Introduction

Childhood is rarely viewed neutrally. Although strongly shaped by the past, childhood in the early 21st century is very different from the one that adults today remember. Looking into the face of a child seems to enable a ‘gaze into the future’. It is no wonder, then, that ideas about childhood, including those expressed in academic contexts, are framed by hopes and anxieties, and by the tension between perceptions of continuity and change. Many features of social, political and economic life have altered, even transformed, childhood in recent decades, and each of these changes has been tracked by academic research, influenced by policy making and reflected on by the public. However, one recent change has grabbed the headlines, setting the agenda for debate about society's hopes and anxieties as well its many uncertainties regarding the degree and nature of change.

The ‘digital revolution’ – widespread access to personalised, interactive, convergent, ubiquitous technologies for networking information and communication processes – is accompanied by anxious speculation regarding the so-called digital generation, digital youth, digital natives, digital childhood. Notwithstanding the excessive hyperbole of the media coverage, the sense of being ‘on the cusp of a new sociality’ (Golding, 2000, p 166) is palpable. However, much of this speculation is not as naively technologically determinist as it is often made out to be, as it is generally understood that fundamental social, political and economic changes have shaped and made possible the particular ‘digital’ environment in which children now grow up. Where early commentators appeared to regard technological developments as not only influential but also inevitable, it is now understood that particular economic, political and cultural processes drive innovation in technology and marketing, and that these processes are in turn subject to influence and intervention. Commenting on global changes in late modernity, Beck (1986/2005, p 15) observes that ‘a new twilight of opportunities and hazards [is coming] into existence – the contours of the risk society’. In the risk society, he argues, we are: