from touchscreen devices to digitally augmented places, in the lives of young children. As the chapters in this book explore, these are embedded in the materialities of changing digital home media environments (Kennedy et  al. 2020), but also move beyond the home through digital platforms of participatory culture and public spaces of play. It is now commonplace for children to inhabit household media environments characterised by dense ecologies of digital media, including Wi-Fi infrastructures, the presence of multiple and mobile devices, along with residual media technologies such as televisions and desktop computers. A critical element of this change has been the infrastructuring of media homes by broadband internet connectivity, which is characterised by increasing bandwidth and wirelessness. Bandwidth and wirelessness have become part of a wider infrastructure that has undergirded a steady accumulation and multiplication of devices, especially mobile and touchscreen devices, roaming easily within the home. These ecologies of media are creating environments where media screens, connection, and communication are persistent and ambient within contemporary homes. In particular,

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since the launch of the Apple iPhone in 2007, and the launch of the Apple iPad in 2010, and the myriad mobile devices that have followed in their wake, household media environments are increasingly characterised by the presence of multiple and mobile touchscreen devices, including a range of touchscreen, tablet computers, and smartphone devices. This ecology has supported the consumption of media content in more distributed and intensive patterns (Chambers 2016; Marsh et  al. 2018), with content streamed to a range of devices via the internet, children consume television and video in more spatially and temporally spread ways. Traditional media content has, of course, been complemented by newer on-demand services and streaming platforms like Netflix, and video-sharing platforms like YouTube, meaning that video content is less and less tethered to the television set or the schedule dictated by television programmers (Ofcom 2019). In addition to changes in children’s media content, the emergence of interactive media technologies such as videogame consoles and handheld consoles, such as the Playstation or Nintendo 3DS, are now common household devices for playing games (Brand et  al. 2019). For younger children, however, the dominant device shaping how they use and consume media is the tablet computer (Ofcom 2020). Their affordances for usability, mobility, and multi-functionality mean that younger children can access a range of content, from video and television to mobile software applications and games. Digital dexterity, then, is embedded in the materialities of young children’s household media environments in which an aggregation of media in the home enables new media practices to emerge. The early chapters in this book explore these arrangements of domestication and emergent relations young children have with and through mobile media, and in particular, through processes of embodiment in everyday life. Yet, children’s changing media environments now extend beyond the home through the mobility of media configuring young children as participants within a range of digital spaces, whilst public play spaces are increasingly mediated by mobile devices and augmented technologies to mobilise children’s public play in refashioned arrangements. These online and public spaces of young children’s digital play, and their materialities of media technologies, are explored in later chapters of this book. These extensive and intensive arrangements of media in the spaces inhabited by children highlight the third element of young children’s digital dexterity, in which discourses and materialities of mobile media are governed within cultural and social contexts.

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Dexterity Mediated Thirdly, then, the mediation of young children’s digital dexterity concerns how mobile media are organised and governed by the affordances of mobile media technologies, the design of digital products, and by parents in managing digital media in young children’s lives. Primarily, mediation of children’s media has been developed in reference to the work of, and research on, parental mediation. Research into the ways parents regulate their children’s media use, referred to as parental mediation, was originally developed in reference to the medium of television and the types of rules and restrictions imposed by parents on the routines and content of children’s viewing (e.g. Bybee et al. 1982; Austin 1993; Pasquier 2001). Studies have since extended the focus on television to include the moderation of newer media such as computers, internet, and videogames in the home (e.g. Livingstone and Helsper 2008; Nikken and Jansz 2006; Valcke et al. 2010; Willett 2015). The parental mediation literature addresses a range of measures parents implement to moderate, or preside over, their children’s media use within home environments. Different styles of parental mediation have been identified and categorised in terms of restrictive mediation, active mediation, and co-viewing or co-­ playing (e.g. Nikken and Jansz 2006)—that is, restricting media use, talking about media use, and viewing or sharing use respectively. These different styles have been located along a spectrum from more authoritarian to more autonomous approaches (Green et al. 2004). Historically, efforts to direct, limit, and supervise television included visible placement of media, imposing time limits, or perhaps co-viewing. Strategies for parenting, then, extended from banning media, enforcing rules, and monitoring without much differentiation between different kinds of screens or screen-based activities, to less universal approaches that account for context and compromise such as evaluating the quality of media and engaging with children’s use, encouraging diversity of media and non-media activities, or creating technology-free times and spaces. With developments in the internet, parental mediation strategies both repeated and evolved from television. Family rules governing computer and internet use have been couched in terms of priorities granted to certain activities over others, limitations on time and content, as well as deferring to technology features like filtering software, or rules designed to protect the technology itself (Downes 2002). Thus, rules and negotiations circulate around both the generic and particular qualities of media

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technologies, and how these reflect the desires of both parents and children. Rules around internet use, for example, have often been framed around the view that the internet could be of benefit to children’s study, and the use of Google, Wikipedia, and school-directed internet resources for these purposes. Other media, such as television, video, gaming, are valued more for the focal point they provide in terms of social participation within the family (Kennedy et al. 2020), whilst circumscribed game or entertainment sites, such as Mathletics, Minecraft, Club Penguin, or YouTube Kids, are often perceived as offering safe play, leisure, or learning spaces (Jaakkola 2019; Nansen et al. 2012; Willett 2015). This book explores some emerging forms of parental mediation that build on these strategies in relation to young children’s mobile media use. There is some research exploring how parents mediate young children’s touchscreen device use (e.g. Chaudron 2015; Nansen and Jayemanne 2016; Nevski and Siibak 2016a; Ofcom 2019). This literature highlights that styles of parental mediation are informed by factors such as children’s age and type of media, parents’ views about the positive or negative effects of mobile media on children, and the kind of media environment and routines families have established (Wartella et al. 2013; Valcke et al. 2010; Ofcom 2020). These studies extend a long tradition of parental mediation literature to analyse how parents perceive, place, and manage touchscreen media in the home, by, for example, implementing social strategies such as discussing or placing rules, or through technical strategies such as using parental controls or content filtering. Yet, research on how parents mediate their children’s media use has to date largely focused on interactions within households and focused predominantly on what parents do to control their children’s media use. Previously, however, studies of family media interaction have revealed situations in which children also actively pushback and attempt to redefine the rules and uses of media in the home (e.g. Aarsand and Aronsson 2009; Pasquier 2001). Such negotiations challenge assumptions that locate control within a disciplinary model in which parents impose media rules and children dutifully follow them. These more child-oriented research approaches acknowledge children’s capacities to influence how media use is configured, highlighting the kinds of tactics children employ in their efforts to circumvent parental discourses and domestic media arrangements. For example, exploiting parental disagreements about the rules or using media at a friend’s house outside the authority of parents (Pasquier 2001; Valentine 1997; Willett 2015).

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In the contexts of young children’s contemporary mobile media use, research reveals a wider set of arrangements and influences mediating use, including the arrangements of particular household media ecologies, the affordances of touchscreen interfaces, and relationships with others, including siblings (e.g. Aarsand and Aronsson 2009; Nansen 2015; Nevski and Siibak 2016b). This book extends this work to reveal how a straightforward disciplinary model of parental control in configuring young children’s digital dexterity is complicated by emerging ways parental mediation is no longer limited to family contexts or domestic screens, but instead moderated in and through the design of commercial products, the cultures of online platforms, or the distribution of media into public spaces. These sites shift parental mediation from its traditional located form within family life and distribute it across spaces, cultures, and technologies in ways that produce, assemble, and govern young children’s digital dexterity in complex arrangements of negotiation. Clearly, then, studies of young children’s media use need to extend beyond a singular focus on domestic spaces or the role of parents in governing their use, by utilising a wider set of methodological and theoretical frameworks to investigate shifting interfaces and intermediaries in young children’s media life (e.g. Giddings 2014; Plowman and Stevenson 2012). There is, then, a need to complement the existing literature with more situated and theoretical work addressing the experiences, meanings, and values associated with emerging digital media technologies and their use by young children (e.g. Giddings 2007). In particular, this research contributes to analysing the materialities of mobile media, their relationship to young children’s embodied play and everyday lives, and how these resonate with wider cultural contexts and discursive formations of digitised media childhoods. So, this book aims to move beyond a focus solely on the interface (touchscreen devices), or children’s software (mobile apps and media content), or parental mediation (family rules, use, and mediation), or popular discourses (from guidelines to moral panics of children’s media), or commercialisation (elements of software design and branding), or participation (online platforms and cultural production). In this book, I set out to develop an interwoven sense of the emerging media technologies, cultures, and economies within and around young children’s mobile media play. This work draws from over five years of research to offer a broad analysis that seeks to highlight the relays between each of these different aspects of young children’s digital dexterity. It explores various sites, issues, and case studies of mobile media in young children’s lives to

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provide a critical perspective on the current technological, cultural, and economic forces shaping the practices and meanings associated with this rapidly evolving sphere of media life.

Notes on Research Contexts and Methods This book draws on a range of data, including qualitative research in domestic settings, data collected from publicly shared content on social media, and case studies of children’s digital products. The earlier discussions in this book draw on qualitative research conducted with children aged from birth to five years old and their families in homes in Melbourne, Australia, between 2015 and 2017. The household research involved 25 families and 41 children (22 boys; 19 girls) aged under 5; it built on established traditions of household media ethnography (e.g. Lally 2002; Morley 1986; Silverstone and Hirsch 1992), using techniques including household media and technology tours, family interviews, and demonstrations of children’s digital play. These approaches allowed for both snapshots of current mobile media use as well as reflections on how children’s media use had changed over time as young children had grown and developed from babies to toddlers to pre-school aged children. This strand of research focused on the geographies and routines associated with mobile media technologies in the home, how they were used by young children, and how parents mediated these uses within the everyday contexts of home life (Fig. 1.1). Media tours involved the family guiding us around their home, identifying and describing the various technologies in the home, including their histories and main uses. Similar to “object biographies” (Silverstone and Hirsch 1992), technology tours are a useful method in terms of eliciting audits and accounts of technologies prompted by their presence rather than relying on participants’ recall. Family interviews extended these discussions to focus on children’s media interests, practices, and concerns. In the interviews we talked about children’s daily media habits, rules of use, attitudes towards new technologies, and perceptions of media guidelines. Semi-structured interviews are an important way of giving participants a voice to reflect on their social practices. Where feasible, tours and interviews with families were followed by children demonstrating their use of favourite media technologies, games, or applications. This method was deployed to benefit from participant observation methods, which seek to gain a greater depth of understanding around social practices and relations

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Fig. 1.1  Photograph of child using touchscreen device at breakfast table

through observation of daily rituals. These methods were, then, motivated by exploratory and ethnographic traditions, which seek to understand social meanings and practices in greater depth, and the application of these methods was varied and guided by the households’ preferences and capacities. The household research was limited by the participating families, who came from a largely homogeneous and privileged group of university-­ educated, inner urban, nuclear, and heterosexual married families. Nevertheless, the families were relatively early and heavy adopters, comprising households with broadband internet, wireless internet connectivity, and multiple mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops), and so they offered insights into young children’s changing media environments and emerging formations of digital dexterity. This situated and qualitative research was, however, constrained by the methodological limitations of accessing and capturing everyday media practices in the private sphere of the home. The presence of a researcher recording the everyday activities of family life, ideally for extensive periods of time, is often both impractical and invasive (Hine 2000; Mackay and Ivey 2004). Not surprisingly then, household media ethnographies have

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tended to focus on particular technologies, including pioneering research such as work on television (e.g. Morley 1986; Spigel 1992) and computers (Lally 2002). Where the focus is not on particular technologies, household media research has largely used a synchronic methodology attending to the present situation, rather than a diachronic approach that is sensitive to historical change and affects. Yet, focusing on single technologies and ‘snap-shot’ approaches neglects the ethnographic importance of studying the interrelations of social and technical life in domestic settings (Nansen et al. 2009, 2015; Wilken et al. 2014). The unique challenges presented by the home as a private space, and by the dynamism and complexity of household media, call for additional methodological approaches and processes. To counter these limitations, household observations and interviews were complemented with online data collection based on more ‘unobtrusive’ digital ethnographic and digital humanities approaches (Ackland 2013; Hine 2015; Rogers 2013). This included social media data collection exploring wider cultural contexts and content shared about young children’s mobile media use on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. Like the household research, the online data collection was selective and purposive, seeking to explore particular sites of cultural production and content sharing around particular hashtags or keywords (e.g. #babyselfie on Instagram; “iPad baby” on YouTube), on social media platforms. This approach reflects a broader turn in media research that has migrated to the internet using a range of qualitative, ethnographic, and embedded approaches to explore and analyse digitally mediated communication, and as a way to access and analyse the contexts and meanings of everyday media use (e.g. Hine 2000; Miller and Slater 2000; Nardi 2010; Rheingold 2000). In one sense these approaches are a pragmatic response to the problem of access, with digital environments offering a wealth of archival, interpersonal, and experiential information. Yet, with some notable exceptions (see: Miller and Slater 2000), digital ethnographies have tended to erase the broader spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts in which media use takes place. Moreover, using this data for research purposes raises ethical issues about privacy and consent given the content is being used in an unintended context from which they were originally shared; something that is further complicated by the research focus on young children. Ethically, the content of public posts or videos online cannot be assumed to be unproblematically available for internet researchers to access as found data

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analysed using unobtrusive methods, as research shifts the context in which they were originally shared (Markham and Buchanan 2012). These issues, along with the ease of extracting online data using digital methods research needs to be balanced against the value of the research aims and outcomes (Highfield and Leaver 2015). These issues were identified and minimised through efforts to de-identify data gathered from publicly available social media posts wherever possible. In other instances, however, anonymity could not be guaranteed. For example, where the intention of posting videos on YouTube was to communicate them to a broad networked public (boyd 2010), and when they had already been viewed and discussed by a large number of people, the benefits of analysis were weighed against potential harms. The value of this data lies in complementing and contextualising the more physically located research through analysis of the wider cultural and mediated networks in which young children’s digital lives are now shared and represented, even from birth (Leaver 2015, 2018). Finally, this book draws on analysis of a range of children’s digital media products, such as mobile applications, digital games, and software tools. These technologies and commercial products are analysed using a combination of technology feature analysis, and analysis of marketing and media representations. This approach, then, includes analysis of technologies drawing on platform and affordance study approaches (boyd 2010; Bucher and Helmond 2017; Gillespie 2017) to investigate the design, operation, and features of young children’s digital media technologies. This strand of research also includes analysing the representations and discourses of commercial marketing material to investigate how these products and designs are discursively constructed for consumers in terms of scenarios and contexts of use. The rationale for drawing on these multiple sources of data is to locate young children’s digital entanglements within the diverse places, platforms, and politics in which they unfold—in order to explore the functionality and affordances of young children’s mobile media, as well as the implications of design and political economy of mobile media within the cultural, material, and discursive contexts of both domestic and public use.

Chapter Outline The book is structured around sites and spaces of interaction, moving from children’s embodiment of media within the home, to online spaces and digital platforms of child participation, to playgrounds and public

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spaces of digital play. Chapter 2 analyses how discursive tensions and material negotiations around young children’s mobile media use and digital dexterity are understood and enacted within domestic space and family life. The analysis in this chapter is located in reference to the concept of apparatus, which articulates the ways both physical spaces and expert discourses coalesce to shape and govern a particular situation. This chapter analyses how this apparatus both configures and complicates parental mediation of young children’s mobile media use, noting that the tension between policy and practice unfolds through often uncertain and inconsistent parental dispositions embedded in the messy materialities, relations, and routines of family life. The chapter goes on to consider how young children’s mobile communication is being assembled based on three techniques of mediation: accidental, assisted, and automated. This assemblage of young children’s communicative capacities is then discussed in relation to Mark Deuze’s claim that we no longer live with but in media, which challenges modes of media resistance in managing children’s screen time found in medical or theoretical discourses of media ‘exposure’. Chapter 3 explores embodied dimensions of young children’s touchscreen media use by drawing on qualitative research with parents and families, and from analysis of user interface (UI) and mobile app developer literature, which encodes touchscreen interaction through the design constraints and possibilities of gesture input techniques. Connecting this research and analysis with phenomenologically informed cultural theory, particularly as it relates to research on mobile technologies, this chapter describes the emergence of a form of digital dexterity that is understood through the concept of touchscreen habitus. That is, the cultivation of young children’s embodied dispositions, conduct, and competence towards mobile- and touch-based media technologies. Chapter 4 shifts from household to online spaces of young children’s media use, analysing YouTube videos of infants and toddlers playing with touchscreen devices and mobile applications. This analysis investigates the ways young children’s use of these interfaces is both understood and shaped by parents through their production, editing, and sharing of videos. The chapter, then, extends research on parental mediation by exploring how digital parenting moves into online spaces as a form of intermediation. Intermediation—in both its technical and cultural understandings—is translated into this context in an effort to account for the entanglement of media, bodies, and discourses in which parents participate in assembling

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children’s touchscreen play, notions of digital dexterity, and their broader digital media culture. Chapter 5 interrogates the evolving use of connected toys in children’s digital play cultures, using Nintendo Amiibo as a case study. Amiibo figurines are based on characters from various Nintendo franchises and connect wirelessly to Nintendo gaming platforms. In their production, promotion, and everyday use, the figurines solicit playful practices that elicit modes of embodied play and digital dexterity that cut across physical objects and digital spaces. Drawing on interface analysis, promotional discourses, and review videos of play on YouTube, this analysis highlights how Amiibo are framed as a means to envelop children in Nintendo’s commercial ecosystem by reinforcing a physical connection with the toy, data, and brand. The concept of postdigital play is deployed to understand this distributed context of play, and the reciprocal dynamic between children’s everyday play and the branded world of connected toys, which in turn, raises questions around children’s emerging datafied play—the transformation of play activities into digital information. Finally, Chap. 6 moves into the digitisation of children’s public play spaces, in which the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital are blurred through mobile, locative, and ambient media. The chapter begins by situating the digitisation of playgrounds in relation to the broader digitisation of public space, before analysing the operation and reception of two recent augmented and interactive play technologies. This analysis reveals how the digital playground expresses tensions associated with sensibilities and meanings attached to public play spaces, the value of digital technologies, and, ultimately, notions of childhood.

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Goggin, G. 2011. Ubiquitous Apps: Politics of Openness in Global Mobile Cultures. Digital Creativity 22 (3): 148–159. Goodwin, K. 2015. Are Your Kids Suffering from Digital Dementia? Blog Post. https://drkristygoodwin.com/digital-dementia/ Graves, L., N. Ridgers, and G. Stratton. 2008. The Contribution of Upper Limb and Total Movement to Adolescents’ Energy Expenditure whilst Playing Nintendo Wii. European Journal of Applied Physiology 104 (4): 617–623. Green, L., and D.  Holloway. 2014. 0–8: Very Young Children and the Domestication of Touchscreen Technologies in Australia. In Proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Annual Conference. Hawthorn: Swinburne University. Green, L., D. Holloway, and R. Quin. 2004. @ Home: Australian Family Life and the Internet. In Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia, ed. G.  Goggin, 88–101. Sydney: UNSW Press. Greenfield, S. 2015. Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains. New York: Random House Incorporated. Grimes, S.M. 2008a. Saturday Morning Cartoons Go MMOG. Media International Australia 126: 120–131. ———. 2008b. Kids’ Ad Play: Regulating Children’s Advergames in the Converging Media Context. International Journal of Communications Law and Policy 8 (12): 162–178. Grimes, S.M., and L.R.  Shade. 2005. Neopian Economics of Play: Children’s Cyberpets and Online Communities as Immersive Advertising in Neopets.com. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 1 (2): 181–198. Haddon, L. 2003. Domestication and Mobile Telephony. In Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology, ed. J. Katz, 43–56. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Haddon, L., and S. Livingstone. 2012. EU Kids Online: National Perspectives. Highfield, T., and T.  Leaver. 2015. A Methodology for Mapping Instagram Hashtags. First Monday 20 (1). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i1.5563 Himmelweit, H.T., A.N.  Oppenheim, and P.  Vince. 1958. Television and the Child: An Empirical Study of the Effect of Television on the Young. London: Oxford University Press. Hine, C. 2000. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage. ———. 2015. Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday. London: Bloomsbury. Hiniker, A., H. Suh, S. Cao, and J.A. Kientz. 2016. Screen Time Tantrums: How Families Manage Screen Media Experiences for Toddlers and Pre-schoolers. In Proceedings of CHI 16, 648–660. New York: ACM Press. Hobbs, R. 2008. Debates and Challenges Facing New Literacies in the 21st Century. In International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture, ed. K. Drotner and S. Livingstone, 431–447. London: Sage.

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CHAPTER 2

Household Mobile Media Arrangements

Abstract  Household mobile media arrangements analyse how discursive tensions and material negotiations around young children’s mobile media use and digital dexterity are understood and enacted within domestic space and family life. The analysis in this chapter is located in reference to the concept of apparatus, which articulates the ways both physical spaces and expert discourses coalesce to shape and govern a particular situation. This chapter analyses how this apparatus both configures and complicates parental mediation of young children’s mobile media use, noting that the tension between policy and practice unfolds through often uncertain and inconsistent parental dispositions embedded in the messy materialities, relations, and routines of family life. The chapter goes on to consider how young children’s mobile communication is being assembled based on three techniques of mediation: accidental, assisted, and automated. This assemblage of young children’s communicative capacities is then discussed in relation to Mark Deuze’s claim that we no longer live with but in media, which challenges modes of media resistance in managing children’s screen time found in medical or theoretical discourses of media ‘exposure’. Keywords  Children • Mobile media • Parental mediation • Household media • Apparatus • Domestication • Touchscreen

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Nansen, Young Children and Mobile Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49875-7_2

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Mobile media do not occupy a fixed place in domestic spaces as with past media technologies, and instead circulate in the home in ways that place them within reach of young children. These conditions of ambient mediation from the very beginnings of life have prompted responses ranging from promise to peril, familiar themes to researchers of media history. Historically, the introduction of any new medium, from the novel and telephone to the television and computer, has been a source of anxiety and debate concerning its potential to either corrupt or empower (e.g. Marvin 1998; Spigel 1992; Ito 2009). Such discursive operations are, as noted in the introduction, repeated in the contexts of mobile media and young children. As to be expected, much of the information parents receive about their children’s use of mobile and touchscreen media comes from mainstream news media, which is dominated by stories that draw on health and medical literature, reinforcing a discourse of ‘exposure’ and risk. Yet, parents also receive competing and contradictory messages from other discursive domains, especially educational and commercial discourses surrounding the benefits of mobile media in the lives of young children. Education literature often provides touchscreens with a legitimating role centred on the digital literacy requirements for future learners, labourers, and citizens (see Plowman et  al. 2010). Educational discourses are, in turn, often leveraged within the mobile app economy, with apps designed for children overwhelmingly sold as educational (Shuler 2009). These contradictory messages are necessarily resolved through the media practices assembled, produced, and reproduced within family life and domestic space. This chapter turns to the materialities, geographies, and routines of mobile media and communications use by young children in the home. The chapter explores young children’s everyday encounters with mobile media, the ways their mobile media use is configured in the home, and how parents mediate these encounters within the everyday contexts of home life by drawing on the concept of dispositif or apparatus (Foucault 1980). This concept is useful in trying to tie together both the discursive and non-discursive elements that operate in any given context. For Foucault, an apparatus articulates the entanglements of “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements” (1980, p. 194); these coalesce to collectively shape and govern a particular situation. The apparatus in the contexts of young children’s mobile media would include the materialities of household media, such as internet infrastructures, device domestication,

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distribution, and mobility, along with discursive operations such as policy guidelines, news media stories, and commercial marketing. This chapter analyses how this apparatus both configures and complicates parental mediations of young children’s touchscreen use, noting that tensions between policy and practice unfold through uncertain and inconsistent dispositions embedded in the messy relations and routines of family life. Enquiring at the intersection of touchscreen interfaces, digital parenting, and commercial software design, then, the chapter goes on to identify emerging arrangements in which young children are produced as users of mobile media and communication technologies. These are characterised as accidental, assisted, and automated. In both industry discourse and academic scrutiny, mobile media are often assumed to have ‘users’, yet it is difficult to fit young children into a category that assumes clear ideas of intentionality and ownership. However, this situation is changing as mobile devices have incorporated touchscreen interfaces and become increasingly prominent in domestic environments (e.g. Nansen 2015; Plowman et  al. 2010; Rideout 2013, 2014). Mobile media are now an embodied part of parents’ personal media (Richardson 2007), occupying a proximal space to young children in the home, in public restaurants (Radesky et al. 2014), and on car journeys (Barker 2009). As such, the chapter extends the notion of apparatus to locate configurations of young media users in relation to Mark Deuze’s (2011, 2012) claim that we no longer live with but in media, which challenges modes of media resistance found in medical discourses of ‘exposure’ and restriction (Strasburger and Hogan 2013), and within certain strands of critical media theory (Stiegler 2010). Instead, Deuze’s thesis posits the need for a more immanent and critical approach to mediated life, something that can be located in examples of cultural production, media art, and everyday practice addressing young children’s mobile media use.

Mediating Mobile Technologies at Home During research in family households, many observations of children’s media use and discussions with parents centred on the domestication and aggregation of mobile media in the home. The principal devices mentioned by parents were mobile phones and tablet computers—although with the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) and release of new commercial games and products involving connected toys, as discussed later in

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the book, this mobile media apparatus will no doubt expand in coming years. The contemporary apparatus, comprising connected media infrastructures, the domestication of multiple devices, and the ambient presence and circulation of mobile media, was discussed by parents in terms of the rationale for and patterns of household mobile media adoption. The reasons given for purchasing mobile devices, whilst often bound up with the logics and imperatives of technology to upgrade and accumulate, were also articulated in terms of their suitability for use by young children. Tablet devices, in particular, were perceived to offer affordances for young children associated with usability, mobility, and multi-functionality, whilst key events, such as a planned family vacation, were often the catalyst for purchase: “Really, we bought it for M, when we were travelling, so she had games when we went overseas and on the long flight to entertain her”.1 Once purchased, however, family discussions highlighted how domesticating and dwelling with mobile devices prompted more frequent, distributed, and varied use by young children. The materialities of mobile media established conditions in which young children were increasingly surrounded by mobile media circulating within the home even if they themselves were not ambulatory, and in which they often observed their parents using mobile devices. Young children become habituated to regularly seeing mobile devices around the home and in other places, such as child-care centres—where they are increasingly used as part of early childhood education—but also by observing their parents’ embodied, distracted, or intimate relations with their phones: “Cause he notices that we pick up this black thing”. Most prominently, young children’s early mobile media encounters were entangled with and animated by touchscreen interfaces that are responsive to and light up through touch. Underscoring the nomenclature of ‘natural user interfaces’ (NUIs) used within the product design and manufacturer communities (e.g. Norman 2010; Widgor and Wixon 2011), in which NUIs are celebrated for inaugurating a more intuitive, embodied, or natural mode of interfacing with computation, the way that touchscreens were often lying about and drew the attention of young children with contact providing instant feedback enticed use: “And he 1  Italicised quotes are used to differentiate participant quotes from other sources. All italicised quotes are anonymised participant quotes from parents who were interviewed as part of the qualitative research, unless otherwise noted. Quotes have not been attributed to specific parents, as they are cited here to express common observations or tropes.

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notices when the lights, the bright light. A little bit moth to a flame, you know” (Fig. 2.1). Clearly the material properties and affordances of mobile media created environments that facilitated and promoted young children’s ease of access and use. Living within these ambient media environments, then, young children often observed and reached for mobile devices “on the iPad or whatever, then what’s actually happening in front of them, then naturally they’ll gravitate towards it”. Discussions with parents revealed that accidental forms of media engagement were a common consequence of these ambient media geographies, interfacial affordances, and early encounters with mobile media. It was not uncommon for young children to accidentally swipe and activate applications, to temporarily lock the screen, or even to dial contacts: Once he did flail his arms and change the song that was coming out of the iPad.2 Fig. 2.1  Photograph of child reaching for touchscreen device

2  Indented quotes are attributed at the end of indented sections to identify and cite the source.

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If I’ve got that on YouTube, they can quite quickly get on to some you know [video] … by pressing … and they don’t do it on purpose, they’re just pushing random buttons. He does Skype calls! I think he recognizes their image; the icon. Then just taps it and. (Parent interview quotes)3

Similarly, analysing publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, there were a significant number of instances in which it appeared young children had accidentally taken photos with the camera phone. Many photos showed a baby with an arm in view reaching towards the phone in a classic trope of a selfie image; others were poorly framed shots showing parts of baby faces too close to the camera lens suggesting they accidentally took the photograph; whilst most definitive was many instances in which the caption of the image posted by parents directly attributed the photograph to a young child: Isabella’s first #babyselfie! She actually pushed the button herself! #sixmonths #almostsevenmonths #cutebaby #babylove #niece #baby #myfavoritelittleperson #cleverbaby Just found this in my phone, my three years old taking selfies when i’m not looking #baby #jad #selfie #babyselfie #cute #happy #babyboy #theappleofmyeye My baby and her selfies lmao. She really took this by herself too. Babies nowadays are something else. #selfie #babyselfie #babiesofinstagram #photogenic. (Public Instagram posts)

The #babyselfie data has the feel of parents recording and sharing important milestones in their baby’s development like their first steps, though here, the images document and communicate young children’s initial encounters with, capacities for, and interactions with mobile technology. While there were many instances in which young children accidentally engaged in mobile media use, sometimes managing to communicate with an unsuspecting interlocutor, it is important to acknowledge such encounters could not have emerged without the enabling infrastructure (Parks and Starosielski 2015; Star 1999) of ambient media contexts and touchscreen interfaces. Significant, too, was the intermediary role played by parents, who influence how devices circulate through the home and, at an interface level, configure the access to and set of apps that young children are likely to accidentally activate and manipulate. Whilst accidental  Citations in indented quotes refer to all quotations in indented section.

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communication more commonly applied to younger children, parents also acted as intermediaries in enabling household environments and interfaces, or operated as proxy users in posting content on their behalf. Assisted communication emerged around the routines and rationales for making mobile media available to their children. Parents did not passively accept the imperatives of media to be used by children just because they could. Instead, they discussed how they actively made decisions around when, where, and why young children used mobile media. Whilst these varied, a number of common parental mediation threads emerged, including the reasons for making mobile devices and content readily available for young children. Parents spoke about using mobile media to entertain their young children in situations where they were otherwise occupied—the so-called pass-back effect (Chiong and Shuler 2010): “Sometimes you use devices to pacify them, so you’re busy, you know doing … work or something”. Parents also described their motivations for making mobile devices readily available for children in terms of perceived benefits of learning to use devices and engaging with educational content as part of the perceived necessity for development of digital dexterity as a mode of digital literacy, or in terms of social benefits associated with viewing digital content, especially family photographs, or in mediating social interaction, especially communication with long-distance relatives: I think cutting them off from it is actually doing them a huge disservice, to be honest. … Because they’re going to go out into the big wide world and they’re just going to be so far behind everyone else. The little one just wants to watch it over and over again. She thinks it’s fantastic watching herself. She’s got international grandparents. Got international cousins … she’s going to be on the screen a lot! (Parent interview quotes)

Alternatively, parents spoke about a desire to place limits on their young children’s use of mobile devices to encourage other activities. Parents described a range of mediation strategies to limit use, ranging from traditional restrictive mediation processes involving the imposition of rules around media-free spaces or times, through to the use of reward-based limits for good behaviour, as well as more technology-focused ways of restricting access such as hiding devices, changing passwords, or turning the Wi-Fi off:

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And so, we’ll change that [log-in] code so then they really both need to ask for it. I’ll often put it up in his wardrobe. … So, it’s out of sight. (Parent interview quotes)

These forms of parental mediation did not, however, simply situate or construct young children as passive recipients of their parents’ desires to make media available. Instead, young children were often active participants in these processes, pushing for access to devices, digital content, and mediated communication. These distributed relations of agency were expressed through young children requesting specific apps (often discovered from their friends); through the ways parents initiated use by, for example, unlocking a device, preparing software, or loading an application, but then handed them over to young children to play; and through wider networks of relations in which others (including siblings or social networks) had a say in the kinds of media young children used (especially perceived quality apps such as those produced by studios like Toca Boca). Similarly, the assisted communication emerging from the analysis of #babyselfie images on Instagram revealed that parents were not only managing young children’s media use within the physical space of the home, but also acting as proxies in mediating online content on their behalf: “I leave my ipad for a few minutes and she’s playing around taking selfies #baby #selfie #babyselfie #cuteness” (public Instagram post). In sharing this digital content on social networks, parents became intermediaries in the communication of their children’s digital images (Nansen and Jayemanne 2016). Clearly, they were determining the platforms and networks where these images were published online, yet the production of these images was more uncertain, with accidental self-portraits taken by infants suggesting they played a key role in the cultural circuits of digital photography (van Dijck 2008; du Gay et al. 2013). Overwhelmingly, such forms of mobile media provision were not settled or stable. Instead, they varied across the course of the week, often in the contexts of family schedules and weekly routines, or due to special social occasions, or often because of the differences in social rhythms between weekdays and weekends, with rules on mobile media use often becoming more relaxed on weekends, due to sense of it as a slower leisure time: And then at the weekend, we often say to the kids, if you can just give us, like, half an hour or something in the morning. We’ll put the iPad in their room, on

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a Saturday morning, or a Sunday morning. And then … Do that the night before, and we’ll sort of tell them to, it will be there. (Parent interview quote)

Arrangements and practices of young children’s mobile media use did not only vary within the routines and rhythms of households, but also in the contexts of family relationships. Varied patterns of use emerged through situated negotiations, involving parental differences in approach or sibling relationships and device sharing. Parents also described changing patterns of media content and app use as children aged, and how this was negotiated through practices of reviewing or co-viewing, or how their mediation practices changed for different children: It’s got a four-digit code that they know. G [older brother] knows the code, um, but he is less inclined to use it. And, so, F [younger sister] has to ask him or us. I’ve stumbled across some, watching stuff I wasn’t aware they were watching, like Ninjago. … So I sat down with them and watched an episode … and kind of talked to them about who the characters were, and what their impression of what the characters were doing. And some things were different because her older brother was at school, and, um, so she had unrestricted access I guess. No one was telling her what to watch and things. … Yeah, I think, just the dynamic of having a second child. (Parent interview quotes)

Shared family media practices often coalesced around cherished family moments or media rituals, exemplified by the practice of ambient family video calls, which as one parent described: “We quite often just have them [on Skype] … have the computers in there while we’re having dinner … the laptop will be there, opened up at one end of the table with the family here and there will be my sister having breakfast with her family in Ireland … the kids are running around and playing with each other, they’ll pop in and say, ‘Hi’”. The routines, rhythms, and relationships of household mobile media use, then, involved varied and sometimes inconsistent or even contradictory patterns. These emerged through media affordances and logics, and via parental mediation strategies to both enable and restrict their availability and operation. In turn, such media technologies and their mediation were embedded within the materialities of household environments and entangled with the messy realities of social rhythms and family relationships to configure an apparatus of young children’s mobile that was not settled or stable, but dynamic and evolving.

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Parental Dispositions Towards Mobile Media Despite the dominance of health discourses and guidelines around young children’s mobile media, parental awareness about recommended guidelines for their young children’s use of mobile media was often unclear, unknown, or even confused: “I have no idea, but I know it’s like really small, and I know that my kids probably watch a little bit more than the recommended viewing time”. Yet, even with the uncertainty about specific recommendations regarding screen time limits for children, there was clearly a more explicit engagement by parents with the logic and framing of time-based and restrictive approaches. Parental dispositions towards health discourses surrounding young children’s use of mobile media were characterised by a sense that they were too narrowly defined, that they were disconnected from the media environments we now inhabit, and they were impractical given the lived realities and routines of daily life, in which parents’ juggle parenting with a number of other pressures and demands from paid work to housework, to the demands of consumer culture and technological innovation: “They’re just problematic because it’s almost like there’s no such thing as being away from a screen anymore”. More critically, parental dispositions rejected the overwhelmingly pathological or instrumental discourses surrounding children’s use of digital media, seeing the framing of health discourses in terms of effects or time, and educational discourses in terms of functional outcomes as overly narrow. Instead, they affirmed the personal and cultural values associated with children and media, seeing benefits of mobile media and digital content through a lens of narrative and play, and critiquing the screen equivalence of this discourse for lacking nuance around the context and content of children’s mobile media use: There so many kinds of screens in kids’ eyes these days, but do you see any problems around the, the idea that all screens are the same? And all the screen activities are the same? I mean that’s what screen time basically means right? So, it’s like they don’t differentiate between an app, family photographs, television, anything. Anyone who’s properly read a book or played a video game like kind of knows that they can be one of the most memorable or special moments of your life. Like, you know, as a kid. (Parent interview quotes)

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Finally, parents described the importance of balance in their young children’s use of mobile media. This was a disposition that was equivocal about screen and authority discourses imposing a rigid model. Instead, parents privileged their intimate experience, common sense, and embedded knowledge in understanding and shaping their children’s use of mobile media: “I don’t think it’s necessary to say no screen time, device time, whatever, but I certainly think you know, if he was not reading, if he was not running around or reading books I’d see it as a problem”. Balancing young children’s mobile media use, then, was both a disposition towards and applying this perspective in configuring and mediating their children’s media spaces and practices. Balance was perceived in terms of organising their children’s mobile media use in relation to other digital media content, legacy media forms, and non-mediated activities. Tensions between mobile media operating either as a resource for young children’s learning, leisure, and social development, or as a site of concern associated with exposure to inappropriate content, risks of overuse, or subject of family conflict, did not only emerge within household spaces or family relationships. They also played out through wider social networks and online communication due to the mobile media apparatus of young children spreading beyond located physical spaces such as the home through networks of internet connectivity. With mobile media connected to digital spaces and networks, and sharing functions both enabling and encouraging content sharing, the particularities of different familial practices intersected with wider cultural norms and debates about the digitisation of childhood. The locus of much of these tensions was the degree to which parents participated in sharing content about their young children within their social networks, or in enabling young children’s social media presence and interaction. Parents described how social networks were a valuable resource for information sharing about appropriate or quality content, especially mobile apps. On the other hand, parents also expressed an awareness of, responsibility towards, and reluctance to create a digital presence and footprint for their children by sharing images on social media, noting the potential personal, emotional, or professional implications for their children when they grew up: But all my Facebook stuff is quite locked down to people I know. But even then no, no naked photos or anything like that … because I don’t think that’s fair. He should be able to choose how he exposes himself through social media.

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I think about the way that my friends, for instance, and no disrespect to them, have posted photos of their kids. … All the way through their lives on a very regular basis, with their real names on social media, it means that as an adult, those children are going to have their whole lives open to the world or at least partially open. (Parent interview quotes)

In contrast to the clearly reflective and restricted practices of sharing content of their young children online by parents, keywords and hashtags related to young children and mobile media (e.g. #babyselfie on Instagram; “iPad baby” on YouTube) reveal that many parents are comfortable and keen to publicly share images, videos, and information about their young children using mobile media. In turn, such sharing is facilitated by the functionality and affordances of mobile media, for easily capturing and posting content, even infrastructuring young children to be able to take and share images. These evolving complexities around young children’s mobile and digital media practices add to the literature on parental mediation by highlighting how diverse and often-contradictory forms of child mobile media use emerge in response to different discourses and their filtering within the everyday routines of home life. Clearly, this apparatus both configures and complicates parental mediations of young children’s mobile media use. Navigating the tension between policy and practice reveals that the standardised or uniform approach implied by policy guidelines is unworkable within the messy materialities, relations, and routines of family life. Instead, we see more circumspect and equivocal parental dispositions, which unfold through sometimes uncertain and inconsistent practices, but also through dynamic and evolving relations that nevertheless remain sensitive to the value and context of mobile media in young children’s lives.

Living with Mobile Media Young children’s practices and their parental mediation clearly extend beyond mobile media interfaces and software platforms affording modes of engagement that require ever-decreasing levels of expertise, skill, or life experience. The observation that touchscreen interfaces lower thresholds of usability to ever-younger populations of users is insufficient to account for the more extensive digital media use we see in young children. Nor can we simply understand such mobile media practices through increasingly careless, uncertain, or complex contexts of parental mediation. Instead,

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just as software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun 2011; Gillespie 2014; Kitchin and Dodge 2014; Manovich 2013), commercial software applications and their algorithmic operations are also increasingly implicated in guiding young children’s media lives (Ito 2009; Nansen 2015; Paolillo et al. 2020). Here, software automates processes of sorting and sharing information, and in doing so, both empowers and governs forms of child media conduct. Automated techniques of interaction emerged as part of the repertoire of young children’s mobile mediality and communication through observations and discussions during the household research, and through surveying commercial software applications. Within family discussions, parents spoke about the ways digital databases and applications facilitated infant exploration and navigation by serving up playlists, codifying appropriate content and guiding parental choices. These included photo galleries stored on mobile devices, as well as children’s Internet television services such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s catch-up online TV service, iView, which are visually organised and easily scrollable. More significantly, algorithmic functions for sorting, recommending, and autoplay on streaming platforms such as Netflix or video-sharing platforms like YouTube meant that infants were often automatically delivered an ongoing stream of content: “They just keep watching it [YouTube]. So it leads on from the other thing. Which is pretty amazing, that’s pretty interactive.” Forms of automated communication specifically addressing young children can also be located in examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores: My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. These applications are designed to support baby image capture and sharing, promising to “allow your baby to take a photo of him himself [sic]” (Giudicelli 2014, n.p.), based on automated software features that use sounds and images to capture a baby’s attention and touch sensors to activate image capture and storage. The Baby Selfie app, for example, works by running animations on the screen, a virtual ‘hide-and-seek’ game involving colourful animals. These moving shapes and characters attract attention and invite interaction, taking photos automatically of their presumably delighted and intrigued behaviour. In one sense these types of applications may appear to ‘empower’ infants to participate in the production of digital content (namely selfies), yet they also clearly distribute this agency with and through mobile media, specific hardware, family members, animated

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characters, and digital software (see: Trezise 2017). Moreover, the design of these apps implies changing forms of conduct, expectations, and concepts around the place of young children in a participatory digital culture. These examples highlight the increasingly automated ways young children are configured as users of mobile media and communication technologies. The concept of digital participation typically assumes a degree of individual agency in deciding what to share, post, or communicate that is not typically available to infants. This conception is challenged, however, by the emerging mobile media practices of young children detailed above. These reveal how such agency is distributed amongst a network of ambient devices, user-friendly interfaces, proxy users, and software sorting. Such distributions reflect conditions, which Mark Deuze has noted, that we do not live with but in media (2011). He argues this ubiquity, habituation, and embodiment of media and communication technologies pervade and constitute our lives. In these processes, technological mediation becomes effectively invisible, negating the possibility of an outside from which resistance can be mounted. As discussed above, resistance remains—at least at present—a solution promoted in medical discourses and paediatric advice, but this default position assumes a neat separation between children and media that is problematised by young children’s contemporary media arrangements. Children are no longer necessarily ‘sat’ in front of media; media are more mobile, creating the potential for accidental, assisted, and automated relations to emerge. Deuze’s thesis suggests that separation and resistance are ontologically futile and instead we should strive for a more immanent relation that seeks to modulate choices and actions from within our media life: finding “creative ways to wield the awesome communication power of media both ethically and aesthetically” (2012, p. 367). Such an immanent ethics and a critical aesthetics of young children’s mediated life can be located in examples of everyday parental practice, online cultural production, and new media art addressing the arrangements of infant mobile media and communication discussed above. For example, an article in the Guardian, “Toddlers pose a serious risk to smartphones and tablets” parodies moral panics around children’s exposure to media by noting that media devices are at greater risk of physical damage from children handling them, whilst, a Tumblr blog “parents on phones”4 invites people to post images taken in public of instances in which adults supervising  http://parentsonphones.tumblr.com/

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c­hildren are distracted by their mobile phones, shifting the focus from how media effects children, to how children are located in a wider culture of media distraction (Licoppe 2012). A design project by Laura Cornet from the Eindhoven Academy—called New Born Fame—comprises a crib mobile built from soft toys shaped like social media logos, motion and touch sensors that activate image capture (much like babyselfie apps), but with automated social media sharing, critically interrogating the ways young children are increasingly bound up with the networked and algorithmic regimes of our computational culture (Fig. 2.2). Finally, parents in this research revealed that they carefully considered the ethics of media in their children’s lives by organising everyday media practices that balanced dwelling with new, old, and non-media forms, and by curating their digitally mediated interactions and archives with an awareness that personal data is rendered as public property (van Dijck 2007), and that they were custodians of their children’s digital memories (Garde-Hansen et  al. 2009). These examples work from an immanent ethical and critical position to make visible and operate from within the conditions of young children’s media life. This chapter has explored the ways young children are increasingly configured as users of mobile media and communication technologies. The

Fig. 2.2  Photograph of New Born Fame crib mobile. (Copyright Laura Cornet)

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emerging digital dexterity outlined here is intertwined with a contemporary apparatus of child media, household media environments, parental dispositions, and assemblages of accidental, assisted, and automated relations of living with mobile media. Moreover, such entanglements of use are discursively reconfigured through multiple channels, contexts, and networks of public mediation. Together, these diverse contexts and forms of conduct have implications for studying and understanding the ways increasingly younger children are produced and emerging as active participants and interpellated subjects within digital culture. These arrangements are extended in the following chapter, which explores young children’s embodied relations with mobile media

References Barker, J. 2009. ‘Driven to Distraction?’: Children’s Experiences of Car Travel. Mobilities 4 (1): 59–76. Chiong, C., and C. Shuler. 2010. Learning: Is There an App for That? Investigations of Young Children’s Usage and Learning with Mobile Devices and Apps. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Chun, W. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Deuze, M. 2011. Media Life. Media, Culture and Society 33 (1): 137–148. ———. 2012. The Unseen Disappearance of Invisible Media: A Response to Sebastian Kubitschko and Daniel Knapp. Media, Culture and Society 34 (3): 365–368. Du Gay, P., S.  Hall, L.  Janes, A.K.  Madsen, H.  Mackay, and K.  Negus. 2013. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage. Foucault, M. 1980. The Confession of the Flesh. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. C. Gordon, 194–228. New York: Pantheon. Garde-Hansen, J., A. Hoskins, and A. Reading. 2009. Save As… Digital Memories. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Gillespie, T. 2014. The Relevance of Algorithms. In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski, and K.A. Foot. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Giudicelli, P. 2014. My Baby Selfie. iTunes App Store. Apple Inc. Ito, M. 2009. Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Kitchin, R., and M.  Dodge. 2014. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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Licoppe, C. 2012. Understanding Mediated Appearances and Their Proliferation: The Case of the Phone Rings and the ‘Crisis of the Summons’. New Media and Society 14 (7): 1073–1091. Manovich, L. 2013. Software Takes Command. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Marvin, C. 1998. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communications in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Routledge. Nansen, B. 2015. Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 18 (5). ISSN 14412616. Nansen, B., and D.  Jayemanne. 2016. Infants, Interfaces, and Intermediation: Digital Parenting in the Production of ‘iPad Baby’ YouTube Videos. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 60 (4): 587–603. Norman, D. 2010. Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural. Interactions, May– June, 6–10. Paolillo, J., B. Harper, C. Boothby, and D. Axelrod. 2020. YouTube Children’s Videos: Development of a Genre Under Algorithm. In Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Hawaii: HICSS. Parks, L., and N.  Starosielski. 2015. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Plowman, L., C.  Stephen, and J.  McPake. 2010. Growing Up with Technology: Young Children Learning in a Digital World. London: Routledge. Radesky, J.S., C.J. Kistin, B. Zuckerman, et al. 2014. Patterns of Mobile Device Use by Caregivers and Children During Meals in Fast Food Restaurants. Pediatrics 133 (4): e843–e849. Richardson, I. 2007. Pocket Technospaces: The Bodily Incorporation of Mobile New Media. Continuum 21 (2): 205–215. Rideout, V. 2013. Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013. San Francisco: Common Sense Media. Rideout, V.J. 2014. Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America: A Report of the Families and Media Project. New  York: Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Shuler, C. 2009. iLearn: A Content Analysis of the iTunes App Store’s Education Section. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Spigel, L. 1992. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Star, S.L. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43 (3): 377–391. Stiegler, B. 2010. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (trans: Barker, S.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Strasburger, V., and M.  Hogan. 2013. Policy Statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics: Children, Adolescents, and the Media. Pediatrics 132: 958–961.

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Trezise, B. 2017. What Does the Baby Selfie Say? Seeing Ways of ‘Self-Seeing’ in Infant Digital Cultures. M/C Journal 20 (4). ISSN 14412616. van Dijck, J. 2007. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. Digital Photography: Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory. Visual Communication 7 (1): 57–76. Widgor, D., and D.  Wixon. 2011. Brave NUI World: Designing Natural User Interfaces for Touch and Gesture. Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann.

CHAPTER 3

A Touchscreen Media Habitus

Abstract  A touchscreen media habitus explores embodied dimensions of young children’s touchscreen media use by drawing on qualitative research with parents and families, and from analysis of user interface (UI) and mobile app developer literature, which encodes touchscreen interaction through the design constraints and possibilities of gesture input techniques. Connecting this research and analysis with phenomenologically informed cultural theory, particularly as it relates to research on mobile technologies, this chapter describes the emergence of a form of digital dexterity that is understood through the concept of touchscreen habitus. That is, the cultivation of young children’s embodied dispositions, conduct, and competence towards mobile- and touch-based media technologies. Keywords  Children • Mobile media • Embodiment • Habitus • Parental mediation • Household media • Digital interface • Touchscreen A key dimension of children’s contemporary engagement with mobile media centres on their embodied relations, and how these are shaped with and through the interfaces, materiality, and mobility of media technologies. This chapter explores the embodied relations of young children and mobile media by developing the concept of a touchscreen media habitus. © The Author(s) 2020 B. Nansen, Young Children and Mobile Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49875-7_3

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This concept connects with the notion of digital dexterity in young children’s mobile media use by emphasising how capacities for interaction with touchscreen devices doesn’t just take shape through the gestural abilities of young children, or the media environments they inhabit, but also through the processes by which they habituate to mobile and touchscreen interfaces. These are situated within the materialities of domestic media spaces and family life. Within these media habitats, children are both interfacing with and habituating to mobile devices in ways that appear to diverge from, but also resonate with residual media’s directed modes of interaction. These are explored through themes of encounter, enculturation, and embodiment. Yet, this research also reveals how children’s touchscreen media habitus is configured—enabled and constrained—by the commercial and design operations of mobile media, in which we see relays between cultural contexts of use, user interface studies, and the design of touchscreen settings by children’s app developers to codify forms of dexterity. As discussed in the previous chapter, developments in touchscreen interfaces and their widespread adoption following Apple’s launch of the iPhone and later iPad installed conditions that renovated young children’s use of media. These conditions have prompted emerging strands of research into young children’s touchscreen media play, including some preliminary research trying to understand some of the qualities of these playful and embodied relations (Marsh et al. 2018; Nansen and Jayemanne 2016; Nevski and Siibak 2016). Alongside this social and cultural research is more political economy inflected research that seeks to review the design and marketing of children’s mobile application software products (Chiong and Shuler 2010; Shuler 2009). At the same time, researchers working in interaction design and user experience design (UX) are exploring young children’s gestural capacities to interact with touchscreen interfaces (Buckleitner 2011; Hourcade et al. 2015), to inform user interface (UI) developments for child-friendly mobile software applications. Here, the term ‘Minimum User Competency’ (MUC) has been coined to characterise the lowering of usability thresholds to ever-younger populations of users for gestural and touchscreen interfaces—down to approximately 12 months of age, from the previous 2.5 years for keyboard interfaces. These strands of research provide insights into the cultural and economic contexts of young children’s mobile and touchscreen media use. Yet, there is scope for further situated and theoretically informed research, exploring how technologies and bodies intersect in the formation of young

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children’s media practices. Drawing on published research from the author (Nansen and Jayemanne 2018; Nansen and Wilken 2019), this chapter focuses on these intersections and entanglements by applying insights drawn from phenomenologically informed cultural theory to the social and economic contexts of technology design and everyday media use. This analysis helps to reveal how mobile technologies, touchscreen interfaces, and media dispositions are operationalised within young children’s contemporary digital cultures. In order to explore the touchscreen media habitus of young children, this chapter draws on qualitative parental interview and observational research of young children’s mobile media practices, and analysis of the user interface (UI) and mobile app developer literature, such as the ‘Event Handling Guide for iOS’, which encodes touchscreen interaction through the design constraints and possibilities of gesture input techniques. Combining these theoretical and empirical lines of inquiry, this chapter explores the cultivation of young children’s embodied dispositions for touchscreen conduct and competence—their touchscreen media habitus. The following analysis is structured around the relational processes of encounter, enculturation, and embodiment. These are situated within the materialities of domestic media spaces and family relations in which media use unfolds. The analysis is also concerned with how, in turn, these spaces and practices are enfolded into wider communities of design, development, and commercialisation, in which we see relays between cultural contexts of use, user interface studies of children’s developmental capacities for gestural interaction, and the design of touchscreen input configurations by children’s app developers.

Cultivating Children’s Touchscreen Media Habitus As discussed in the previous chapter, it is now commonplace for young children to inhabit household media environments characterised by dense ecologies of digital media, including Wi-Fi infrastructures, the presence of multiple and mobile touchscreen devices, along with residual media technologies such as televisions and desktop computers. The domestication of and dwelling within these contemporary media habitats facilitates young children’s encounters with media technologies: “we’ve got an iPad, which just floats around anywhere”. In particular, the mobility of tablet computers and mobile phones, no longer located in a fixed place but circulating around the home through routines of use and disuse, has prompted

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children’s early and regular encounters: “they just kind of picked up the things that were laying around”. A range of touch- and haptic-oriented media have now come to inhabit homes in ways that become readily available but also appealing for young children through the affordances of the interface responding to touch with screens lighting up, and gestural movements activating applications. These routinised encounters with touchscreen devices habituate young children to the availability and interactivity of haptic media technologies, in which the sense of touch and physical gestures and motions guide possibilities for interaction. These media habitats and touchscreen encounters are, however, not purely an outcome of spatial arrangements and mobilities of touchscreen media, but also culturally encoded or enculturated, in the way parents make available, model behaviour, and mediate their children’s media interactions. For example, young children observed their parents embodied, distracted, or intimate relations with their phones and tablets (see Mowlabocus 2016a, b): “I, I suppose indirectly he’s fascinated … he notices when our attention is drawn by it”. Through these observations, children become enculturated into understanding the cultural value of mobile screens in contemporary life, and they embodied such values through imitation: “the other day he found … he got his mum’s phone and starting going, ‘Lala-lala’, talking”. In addition to indirect forms of habituation, parents identified more deliberate practices of providing children with mobile devices, to ‘pacify’ them in situations where they were otherwise occupied, such as driving, working, or socialising, and thus deployed mobile devices as a tool of distraction or management within the routines of family life. Yet, such parental provision of devices was not simply an expression of what Mowlabocus (2016a, b, n.p.) describes as the hail of smartphones “reminding us to be productive … as workers, students, parents, friends, consumers, and producers”, in which “their constant notifications interpellate us into the contemporary political-economic structure from an ever-earlier age”. Instead, such attachments also reflected the value placed by families on children’s digital play, learning, and social interaction, in which the everyday and ordinary usage of touchscreen media slowly seeped down to younger children’s everyday media practices, which as a research participant described: “We had my son’s birthday and there were some photos, some footage of us singing happy birthday and the little one just wants to watch it over and over again”.

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Young children’s touchscreen media habitus is, then, embodied through the affordances and materiality of mobile devices for being held, touched, and carried: “the phone is 100% instant and it’s little, they can carry it around, so I think that’s part of the attraction as well”. Mobile media encounters are animated by touchscreen interfaces that are responsive to simple gestural actions of young children: “they can grab it and start playing with it. It just shows that it’s so much part of their world … to swipe something.” And, these mobile media relations are habituated over time through cultural contexts of provision and performance as part of their “individual and collectively realized corporeal schema” (Richardson 2012, p. 135). Arguably, the swipe emerges as the key gesture of a touchscreen habitus: “she knew from quite a young age to swipe a photo on the phone”. Yet, the swipe is not immediately part of haptic conduct, but emerges as critical in the transition from simple and intuitive discrete interaction to more encoded multi-touch gestural styles. Like Merleau-Ponty’s keyboard habitus, it is expressive of young children’s internalisation of a particular mode of gestural input for corporeal conduct as part of a wider touchscreen habitus (Fig. 3.1). The swipe speaks to the formation of young children’s touchscreen habitus and embodied capacities for and relations with media being shaped through the dominance of a particular interfacial mode of engagement— touch. This, then, guided interactions and expectations with media more generally, including interfacing with ‘residual media’ (Acland 2007): “It’s funny because when she was younger she would go up the T.V. and she would try swiping the T.V. to turn the channel”. The ‘failure’ of legacy media to Fig. 3.1  Photograph of child swiping touchscreen

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respond to touch was seen as underscoring the intuitive qualities of touchscreen media, located in the generational naming of ‘natural user interfaces’ within the product design and manufacturer communities (e.g. Norman 2010): “He has been using an iPad before he was 1. He could unlock it. He could open things with it. Play games. Choose apps. Before he could talk or walk. It’s such an intuitive interface.” Such embodied dispositions highlight how young children’s means of conceptualising digital media are driven by modes of interfacing: “The keyboard in my office is a big novelty. … So, it’s a novelty, that, I think that they actually don’t see the computer and the tablet as similar devices.” A touchscreen habitus is, then, not just cultivated by relations of encounter, enculturation, or embodiment, but critically constrained and guided by codified regimes of interaction involving design and development.

Media, Habitus, Phenomenology Understood as the acquisition and embodiment of dispositions or forms of conduct, the concept of habitus has been developed across anthropological and sociological literature to address the relations that emerge between bodies and technologies in everyday life (Bourdieu 1977; Mauss 1973). Marcel Mauss, for example, located habitus at the intersection of bodily practices, object designs, and cultures of use, noting how particular forms of movement, from walking, swimming, sitting, and digging, were entrained and organised over time within specific cultural contexts through forms of repetition, interaction, and imitation. Pierre Bourdieu’s social analysis understood habitus less in terms of micro analysis of bodily movements, but still as a significant element at the intersection of culture and embodiment, in which dispositions are culturally shared and shaped through class-based activities and experiences. Phenomenology, with its focus on the body’s place, performance, and expression of material culture, has productively contributed to this concept of habitus and its intersection with media technology. From this work, body techniques have come to be understood as “culturally and contextually specific—taught, learnt, and dynamically evolving” (Richardson and Wilken 2009, p. 24). In phenomenological terms, the way in which body-technology relations become part of our habitus, our “corporeal schema” (Richardson 2012, p.  135)—“expresses the power we have of dilating our being in the world, or of altering our existence through incorporating new instruments” (Merleau-Ponty 2012,

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p.  45). For Merleau-Ponty, whose focus was on analogue technologies, habitus was not simply an involuntary or rigid pattern of behaviour, but, rather, an empowering relationship between bodies and artefacts that expressed capacities to adopt and adapt to technologies, to embody them in order to act in the world. Merleau-Ponty identified multiple layers of habitus, which incorporated physical bodies, repeated use, learnt movements, and cultures of use. So, for example, the typing body habituated to keyboard use when the corporeal schema was distributed in the fingers, performed through their dexterity, and learnt through cultural norms, such as touch-typing (2012, p. 145). Such reflections have been taken up by more recent variants of phenomenology, which seek to understand the situated negotiations and distributed qualities of human-technology relations. Here, the influential work of Don Ihde (1990, 1993), which understands embodied relations as one type of interrelation forms—including alterity, hermeneutic, background—has provided a productive lens for considering various technologies and their embodied dimensions, including mobile media and touchscreen interface interaction (Wellner 2016). This, in turn, connects to a broader ‘material turn’ in media and communication studies, especially the study of mobile and touch-based interfaces (Farman 2012; Mowlabocus 2016a, b; Richardson and Hjorth 2017; Parisi et al. 2017), which orients us to the histories, senses, and experiences of contemporary haptic media. One trajectory of analysis and theorising such forms of habitus is labelled ‘cultural phenomenology’ (Richardson and Third 2009; Connor 2000; Csordas 1999). Cultural phenomenology “resituates embodiment and materiality within sociocultural contexts” by turning our attention to “the body-technology relations that emerge from particular cultural milieu and collective habits” (Richardson and Wilken 2017, pp. 120–121). In bringing together both phenomenological and cultural studies traditions, this approach has been deployed to “critically account for the perceptual and sensory dimensions of everyday material culture” (Richardson and Third 2009, p. 49), including the embodiment of mobile devices (Richardson 2012; Richardson and Wilken 2017). Such phenomenological reflections have also been taken up within the contexts of human-computer interaction (HCI) research, documenting how appropriating gestural interfaces requires levels of physical ability, learned and controlled bodily movements as input, and situated meanings of use (e.g. Loke and Robertson 2011; Nansen et al. 2014).

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Placing phenomenologically oriented approaches within a more explicit media studies frame, Ben Highmore (2011) has argued that habitus is a productive concept for understanding how our senses accommodate or habituate to the complexity of contemporary media and information environments. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of apperception (1999), which sees the automated embodiment of sensations and knowledge as enabling human capacities to engage with new and changing technological experiences, Highmore turns to contemporary media environments to discuss his own habits of media interaction: “I can perform fairly complex operations on a computer while also successfully following a TV show that has a number of intertwined narrative threads” (Highmore 2011, p. 134). In this way, he draws on personal and descriptive reflection to challenge effects, discourses around concerns like screen time, pathological media use, or information overload to suggest habitus can operate as an embodied resource—distributed amongst the senses, and in relation to the materiality of media—to allow for attention to be delegated, scattered, and distracted in ways that foster new forms of media relations to emerge. Highmore (2011) argues that the habituation of experience and the embodying of knowledge—“to the hands, the feet, the nervous system and to the field of apperception” (134)—free up the senses and build capacity for adopting new, unfamiliar, or changing technologies. Clearly, phenomenologically informed cultural theory around habitus and body-technology relations forms a productive way of understanding young children’s encounters, enculturation, and embodiment of touchscreen media offered in this chapter. This orientation towards habitus as both mediated by technologies and embedded in culture contexts is valuable in turning our attention to everyday media practices and their situated contexts. It highlights the importance of attending to the specificity of interfaces, the conduct of young bodies, the ecologies of media spaces (both mobile and residual), the cultural practices surrounding and shaping these activities, and the wider communities of interest representing, designing, or commodifying these relations.

Configuring Habitus Through Interface Design As the discussion of young children’s touchscreen habitats and habituation above suggests, the formation of young children’s touchscreen habitus emerges through their embodiment and enculturation of dexterity and dispositions towards touchscreen media shaped by direct experience

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(responsive interfaces, interactive content, tactility of the media), by rich household media environments (multiple and mobile devices, internet connectivity), and through mimesis and mediation (observing and imitating, fitting within family media practices, and gestural and other bodily adjustments). Here, the touchscreen interface is understood not solely as the point at which the user interfaces with the computer screen, but as Cramer and Fuller (2008) argue, the interface becomes a site of exchange which operates below the level of the user through hardware, software, code, and protocol within computer systems, as well as beyond the screen through shared practices and norms operating at the level of culture. At the level of the screen, touchscreen gestures must be registered by and map onto a predefined and limited range of common UI (user interface) gesture types (tapping, pressing, swiping, dragging, scrolling, pinching, spreading, rotating), which are designed, detailed, and determined by product manufacturers such as Apple, and made available for software developers through API’s and documentation such as Apple’s ‘Event Handling Guide for iOS’ (Fig. 3.2). These gestural interactions and encodings are, in turn, informed by recursive examples of UX (user experience) research that draws on cultural resources. YouTube videos of young children playing with iPads shared by their parents discussed in the next chapter, for example, have been used as a resource by interaction design researchers to understand young children’s interface capacities to inform the further development of touch design in commercial mobile apps (Buckleitner 2011). Using YouTube videos to analyse infants, toddlers, and young children’s abilities to use touchscreen devices, therefore, locates children’s touchscreen habitus within wider cultures and economies of play, becoming a commercially valuable resource for informing interaction design and software product development: A perfectly flat, glassy surface is magical all by itself. It doesn’t exist in nature … and when it’s covered with fog or a slippery oleophobic coating, it gets even more interesting to your fingers …. The Minimum User Competency (MUC) has dropped from around 2½ years (for the mouse) to around 12 months (for the iPad) …. This presents new opportunities for children’s interactive media developers; nothing short of a new era in computing, as the user interface becomes increasingly invisible. (Buckleitner 2011, p. 10)

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Fig. 3.2  Touch Gesture Reference Guide. (Created by Vilamor, Craig, Dan Willis, and Luke Wroblewski. 2010. Available at: https://static.lukew.com/ TouchGestureGuide.pdf. Creative Commons)

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This research highlights a common and not unexpected observation that initial modes of touchscreen interaction involve actions such as jabbing, swatting, licking, and smearing (e.g. Buckleitner 2011). While “looking, tasting, smelling, and hearing”—alongside jabbing, swatting, and smearing—“are all variants of ‘handling’ the world” (Richardson and Third 2009, p.  154), in design terms, such haptic interface exploration can be understood as a form of gestural excess (Apperley 2013; Simon 2009), insomuch as these gestures exceed and therefore are not clearly registered within the codified regime of the touchscreen interface. For young children, touchscreens (and mobile devices more generally) require subtle yet significant reformulations of, adjustments to, and disciplining of, gesture. With children, this gestural literacy involves learning through doing, whether their fingers have moved far or fast enough, or in a straight enough line, to activate on-screen actions—that is, they must discover and then adjust their actions to accord with and map onto those movements incorporated within predefined gesture recognition lists. And yet, young children’s capacities to deliberately interact with touchscreens are fairly quickly acquired. Beginning from around the age of 12 months, children demonstrate abilities for simple discrete types of single-fingered gestural interaction such as tapping and swiping (or flicking) (Cristia and Seidl 2015; Hourcade et al. 2015). More complex and multi-touch gestures, such as dragging or pinching, whilst slower to develop, are displayed from around 18 months and steadily increase over time (Hourcade et al. 2015). Children’s touchscreen habitus, then, becomes a site of interest for UX and interaction design researchers aiming to build applications for play and learning that accommodate these capacities through programmed tolerances for gestural input techniques. Habitus could be viewed as an implicit dimension to human-centred design traditions, with a focus on user experience (e.g. McCarthy and Wright 2004). Perhaps the most significant context in which habitus emerges as a critical aspect of design research and innovation is in the development of touchscreen interfaces. Whilst it is recognised by both HCI and media scholars that haptic media and gestural interfaces are not unique to our current moment of digital mobile media (Buxton 2007; Parisi et al. 2017), drawing on past regimes of interaction such as GUI (graphical user interface), they are nevertheless part of an NUI (natural user interface) apparatus that imagines a renovated experience of computer interaction by incorporating people’s natural modes of physical communication and movement. This paradigm of interaction has, however, been critiqued for the assumption that such

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interfaces are somehow intuitive, universal, and immediately usable (Norman 2010). Rather than a mode of interaction that comes naturally, Donald Norman and others have noted that gesture systems still require designing a grammar of interaction that follows well-defined modes of expression and navigation. Thus, like any other mode of interfacing, touchscreen media are still subject to entanglements of design protocols and learnt user practices in which specific gestures must become habituated. This is particularly evident, he suggests, in computer interactions designed to mimic existing movements from activities in everyday life, such as bowling in Nintendo Wii Sports, which requires users release the button on the controller as they swing their arm in order to mimic the release of the bowling ball. Rather than easily translating the movement into the game without users having to adapt their habits of action, however, it was found players would often accidentally release the entire controller itself, requiring Nintendo to issue warnings about and then redesign the wrist strap, and requiring players to habituate to controller-specific gestures. In turn, phenomenologically informed cultural theory of mobile media emphasises as part of the enculturation of technology that gestural interfaces are “culturally specific and materially contextual” (Richardson and Third 2009, p. 155). Despite efforts to naturalise this habitus, whether that naturalness is located in the child or the gestural interface—accompanied by claims to either digital natives (Prensky 2001) or natural modes of computer interaction (e.g. Widgor and Wixon 2011)—young children’s touchscreen media habitus cannot be disentangled from the site of its cultural production, material performance, and economic exploitation. Designing for young children’s touchscreen habitus may appear to be a task in which UI designers simply codify children’s gestural capacities onto touch-based user interfaces. Yet, as this research highlights, haptics is both specific to and produced within different bodily, technological, and cultural contexts. The ability to use touchscreen devices is not simply determined by children’s developmental capacities, as this operates within feedback loops involving forms of encounter, enculturation, and embodiment described above. Parents deliberately assemble the interface between child and touchscreen through the provision and promotion of mobile devices and applications (Nansen and Jayemanne 2016). Similarly, the so-called Minimum User Competency (MUC) of touchscreen interfaces is not simply a product of touchscreens automatically lowering thresholds of computational usability to ever-younger

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populations, with children’s capacities for gestural interaction purposefully fed back into UI development in order to foster both the design of child-­ friendly software applications and extend the market of potential users (Buckleitner 2011). Within such political economies of media haptics minor variations of gesture type and tolerance spread across various mobile applications, operating systems, and device manufacturers. Commercial efforts to own particular gestures like the swipe to unlock or the pinch to zoom have featured in the long-running patent wars between Apple and Samsung, and yet legal settlements of these differences signal to the standardisation of touchscreen gestures, enrolling media haptics within a wider platform imperialism (Yong 2015). The result is a kind of ‘ergonomic branding’ (Parisi 2015), in which the material design of branded touchscreen interfaces inscribes bodies with a touchscreen habitus that codifies the feel and performance of gestures. Whilst this may maximise the efficiency of gestural interaction, and lower thresholds of usability, it comes at the “cost of the autonomy of gesture” (Zehle 2012), delimiting the possibilities of children’s haptic media technologies, experiences, and cultures. Applying phenomenologically informed cultural theory to technology relations as a way to approach young children’s formation of an embodied dexterity and disposition towards touchscreen interfaces reveals that this habitus is produced through young children’s increasing use of mobile and touchscreen media. This use is cultivated by encounters, enculturation, and embodiment of touchscreen media in domestic and family life, and appropriated by touchscreen user interface designers and product manufacturers. UX and interaction design researchers are interested in how developmental capacities intersect with forms of encounter, enculturation, and embodiment as part of the dominant interface now reconfiguring children’s media habitus. With young children growing up in media environments defined by increasingly intimate and entangled haptic computational experiences, we also see parents of young mobile media users reflecting on the significance and implications of such changing media interfaces and experiences. Parents in household research implicitly touched on critical elements of phenomenology and habitus in discussions of sensation, affect, and subjectivity in the touchscreen relations they observed in their children: “I think that in some ways it (touchscreen) makes them feel more connected to the device, like they’re more part of what they’re doing”. Such observations highlight shifting but shared media subjectivities entrained through an emergent touchscreen habitus in terms of dispositions and expectations

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for immediacy, for availability, and for connectivity in the operation of digital media. Paradoxically, whilst such reconfigurations enable modes of experience not available through older interfaces, the touchscreen interface also instals anxieties about the erasure of sensory engagement afforded by more traditional modes of physical play and learning: “with the iPad, you don’t get texture. You don’t sort of feel, you know, if you’re using sand, or if you’re using tissue paper, or you’re using Play-Doh, or whatever, you’re actually getting different textures to feel. It’s definitely missing a sensory input to it.” These tensions around the redistribution and revaluation of sensory experience structured through young children’s everyday and embodied touchscreen interfacing are, in turn, folded into broader contradictions within cultural theories of media haptics and habitus. On the one hand, acquiring capacities for using touchscreen interfaces equips young children with embodied resources of and dexterity for apperceptively relating to and through digital media (Highmore 2011), whilst on the other hand, touchscreens inscribe bodies with codified gestures for manipulating interfaces (Parisi 2015; Zehle 2012), thus delimiting the potentials for children’s expressive communication and diversity of haptic media culture. These contradictions raise important questions about the significance of a culturally dominant interface form in reconfiguring dispositions, especially for young children growing up in media environments defined by increasingly intimate and entangled haptic media experiences. And they call for understandings of children’s digital media informed by, and accounting for, relays between everyday media practices, cultural norms, and economies of design.

References Acland, C.R., ed. 2007. Residual Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Apperley, T. 2013. The Body of the Gamer: Game Art and Gestural Excess. Digital Creativity 24 (2): 145–156. Benjamin, W. 1999. The Arcades Project (trans: Eiland, H., and McLaughlin, K.). Cambridge: The Belknap Press. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buckleitner, W. 2011. A Taxonomy of Multi-Touch Interaction Styles, by Stage. Children’s Technology Review 18 (11): 10–11.

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Buxton, B. 2007. Multi-Touch Systems That I Have Known and Loved. http:// www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html. Accessed 06 Jan 2014. Chiong, C., and C. Shuler. 2010. Learning: Is There an App for That? Investigations of Young Children’s Usage and Learning with Mobile Devices and Apps. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Connor, S. 2000. Making an issue of cultural phenomenology. Critical Quarterly 42 (1): 2–6. Cramer, F., and M.  Fuller. 2008. Interface. In Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. M. Fuller, 149–153. Cambridge: MIT Press. Cristia, A., and A. Seidl. 2015. Parental Reports on Touch Screen Use in Early Childhood. PLoS One 10 (6): 1–20. Csordas, T.J. 1999. Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology. In Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, ed. G.  Weiss and H.F. Haber, 143–162. London: Routledge. Farman, J. 2012. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. London: Routledge. Highmore, B. 2011. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. London: Routledge. Hourcade, J.P., S.L. Mascher, D. Wu, and L. Pantoja. 2015. Look, My Baby Is Using an iPad! An Analysis of YouTube Videos of Infants and Toddlers Using Tablets. In Proceedings of CHI 15, 1915–1924. New York: ACM Press. Ihde, D. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1993. Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Loke, L., and T.  Robertson. 2011. The Lived Body in Design: Mapping the Terrain. In Proceedings of OZCHI ‘11, 181–184. New York: ACM Press. Marsh, J.L., D.  Plowman, J.  Yamada-Rice, C.  Bishop, J.  Lahmar, and F.  Scott. 2018. Play and Creativity in Young Children’s Use of Apps. British Journal of Educational Technology 49 (5): 870–882. Mauss, M. 1973. Techniques of the Body (trans: Brewster, B.). Economy and Society, 2: 70–88. McCarthy, J., and P. Wright. 2004. Technology as experience. Interactions 11 (5): 42–43. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2012. The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Mowlabocus, S. 2016a. The ‘Mastery’ of the Swipe: Smartphones, Transitional Objects and Interstitial Time. First Monday 21 (10). http://journals.uic.edu/ ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6950/5630 ———. 2016b. Feel the Quality: The Haptic Economy of Unboxing Videos on YouTube. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). Berlin: AoIR. Nansen, B., and D.  Jayemanne. 2016. Infants, Interfaces, and Intermediation: Digital Parenting in the Production of ‘iPad Baby’ YouTube Videos. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 60 (4): 587–603.

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———. 2018. Young Children’s Touchscreen Habitats, Habituation, and Habitus / écrans tactiles, accoutumances et habitus des jeunes enfants. In Les cultures médiatiques de l’enfance et de la petite enfance, ed. Marlène Loicq, Aude Seurrat et Isabelle Féroc Dumez, pp. 114–125. Booke-e: Paris. (ISBN: 978-2-9549483-2-4). Nansen, B., and R.  Wilken. 2019. Techniques of the Tactile Body: A Cultural Phenomenology of Infants and Mobile Touchscreens. Convergence 25 (1): 60–76. Nansen, B., F. Vetere, J. Downs, T. Robertson, M. Brereton, and J. Durick. 2014. Reciprocal Habituation: A Study of Older People and the Kinect. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI) 21 (3): 1–20. Article 18. Nevski, E., and A. Siibak. 2016. The Role of Parents and Parental Mediation on 0–3-Year Olds’ Digital Play with Smart Devices: Estonian Parents’ Attitudes and Practices. Early Years: An International Research Journal 36 (3): 227–241. Norman, D. 2010. Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural. Interactions, May– June, 6–10. Parisi, D. 2015. A Counterrevolution in the Hands: The Console Controller as an Ergonomic Branding Mechanism. Journal of Games Criticism 2 (1). http:// gamescriticism.org/articles/parisi-2-1 Parisi, D., M. Paterson, and J.E. Archer. 2017. Haptic Media Studies. New Media and Society 19 (10): 1513–1522. Prensky, M. 2001. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon 9 (5): 1–6. Richardson, I. 2012. Touching the Screen: A Phenomenology of Mobile Gaming and the iPhone. In Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone, ed. L. Hjorth, J. Burgess, and I. Richardson, 133–151. New York: Routledge. Richardson, I., and L. Hjorth. 2017. Mobile Media, Domestic Play and Haptic Ethnography. New Media and Society 19 (10): 1653–1667. Richardson, I., and A.  Third. 2009. Cultural Phenomenology and the Material Culture of Mobile Media. In Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches, ed. P. Vannini, 145–156. New York: Peter Lang. Richardson, I., and R. Wilken. 2009. Haptic vision, footwork, place-making: a peripatetic phenomenology of the mobile phone pedestrian. Second Nature: International Journal of Creative Media 2 (1): 22–41. ———. 2017. Mobile Media and Mediation: The Relational Ontology of Google Glass. In Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Perspectives on Media, ed. T. Markham and S. Rodgers, 113–123. New York: Peter Lang. Shuler, C. 2009. iLearn: A Content Analysis of the iTunes App Store’s Education Section. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Simon, B. 2009. Wii Are Out of Control: Bodies, Game Screens and the Production of Gestural Excess. Loading 3 (4). http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/ loading/article/view/65/59

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Wellner, G. 2016. A Postphenomenological Inquiry of Cell Phones: Genealogies, Meanings, and Becomings. Lanham: Lexington Books. Widgor, D., and D.  Wixon. 2011. Brave NUI World: Designing Natural User Interfaces for Touch and Gesture. Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann. Yong Jin, D. 2015. Digital Platforms, Imperialism and Political Culture. New York: Routledge. Zehle, S. 2012. The Autonomy of Gesture: Of Lifestream Logistics and Playful Profanations. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 13 (3): 340–353.

CHAPTER 4

Parental Intermediation on YouTube

Abstract  Parental intermediation on YouTube investigates online spaces of young children’s media use, analysing YouTube videos of infants and toddlers playing with touchscreen devices and mobile applications. This analysis investigates the ways young children’s use of these interfaces is both understood and shaped by parents through their production, editing, and sharing of videos. The chapter, then, extends research on parental mediation by exploring how digital parenting moves into online spaces as a form of intermediation. Intermediation—in both its technical and cultural understandings—is translated into this context in an effort to account for the entanglement of media, bodies, and discourses in which parents participate in assembling children’s touchscreen play, notions of digital dexterity, and their broader digital media culture. Keywords  Children • Mobile media • Parental mediation • YouTube • Digital interface • Touchscreen This chapter investigates the ways young children’s digital dexterity shaped through a touchscreen habitus is both understood and shaped by parents through the production, editing, and sharing of videos of young children playing with mobile media uploaded to YouTube. The analysis draws on published research from the author and colleague (Nansen and Jayemanne 2016), and is situated in relation to literature and theories of parental © The Author(s) 2020 B. Nansen, Young Children and Mobile Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49875-7_4

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mediation, which examines parental modes of regulating their children’s use of media such as television and video games within family life and domestic space. The article extends this area of research by considering broader cultural contexts and diverse practices of digital parenting (Clark 2011), in which parental mediation of touchscreen interfaces and mobile applications is produced by parents participating in the public circulation and discursive construction of children’s digital dexterity. The concept of parental intermediation is proposed as a way to help understand these expanded and distributed networked publics of digital parenting. In these online contexts, parents are operating as intermediaries in producing both children’s digital play and discourses around children’s digital practices, especially widespread and competing claims to ‘naturalness’ located with either the interface or the child. The chapter suggests that research into online contexts alongside the domestic in which digital parenting and discourses of childhood unfold can extend some limitations of parental mediation literature in ways called for by mobile and networked technologies. Moreover, insights afforded by critical interface studies (e.g. Hayles 2005; Galloway 2012) as well as cultural industries literature (e.g. Deuze 2007; Nixon and du Gay 2002) offer novel theoretical lenses through which to examine these expanded processes of digital parenting. This chapter advances this research by analysing the material and cultural production of videos of young children playing with touchscreen interfaces, and the consumption of these media beyond the domestic environment or the relatively bounded space of a given social network through their distribution in the networked public space of YouTube (Burgess and Green 2018; Lange 2008).

Digital Parenting: Mediation, Remediation, and Intermediation As discussed in the introduction, research into how parents regulate their children’s media use, referred to as parental mediation, was originally developed in reference to the medium of television and the types of rules and restrictions imposed by parents on the routines and content of children’s viewing. Studies then extended the focus on television to include the moderation of newer media such as computers, internet, and videogames in the home, and more recently considered how parents manage young children’s use of mobile media and touchscreens in the home (e.g.

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Chaudron 2015; Nevski and Siibak 2016; Ofcom 2020). The parental mediation literature addresses a range of measures parents implement to moderate their children’s media use, predominantly within home environments. Efforts to direct, limit, and supervise include visible placement of media, filtering software, reviewing media, imposing time limits, and so on, whilst less authoritarian strategies include evaluating the quality of media and engaging with children’s use, or encouraging diversity of media and non-media activities. Research shows that styles of parental mediation are informed by factors such as children’s age and type of media, parents’ views about the positive or negative effects of media on children, and the kind of media environment and routines families have established (Wartella et al. 2013; Valcke et al. 2010; Ofcom 2020). These family and household media contexts are shaped to a large extent by parents’ own past experience and familiarity with media. Understanding how parents’ own memories and experiences of childhood influence their decisions in raising their children has been described through the concept of prolepsis (Cole 1996; McPake and Plowman 2010). Prolepsis is originally applied to a broad catalogue of parenting activities; however, McPake and Plowman developed it in specific reference to children’s digital media literacy and education in an effort to describe the influence of parental experiences and aspirations. Prolepsis signifies how familiar or comfortable parents are with media technologies, as well as the beliefs and hopes they attach to media and its role in their children’s lives. Prolepsis can be understood, from a media perspective, as a process in which parents remediate technology experiences from their past, refashion them in relation to new media, and project their ambitions onto their children’s futures (see Bolter and Grusin 2000). Parental remediation highlights the ways that digital media is not perceived in purely negative terms, and is not just located within the immediate contexts of use or effect, but instead spreads out through symbolic dimensions into other ‘intermediate’ times, such as past memories or future projections of media habituation (Cross 2008; Keightley 2013). Moreover, remediation highlights the ways digital media exist in increasingly rich media environments where children participate in redefining the meanings and uses of media in the home (e.g. Aarsand and Aronsson 2009), and parents often encourage more extensive patterns of media use (McPake and Plowman 2010; Wartella et al. 2013).

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Many of today’s parents have grown up with technology and their proleptic response is to marshal and promote media use for its perceived benefits in their children’s lives, as well as in anticipation of future necessity or advantage. Related to this more enthusiastic operation of prolepsis is the emerging ways parental mediation is no longer limited to family contexts or domestic screens, but instead spreads beyond the home environment through the mobility of media as well as sharing on digital and participatory platforms. When parents produce and publish online videos of their young children interacting with touchscreens and apps, for example, they are not simply moderating children’s media use within the home, but also operating as an intermediary in contributing to, or modulating, wider online representations and discourses of children’s digital dexterity and touchscreen habitus. This process can be understood as a shift from traditional parental mediation in its bound and located form within family life, and from parental remediation derived from prolepsis and past media experience, to parental intermediation in which parenting occurs with and through media—and its expanding platforms and networks—to shape or modulate how children’s media relations are understood and enacted. iPad

Baby Videos on YouTube

Videos of babies, toddlers, and young children playing with iPads, along with other tablet computers and touchscreen devices like smartphones, are highly viewed videos that began to be posted following the launch of the original iPhone and iPad. The popularity of this genre is reflected in the ongoing publishing of videos in this genre, as well as the volume of views or comments.1 The genre of iPad baby videos is mostly presented in short recordings within home settings. These videos typically show young children encountering mobile devices and interacting with touchscreen interfaces, beginning with younger children banging, tapping, licking, shaking, and swiping (Hourcade et  al. 2015), and progressing to older children navigating screens and apps with digital dexterity. The apps used by the children are mostly music-related, though also include other games and educational apps involving animal games, counting and reading activities, or drawing tools. Most of the videos feature an ostensibly hands-off and naturalistic style in which the camera is positioned to observe and record 1  Analysis of YouTube comments occurred prior to the ‘switching off’ of comments on children’s channels or videos by YouTube in January 2020.

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the child’s activities from a distance. Whilst narrative or commentary is largely absent in the iPad baby genre, the voice of a parent—typically a father—making the recording can sometimes be heard off-camera verbally guiding, encouraging, or praising the child for their abilities to use the device: for their digital dexterity. It is unclear whether the videos are being shared for a particular audience, such as geographically distributed family and friends, or whether they are posted for wider public consumption. As a form of participatory culture (Jenkins 2006) and vernacular creativity (Burgess and Green 2018), this genre involves varying elements of the quotidian and professional, the spontaneous and constructed, and the humorous and critical. The iPad baby videos are often described by their uploaders as recordings of natural, unmediated digital dexterity, and they often display vernacular signifiers of immediacy (shaky camera work, close­up angles, domestic everyday settings, incidental lighting, young children as subjects, unedited sound and footage). The mobility and accessibility afforded by phone cameras is a crucial element of these videos because of its integration into the flows of home life in which young children are enmeshed. There is clearly, however, a number of production techniques that highlight the constructed and performative dimension to these videos, which I return to later in chapter. This genre of videos fits into a broader range of children’s videos on YouTube (Lange 2014), and participation in digital spaces more broadly. Children’s participation, play, and productivity on YouTube is gaining increased attention from internet researchers. Young children often possess the competencies necessary to engage with platforms such as YouTube (Marsh 2016, p. 374), facilitated by developments in touchscreen interfaces, automated content delivery, and child-specific platforms like the YouTube Kids App (Burroughs 2017). As a result, children are playing an active role in both the consumption and production of online video content. The aggregation of children’s user-created content has formed into recognisable and distinct genres of entertainment, including gaming tutorials and let’s play videos, to prank and comedy channels, to children’s play and DIY videos involving materials like slime or Play-Doh, and of course, toy unboxing videos—a popular genre in which children and adults publish videos of themselves unpacking and reviewing various commercial toy products. Studies of toy unboxing videos in particular have received much attention, no doubt owing to the fact that unboxing channels such as Ryan’s Toys Review are among the top earning channels on YouTube. Based on numbers of subscribers and views, these channels are quickly becoming

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legitimate and aspirational media enterprises that often earn more than traditional celebrities within the YouTube economy (e.g. Dredge 2016), and have thus been analysed for their role within YouTube’s entertainment industry (Craig and Cunningham 2017; Ramos-Serrano and Herrero-Diz 2016). Within such child economies of YouTube, research has studied the rise of popular new entertainment genres such as toy review videos in which children’s viewing cultures are increasingly commercialised (Jaakkola 2019), or Minecraft Let’s Play videos in which children record themselves playing Minecraft as part of peer-based creator performers and pedagogies (Dezuanni 2020). Other research has focused on video content and reception, and the rise of child YouTubers as influencers or celebrities, with children imitating professional video production techniques and branding activities whilst professional channels in turn imitate the vernacular and spontaneous qualities of children’s play in the pursuit of authenticity (Nicoll and Nansen 2018). This “calibration” of authenticity is, as Crystal Abidin (2017, n.p.) writes on “family influencers” more broadly, a deliberate tactic deployed by parents to offset critiques of exploitation—to “[convince] followers that these performers are ‘family’ before ‘influencers’, and privilege care, wellbeing, and enjoyment of their children above commerce”. Others have explored how these videos are consumed within the home (Marsh 2016). Here, child viewers are understood as ‘cyberflâneurs’, whose practices exceed passive consumption through the vicarious enjoyment of observing other children playing and as a means of augmenting offline toys and play practices. Children are thus co-creators in what Lange (2014, p. 144) describes as the platform’s affective and technical “affinity spaces”—that is, participatory cultural spaces of shared interest that facilitate a feeling of identification, affiliation, and the development of informal literacies. Alternatively, a number of articles are raising concerns about the impact of the kind of content produced by and for children, and how it is delivered to young audiences on YouTube—algorithmically organised and automated to serve up endless amounts of repetitive and mindless content of toys being unboxed and, in the process, captivating, coercing, and commodifying the lives of young children (e.g. Bridle 2017; Lafrance 2017; Paolillo et al. 2020). In addition to concerns about content, issues around children’s privacy, personal data, and vulnerability to targeted advertising have arisen, recently resulting in a settlement between YouTube and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over allegations of violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) related to data

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tracking and targeted advertising of children under 13 without explicit consent. Whilst children are often positioned as victims of a digital culture industry, either interpellated as passive consumers of hyper-commercial content without any protections or blindly imitating brand influencers in the futile and aspirational hope of becoming successful YouTubers, the diversity, popularity, and pleasure exhibited by children’s participation on YouTube challenges such reductive conclusions. There is clearly much more going on in this space of affinity. In relation to the iPad baby video genre, these young children are clearly subject to parental desires and actions in producing and publishing videos rather than child agency. Nevertheless, the genre also engages in popular discussions about children and media technologies, not about children’s role in YouTube economies but instead representing and producing competing ideas about children’s use of touchscreens through notions of digital dexterity in young children’s use of touchscreen media. As the range of tablet computer products, along with the number of videos in this YouTube genre have grown considerably since 2010, the interest and debate metricised through views and comments coalesces around earlier iconic videos. Two earlier videos are analysed below, based on their status and popularity, but also because they are exemplary of two dominant positions taken on the child-interface relation, and of two distinct modes of editing that characterise the genre of iPad baby videos more broadly: “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work”2 and “Baby Works iPad Perfectly. Amazing Must Watch!”3 They are, then, representative of the iPad baby video genre, and the recurring debates around young children and touchscreen media. This chapter analyses the production, editing, and reception of these two videos, and situates this in relation to material and cultural theories of mediation: critical interface studies and cultural production literature. In sharing these videos and articulating specific discursive claims, parents move from a mediating role within the home to an intermediary position in which they are contributing to public representations and discourses of young children’s mobile and touchscreen technology use.

2  UserExperienceWorks (2011). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXVyaFmQNk 3  Original video published by Mike Wilson Tunes (2010) no longer available; but reposted by other YouTube channels. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPf5TgcL30w

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Naturalness: Touchscreen Interface Versus Digital Native The video “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work” clearly establishes in its title that the primary actant in this encounter is the media technology, not the child. It suggests a comparative approach to the operations of old media (magazines) versus new media (tablet computers). And the video delivers on this suggestive title, presenting footage of a baby girl playing with an iPad, which is then contrasted with scenes of her trying and failing to manipulate the pages of a magazine. Unlike many videos in this genre, this video is highly edited with explanatory intertitles that make claims about her affective response to traditional media; that she is disappointed or unengaged by older magazine media due to the static limitations of the interface, which does not feature an interactive surface that can be swiped, pinched, and so on (Fig. 4.1). Through its editing and intertitles, this video advances a specific argument about the ease of use and intuitiveness of a touchscreen interface; because the touchscreen utilises gestural movements rather than learnt procedures or symbolic language, even a baby can use it. Such interfaces bypass traditional input devices like the keyboard through more ‘naturalistic’ interfaces that expand the repertoire of computer input modalities (touch, vision, voice, motion, etc.). Here, the nomenclature of ‘natural user interfaces’ (NUIs) within the product design and manufacturer Fig. 4.1  Screenshot of YouTube video, “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work”

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communities aligns with the video’s locating of ‘naturalness’ within the media device itself. These interfaces are helping to reshape not only the ways we personally interact with computers but also the way we collectively acculturate computation (Galloway 2012). The role of touchscreens within economies of play, for example—or what Galloway calls “ludic capitalism” (2012)—is evident in design research using the same ‘iPad baby’ data set to inform baby app product development and commercialisation for a growing market of increasingly younger children (Buckleitner 2011). This research provides a taxonomy of children’s touchscreen gestural capacities to inform product development for children’s digital apps and play. Here, we see interface fascination manifest in the economic and cultural possibilities of computing with ‘minimum user competency’. The video “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work”, affirms this so-called MUC with clips of the baby girl alongside paratextual framing and intertitle commentary that assert a media-centric understanding and deterministic perspective: For my 1 year old daughter, a magazine is an iPad that does not work. It will remain so for the rest of her life. Steve Jobs has coded a part of her OS. Technology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. Medium is message. Humble tribute to Steve Jobs, by the most important person: a baby. (YouTube video caption)

The father who posted this video is not simply a proud parent or disinterested bystander, but also an active participant in evaluating and interpreting notions of touchscreen habitus and digital dexterity. The young girl is presented as ‘programmed’ and, because she cannot yet read or speak but only gesture, this programming is happening at a pre-linguistic level. Her ‘operating system’ is being coded by her interactions with the iPad to the degree that the legacy print technology, represented by the magazine, is ‘impossible to understand’. The video seeks to convince viewers that a shift is taking place between two media epistemes. More than simply attesting to the design qualities or usability of the interface, the video makes a claim about contemporary media conditions and their impact on the construction of subjectivity.

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Moreover, in making these claims the father suggests some knowledge of media theory, Marshall(ing) McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message”, which foregrounds a belief in the determining power of the technology form rather than the content transmitted. Whilst demanding attention on the interface medium, the video does not so much signal a McLuhnesque effect in which media extend (and simultaneously amputate) the human senses, but instead articulates a more Kittleresque understanding of media determination (1990). German media theorist Friedrich Kittler agrees that humans are defined by technology, but inverts the perspective in which media relate to bodies to a situation in which bodies are relative to media. Media are primary. Kittler identifies distinct networks of media and associated institutions—discourse networks—that shape the ways different historical periods are able to store, transmit, and process data. These, he argues, set the conditions for the production of subjectivity. For example, a critical component in the transmission of knowledge during the print discourse network of 1800 was the mother’s voice, sounding the words as children learnt to read, and installing an intimacy with the text. In contrast, Katherine Hayles updates Kittler’s media-centric analysis by noting that in the contemporary digital discourse network, “the mother’s voice that haunted reading has been supplanted by another set of stimuli; the visual, audio, kinaesthetic, and haptic cues emanating from the computer” (Hayles 2005, p. 4). These serve to acculturate children to a ‘computational universe’ in which computational processes, interfaces, and sensations drive and condition their experience. This is the interface effect shown in “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work”; an interface effect or acculturation, in which the child acquires a touchscreen habitus that expands the notion of ‘audio-visual media’ in harnessing the use of touch, gesture, and movement. The video “Baby Works iPad Perfectly. Amazing Must Watch!” provides a contrasting position that shifts attention from the interface to the child. As signalled in the title, the sense of wonder is directed at the baby rather than the technology. The video shows a two-year-old boy sitting on an armchair playing with the iPad in his lap, whilst the father can be heard off-camera encouraging him to demonstrate his favourite apps and praising his performance (e.g. “You’re so smart”). In this video, then, the technology is understood as a media tool, whilst it is the child who possesses the digital dexterity and intuitive capacity to easily use the touchscreen device:

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My son Bridger just turned 2 last week and I bought him an iPad, mostly an excuse for me to get one and he actually can use it perfectly! His speech, understanding, word recognition, and even hand eye coordination have improved within just a short while!! I am so amazed and thankful for this amazing learning tool that my son has! I wanna say thanks to Apple and all those that have given my child such a head start in life with this amazing instrument! My son can read tons of words now, he knows every animal and dinosaur and he just turned 2 years old!!!! If you have a child around 2, don’t rob him/her of knowledge, go buy him/her an iPad! (YouTube video caption)

The father provides this as an example of how easy technology use comes to this generation. In doing so, he locates ‘naturalness’ in the child and not the gestural interface; an idea that children are now ‘born digital’ and so native to this environment (Prensky 2001; Palfrey and Gasser 2008). The thesis of the digital native, which emerged in the early twenty-­ first century, was a way to describe a generation of young people from the 1980s onwards whose lives have coincided with the development and explosive growth in computing, internet, gaming, and mobile technologies. By growing up surrounded by and immersed in digital technologies, this generation is thought to possess a natural familiarity, confidence, and dexterity with technology absent in older generations of digital ‘migrants’. The native label has, however, been subject to critique in relation to the more intensive media environment of children born after the year 2000 (Selwyn 2009). In his review of the digital native thesis, Neil Selwyn argues that such terms characterise a shared disposition without adequately interrogating children’s specific media uses or experiences, and so “the notion of the ‘digital native’ should be seen more as a discursive than descriptive device, employed by those seeking to exert some form of power and control over the shaping of the digital (near) future” (Selwyn 2009, p. 371). For Selwyn, this discursive device is imposed by adults on children, and often informs a sense of crisis about the technology-saturated lives of children in order to inform regimes of governance. He notes that such essentialist assumptions about children and media fail to account for the messier realities of actual media practices, and thus overlook diverse forms of media access, habituation, and expertise among children. Whilst “Baby Works iPad Perfectly. Amazing Must Watch!” participates in discursively producing a position that characterises children as innately possessing digital dexterity, the video does not suggest a sense of crisis and need for governance. Instead, the father is revealed as a fan who is actively

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working to legitimise the interface and its educational benefits, compelling a need for its consumption. And in doing so, this video contributes to discursive configurations of childhood expertise that privileges a surface literacy oriented to the interface, whilst obscuring knowledge about computational operation. Not that a two-year-old child would be able to program software, but in representing expertise as the ability to navigate the interface, the terrain of digital literacy is foreclosed. Orienting expertise around the ‘user interface’ obscures other sites of knowledge about computational operation in which the multiple layers of the interface and their significance are elided. Interfaces, as Cramer and Fuller (2008) argue, are better understood as distinct contact points and exchanges between hardware, software, code, and protocol within computer systems; between humans and machines at the user interface level; and between humans in and through network cultures. A particular strand of digital media literacy, which can be located in hobbyist computational cultures and DIY skill-sharing, along with educational initiatives for developing early programming skills (e.g. Alper 2014; Levy 1984), reinforces these ideas. This mode of literacy recognises the importance of understanding the operations of algorithms, databases, and software protocols embedded in and constitutive of everyday life (e.g. Chun 2011; Galloway 2012). In these contexts, user-friendly interfaces or the celebration of child-interface expertise circumvents the ability—and desire—to investigate the processes of computation within the machine and culture more broadly. By only learning the relatively shallow layer of screens and apps, the interface involves ‘programming’ users insofar as it inculcates their use of a truncated repertoire of procedures and actions. This, then, can be read as a kind of update of Friedrich Kittler’s argument in ‘Protected Mode’ (1997), in which he argues that corporate control and lock-down of computer systems prevent any significant user intervention into their functioning. Similarly, touchscreen technologies and their discursive configuration can be seen to more tightly enmesh children within the protocols of media consumption and a touchscreen habitus configured at the screen surface. iPad

Baby Video Reception

Video comments attached to the videos discussed above were collected and analysed. These comments are no longer visible in the wake of YouTube’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over

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allegations of violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) related to data tracking and targeted advertising of children under 13 without explicit consent. Many of the comments to these videos engaged with notions of naturalness represented. So, for example, comments on the video “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work” expressed wonder at the power of touchscreen interfaces for their capacity to naturalise computer use and thus empower young users: “I’ve heard lots of stories lately about how naturally toddlers take to the touch screens of smart phones and tablets, but this video says it all” (YouTube video comment). In contrast, many comments on “Baby Works iPad Perfectly …” focused their praise at digitally native children’s capacity to naturally pick up and use touchscreen media: “I never in my life would have imagined that a toddler could use an ipad like a pro but the reality is that they can pick up things pretty fast. I think it’s pretty cool” (YouTube video comment). Juxtaposing these expressions of wonder and the locus of naturalness, however, were many comments that noted the banality of such interactions in terms of a child’s physical development trajectory, or a common-­ sense view on their engagement with the material world: “Pinching and flicking gestures are a part of a baby’s natural development and dexterity. It’s not ground-breaking, nor is it due to an iPad” (YouTube video comment). In keeping with the agonistic dynamic of comment culture, but also the wider discourses circulating about the developmental, social, and even ecological risks associated with young children using mobile media, comments pointed to iPads detracting from ‘natural’ play, traditional media use, or electronic dependency: More sensuality! Less electronics I say! He’s entering the age of the digital cage early. … Give that kid a book! This kid is going to have a lot of trouble adjusting to fossil fuel depletion. (Public YouTube comments)

Such dispositions extended to addressing the parents who posted content, often expressing unease or misgivings about their mediating role in facilitating their children’s use of mobile media, extending to outright aggressive accusations of poor parenting, if not neglect: This is excellent parental planning. Show that child early that she will spend life enslaved to a screen in order to afford whatever magazines and the fashion industry command her to consume. Welcome to reality, kid.

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Why not give your child paper and pens? Parents who use iPads as replacements for physical things like toys, the outside world disgust me. (Public YouTube comments)

These comments directed at poor digital parenting extended from critiques of giving young children touchscreen devices to parents publishing videos of their young children on YouTube, and the potential implications of such digital traces on children’s future lives as part of a digital footprint and cultural database that remains accessible, searchable, and retrievable to a wide networked public (Lovink 2008): “You’ve obviously spent a lot of time ‘teaching’ him how to use the iPad. How about teaching him to swim or ride a bike, walk confidently or even actually using real crayons to draw on real paper. Sad. Going down this route with him leads to isolation and bullying. Get a grip. He will have absolutely no ability to concentrate over 8 seconds. But props, he’s YouTube famous” (YouTube video comment). The iPad baby video genre ostensibly presents candid scenes of technology encounter and interaction involving young children and touchscreen technologies. They portray a sense of wonder at this child-technology relation, but this wonder is guided by associating notions of naturalness with either the interface or the child. In turn, the associated comment threads largely respond to the content within the representational frame, debating norms of parental mediation.

Technical and Cultural Intermediation in Video Editing Analysing the production of these videos highlights the role of parents not just in mediating their young children’s technology use, but also their role as both technical and cultural intermediaries in recording and publishing these videos. How these videos are produced involves various technologies and techniques, whether in editing the video or the child’s parentally coached performance. The term parental intermediation is useful for illuminating the role that the parents in both videos play within such digital networks. Parental intermediation builds on and also departs from themes established within parental mediation literature through reference to theories of technological intermediation (Hayles 2005), and cultural intermediation (Bourdieu 1984). As this context of online video-sharing shows, the modes of parental mediation help to destabilise competing claims to ‘naturalness’ located with either the interface or the child. Neither the

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child nor device can be disentangled from the processes in which these relations and their representations are produced, circulated, and debated. These operations are made visible in two distinct ways within the two videos under analysis: editing the production and editing the performance. “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work” has been crafted through postproduction techniques in order to make an argument about the significance of the encounter and computational entanglement of child and touchscreen. The video makes use of short and repeated segments of footage of a young girl using an iPad cut with segments of her interacting with a magazine as though it too had an interactive interface. These scenes are then edited together with intertitles—ironically recalling a much older cinematic mode of media. This video is explicitly and highly edited, making visible the assemblage of media required to make and share this recording. This is implicit in all videos within the genre. A recording device such as a smartphone is necessary, of course, but also access to a computer, an internet connection, and basic competencies in the use of social media platforms. Moreover, this video is only possible because of the historical, steady, and aggregated domestication of viewing, recording, and editing technologies in the home—from the television and VCR, to the camcorder and personal computer, to the mobile and touchscreen device, to editing software, mobile applications, social media platforms, and so on. This situation is, then, assembled through the mediating role of parents, the presence of a recording device, the architecture of the internet and YouTube platform—all gathering around the child-interface interaction. In bringing these different media devices and applications together, and then distributing the production amongst a networked public (boyd 2010; Papacharissi 2010), parents are not simply governing their child’s technology use within the home in terms of access or rules of use. Instead, they are intermediating this play with and through an aggregation of media, and broadcasting it to a wider audience. Hayles has used the term ‘intermediation’ to characterise the constellations or aggregations of different media forms involved in the processes of making, storing, and transmitting digital information. This term opens up the ways multiple media—novel, film, television, website, video game, and social media platform—now come to shape the construction and reception of a cultural text or product. She develops this concept in order to approach the dynamics of literary texts and subjectivities within a regime of digitality: “rather than holding up as an ideal a unitary convergent work to which variants can be subordinated … we should conceptualize texts as clustered

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in assemblages whose dynamics emerge from all the texts participating in the cluster, without privileging one text as more ‘original’ than any other” (2005, p. 9). Rather than focusing on the subject or the media alone, Hayles’ concept of intermediation orients us to the technologies and transactions entwining these different actors. If we are to adequately account for these expanded contexts and public networks of digital parenting, parental mediation can be reconsidered through the concept of intermediation. Here, parents are not working to govern or moderate children’s use of technology in reference to discrete media devices or hermetic family contexts, but are instead utilising a range of media to contribute to public conversations online and thus helping to shape how children’s touchscreen habitus and wider digital culture is represented and understood. Setting videos loose within such public channels and networks does not, however, mean motivations for doing so are known, nor guarantee an audience or stable reception, but instead exposes them to potential acts of reinterpretation or repurposing. Such acts are revealed in the use of these videos by interaction designers and product developers to understand infants’ interface capacities so as to develop commercial mobile apps (Buckleitner 2011) (Fig. 4.2). “Baby Works iPad Perfectly. Amazing Must Watch!” signals a different mode of editing that addresses the performance of the child rather than video production. It is shot in a continuous fashion, and it contains many of the vernacular signifiers of a naturalistic event with shaky handheld camera work, a domestic quotidian setting, incidental lighting, and unedited sound and footage. Yet, it is also clearly a deliberately staged scene, with the child positioned on an armchair with the iPad in his lap, whilst the Fig. 4.2  Screenshot of iPad Baby Mashup video compilation

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angle of the shot is framed to provide a clear view of the touchscreen and child’s gestures. In addition to the deliberate set-up of the scene, the video provides an exemplary, if exaggerated expression, of the standard generic tropes of parental guidance and encouragement. The father can be heard clearly throughout the video verbally instructing and prompting his son to demonstrate his favourite apps, as well as the ability to navigate between apps icons on the home-screen. So, in a sense, he is operating like a film director trying to control the sequence of events and narrative of the scene. For example, the father prompts by asking, “Why don’t you draw a squiggly line?” and when the child seems to be at an impasse as to which animal to choose from a list, the father prompts again, “There are some other animals? Why don’t you pick another animal?” The verbal prompting and directing of the child’s actions reveals the child is revisiting and rehearsing well-worn patterns of app use. This can be seen when the child plays a video and begins scrolling forward, and the father asks, “You’re looking for the monkey part, aren’t you?” “You’re looking for your favorite part.” There is, then, a sense in which not only is the present recorded action directed, but that this interaction has been practiced, learnt, or perhaps even trained, over time to become habituated interaction. In this video, parental intermediation is less the postproduction of snippets of footage to make an argument to a networked public so much as a coaxing of certain desirable behaviours from the child’s playful repertoire. In doing so, this video of a child’s use of apps does not only involve technical aspects of intermediation through aggregating media to record, produce, and circulate the video, but also highlights how this genre of video participates in culturally intermediating public conversations and discourses about mobile media in the lives of young children. The concept of cultural intermediaries was introduced to account for a new professional class of media workers emerging in France during the second half of the twentieth century (Bourdieu 1984). Working as producers, journalists, and broadcasters in the expanding fields of news and entertainment media, this class of cultural workers were seen as critical to shaping public reception, practice, and taste of cultural products by mediating between their production and consumption. Since identifying and documenting the emergence of such professional cultural intermediaries, a number of scholars have drawn attention to an expanded number of fields in which culture circulates and thus cultural intermediaries operate (Deuze 2007; Nixon and du Gay 2002). Following developments in

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digital and networked media, however, the understanding of cultural intermediaries has expanded beyond professional domains to include the activities of a range of amateurs and consumers who participate in the co-­ creation of cultural products and their value. This participatory cultural consumption engages with a diversity of digital and cultural products, for example, entrepreneurial video bloggers reviewing products on YouTube (Burgess and Green 2018). Such participatory activities signal a media environment in which distinctions between production and consumption, amateur and professional, or commercial and non-commercial become unsettled. Whilst these activities may generate tensions around forms of cultural capital, intellectual property, and free labour (e.g. van Dijck 2009), it is clear that in contexts of digital networks, users and consumers operate to intermediate the form and value of cultural products. In the case of iPad babies on YouTube, parents are not operating simply as receivers of professional wisdom about children’s media based on expertise in areas such as health or education. Instead, they are also actively participating in the co-creation of how touchscreen media use by and the digital dexterity of children is culturally enacted, represented, and understood. Whilst the purposes of production and the audiences of such broadcasts remain uncertain, these parents are undertaking work of cultural intermediation in a vernacular capacity. This does not appear to be a deliberate attempt to intermediate between the production and consumption of mobile media products. Nevertheless, their activities constitute a mode of cultural intermediation that extends the audience and consumer demographics of the product—both devices and mobile applications. Their cultural intermediality helps to add value to the digital product in terms of its discursive configuration within networked publics, but also through the ways their videos have been appropriated to inform design research for the commercial development of children’s mobile applications.

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Hourcade, J.P., S.L. Mascher, D. Wu, and L. Pantoja. 2015. Look, My Baby Is Using an iPad! An Analysis of YouTube Videos of Infants and Toddlers Using Tablets. In Proceedings of CHI 15, 1915–1924. New York: ACM Press. Jaakkola, M. 2019. From Vernacularized Commercialism to Kidbait: Toy Review Videos on YouTube and the Problematics of the Mash-Up Genre. Journal of Children and Media 1 (2): 237–254. Jenkins, H. 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. Keightley, E. 2013. From Immediacy to Intermediacy: The Mediation of Lived Time. Time and Society 22 (1): 55–75. Kittler, F.A. 1990. Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (trans: Metteer, M., with Cullens, C.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1997. Literature, Media, Information Systems. Amsterdam: G+B Art International. Lafrance, A. 2017. The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube Kids. The Atlantic, July 25. Lange, P.G. 2008. Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13: 361–380. ———. 2014. Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Levy, S. 1984. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Garden City: Doubleday. Lovink, G. 2008. The Art of Watching Databases. Introduction to the Video Vortex Reader. In The Video Vortex Reader. Responses to YouTube, ed. G. Lovink and S. Niederer, 9–12. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Marsh, J. 2016. Unboxing’ Videos: Co-construction of the Child as Cyberflâneur. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 37 (3): 369–380. McPake, J., and L.  Plowman. 2010. At Home with the Future: Influences on Young Children’s Early Experiences with Digital Technologies. In Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Education, ed. N.  Yelland, 210–226. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Nansen, B., and D.  Jayemanne. 2016. Infants, Interfaces, and Intermediation: Digital Parenting in the Production of ‘iPad Baby’ YouTube Videos. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 60 (4): 587–603. Nevski, E., and A. Siibak. 2016. The Role of Parents and Parental Mediation on 0–3-Year Olds’ Digital Play with Smart Devices: Estonian Parents’ Attitudes and Practices. Early Years: An International Research Journal 36 (3): 227–241. Nicoll, B., and B. Nansen. 2018. Mimetic Production in YouTube Toy Unboxing Videos. Social Media + Society 4 (3): 1–12. Nixon, S., and P. du Gay. 2002. Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries? Cultural Studies 16 (4): 495–500.

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OfCom. 2020. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report. London: OfCom. Palfrey, J., and U. Gasser. 2008. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. New York: BasicBooks. Paolillo, J., B. Harper, C. Boothby, and D. Axelrod. 2020. YouTube Children’s Videos: Development of a Genre Under Algorithm. In Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Hawaii: HICSS. Papacharissi, Z., ed. 2010. A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. London: Routledge. Prensky, M. 2001. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon 9 (5): 1–6. Ramos-Serrano, M., and P. Herrero-Diz. 2016. Unboxing and Brands: YouTubers Phenomenon Through the Case Study of EvanTubeHD. Prisma Social 1 (May): 90–120. Selwyn, N. 2009. The Digital Native  – Myth and Reality. ASLIB Proceedings 61: 364–379. Valcke, M., S. Bonte, B. De Wever, and I. Rots. 2010. Internet Parenting Styles and the Impact on Internet Use of Primary School Children. Computers and Education 55 (2): 454–464. van Dijck, J. 2009. Users Like You: Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content. Media, Culture and Society 3 (1): 41–58. Wartella, E., V. Rideout, A. Lauricella, and S. Connell. 2013. Parenting in the Age of Digital Technology: A National Survey. Report of the Center on Media and Human Development, School of Communication, Northwestern University.

CHAPTER 5

Digital Toys and Datafying Play

Abstract  Digital toys and datafying play interrogate the evolving use of connected toys in children’s digital play cultures, using Nintendo Amiibo as a case study. Amiibo figurines are based on characters from various Nintendo franchises and wirelessly to Nintendo gaming platforms. In their production, promotion, and everyday use, the figurines solicit playful practices that elicit modes of embodied play and digital dexterity that cut across physical objects and digital spaces. Drawing on interface analysis, promotional discourses, and review videos of play on YouTube, this analysis highlights how Amiibo are framed as a means to envelop children in Nintendo’s commercial ecosystem by reinforcing a physical connection with the toy, data, and brand. The concept of postdigital play is deployed to understand this distributed context of play, and the reciprocal dynamic between children’s everyday play and the branded world of connected toys, which in turn raises questions around children’s emerging datafied play—the transformation of play activities into digital information. Keywords  Children • Mobile media • Digital toys • Amiibo • Postdigital play • Nintendo • Children’s data • Datafication As discussed in previous chapters, the steady accretion and dispersal of media, including gaming technologies, throughout home environments has created household ecologies of ambient media, yet these ecologies © The Author(s) 2020 B. Nansen, Young Children and Mobile Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49875-7_5

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have become further intensified through emerging connected toys in which computation and play spread beyond the screen. Children’s media spaces and practices are becoming increasingly complex arrangements as devices, screens, and toys are digitally integrated to enable the mobility and flow of both content and data (Holloway and Green 2016). In game studies, this has been described as a ‘postdigital’ phase of play, wherein play is no longer a singular activity contained by one digital device at a time (Giddings 2014; Jayemanne et  al. 2016). Instead, postdigital toys and games spread the interface ‘envelope’ of play (Ash 2015), so that it multiplies across digitised objects, infrastructures, and environments. This chapter addresses the evolving development and use of connected toys and postdigital play in children’s media cultures. The chapter uses Nintendo Amiibo as a case study, drawing on published research from the author and colleagues (Nansen et al. 2019) to analyse the interface, promotional discourses, and review videos of play on YouTube. Amiibo figurines are based on characters from various Nintendo franchises, such as Super Mario Bros., and use NFC tags to connect wirelessly to Nintendo’s Switch, 3DS, and Wii U platforms. The chapter shows that in their production, promotion, and everyday use, the figurines solicit playful practices that elicit modes of digital embodiment and dexterity that cut across physical objects and digital spaces. The analysis highlights how Amiibo are framed as a means to envelop children in Nintendo’s commercial ecosystem by reinforcing an embodied connection to the toy, data, and brand. Yet, this chapter reveals how children’s postdigital play often exceeds the activities prescribed by media industries or the design of technologies (Giddings 2014; Kline 1995), whilst at the same time such configurations also entangle children in emerging economies and politics of datafied play in which play activities are transformed into valuable digital information.

Postdigital Ecologies of Play This chapter contributes to the domestication tradition of household media research, which has sought to understand how new technologies are domesticated within physical spaces, family relations, and social practices, as well as how these practices become physically, socially, and symbolically located within the home. It also contributes to research on children’s mobile and digital gameplay, by situating connected toy products within contemporary arrangements and ecologies of household media, in which they reconfigure spaces and practices of young children’s

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digital play. In domestic spaces, for example, there are interesting parallels in the emergence of new kinds of commercial products involving computation and digital play spreading beyond the screen. The emergence of postdigital play can be traced to the release and popularisation of commercial products, which include well-known commercial products like the Skylanders, Disney Infinity, and Lego Dimensions series, as well as Nintendo’s Amiibo figurines (Nansen et al. 2019). These products incorporate internet-enabled toys or figurines and use near-field communication to facilitate mobility and storage of data between games and consoles. Postdigital forms of play can also be understood to include non-videogame connected toys, augmented-reality apps, and computer-­ augmented board games, each of which are adding new material elements and contexts to digital games and play. In game studies literature, these have been referred to as Hybrid Playful products (Tyni et al. 2013), which incorporate tangible elements such as figurines into the screen-based play space utilising communication protocols and tags, such as near-field communications and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags to connect the physical and the digital. It is, of course, important to acknowledge that digital play has always involved hybridity in its products and play. The Magnavox Odyssey, for example, which was tied to the television and thus had some similarities with the contemporary game console, also experimented with peripheral input devices such as a light gun and visual elements such as translucent plastic screen overlays. The launch of the Nintendo Wii in 2007, whilst celebrated for its novel interface and controller, the ‘Wiimote’, which renewed conceptual and popular interest in hybrid play, was then in many ways a continuation rather than departure from histories of digital game interfacing and play. Nevertheless, the growing range of examples of hybrid games imagine emerging possibilities for domestic play that extend the digital beyond the screen, blending physical play spaces with digital content in ways that have been characterised as an “aesthetics of recruitment” (Jayemanne et  al. 2016), in that they enrol and assemble diverse play practices, spaces, and experiences in novel but often unstable arrangements. In doing so, they extend and intensify trends identified in digital homes research, which reveal how mobile devices and infrastructures in homes blur what were previously distinct and dedicated spaces (such as bedrooms) or times (such as family meals), to become sites of potentially continuous digital mediation (Nansen et  al. 2009). As with these remediated spaces, postdigital play products also extend digital games research (Jayemanne et al. 2016),

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in which they are configured through competing and unsettled arrangements comprised of software and data affordances, embodied interaction, branded worlds and product marketing, and everyday cultures of children’s play. The notion of ‘recruitment’ has previously been deployed in political-­ economic analyses of digital games. In Scott Lash and Celia Lury’s research on the FIFA brand, they argue that the FIFA digital games were a form of recruiting consumers to the broader FIFA brand (2007, pp.  54–55). Brands in the global media environment develop their “networks through media outreach, translation and transposition, through the recruitment of other objects” (Lash and Lury 2007, p. 55). Postdigital play is situated in such networks, yet it makes the material processes of recruitment the subject of play, thus emphasising the development of skills required for discerning what and how to recruit different elements into an assemblage of play. Such skills are important because inherent in the notion of recruitment is the possibility of failure and botched attempts to gather bodies, devices, and objects together in a given situation. Recruitment can also have a coercive aspect, evoking concepts of the military draft. As game studies and HCI research have shown, games and play can exercise powerful attractions, drawing people into new social experiments, spatial and temporal typologies, bodily practices, and technical arrangements (Nansen et al. 2014). Such research has also noted that these situations are often precarious (Apperley 2015), whether that be because people are reluctant or unwilling to play; play spaces are unsuitable for or discouraging of distributed play; or technical mishaps, failures, or incompatibilities. Alongside commercial products, for example, are less well-known and more education-based gaming system examples such as Osmo, which is advertised as ‘play beyond the screen’, extending the interface of the iPad by projecting it onto a surface, making the surface interactive through the use of visual software that recognises objects, allowing the iPad to react to activities undertaken on the physical surface. Osmo utilises ‘Reflective Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology’ software applications, combined with a stand and reflector that attaches to an iPad to direct the device’s camera towards the surface that it stands on, and includes the use of physical game pieces such as numbers, letters, and the classic tangram puzzle. Osmo effectively turns the physical surface in front of the screen into a digital interface. While it is a unique device, it is evident that this and many other postdigital products rely on technologies that have already been subject to the process of domestication—such as tablets and mobile

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phones, which are often themselves hybrid ensembles of devices such as cameras, gyroscopes, and so on—in order to operate. Osmo is in some ways exemplary of current postdigital play in the home, requiring the recruitment of spaces and materials to produce a fluid interface. In the promotion of such postdigital products, there is an emphasis on the sociality of play by extending the possible contexts and participants into the gaming situation. Osmo’s marketing video, for example, shows an adult in a pure white room setting up the tablet for play on a table. A child emerges out of this idealised domestic space and begins to manipulate the tangram pieces to create shapes and perform other activities. This draws another child, and then more, until a crowd has formed. While this is a typically decontextualised advertising situation (e.g., nobody starts crying because they stepped on a tangram piece), the enrolment of players by moving beyond the screen, as well as an enrolment of many different material and digital elements distributed through the postdigital play space, suggests creative and playful possibilities that surpass the confined limits of traditional video games. And yet, when Osmo play was observed in the household, research within one particular setting involving two siblings (a girl aged three and boy aged five), arrangements were not necessarily smooth or followed in a prescriptive fashion. Set-up on the living room floor, the younger girl attempted to follow the spelling app’s instructions to place a letter tile on the physical play surface, but it was unable to read the letter she was placing, presumably due to poor placement within the field of the reflector’s vision. After a number of unsuccessful attempts, she leant over and tried touching the letter on the screen in a demonstrable action of a touchscreen habitus in which touchscreens have become habituated within children’s contemporary media environments. The older brother, who was sitting within reach, interjected into her play by pushing a number of additional letter tiles onto the physical play surface, causing the app to flash and issue visual instructions. It was unclear whether this act was intended to assist or disrupt his sister’s play, though failing to get feedback from her engagement she stood up and walked away. The brother promptly slid across the floor into the spot she had occupied in front of the screen and cleared the letter tiles from the play surface in order to begin a fresh game. The intensive potentials for postdigital play exhibited by devices such as Osmo, in which children and varied objects come together, also sometimes fail to coordinate coherently within different processes of interfacial assemblage (Fig. 5.1).

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Fig. 5.1  Photograph of child playing with Osmo game

These games and playful devices are part of a broader reconfiguration of material and digital elements in computers that are increasingly mobile, ‘pervasive’, ‘locative’, ‘augmented’, and ‘mixed’ (Montola 2011), and which are often described through the language of the ‘Internet of Things’ (van Kranenburg 2007), and its toy-based variant, the Internet of Toys (Holloway and Green 2016; Mascheroni and Holloway 2019). They can, however, also be characterised as part of a broader regime of postdigitality, in terms of gaming that is continuous with the digital, yet that also exceeds the digital through conditions that are part technical, historical, aesthetic, and affective (Berry 2014, 2015; Schinkel 2014). Broadly, the postdigital “describes the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitisation” (Schinkel 2014, n.p.), in which “the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital becomes increasingly blurred … [and] computation is part of the texture of life itself which can be walked around, touched, manipulated and interacted with in a number of ways and means” (Berry 2014, n.p.). In terms of gaming, this notion connects neatly with changing infrastructures, devices, software, and connectivity, creating ecologies of digital games that are at once analogue and digital, virtual and actual, technical and affective, narrative and playful. The idea that digital games are ‘messy’ (Bogost 2009) or assemblages of digital and non-digital interaction (Taylor 2009) indicates the relevance of the postdigital concept in thinking about the increasingly distributed arrangements of children’s play and gaming.

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In an article on the “ontological entanglement” of physical and virtual elements of children’s play with smart toys, for example, Jackie Marsh (2017, pp. 1–32) similarly suggests that children’s IoT play should be considered as hybrid and co-constitutive. She calls for further research on the political economy of internet-enabled toys—that is, how data is extracted and mobilised by toy companies, and for what purposes. Marsh (2017, pp. 1–32) also reflects on the possibilities of transgressive play with smart toys, and considers the ways in which young users may resist the data-collection strategies of smart toys. Informed by game studies’ material turn (Apperley and Jayemanne 2012), this chapter explores these intersections of political economy and children’s everyday play practices in configuring such forms of postdigital play. In the context of the postdigital, connected toy products such as Nintendo Amiibo recruit different elements into an assemblage of play, cutting across the physical and digital to recruit a wide set of objects and practices into the branded space of play. In such postdigital environment, play multiplies across digital infrastructures and environments, and media companies are thus incentivised to broaden their interface ‘envelopes’ to capture increasingly unruly and transgressive forms of digital/physical play. The case study below aims to account for the reciprocal dynamic between children’s everyday play (which often encompasses appropriation and repurposing of toys) and the branded world of IoT products in which transgressive forms of play are reincorporated back into a branded environment. In turn, these dynamics point to emerging questions around children’s datafied play and literacies within the environments and economies of postdigital play—how the ‘mundane data’ (Lupton 2017; Pink et al. 2017) produced within these everyday contexts of play are felt, experienced, and understood.

Interfacing with Amiibo Amiibo figurines are physical toys based on characters from various Nintendo franchises, such as Mario and Luigi. Amiibo work by ‘interacting’ with Nintendo hardware and software via wireless near-field communication (NFC) technology, which connect wirelessly to Nintendo’s Switch, 3DS, and Wii U videogame platforms. They can be differentiated from similar ‘hybrid’ toy/videogame franchises such as Skylanders, Disney Infinity, and Lego Dimensions to the extent that they do not require additional plug-in hardware and they operate across multiple platforms and

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games; they are not designed with one specific technology or game in mind (Fig. 5.2). In mediating such platform relations, Amiibo figurines operate as coded software objects (Kitchin and Dodge 2014) for data storage and transmission. For some games, the Amiibo operate on a read-only basis—that is, they merely ‘unlock’ pre-existing content in the software when detected by the platform’s NFC reader. For other games, such as Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, the Amiibo function as data storage devices that keep track of player profiles and character progress. Their software affordances are thus capable of storing data corresponding to personal game experience and the datafication of digital dexterity as it develops through gameplay. In enabling multiple forms of play and connection, Amiibo also facilitate the sharing and mobility of personal play data. For example, in Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U, players can develop the strengths and abilities of the Zelda avatar, store this data on the Amiibo, and transfer it between other Wii U and 3DS devices. This feature is similar to the limited data storage that Nintendo introduced on the Wii remote controller or ‘Wiimote’,

Fig. 5.2 Photograph of Amiibo figurines (https://www.flickr.com/photos/128984244@N02/32845296782/)

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which allowed for the storage of up to ten player-created ‘Mii’ (which refer to personalised player avatars on the Nintendo Wii), which could then be used if the Wiimote was connected to a different Nintendo Wii console. Additionally, Amiibo are designed to unlock additional material within games, such as demos of classic Nintendo games. And with the figurines themselves remediating characters from classic Nintendo games—such as The Legend of Zelda—Amiibo are tightly woven into Nintendo’s branded environment (Kinder 1991; Kline et al. 2003), which connects the postdigital present of the Amiibo figure to the repackaging of and nostalgia for past Nintendo content. The distributed interface of Amiibo, materialised through figurines and their stored data can then be understood through the cultural value of play data, where personal dexterity, performance, and gaming capital (Walsh and Apperley 2009), are datafied as a way of displaying embodied and symbolic value in the contexts of digital play. In addition, in what James Ash describes as “interface envelopes” (Ash 2015), which expand both the material and affective space of play, Amiibo also incorporate player allegiance or loyalty to the branded world of Nintendo. Amiibo are externalised into the physical world of collectible toys and figurines, which greatly expands the interface envelope to encompass a broader ‘aesthetics of recruitment’ in which children enrol themselves in the Nintendo universe through a physical and embodied encounter with a physical toy, which can then serve as an entry point into Nintendo’s brand ecosystem. As Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Grieg de Peuter (2003, p. 126) note, Nintendo have long been concerned with generating a sense of brand loyalty among their child consumer base, as a means of developing a lifelong feeling of belongingness and commitment to Nintendo products. Yet, the Amiibo figurines operate to spread branded play across physical and digital spaces, configuring an entangled combination of online or offline play practices, memories, and experiences, which are physically held and carried, but also extend into digital representations of play and performance within the videogames themselves, and over time come to embody hours of play and commitment to the product through the accumulation of personal play data. Amiibo are clearly framed as a means to envelop children in Nintendo’s ecosystem by soliciting playful practices that cut across physical objects and digital spaces. For companies such as Nintendo, this type of postdigital play—sometimes referred to as ‘toys-to-life’—is a desirable commercial activity. Amiibo nurture a physical bond between children, software, and

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the branded world of characters from various game franchises. This is achieved through the software affordances of the figurines as well as through marketing and promotional materials. Unsurprisingly, the first Wii U game to feature Amiibo compatibility was Super Smash Bros. for Wii U—a crossover fighting game that had already established itself as an explicitly crossmedia product through its transposition of characters from other Nintendo franchises, such as Mario and Pikachu, into a new game. This transposition of characters figured prominently in the initial marketing surrounding the Amiibo. In the Smash Bros. series, various Nintendo figurines come to life and battle against each other, with the in-game representation of figurines predating the release of the Amiibo toys. The Amiibo figurines were, then, marketed as objects that physically externalised this game universe, in which players could ‘train’ and ‘level up’ their favourite characters in the game world and store their experience and progress data on corresponding Amiibo figurines. In an early promotional video first shown at the 2014 Electronic Games Expo (E3), Nintendo of America’s product and marketing manager, Bill Trinen, explained this entwining of personal play data with the Nintendo brand by stating that “each figure contains the spirit of the character they represent” (Nintendo 2014a). Trinen also emphasised the embodied and affective value of the Amiibo toys, realised through attachment and the acquisition of digital game play dexterity, explaining that “no two Amiibo will be the same”, and repeatedly emphasises the ‘personal’ nature of the player-Amiibo relationship: “collect your favourite figures, then battle, train, level up, and form your own unique bond with them” (Nintendo 2014a). The relationship between the Amiibo figurines and the acquisition and performance of dexterity as something realised through personal attachment to and care for the toy is the focus of another key 2014 promotional video titled “Gameplay and Quest for the amiibo!” (Nintendo 2014b). In this video, a young Smash Bros. player (‘Jack’) seeks to beat his sibling’s older friends in the game (and thus win their respect) by purchasing, training, and levelling up his own Mario Amiibo. In order to do this, Jack is portrayed developing an affective bond with the toy both inside and outside the digital world of the game—at the dinner table, at the park, in his bedroom, and so on. Once Jack has dedicated the necessary affective commitment to the toy, he is shown upstaging his sibling’s older friends in a competitive match. This promotional video neatly illustrates the discursive instructions that Nintendo seek to impart to consumers for how to integrate the toys in both online and offline play. First, it attempts to illustrate

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that ‘proper’ usage of Amiibo entails a unique, personal, and above all, affective attachment to be forged between player and toy. The interface envelope generated by the game ‘follows’ Jack into the messy reality of everyday life through the Amiibo figurine, thus producing an aesthetics of recruitment that cuts across digital and physical spaces. Secondly, the Amiibo-player relationship reinforces what James Ash describes as an “ecotechnics of care” (Ash 2015, p.  109), in which an affective set of embodied and dexterous dispositions are formed through the child dedicating time and commitment to the product and the data it embodies. Thus, the relationship with the Amiibo is both quantified through software affordances for personalising player data and history, but also qualified through the child player investing time, effort, and energy in order to level up and develop his character’s abilities.

Locating Amiibo in Everyday Play Practices Beyond the Amiibo interface and product advertising, the representation, understanding, and use of Amiibo extend into everyday postdigital practices of play, which are accessible in some sense through video content and comments of Amiibo reviews and interactions posted to YouTube by users. These videos contextualise and visualise different ways that Amiibo are configured within everyday play and situated within domestic and family media ecologies, in which the complexity and messiness of digitally connected devices, screens, and toys unfold. Nintendo’s Amiibo figurines are seen in these videos as exemplary of postdigital forms of play, whilst also pointing to tensions between design intent and acts of appropriation within children’s everyday play spaces and practices. In a review video posted by the FamilyGamerTV YouTube channel, titled “Super Smash Bros and amiibo Get Toy Tested” (FamilyGamerTV 2014a), the channel host introduces the newly released Amiibo figurines. The video involves the channel host interviewing and discussing Amiibo with a television games reviewer to explain to viewers how they work within the Nintendo platform and franchise ecosystem, providing demonstrations of game use and describing them in relation to other examples of postdigital toys: Host: As you play with them, they level-up, which means they get stronger. But also, they unlock new moves, so they develop, and they grow. But also you get

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special items and you feed them to your character. And that gives them more powers and more abilities. Reviewer: It’s almost Tamagotchi-esque, if that’s even a word! You have to feed them, look after then, take care of them. Host: The more you do that, the more time you spend with them, the better they get. Reviewer: The other thing that really interested me: you’re saying that you can play them in more than one game … so you said super Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart 8. So I’m assuming that as Nintendo bring out more games, these will be able to be put into different games. Now that is more interesting, because with Skylanders or Disney Infinity, you are playing the one game. Say you buy your Mario, you know that it’s just not finished when they bring out Super Smash Bros. You know that you need to keep that, to look after that, because that’s going to be useful to you next Christmas when I buy you the next game. So it has that longevity to it … which all parents want. (YouTube video dialogue)

The video, then, works as a piece of videogame review and pedagogy, highlighting the affective attachments or ‘ecotechnics of care’ that Amiibo engender through their cross-platform and software affordances for personalising player data and history, whilst also explaining how they operate by making connections to other familiar postdigital toys like Skylanders figurines, and going further back, Tamagotchi. Such connections establish a legacy of digital toy play, whilst simultaneously attempting to overcome the affective limitations identified in toys such as Tamagotchi, which were critiqued for materialising ‘disposable love’, and therefore degraded ecotechnic relations of care (Bloch and Lemish 1999; Turkle 2011). In a separate video from the FamilyGamerTV YouTube channel, titled “Brothers and Sisters Play Super Smash Bros. and Amiibo Wii U” (FamilyGamerTV 2014b), the channel host—clearly operating more in his role as a father—demonstrates the intergenerational pedagogy that is tied into the use of the Amiibo figurines. He presents his three children with three Amiibo and asks them to identify them: Mario, Link, and Pikachu. This is followed with a short lesson in the nomenclature of Legend of Zelda, carefully explaining the difference between the titular Zelda and the protagonist Link, in order to clarify the name of the Amiibo that one of his children is using. The father then turns to the more practical matters of showing and teaching the children how to use the Amiibo with Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Mario Kart 8. In doing so, his reflections emphasise the ‘physicality’ of the toy and how this extends the interface:

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“you have that physical connection between the on-screen action and the physical toy”, and attachment to the franchise/brand: “There’s that real connection created between the on-screen character and the physical Mario toy” (FamilyGamerTV 2014b). Towards the end of the video he discusses some footage of his children playing Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, noting that: “with Tom playing in the background, Ollie’s just happy to have that Link character in his hand and treats it much like he would any other toy”. Not only does the physicality of the Amiibo create new opportunities for play within practices of ‘turn-taking’ within social screen-based play (e.g. Apperley 2010), but it also means that it can be removed from the screen environment, only to be later reincorporated. This latter possibility is noted positively by the father: “[the Amiibo] gives him a reason to do stuff away from the screen”. The father also describes how his child fostered an attachment to the figurine much like any other toy, which seemed to occur independently of the software or platform (FamilyGamerTV 2014b). Throughout the video, the father comments on the toy-like elements of the Amiibo, and how his children interact with them as toys, which he regards as a positive element of the Amiibo: “having this physical element to the game that brings them out of the game and into the living room”. The mobility of physical Amiibo figurines, then, means they are able to quite easily move outside of the digital environment of play, and much like Osmo, into the messier realities of children’s everyday play spaces (Giddings 2007) in which children are able to appropriate and repurpose branded IoT products into everyday play practices. Nintendo’s official position, however, is that Amiibo are intended to tie people “back to the game experience” (Peckham 2015, n.p.), and “to forge a better connection between gameplay and Amiibo itself” (Peckham 2017, n.p.), where brand loyalty is fostered. Nintendo’s president, Tatsumi Kimishima, has openly stated that this is a ‘challenge’ for the company to overcome, as their main intention for the figurines is to create a more fully integrated media ecosystem that cuts across the physical and the digital, rather than a ‘regular’ line of toys that children can collect and play with (Peckham 2015, 2017, n.p.). Thus, YouTube videos of children’s Amiibo play highlight a tension in such postdigital commercial toys. Although the Amiibo are designed to reinforce the interaction between the child and the branded world of Nintendo, the toys often enter the messy reality of children’s everyday play in ways that exceed prescription through alternative forms and meanings of play—Amiibo figurines can be appropriated by children as an ordinary

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toy and used in alternative arrangements of play no longer tied to the digital game. Studies of postdigital play have acknowledged that children’s play with digital media is increasingly messy and unpredictable, potentially leading to imaginative and transgressive practices that “cannot necessarily be predicted before they emerge in the process of play” (Jayemanne et al. 2016, p.  51). Internet-enabled toys such as Nintendo’s Amiibo can be seen in a similar light. However, they also point to corporate strategies for postdigital games that reinforce the connection to the brand by enrolling physical toy figurines based on characters from various Nintendo franchises into the space of play. This extends the digital brand out into the physical spaces of children’s physical play spaces and, in turn, reincorporates extensive forms of play back into a branded environment through attachment to both a physical object and the data it embodies.

Datafying Children’s Play Nintendo’s commercial ambitions for the Amiibo—which are laid bare in the advertisements, the in-game content, and the interfacing techniques involved in Amiibo play—reveal that postdigital forms of play are often reincorporated into a branded environment. Amiibo expand Nintendo’s interface ‘envelope’ to encompass physical activities that would normally exceed traditional videogame hardware or software. And they facilitate an ‘ecotechnics of care’ where the performance of digital dexterity through in-game success is a product of the amount of ‘care’ one invests in their Amiibo toy. Through these postdigital arrangements, Amiibo naturalise the process of data collection, generation, and sharing. In the video “Brothers and Sisters Play Super Smash Bros. and Amiibo Wii U” (FamilyGamerTV 2014b), for example, the adult discusses the benefits of personalised play data stored by the personal Amiibo figurines. The father gets his children to play Mario Kart, where the Amiibo unlock franchise specific wearable content for the Mii drivers of vehicles in the game, allowing players to customise their appearance (e.g. by wearing a Yoshi themed green and white helmet). He goes on to explain how storing data will allow them to ‘train’ and ‘level up’ the Amiibo character for use as what Nintendo (2014a) calls “your alter ego, partner, or rival” in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. The levelling up creates scope for customisation of the Amiibo, which means that the children have to make decisions about how to develop their Amiibo as soon as they have registered the figurine on Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, thereby inculcating children in a

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digital environment where datafication is mediated through ‘user-friendly’ software (Chun 2011; Lupton and Williamson 2017). Crucially, these interface ‘effects’ take place in familiar environments for children—in physical play spaces, with toys and brands that children recognise, trust, and personally connect with. These data exchanges enact an ecotechnics of care, in which the process of caring for the Amiibo enhances the child’s gaming experience. There is a clear tangible benefit to Amiibo play by enacting this data exchange. But there is also a palpable experience of personal data produced through Amiibo play—it is made meaningful through such everyday contexts (Pink et al. 2017), in which data is sensed or ‘felt’ (Lupton 2017), through its storage within the embodied materiality of the figurine and transmission into gameplay personalisation and progression. This data records player statistics and behaviour, rather than identifiable personal information. Nonetheless, by transforming play activities into digital information, such datafied play can be situated within wider shifts whereby as technology designs “capture and respond to children’s everyday experiences more and more seamlessly, their bodies, activities and social experiences are being tracked and datified” (Holloway 2019, p. 34). With the tracking of children’s data producing commercial value through technologies such as connected toys (Green and Holloway 2019; Holloway 2019; Mascheroni 2018), concerns are being raised about the impact of datafied childhoods (Lupton and Williamson 2017), within online spaces of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). Alternatively, we can see how these forms of datafying children’s play may also help to foster children’s data literacy—something we see in the ways the Amiibo is discussed and explained by the parent in the video “Brothers and Sisters Play Super Smash Bros. and Amiibo Wii U” (FamilyGamerTV 2014b) in terms of sorts of data collected, and its value and use within various Nintendo games. Amiibo may offer a possibility for young children to gain a sense or understanding of personal data and data exchange within the context of digital play, within the Nintendo system which implies an ostensibly safe and bounded circuit for data exchange. Given that Nintendo is a seemingly ‘trusted’ brand, and there is not personally identifiable information in the data, parents appear comfortable letting their children engage in the datafied play guided by the prompts from the software and hardware. In this respect, the Amiibo offers children access to emerging forms of data literacy in an informal context.

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Data literacy competencies are often difficult for young people to acquire informally, and are often shaped by the more deliberate and didactic pedagogies of families and schools with their emphasis on security and safety, in which data exchange is seen as a risk. In one sense, play may normalise data exchange, but the Amiibo crossmedia system also makes these often invisible exchanges explicitly tangible by demanding a haptic engagement. Rather than being a configuration of settings on the software interface, the Amiibo require the coordination of hand, toy, and device to produce the data exchange, foregrounding it as an activity by making it a momentary focus within a game, rather than relegating data exchange to a more invisible or ambient experience (Hjorth and Richardson 2014). As it stands, however, the enclosed circuits of data exchange of the Amiibo may promote an informal data pedagogy of assumed safety which may not serve young people as a useful model if deployed in other contexts where data exchange is more extensive. In particular, the relationship of trust, care, and reward that shapes the experience of Amiibo use could create vulnerabilities if young people do not also develop a critical and discerning platform-specific understanding of data sharing; to be able to evaluate who, when, and what to share. Ultimately, Amiibo and other postdigital forms of play imply that sharing data is fun and rewarding for the experience of play. This suggests a need for better understanding how toys that involve the storage and transfer of personal data are experienced and understood by children, and how such playful data practices may translate into the wider production of values and norms of children’s data sharing.

References Apperley, T. 2010. Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. ———. 2015. Venezuela. In Videogames Around the World, ed. M.J.P.  Wolf, 613–627. Cambridge: MIT Press. Apperley, T., and D. Jayemanne. 2012. Game Studies’ Material Turn. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 9 (1): 5–24. Ash, J. 2015. The Interface Envelope: Gaming, Technology, Power. New  York: Bloomsbury. Berry, D. 2014. The Post-digital Ornament. Stunlaw. http://stunlaw.blogspot. com.au/2014/06/the-post-digital-ornament.html ———. 2015. Continuous Interfaces. In Stunlaw: Philosophy and Critique for a Digital Age. http://stunlaw.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/continuousinterfaces.html

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Bloch, L., and D. Lemish. 1999. Disposable Love: The Rise and Fall of a Virtual Pet. New Media and Society 1 (3): 283–303. Bogost, I. 2009. Videogames Are a Mess. http://www.bogost.com/writing/videogames_are_a_mess.shtml Chun, W. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge: The MIT Press. FamilyGamerTV [FamilyGamerTV]. 2014a. Super Smash Bros and Amiibo Get Toy Tested [Video File], December 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= BXzyyHFlFmg ———. 2014b. Brothers and Sisters Play Super Smash Bros. and Amiibo Wii U [Video File], November 28. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= oyyFiqOhXoY Giddings, S. 2007. “I’m the One Who Makes the Lego Racers Go”: Studying Virtual and Actual Play. In Growing Up Online: Young People and Digital Technologies, ed. S. Dixon and S. Weber. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2014. Gameworlds: Virtual Media and Children’s Everyday Play. New York: Bloomsbury. Green, L., and D. Holloway. 2019. Introduction: Problematising the Treatment of Children’s Data. Media International Australia 170 (1): 22–26. Hjorth, L., and I.  Richardson. 2014. Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media. London: Palgrave. Holloway, D. 2019. Surveillance Capitalism and Children’s Data: The Internet of Toys and Things for Children. Media International Australia 170 (1): 27–36. Holloway, D., and L. Green. 2016. The Internet of Toys. Communication Research and Practice 2 (4): 506–519. Jayemanne, D., T.  Apperley, and B.  Nansen. 2016. Postdigital Play and the Aesthetics of Recruitment. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (ToDiGRA) 2 (3): 145–172. Kinder, M. 1991. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kitchin, R., and M.  Dodge. 2014. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Kline, S. 1995. Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing. London: Verso. Kline, S., S. Dyer-Witheford, and G. de Peuter. 2003. Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Lash, S., and C. Lury. 2007. Global Culture Industry. Cambridge: Polity. Lupton, D. 2017. Feeling Your Data: Touch and Making Sense of Personal Data. New Media and Society 19 (10): 1599–1614.

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Lupton, D., and B. Williamson. 2017. The Datafied Child: The Dataveillance of Children and Implications for Their Rights. New Media & Society 19 (5): 780–794. Marsh, J. 2017. The Internet of Toys: A Posthuman and Multimodal Analysis of Connected Play. Teachers College Record 119 (15): 1–32. http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/113557/ Mascheroni, G. 2018. Researching Datafied Children as Data Citizens. Journal of Children and Media 12 (4): 517–523. Mascheroni, G., and D.  Holloway, eds. 2019. The Internet of Toys: Practices, Affordances and the Political Economy of Children’s Play. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Montola, M. 2011. A Ludological View on the Pervasive Mixed-Reality Game Research Paradigm. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 15 (1): 3–12. Nansen, B., M. Arnold, M. Gibbs, and H. Davis. 2009. Domestic Orchestration: Rhythms in the Mediated Home. Time and Society 18 (2): 181–207. Nansen, B., F. Vetere, J. Downs, T. Robertson, M. Brereton, and J. Durick. 2014. Reciprocal Habituation: A Study of Older People and the Kinect. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI) 21 (3): 1–20. Article 18. Nansen, B., T.  Apperley, and B.  Nicoll. 2019. Postdigitality in Children’s Crossmedia Play: A Case Study of Nintendo’s Amiibo Figurines. In The Internet of Toys: Practices, Affordances and the Political Economy of Children’s Play, ed. G. Mascheroni and D. Holloway, 89–108. Palgrave Macmillan. London. Nintendo [Nintendo]. 2014a. Nintendo – Amiibo E3 2014 Trailer [Video File], June 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odUjMhc6YgUandt=3s ———. 2014b. Super Smash Bros. Gameplay and Quest for the Amiibo! [Video File], October 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3c_JDDp99 kandt=114s Peckham, M. 2015. Exclusive: Nintendo’s New President on the Icon’s Future. TIME, December 3. http://time.com/4129171/nintendo-tatsumikimishima/ ———. 2017. 19 Things Nintendo’s President Told Us About Switch and More. TIME, February 7. http://time.com/4662446/nintendo-president-switchinterview/ Pink, S., S. Sumartojo, D. Heyes Lupton, and C. Heyes La Bond. 2017. Mundane Data: The Routines, Contingencies and Accomplishments of Digital Living. Big Data and Society 4 (1): 1–12. Schinkel, W. 2014. What Is ‘Post-digital’? Rsearch Tumblr. http://rsearch. tumblr.com/ Taylor, T.L. 2009. The Assemblage of Play. Games and Culture 4 (4): 331–339. Turkle, S. 2011. Alone Together. Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.

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Tyni, H., A.  Kultima, and F.  Mäyrä. 2013. Dimensions of Hybrid in Playful Products. In Proceedings of AcademicMindTrek ’13, 237–244. ACM Press. New York. van Kranenburg, R. 2007. The Internet of Things: A Critique of Ambient Technology and the All-Seeing RFID Chip. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Walsh, C., and T.  Apperley. 2009. Gaming Capital: Rethinking Literacy. In: Changing Climates: Education for Sustainable Futures. In Proceedings of the AARE 2008 International Education Research Conference. Queensland University of Technology. Brisbane. Zuboff, S. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books. London.

CHAPTER 6

Postdigital Playgrounds

Abstract  Postdigital playgrounds move into the digitisation of children’s public play spaces, in which the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital is blurred through mobile, locative, and ambient media. The chapter begins by situating the digitisation of playgrounds in relation to the broader digitisation of public space, before analysing the operation and reception of two recent augmented and interactive play technologies. This analysis reveals how the digital playground expresses tensions associated with sensibilities and meanings attached to public play spaces, the value of digital technologies, and ultimately notions of childhood. Keywords  Children • Mobile media • Public space • Playground • Postdigital play • IoT Children’s public play spaces, such as playgrounds and parks, are associated with positive ideas and ideals of physical or social activity. As such, they are typically contrasted with the negative connotations associated with digital screens and their impact on children’s wellbeing, such as solitary and sedentary behaviours. Here, outdoor play often enters public discourse as a way of getting children away from the screen. Yet, just as with play in the home discussed in the previous chapters, such binaries are blurring through the steady digitisation of children’s public play spaces. © The Author(s) 2020 B. Nansen, Young Children and Mobile Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49875-7_6

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This digitisation is happening through the widespread and often incidental use of personal mobile devices in and around children’s public play, and via more deliberate design interventions that aim to embed or augment children’s play spaces with digital infrastructures, sensors, and interfaces. On the one hand, then, this digitisation of children’s public play spaces operates within everyday arrangements of mobile and intimate parental surveillance, and on the other, within a logic of technology innovation in which transformative potential is envisaged in designing interactive playgrounds. This chapter explores the entanglement of digital technology and children’s public play spaces, in which the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital is blurred through mobile, locative, and ambient media. The chapter begins by situating the digitisation of playgrounds in relation to the broader digitisation of public space, and in the ways the blurring boundaries of digital and non-digital have been understood. This chapter then situates trajectories of digital playgrounds in relation to the material and discursive contexts of mobile media in children’s public play by analysing two recent examples of augmented and interactive play technologies: HybridPlay, a smartphone game that wirelessly connects to a sensor-equipped clip to transform playground equipment into gaming interfaces; and Disney Fairy Trails, an augmented-reality app leveraging Disney’s Fairies franchise designed to produce a ‘magical’ outdoor fairy hunt in public gardens. These examples are analysed in terms of their functionality, representation, and online reception to explore the often-­ contradictory sensibilities attached to this situation of postdigitality, and in particular how they unfold in relation to the production of spaces and reconfiguration of meanings attached to public play spaces, digital technologies, and childhood.

Children, Public Space, and Mobile Media Children’s presence in and movement through public space has declined in many parts of the developed world (e.g. Garrard 2009; Hillman et al. 1990). This is attributed to a wide range of factors, reflecting wider changes in built environments, social norms, parental concerns about safety, and evolving practices of technology use, with children often perceived to be playing less in the street when they are indoors attached on computers. Consequently, a ‘geography of danger’ (Valentine 1997), in which places are organised by parents into a hierarchy of perceived

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dangerousness from public parks, to shopping centres, to playgrounds, to outside school, means that children’s right to the city (Lefebvre 1996) has been radically amended, with their play often reduced to designated ‘safe spaces’ such as playgrounds. As part of this geography of play, children’s public play spaces, such as playgrounds and parks, are increasingly subjected to disciplinary governance and design measures in attempts to foster safer environments. This circumscription of children’s participation in public space aligns with broader cultural shifts in the construction of childhood and the governance of their play (Malone 2007). In children’s public play spaces, the standardisation of design, use of commercial play equipment, and fenced areas foster a sense that these spaces support particular kinds of use for particular kinds of demographics—children engaging in active, safe, and physical play. Pushback against trends of standardisation can be located in programs such as UNICEF’s Child-Friendly Cities Initiative, which aims to redesign children’s public play spaces based on a child-rights and participatory framework involving design and collaboration with children and local councils—including many local Australian municipalities (Whitzman et al. 2009). Whilst such child-centred design approaches emphasise physical infrastructure and children’s cultures of use in playgrounds, the question of how digitisation is or could play a role in reconfiguring the spaces, experiences, and meanings associated with public playgrounds and children’s play practices is emerging through everyday mobile media use as well as more deliberate designs interventions. The digitisation of children’s public space is, like in many other contexts, predominantly occurring through the widespread and often incidental use of personal mobile devices taking place around children’s public play. This digitisation of children’s public play spaces, enabled by developments in mobile device ubiquity and connectivity, operates within broader arrangements of mobile and intimate parental surveillance (Albrechtslund and Lauritsen 2013; Leaver 2017; Southerton et al. 2019). Yet, there is little research explicitly investigating how mobile devices are used in children’s public play spaces. More broadly, research explores the role of mobile technologies in mediating children’s mobility and movement in public space, emphasising the surveillance capacities or functions of communications technologies, and how they reinforce parental fears and anxieties (e.g. Fotel and Thomsen 2004; Malone 2007). Other research is more ambivalent, highlighting the importance of mobile devices for extending children’s public geographies and spatial mobilities (e.g. Nansen

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et al. 2017), whilst also noting how the contactability provided by mobiles may, in addition to enabling capacities to monitor or surveil children, also help to alleviate parental fears, free children and parents from set deadlines, expand children’s spatial ranges, and thus empower young people to reclaim public spaces (Pain et al. 2005; see also Williams and Williams 2005). Complementing this focus on the child is a growing body of research emphasising the social and health risks associated with parental phone distraction. Observational data of families eating together at fast food restaurants suggests that children experience adults’ phone distraction as emotionally distancing and consequently compete for their attention (Radesky et al. 2014). Research addressing the impact of mobile phones on adult-child relationships in playgrounds by Hiniker et  al. (2015) emphasises the potentially negative consequences in terms of distraction, social distance, safety, and behaviour modelling from parents. This research highlights that when phones are used by adults in playgrounds, it tends to involve short durations of use, and that whilst the reasons for phone use were varied—spanning child-related activities like taking pictures, checking the time, or coordinating events, to parent-related tasks such as socialising, doing work, or viewing entertaining content—child-related phone use was twice as common as non-child related phone use (Hiniker et al. 2015). Whilst this research highlights how adults’ phone use while caring for children may be displacing more child-centred social and physical interaction, these conclusions do not sufficiently recognise the embedded use of mobile media in which these devices operate as part of the infrastructure of social relationships and communication, including their use as part of more child-centred interactions, experiences, and play through applications ranging from videos, photos, games, and video chat. Nevertheless, the research orients us to the dominant discourses shaping how mobile devices are commonly understood to detrimentally impact on children’s experiences of public spaces and social interactions. To understand how digital technologies are reconfiguring playgrounds and children’s play, mobile phones must be considered within a broader ecology of media, including technical infrastructures, devices, networks (Wi-Fi, NFC), software applications, and increasingly interconnected things and, in turn, how these media amend meanings associated with particular places. Research in the area of location-based media has highlighted how mobile media technologies have “profound implications for our perception of space” (de Souza e Silva 2013, p. 118), yet in relation to the playground, the intensification of digital media in the city

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challenges everyday use and understanding of play in these sites. Existing research has fruitfully explored the re-appropriation of the city for playful purposes through location-based games and social media (e.g. Richardson and Hjorth 2017; Leorke 2018; Moore 2015). Yet, as mobile devices and the accompanying media ecology re-inscribe play and playfulness within everyday urban spaces, there remain questions about how such digitisation impacts on environments that have been specifically set aside for the play activities of children. Given the history of the playground as a site of children’s culture (Factor 2004), how do processes of digitisation impact on the ways children’s play in these spaces is understood and enacted? 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 (Frost 2012). Over time, the public playground familiar to us today, comprised of standardised commercial play equipment in fenced or segregated areas of public parks, emerged as the dominant form (Erickson 2011). Despite historical movements and differences in the politics and designs of playgrounds, including more unfinished adventure playgrounds (Shier 1984), or more child-focused participatory playground designs (Whitzman et al. 2009), or the development of private, indoor, or commercial play centres that commodify play, these spaces nevertheless share a common goal—to foster children engaging in active, safe, and physical play. Given the history of the playground as a site set aside for the explicit purpose of children’s active, safe, and social play, this chapter asks what is at stake for children’s play culture (Factor 2004), in terms of the ways children’s play in these spaces is understood and enacted, when these spaces are embedded with digital media infrastructures, practices, and alternative forms of physical dexterity. In contemporary debates on childhood, playgrounds often serve as the antithesis of screens, and yet mobile media operate to spatially extend existing parental concerns about ‘screen time’ (Haddon 2013). Playgrounds are thus positioned as a ‘natural’ resource for parents or guardians who believe their children need time away from screens because they are spending too much time engaged with media. The penetration of mobile media infrastructures into playgrounds disrupts this understanding of the playground as a site that is ‘unmediated’ by technological media. Restricting children’s use of mobile devices in such spaces, however, overlooks the ways public spaces like playgrounds are already connected to a

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wider mobile media infrastructure, and the ways that existing mobile phone use among parents and other supervising adults are remediating the playground. For example, sites in public parks, including children’s playgrounds are incorporated into the digital infrastructure of the digital app game Pokémon GO. The Pokémon GO app, which maps digital play onto everyday public space, does not discriminate between different types of place in the production of social and ambient play (Apperley and Moore 2019; Richardson and Hjorth 2017). By transforming the urban environment into a ‘playground’, in spaces set aside for children’s play Pokémon GO can thus create an unwelcome intrusion, coming into conflict with the perceived values of play and learning, such as more gross physical skills rather than screen dexterity, which are embedded and enacted in a discrete playground location. In many ways, it would be reductive to treat digital media as simply intruding on or negating play, as mobile media and devices can also encourage creative forms of play. Children’s public spaces, including their street cultures and playground play, have always been sites of mediation in which playful practices borrow from cultural and media resources, such as stories and characters, to shape play activities (Factor 2004; Opie and Opie 1969). Mobile media extend these traditions with, for example, children integrating media-based Pokémon play resources such as animations, collectable card games, and videogames into the structure of their spatial play practices. Giddings (2014, 2017) argues for understanding this mediated play as form of “distributed imagination” that is both assembled through techno-social and collective relations, drawing on the resources of both physical environments and imaginative interpretations. Play thus actively recruits materials from the mediated worlds of children whether or not media technologies are old or new, absent or present: The workings of imagination in children’s lives have always populated mundane experience with non-actual actions and characters—from elaborate fantasy worlds spun off in talk and gesture from play with dolls, building blocks or tree stumps and manhole covers (Factor 2004), the fleeting moments of jokes, songs and daydreams (Opie 1993), to intimate relationships with a precious toy or imaginary friend (Winnicott 1974). Over recent decades these processes have been mechanized and monetized by commercial children’s toy and media culture, not least in the transmedia system of Pokémon itself. (Giddings 2017, p. 59)

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Digitally Augmenting Playgrounds In addition to the use of mobile phones in mediating children’s public spaces and experiences, there are more deliberate design interventions emerging that aim to embed or augment children’s play spaces with digital sensors, interfaces, and software applications. Here, the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) operates in combination with a logic of technology innovation in imagining and designing ‘interactive playgrounds’ (Poppe et al. 2014), to transform children’s physical play spaces and activities. The digital augmentation of children’s playgrounds and public play spaces is as shown in the previous chapter, only one example of a larger trajectory of digitised spaces of play. Augmentation has affected the reimagining and transformation of numerous mundane sites from family homes to city streets. Yet, in the playground, the messy hybridity of digitally augmented space raises important questions for the current and future uses of playgrounds, parks, and other dedicated play spaces. As environments associated with specific cultural and historical values of play, and as discussed below, seams of unsettled affect are opened up within the digitisation of playground. The idea of interactive playgrounds has emerged from computer science and interaction design research, with the aim of building technology-­ enhanced installations and spaces that combine immersive or interactive elements from digital games research with physical environments and equipment associated with traditional play (e.g. Moreno et  al. 2013; Poppe et al. 2014). Such installations or spaces can range from relatively small play interfaces, to larger augmented public spaces, and can include interactive elements involving all sorts of sensors, displays, or projectors. Digitally augmenting children’s play spaces are imagined in these contexts as a way to provide more engaging, entertaining, and immersive play experiences, whilst also promoting physical activity, social interaction, or inclusion. An example of an interactive playground project is the ‘Interactive Slide’, a large inflatable slide augmented with an interactive camera-­ projector that acts as an image projection screen, whilst the projector includes motion detection sensors to transform the slide into an interactive surface (Soler-Adillon and Parés 2009). The Interactive Slide, then, becomes a platform for games-designers to develop different applications and experiences for physical play and development. An initial application was the Virtual Mosaic, a Tetris-inspired game that projected coloured

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falling squares onto the interactive surface of the slide, which could then be touched or moved or even scattered by sliding down the slide. The emergence of interactive playgrounds speaks to both a blurring of the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital in our everyday experience of media and technology as discussed in the previous chapter, and to broader contemporary developments occurring within the landscape of the ‘smart city’. The digitisation of playgrounds, thus, fits within a broader trajectory of smart city technologies, in which urban space is becoming digitised and ‘sentient’, embedded with digital media and networked communication infrastructures that are reconfiguring the operation and experiences associated with various spaces of public life (Gabrys 2019; McQuire 2017; Shepard 2011). Here, the theoretical framing of the postdigital (Berry 2014) is helpful for not simply identifying the spread of technologies into spaces, objects, and bodies, but for highlighting how such reconfigurations have implications for embodied experience, media economies, and social relations in the city. How people interface with computational technologies is no longer a discrete act, but a continuous operation facilitated through mobile, locative, and ambient media: The historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital becomes increasingly blurred, to the extent that to talk about the digital presupposes a disjuncture in our experience that makes less and less sense in the experience of the everyday … [here] the interface … is increasingly being stretched across computational devices, objects, practices material and phenomenological dimensions. (Berry 2015, n.p.)

The vision of the smart city is typically an instrumental in which an ecology of digital infrastructures, IoT technologies, embedded sensors, mobile devices, and location-based technologies or services produces the city as a continuous interface of data collection, networked connectivity, and urban operation management (e.g. Shepard 2011; Greenfield 2010). Yet, as the postdigital highlights, such aggregated configurations often overlook the particularities of urban politics, materialities, and experiences. The ideal of seamless interconnectivity operating at the scale of the city through interconnected devices in a system of real-time data processing treats the diversity of urban places as a homogeneous smooth space of computational operation. Critiques of the smart city highlight contradictions between such visions of technologies working together to function

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consistently and uniformly, and cities, which exist as collections of various located geographies, social milieus, and inhabitants (e.g. Greenfield 2013). In smart city visions that privilege technologised spaces, privatised infrastructure, and ‘citizens’ that are assumed to be professional, technologically literate, and able-bodied adults, specific public sites like playgrounds or disenfranchised inhabitants like children are often overlooked. Nevertheless, the intersection of digital technologies and public spaces may also be harnessed otherwise, including for playful purposes (Greenfield and Shepard 2007; Leorke 2018; Nijholt 2017). Here, the appropriation of digital technologies and data in the city offer opportunities for reimagining and reshaping public spaces towards playful purposes and applications. The development of playful ways to augment public spaces with digital technologies has been promoted through various playable cities movements, including Bristol’s well-known city branding project, which aims to bring art, technology, and culture together through interaction design projects to enable playful digital layering or interactions with places around the city.1 Yet, the city as a continuous and playable interface is evidenced in a range of other commercial, government, and independent projects, including more structured gameplay, such as the augmented-­ reality massively multiplayer online location-based game Ingress, which connects to a longer history of locative media and play (Moore 2015), to more temporary and experimental projects, such as embedding urban furniture with affordances for digital annotation or communication (e.g. Nansen et al. 2014; Nijholt 2017). Commercial examples of physically embedding sensors and digital interfaces into playgrounds are growing,2 though remain at this point relatively rare; they mostly exist as lab-based prototypes rather than real-world applications owing to issues of cost but also durability, vandalism, and maintenance. There are, however, emerging interaction design prototypes, as well as software-based products that take advantage of smart phone affordances such as location-based functions, in-built sensors such as accelerometers, near-field communications such as Bluetooth, and the possibilities of connecting mobile devices to a range of peripheral hardware. These offer opportunities for augmenting play spaces without requiring the complete redesign of play equipment or infrastructure, and in doing so, complement digital dexterity with physical play. What remains  https://www.playablecity.com/cities/bristol/  For example, see: https://www.fitness-gaming.com/news/schools/

1 2

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under-explored, however, is what seams are opened up in the social practices, meanings, and values associated with the digitisation of children’s public play spaces. Such seams include ideas about the role of digitality in facilitating children’s right to the playable city (Apperley and Leorke 2013), but also in the ways such postdigital imaginaries, products, and practices are received in terms of values and sensibilities associated with the functions of children’s playgrounds, and what, if any, role digital devices should play in these spaces. Two examples of augmented and interactive play technologies, HybridPlay and Disney Fairy Trails, are analysed below in terms of their functionality, representation, and online reception to explore how these often-contradictory sensibilities unfold in relation to the configuration of and meanings associated with children’s public play spaces. These sensibilities, as we elaborate in the following section, sometimes reinforce, sometimes remediate, and sometimes reject the dominant discursive framing of children’s public play spaces or children’s digital media.

Case Studies of Postdigital Play Products The two examples of augmented and interactive play technologies, HybridPlay and Disney Fairy Trails, were analysed in terms of their functionality, representation, and online reception. The functionality analysis of the technologies drew on platform and affordance study approaches to unpack their operations, features, and technical mediation of public space. The representation of these designs was analysed by drawing on corporate promotional and marketing material to investigate how they were discursively constructed for consumers in terms of scenarios and contexts of use. The public reception of these media technologies was analysed through available online data collected across social media platforms. For Disney Fairies Trail, public responses were collected from posts, comments, and content shared using keywords and hashtags (e.g. #disneyfairytrails) across Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. For HybridPlay, public comments and conversation threads were collected from online spaces— though these were less from social media platforms and instead more commonly found below the line on news and tech journalism articles, as well as blogs and crowdfunding sites. These public comments were identified, collected, and analysed across both case studies to gauge the public response to the digitisation of children’s public space.

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Disney Fairies Trail, emerged in 2015, when Walt Disney Company (Australia) partnered with the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney and Melbourne to develop and instal the Disney Fairies Trail experience (the Creative Shop), an augmented-reality (AR) application that allowed children to find, collect, and fly fairies such as Tinkerbelle and her friends from the Disney Fairies movie franchise in a number of public parks. The downloadable app worked on internet-connected mobile devices and geo-­ location technology, and guided by a digital map on the mobile screen children searched for fairies in the gardens, which appeared as animated characters overlaid on physical places, with the augmented-reality content activated by the app receiving push notification from beacon technology on the location of the user within the gardens and their proximity to each fairy hiding place (Fig. 6.1). The Disney Fairies Trail experience was launched as a temporary installation as part of a school holiday programme of events, using a commercial entertainment brand to promote engagement with and education about the natural environment. As a commercial partnership between an

Fig. 6.1  Screenshot of the Disney Fairies Trail mobile application. (Source: The Creative Shop, app designer and developer)

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entertainment company and a public not-for profit institution responsible for botanical conservation and education, the full title of the installation, The Disney Fairies Trail: Magic in our Natural World, speaks to the multiple hybridities of the application—public-private, commercial-educational, digital-physical, mobile-located, natural-magical, which were at one elided and celebrated in the marketing representations: The Disney Fairy Trail showed thousands of children the true magic of our natural world. The partnership reinforced brand recognition and values while fulfilling key social responsibility and education objectives for the Walt Disney Company in Australia. (The Australian Botanical Garden, http://www.australianbotanicgarden.com.au/)

Apart from promotional material from the corporate developers, designers, sponsors, and parks, there was surprisingly little public communication about this mobile app and its digitised experience of public place. Of course, this research only looked at public communication online, and so did not include private communication on messaging applications or social media networks. But, given this was an overt commercial branding of a public space, that it was an explicit digital remediation of what is otherwise a natural, if constructed, physical setting, and that the claims to supporting curiosity, engagement, and learning about the natural environment were somewhat murky and tenuous, there was surprisingly little volume or intensity of negative reaction to this application. Instead, most of the public posts and discussion revolved around enjoyment, with images of the app and experience shared on Instagram, or conversations anticipating and planning when to go and who to take, especially as an activity to entertain children during the school holidays, and suggesting the experience to friends: How cute The kids would love this We are planning to go, so definitely would love to join you! (Public Facebook posts)

Critical reactions to the fairy trail AR app revolved round much more prosaic complaints, and in particular difficulties getting the application to load or function properly, along with other less relevant complaints such as the poor quality of coffee available at the site:

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It won’t let me download the app on my iPad stupid thing Yeah I had probs with mine at first but the guy in the office had a troubleshooting sheet! Just had to fiddle with some settings …. That would have been helpful!! We were with people who had a working app so we just looked at the fairies through that. (Public Facebook posts)

In considering how this digitisation of public space was received in terms of social values and sentiments associated with either public parks or with digital devices, the analysis of public online comments revealed virtually no sense of this hybridising as unsettling, as transformative, as exceptional, or as corrosive. Instead, it was seemingly accepted as a novel but relatively familiar piece of entertainment, and a holiday activity aligned with the experience of the everyday. This is probably not surprising given the context and functionality: this was a temporary application that is reminiscent of many contemporary museum and gallery exhibitions; it was deployed as a mobile application involving commercial content and technical features familiar to many parents of young children using iPads and iPhones; and it was installed within a public park for only a brief period in a manner that was not visually obtrusive or physically damaging. In many ways, then, this digitisation was not significant enough to challenge cultural sensibilities associated with children’s parks, play, or use of digital media. HybridPlay, a crowdfunded app, is more directly oriented at reconfiguring the ways public playgrounds are used and conceived. HybridPlay (lalalab), which began as an art project called HybridPlayground in 2008 (http://www.lalalab.org/hybrid-playground/) is a mobile gaming system that incorporates sensor hardware with a smartphone game platform (for history of design and technical description, see: Díaz et al. 2016). The hardware is a sensor clip made of rubber with inbuilt sensors, including accelerometers, gyroscopes, and proximity sensors, which is designed to be attached to different pieces of playground equipment. The clip wirelessly connects to a smartphone to incorporate movement from the sensor as a physical game mechanic within mobile app games and the digital play space of the screen. An example of a HybridPlay game is Space Kids, which uses the sensor attached to swings or a seesaw in order to physically control an astronaut character on screen navigating in and through space. Designed and developed by a team of Spanish new media artists, designers, and programmers, HybridPlay is informed by the philosophy of the open-source movement—it is a gaming platform powered by Arduino

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Fig. 6.2  HybridPlay sensor clip. (Copyright HybridPLAY Clara Boj and Diego Diaz 2015)

open-hardware, enabling other games developers to build or customise games that incorporate the different sensors into new digital game designs (Fig. 6.2). HybridPlay is, then, explicitly designed for children’s public playground use; it not only depends upon the presence of and interaction with various pieces of popular playground equipment, but in attaching them to a digital game experience, clearly reimagines their functions, affordances, and meanings. The tagline, “A new way to play: HybridPlay transforms playgrounds into video games” is literal. Playgrounds are transformed into an element of the digital gaming ecology when the sensor clip is attached to play equipment, and by requiring that children play on physical playground equipment to control actions in a digital game space, the playground becomes a control interface much like a joystick (Fig. 6.3). The current status of HybridPlay is uncertain. It was launched on a crowdfunding site but did not reach its funding goal and the campaign is now closed.3 Whilst the product website is still live, it appears that it never went into production. This may be related to the product promotion and marketing representation of the application, which so directly targeted and reshaped the use and meaning of playgrounds. As a kind of gamification, HybridPlay was informed by an ideology of digital gameplay as radically and positively transformative. Here, the sedentary effects of digital 3  https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/hybridplay-engaging-fitness-gaming-onplaygrounds#/

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Fig. 6.3  HybridPlay design scenario. (Copyright HybridPLAY Clara Boj and Diego Diaz 2015)

games were reimagined by combining the attraction of mobile devices with the benefits of physical activity, whilst simultaneously drawing on the benefits of digital games for communication and teamwork transplanted into playground spaces: HYBRIDPLAY is a new, revolutionary inclusive fitness game device for you and your children to engage in physical activity by playing video games outdoors. Too many phones and tablets. Video games are a fun and enriching tool, but we can go a step further and make games not only mentally, but physically engaging, while bringing kids and adults together outdoors. HYBRIDPLAY combines the best of digital and physical play, enhancing the playground by making it inclusive for all abilities, and bringing back children’s excitement for the outdoors. It is the ultimate inclusive fitness game system for kids and adults! Join us for engaging outdoor fitness and play now! (HybridPlay crowdfunding site)4 4  HybridPlay, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/hybridplay-engaging-fitness-gamingon-playgrounds#/story

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In trying to combine the attractions and benefits of both digital and physical experiences, and address health concerns about digital play by implying that digitising public spaces would enhance their attraction— essentially suggesting that if you can’t get children off the iPad, take the iPad into the playground!—HybridPlay implicitly made claims that challenged social norms, values, and sensibilities associated with the configuration and understanding of children’s play, and in particular, normative assumptions about what kinds of play activities should be undertaken in places such as playgrounds. Much like the Disney Fairies Trail, there was not a great volume of public discussion about HybridPlay, but in contrast, the responses available were much more visibly critical. These public critiques were more clearly aligned with received discourses about both public playgrounds and digital media, with most concerned about the potential of digital play to migrate its negative qualities, such as distraction, sedentary behaviour, or anti-social dynamics into, and then corrupt the positive qualities of playgrounds for free and physically active play (despite the claims of the product developers or mechanics of the system contradicting such pronouncements): This is an absolutely awful ill-conceived application of digital technology. Proponents of the “Internet of Things” concept have gems like a sensor to tell you when your coffee mug is empty with an app to send a text message. Put the phone down and look in your mug! Same thing here. No Kickstarter needed. Just kick this bad idea to the curb. for goodness sakes just let children play … don’t get them addicted to computer games in the playground. Like the kids are going to do any physical activity, when they have a gaming device in their hands. Here is a idea for you, lock boxes on the playground for phones/games that only open after a hour passes. (Comments posted to tech blog articles)

These affective critiques not only centred on the inherently positive values of physical play and public spaces, and the contrasting inherently negative values associated with digital devices and innovation, but also extended to encompass broader notions about the corrosive trajectories of children’s play cultures dominated by digital media, and risk-aversion regulation:

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Maybe we should consider letting kids get hurt now and then to teach them the world is a dangerous place. Let them jump out of swings let them meet random children and play with them. Merry Go Rounds just aren’t any fun when you are not going fast enough that you have to hang on. yo dawg i heard you like to play while you play so we put a tv on all the outside toys so your shut-in kids will want to go the fuck outside once in a while. (Comments posted to tech blog articles)

Concluding The sense of incompatibility between public parks and digital play evidenced in these online reactions and comments to HybridPlay is revealing in ways not apparent in the Disney Fairies Trail application. Again, however, this is probably not that surprising given the context and functionality of the application. Rather than a temporary and peripheral exhibition, HybridPlay was imagined and represented as a direct restructuring of and transformation in children’s public play spaces; something that aimed to radically reshape the experience of the playground, the kinds of dexterity and play engaged in within these spaces, and consequently how the meanings of such spaces would be understood. Here, the digitisation of the space was adapting and innovating with newer IoT sensors and connectivity in a way that more profoundly reimagined what a playground could and should be. And this reimagining jarred with long-standing ideas and deeply held sensibilities about the role of public play and parks—sensibilities shaped by personal and cultural histories of association, memory, and experience that are deeply ingrained and largely uninterrogated until they are opened up by seams of the postdigital that reconfigure previously distinct technologies and practices of play. The examples discussed in this chapter reflect broader changes to children’s contemporary public play spaces, which are increasingly subjected to forms of digitisation occurring through the widespread and often incidental use of personal mobile devices around children’s public play, and via more deliberate design interventions that aim to embed or augment children’s play spaces with digital infrastructures, sensors, and interfaces. Although the examples discussed are only temporary or incomplete, they nonetheless render visible the paradox that these spaces are already highly digitally mediated through everyday mobile media infrastructures, devices, and practices, and in turn they register often-contradictory sensibilities attached to the reconfiguration and reimagining of children’s public play

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spaces. There is more work to be done, beyond the scope of this chapter, analysing the implications of these technologies for their capacities to capture personal data, and what this datafication of children and play means for the encroachment of commercial activity into public spaces such as playgrounds through digital infrastructures or applications. Nevertheless, at the level of social spatial experience, this chapter highlighted how within a broader trajectory of smart cities and play in urban space characterised by the blurring of discrete spaces of sociality, the messy arrangements of postdigital playgrounds reveal emerging seams of affective disjuncture and disillusion. Seams, on the one hand, express the logic and imperatives of technological innovation and development to spread and solve perceived problems, and on the other hand, express how such postdigital imaginaries, products, and practices are received in terms of cultural and historical values of play, and personal sensibilities associated with public spaces, digital technologies, and children’s play. This digitisation of children’s parks and playgrounds, then, resonates with trajectories and rearrangements already well underway—though unsettled and ongoing—in a range of domestic, online, and public spaces discussed throughout this book. These varied sites, from bedrooms, to blogs to parks, are now interwoven with both familiar but also emerging mobile and touchscreen media technologies, in which we see young children’s digital dexterity on display. This book has sought to locate and analyse how such dexterity with mobile and touchscreen media is not a simple physical capacity, but instead something that emerges through configurations of imagination, mobilisation, and mediation. These configurations comprise materialities of mobile media, young children’s embodied play and everyday lives, and wider cultural contexts, discursive formations, and commercial interests in shaping practices and meanings of digital childhoods. With such a range of technologies, economies, and cultures acting on young children’s access to, capacities for, and conceptualisations of mobile media, it is clear that the tensions around young children’s mobile media identified and analysed in this book will continue to produce young children’s digital dexterity in specific and competing arrangements of negotiation.

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Index

A Abidin, Crystal, 76 Affinity spaces, 76 Age, 5, 8, 14, 17, 54, 56, 57, 63, 73, 83 impact on internet use, 14 Algorithms, see Commercial software applications Ambient mediation, 36 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), 4, 5 Amiibo, see Nintendo Amiibo Apparatus, 23, 36–38, 43, 45, 46, 50, 63 Apperception, 60 Apps, 2, 5, 10, 11, 14, 18, 22, 23, 36, 40, 42–45, 47–49, 54, 55, 58, 61, 65, 72, 74, 79, 80, 82, 85–88, 95, 97, 114, 118, 123–125, 128 development of childfocused, 117 Ash, James, 94, 101, 103

B Baby selfies Baby Selfie app, 47 My Baby Selfie app, 47 See also Instagram; YouTube Benjamin, Walter, 60 Biological essentialism, 8 Bluetooth, 121 Body–technology relations, 58–60 See also Embodied relations with mobile media Bourdieu, Pierre, 58, 84, 85, 87 Branded platforms, 10 Brand loyalty, 101, 105 Broadcast media, 5, 13 children’s relationship with, 13 C Child-friendly software, 65 Childhood, 3, 6–8, 13, 18, 24, 38, 45, 72, 73, 82, 107, 114, 115, 117, 130 historical construction of, 7

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Nansen, Young Children and Mobile Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49875-7

153

154 

INDEX

Child–interface relations, 77 Children’s media history, 7 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), 76, 83 Child studies, 7 Club Penguin, 17 Cognitive development, 3, 7 impact of mobile and touchscreen technologies, 7 Commercial interests, 10, 130 shaping of children’s digital media use, 10, 130 Commercial software applications, 47, 82 algorithms, 47 Connected toys, see Digital toys Consoles, see Videogame consoles Consumer socialisation, 10 Cornet, Laura, 49 New Born Fame crib mobile, 49 Cramer, Florian, 61, 82 Cultural phenomenology, 59 Cyberflâneurs, 76 D Datafication of children’s play data-sharing, 106–108 de Peuter, Grieg, 101 Deuze, Mark, 23, 37, 48, 72, 87 Digital competency, 8 context of, 8 Digital culture, 2, 48, 50, 55, 77, 86 Digital dexterity imagining, 8–12, 130 mediation, 8, 16–19, 130 mobilisation, 8, 12–15, 130 Digital games, 2, 7, 10, 22, 95, 96, 98, 102, 106, 119, 126, 127 hybrid games, 95 See also Digital toys Digital literacy, 8, 9, 36, 41, 82

Digital natives, 64, 78–82 Digital parenting, 2, 5, 23, 37, 72–74, 84, 86 Digital play, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 15, 19, 23, 24, 56, 72, 95, 101, 107, 118, 125, 128, 129 See also Location-based media; Postdigital play Digital toys, 2, 4, 7, 24, 37, 93–108 Disney Fairy Trails, 114, 122, 124 Disney Infinity, 95, 99, 104 Dispositions, 23, 37, 44–46, 50, 55, 58, 60, 65, 66, 81, 83, 103 Distributed imagination, 118 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 101 E Early childhood settings, 3 Ecotechnics of care, 103, 104, 106, 107 Embodied relations with mobile media, 4, 50, 53 Ergonomic branding, 65 EU Kids Online project, 3 F Family influencers, 76 FIFA digital games, 96 Fine motor skills development, 11 impact of mobile and touchscreen technologies, 11 Foucault, Michel, 36 Fuller, Matthew, 61, 82 G Galloway, Alexander R., 72, 79, 82 Geography of danger, 114 Google, 17 Graphical user interface (GUI), 9, 63

 INDEX 

H Habituation to mobile media use, 11, 48, 56, 73, 81 Habitus interface design as configuration, 60–66 multiple layers, 59 See also Touchscreen media habitus Haddon, Leslie, 3, 9, 12, 13, 117 Haptic media products, 6, 7, 12, 56, 59, 63, 65, 66 Hayles, Katherine, 72, 80, 84–86 Highmore, Ben, 60, 66 Home, see Household Household children’s internet use in, 14 media environments, 14, 15, 50, 55, 61 Human–computer interaction (HCI) research, 59, 96 HybridPlay, 114, 122, 125–129 Hybrid Playful products, 95 I Ihde, Don, 59 Inappropriate content, children’s exposure to, 45 Infants’ social media use, 2, 4, 45, 85 Ingress, 121 Instagram, 2, 4, 21, 40, 42, 46, 122, 124 Interactive games, see Digital games Internet-connected toys, see Digital toys Internet of Things (IoT), 37, 98, 99, 105, 119, 120, 128, 129 Internet of Toys, 98 Internet television series, 47 iPad, 2, 5, 6, 15, 39, 42, 54, 55, 58, 61, 66, 74–86, 88, 96, 125, 128

155

See also Tablets iPad baby videos, 74–77, 82–84 iPhone, 2, 15, 54, 74, 125 J Jenkins, Henry, 9, 75 Jobs, Steve, 6, 79 K Keyboard habitus, 57 Kimishima, Tatsumi, 105 Kittler, Friedrich, 80, 82 Kline, Stephen, 10, 94, 101 L Lange, Patricia G., 4, 72, 75, 76 Lash, Scott, 96 Legacy media, 45, 57 See also Broadcast media Lego Dimensions, 95, 99 Livingstone, Sonia, 3, 9, 13, 14, 16 Location-based media, 116 Ludic capitalism, 79 Lury, Celia, 96 M Magnavox Odyssey, 95 Marsh, Jackie, 3, 4, 14, 15, 54, 75, 76, 99 Material spaces of use, 12 Material turn in media and communication studies, 59 Mathletics, 17 McLuhan, Marshall, 78 McPake, Joanna, 73 Media contexts, 3, 40, 73 changes in, 3 Media dispositions, 55

156 

INDEX

Media practices changes in, 13 generational shift, 5 Media theory, 7, 37, 80 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 57–59 Microsoft Kinect, 11 Minecraft, 17, 76 Let’s Play videos, 76 Minimum User Competency (MUC), 8, 54, 61, 64, 79 Mobile applications, see Apps Mobile devices, 2, 3, 5, 11, 14, 15, 20, 37–39, 41, 47, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 74, 95, 114–117, 120, 121, 123, 127, 129 Mobile media children as accidental users, 23, 37, 39, 48, 50 children as assisted users, 23, 37, 41, 48, 50 children as automated users, 23, 37, 47, 48, 50 children’s everyday encounters with, 36 interfaces, 2, 46, 53 materialities, 6, 15, 18, 36, 38, 53, 130 social benefits, 41 Mobile media play, 4, 18 See also Digital play Mummy-tech blogs, 10 N Nansen, Bjørn, 3, 4, 10, 13, 17, 18, 21, 37, 42, 47, 54, 55, 59, 64, 71, 76, 94–96, 115, 121 Natural user interfaces (NUIs), 7–10, 38, 58, 63, 78 Netflix, 15, 47 Nintendo Amiibo

Amiibo figurines, 24, 94, 95, 99–106 interfacing with, 99–103 intertwining with everyday play, 99, 103–106 Nintendo 3DS, 15 Nintendo Wii Sports, 64 Wii U, 94, 99, 100, 102, 104, 106, 107 Wiimote, 95, 100, 101 See also Nintendo Amiibo Norman, Donald, 38, 58, 64 O Osmo, 96–98, 105 P Parental mediation intermediation, 71–88 pushback against, 115 on YouTube, 71–88 Parenting, see Digital parenting Parents, 2, 5, 23, 37, 72–74, 84, 86 digital parenting, 2, 5, 23, 37, 72–74, 84, 86 dispositions towards mobile media, 23, 44–46, 50 guidance on children’s use of mobile media, 5 moderation of internet use, 16, 73, 74, 86 own mobile media use, 73 parental attitudes to mobile media, 4 perception of balance, 45, 49 See also Parental mediation Participatory culture, 14, 75 Pass-back effect, 41 Phenomenology, 7, 58–60, 65

 INDEX 

See also Cultural phenomenology Physical wellbeing, 11 impact of mobile and touchscreen technologies, 11 Playgrounds digital augmentation of, 119 digital use in, 22, 24, 114 Interactive Slide, 119 postdigital, 113–130 recreational use, 117 Virtual Mosaic, 119 Playstation, 11, 15 Plowman, Lydia, 3, 9, 13, 14, 18, 36, 37, 73 Postdigital landscape, 3 Postdigital play, 24, 94–97, 99, 101, 106, 122–129 Privacy, see Online privacy concerns Prolepsis, 73, 74 Public spaces children’s presence in, 114–116, 118, 119 children’s right to playable city, 122 digital use in, 114, 115, 122, 125, 128 personal mobile device use by parents, 115, 129 See also Geography of danger R Recruitment aesthetics of, 95, 101, 103 coercive aspect, 96 Research methods ethical issues, 21 media tours, 19 product analysis, 22 Residual media, 14, 54, 55, 57

157

Risk discourse, 36 Ryan’s Toys Review, 75 S School-aged children, 3 studies of, 3 Screen time active, 11 passive, 11 recommended times, 5, 44 Seiter, Ellen, 10 Selwyn, Neil, 7, 9, 81 Skylanders, 95, 99, 104 Sleep apps, 11 hygiene, 12 impact of mobile and touchscreen technologies, 11 Smart city, 120, 121, 130 critiques of, 120 Smart digital products, 4 Smart toys, 99 transgressive play, 99 Smartphones, 2, 5, 11, 15, 20, 48, 56, 74, 85, 114, 125 Social media children’s engagement with, 4 debates about effects on health, 6 Social networks, 42, 45, 72 Social wellbeing, 11 impact of mobile and touchscreen technologies, 11 Software applications, 3, 9, 11, 15, 47, 54, 65, 96, 116, 119 Sony Move, 11 Streaming services, 2 Surveillance capitalism, 9, 107 Surveillance of children’s internet use, 114, 115 Swiping, 11, 57, 61, 63, 74

158 

INDEX

T Tablets, 2, 5, 6, 11, 15, 20, 37, 38, 48, 55, 56, 58, 74, 77, 78, 83, 96, 97, 127 Tamagotchi, 104 Technological mediation, 48 Technologisation of childhood, 13 Television children’s relationship with, 10, 14–16, 47, 72 debates about effects, 6 Toca Boca, 42 Touchscreen gestures gestural literacy, 63 Touchscreen interfaces ease of use, 6, 7, 78 haptic exploration, 55 See also User interface (UI) Touchscreen media habitus embodiment, 54, 55, 58–60, 64, 65 encounter, 54–58, 60, 64, 65 enculturation, 54, 55, 58, 60, 64, 65 Touchscreens, 2–9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 36–40, 46, 53–66, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77–88, 97, 130 Trinen, Bill, 102 Tumblr, 48 parents on phones blog, 48 U UNICEF, 115 User experience design (UX), 54, 61, 63, 65

User interface (UI), 7, 23, 54, 55, 61, 64, 65, 82 design, 54, 55, 64, 65 See also Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) V Vernacular creativity, 75 Video calls to family members, 43 Videogame consoles, 7, 11, 15, 95, 101 handheld, 15 Video-sharing platforms, 15, 47 See also YouTube W Wikipedia, 17 X Xbox, 11 Y YouTube children’s agency on, 42 iPad baby videos, 74–77, 82–84 parental intermediation, 71–88 toy unboxing videos, 75 videos of children’s touchscreen use, 37 YouTube Kids App, 75 See also Family influencers