I’m excited to announce that I am leading a team of editors launching a new book series with Palgrave McMillan exploring what we are calling digital childhoods. We aim to bring together interdisciplinary interventions that explore how children and their families experience, utilise and navigate new technologies. Urging scholars to examine the meaning of childhood in the digital age, Digital Childhoods addresses topics relating to how technologies and digital platforms shape families, parenting, and education across formal and informal settings.. 

Thus far, book series about digital transformations, children, youth, the media, education, family life and social change have tended to keep each field of study within conventional academic disciplines. Yet, these kinds of field boundaries are merging as it has become impossible to talk about childhood without considering the digital. Conversely, families and children are now a key arena for debate and discussion in respect of the digital. There is now an intersecting set of academic fields, in both teaching and research contexts, that bring together studies of broad structural and socio-cultural transformations focusing on children and childhoods. The series will bring together, for the first time, scholars who are interested in exploring the effects of digital transformations on family life, the experiences of growing up in a range of different societies, and services and sectors working with children (social work, education). 

The series’ origins lie in the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, which brings together scholars from health, education, law, sociology and media and communications to investigate the complex and interdisciplinary nature of digital childhoods. Over the last four years, the Centre has acted as a lightning rod for a range of international scholars from every continent who are exploring the nature of the digital transformation across contemporary childhood and family life. There is both a need for focused publications in this area and a forum to bring together varying disciplinary perspectives on a phenomenon of extraordinary social interest and concern.

The new series particularly welcomes critical publications that address the diverse and contingent nature of contemporary digital childhoods and that challenge normative popular claims about the meanings and implications of digital technologies for children, parenting, and families. This is a timely intervention at a time when much public and policy debate about digital technology and children is predominantly approached through lenses of harm and risk, without in-depth accounts of the complexity and nuance of digital childhoods in differing socioeconomic, geographic, ethnic and cultural contexts. 

The series will feature scholarly works (Pivots from 25,000 to 50,000 words; monographs and edited volumes from 70,000 – 100,000 words) that shifts public vocabularies when discussing this emerging societal issue. Authors and editors are strongly encouraged to write accessibly and to foreground actionable knowledge to inform policymakers, educators, NGOs, NFPs and the media.

We are keen to receive proposals that meet these objectives so please advertise the series and get in touch.

On December 10th, legislation restricting access to social media for young people under the age of 16 will come into force. The band is incredibly controversial and problematic and the eSafety commission in Australia has commissioned an evaluation led by Stanford University to try to tease out its impact and effect over the next two years. I have been asked to be on the International advisory committee supporting this evaluation. I am looking forward to this challenge and hope to be able to play a part in the public debate surrounding the implementation of the legislation as well as understanding of its impact and effect

This invited commentary focuses on the axiological role of “children” and “good childhoods” within public debates about control and regulation of everyday digital cultures. It consider contrasting approaches to direct state control, social norms and big tech in respect of children from China and Australia in order to open up discussions about the role of digital regulation, commercial powers and the changing role of the state.

The commentary aims to stimulate debate around three themes. First, how children and childhoods are often excluded from debates in communication research – a significant theoretical and cultural gap within the wider discipline; secondly, how the Anglo American political economy of Australia shares both similarities and differences with the perceived more authoritarian societies of China thus positioning the Asian Pacific as a key area for focus on the new forms of digital regulation; and thirdly how children and youth themselves provide both proxy and good cause for mechanisms around social control in respect of digital culture.

This article complements the other scoping review published last year. It examines current Australian research about digital media use by families with young children. Informed by a scoping review of 55 publications (2017–2022), we use select findings as departure points to consider how Australian media and communications research can meaningfully contribute to both local and international knowledge. We find that current Australian research largely mirrors international trends, particularly in its lack of attention to differing experiences of digital childhood and its emphasis on instrumental dimensions of parenting. However, we argue that features of the Australian context mean that researchers here have an opportunity to contribute much needed insights across several key areas. First, there is an opportunity to examine how Indigenous and migrant families navigate digital media, building on existing Australian traditions that highlight these communities’ media practices. Second, there is an opportunity to examine how digital exclusion shapes early childhood experiences, particularly given Australia’s persistent challenges with digital inequality. Third, there is an opportunity to critically examine how Anglo-Celtic Australian parenting cultures inform normative understandings of children’s digital media use. These directions would not only provide a fuller picture of Australian digital childhoods but would also address areas of significant need in international research. We argue that these directions would enable richer and more deeply contextualised understandings of the breadth of Australian digital childhood experiences, enabling better public debate about children’s everyday digital media use.

The online publication can be found here.

This new open access book available here outlines how the digital platforms that mediate so many aspects of commercial and personal life have begun to transform everyday family existence. It presents theory and research methods to enable students and scholars to investigate the changes that platformization has brought to the routines and interactions of family life including intergenerational communication, interpersonal relationships, forms of care and togetherness. The book:

• Situates debates about platformization, mediatization and datafication within a history of change in social organization

• Pursues the significance of datafication within self-understandings family narrative

• Summarizes current state of knowledge about the platformization of the family

The book emerged from a seminar jointly funded by the Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe project, the Norwegian Research Council and The Australian Centre of Excellence for the Study of the Digital Child held in Oslo May 2023.

We launched the book at an event held at the University of Oslo on the 20th of January 2025. There is a video of that event available here with speakers from the author team as well as respondents.

As the Albanese government introduces legislation aimed at restricting youth access to platforms like TikTok and Instagram, concerns arise over enforcement, surveillance, and the unintended consequences for young users and their communities. I provided “expert” opinion for Noes Kosmos available here.

In this recently published article available here, we argue that online, informal learning communities bring youth opportunities for learning that schools cannot offer. Yet, there are concerns about the impact of social media platforms’ control over online learning. We argue for a re-evaluation of what an ‘online informal learning community’ is by looking at such active communities on three platforms: YouTube, Twitch and TikTok. We do this by reconsidering Gee’s ‘affinity spaces’ and by asking: how can we understand online informal learning communities in the current sociotechnical context? We observed and analysed interactions of six learning communities on YouTube, Twitch and TikTok. Our results show that in today’s platformised online context, Gee’s concept of ‘affinity spaces’ should be reconsidered in three ways. First, platforms call for discussion about affinity spaces’ boundaries through the visibility regimes that play a part in access. Second, platforms challenge the affinity spaces’ grammar; to maintain a focus on their interest, platforms need to engage with interests provided by platform cultures. Third, a more fixated hierarchisation, informed by platforms’ focus on creators, impacts affinity spaces’ social structures. We introduce the concept of ‘platformised affinity space’ as a first step to specific dynamics that platforms introduce to online informal learning communities. We conclude that we only understand these communities when acknowledging how these dynamics are appropriated as well as resisted to achieve community goals.

This was the title of the most recent Digital Child seminar held at ACMI. The full program, list of speakers and description of the event can be found here.

At this his current time when there is so much negativity around the use of digital media for and by children and young people it was inspiring to hear accounts of the ways that experiences of digital media permeate every aspect of growing up today. Finding ways to better understand this, advocate for its meaning and pleasures especially in terms of finding a language to explain being with digital media remains a key purpose for all of us.

I will talk virtually at a conference held in Seoul, South Korea advertised as an international conference on media literacy. The conference is held by the community media foundation in South Korea.My  presentation reflects on a recent publication called  Manifesto for a better children’s Internet. This is a conceptual provocation is designed to help us think about what we might want from the Internet for our young people and what would be the key principles involved in designing a better space for young people and children to engage online. A video of my talk can be found here.

I was recently on a panel presenting at the Social Media Summit held jointly by the premieres of New South Wales and South Australia. In a context of extreme concern about the so-called impact and effects of social media on children and young people and in a country such as Australia where there is considerable political impetus to impose forms of control and bands on young peoples use of an access to forms of digital media, I argued: We all -children and youth included-live in a totally digitally dominated wold. Young people’s informal learning ecologies show their abilities to leverage education, civic engagement, and digital citizenship. A good childhood in Australia would enable schools toto help students develop meaningful interactions in the world.