The internet and other online technologies provide children across Europe with a range of opportunities and benefits. The main opportunities can be classified into four categories: education, learning and digital literacy; participation and civic engagement; creativity and self-expression; and identity and social connection (Livingstone and Haddon, 2009; and see Chapter One, this volume). Research evidence suggests that adults and children agree that children use the internet mostly as an educational resource, for entertainment, games and fun, for searching for global information and for social networking and sharing experiences with distant others (Hasebrink et al, 2009).

The question about children's opportunities and benefits online can be theoretically contextualised by the notions of structure and agency. Structure refers to rules and resources, which are ‘always both enabling and constraining, in virtue of the inherent relation between structure and agency’ (Giddens, 1984: 169). Rules and resources related to children's internet use include parental guidance, rules and restrictions, material resources for using the internet at home and at school (for example broadband connection, a child's own computer), the availability of time to be spent online and so on. Meanwhile, the concept of agency has been associated with a long list of terms including freedom, creativity, self-hood, choice, motivation, will, initiative and so on (see Emirbayer and Mische, 1998), where ‘agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place’ (Giddens, 1984: 9).

Online opportunities are themselves interconnected and they all depend on children's agency and literacies. The significance of the internet for participatory activities lies in the shift from the ‘traditional’ public sphere to everyday active participation in a networked, highly heterogeneous and open public sphere (Burgess, 2007). But making use of any online opportunities connected to participation and civic engagement largely relies on communicative competencies in general and digital skills in particular. Hence, digital literacy can be seen as an essential competency important for democratic practices (Dahlgren, 2006). Digital literacy is also linked to participation through user creativity, that is, through various practices involving online content creation. Moreover, such creativity is essentially social as it needs individuals to be capable of using, transforming and extending information in a way that enables other individuals acting in the social field to recognise and acquire the information (Csíkszentmihályi, 1996).