Datafied Childhoods: data practices and imaginaries in children’s lives

In an online talk I recently organized on data-driven environments, one of this book’s authors discussed how children are growing up monitored by their parents’ digital devices and by schools and educational platforms, without regard for their privacy rights. At the end, a participant wrote in the chat: “An amazing presentation. But also the most depressing talk I have heard for some time – and I work on climate change!” That participant also asked whether there was “any gap or glimmer of an alternative future to the one that the tendencies mapped out is leading to”. In the first pages of Datafied Childhoods, Mascheroni and Siibak seem to address that question. They note that “there are reasons to believe that this is an opportune moment, given current trajectories, to call into question the continued datafication of childhood at home, at school, and in a child’s peer group, and to imagine a different future in which data are repurposed for the social good and best interests of children” (p. 3). Mascheroni and Siibak aim to counter the opacity that surrounds the datafication of childhood, a topic that has been far less researched or present in news coverage than other risky consequences of the digital environment for children. For that purpose, chapter 2 presents three theoretical pillars that make it possible to go beyond a strict view of datafication as a data-driven business or political governance model: