Debating Digital Childhoods: Questions concerning technologies, economies and determinisms

Abstract The learning child, the child that is the object of interest through modernity and into mutated modernity, in the knowledge economy, is a digital age identity of great interest. Talk about childhood and the digital age invokes a range of questions about what is happening at this time and with these technologies and that creates more or less of a distinction that makes it both possible and necessary to start or to continue talking. This article identifies and engages with different positions in the debates on digital childhood. A range of philosophical questions are presented and their importance to the debates are explored. A series of metaphors and examples are presented in order to play, in a serious way, with the meanings and experiences and narratives of digital childhoods. To explore these questions it is worth considering a politics of digital childhoods and the ebb and flow of perceived tensions—of the sense that there is a problem with other ways of thinking about digital childhoods that are not accepted, not approved. That this talk might have the quality of a debate orients us to the probability that there will be significant differences in relation to not just the positions that can and should be taken in relation to children's digital lives but also what is meant by a digital age and digital lives. The focus of this article is constructing an overview of the debates around digital childhood and the ways in which the work of a philosophical line of questioning might contribute to the debate.