Access to digitally connected living should support social and economic inclusion and provide opportunities for people to improve their quality of life. Yet evidence linking digital access and quality of life is lacking. We contribute by examining the relationship between quality of life and the extent to which individuals have accessed the Internet and whether they own their devices and connectivity. The dataset covers 27 490 individuals living in the Gauteng City-Region of South Africa. Results show that after controlling for other factors, individuals who are digitally connected exhibit significantly larger scores on quality of life indicators than individuals without access. However, 95% of individuals without access are from households below the median income category, and the odds of access are 9.85 times as large as for above median income than for those below median income. Thus, digitally connected living depends on, and cannot be disentangled from, preexisting opportunities for social and economic inclusion.

Technology plays an essential role in shaping youth’s communication and social interactions in online multiplayer games. Due to physical distancing restrictions during the COVID-19 global pandemic, online multiplayer games like Minecraft and Roblox are well-positioned to amplify healthy communication/social connections and mitigate the impact of social isolation. Research so far has been focused on how these gaming environments support youth development from the perspectives of individual stakeholders (e.g., caregivers, educators, designers, and developers). However, features of these games, such as communication and parental controls, are often misaligned with the ways in which children develop communication and social skills. Using a series of case studies of popular virtual worlds and online games, this paper provides an analysis of critical design features that serve youth throughout different stages of childhood and early adolescence. We offer three main contributions: (a) a comparison matrix of similarities and differences in communication and control features between platforms; (b) an evaluation of design features in selected virtual world platforms that promote safe and positive social interactions; and (c) a method for cross-platform comparison aimed at helping researchers, designers, and practitioners examine specific dimensions of social communication and play experience in virtual worlds.

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This paper provides a framework that adapts a design tool known as personas to better capture the ways that caregivers mediate their children's use of interactive media. Interactive digital media has become a more pervasive part of families' lives and tensions have increased around children's engagement with digital media. Historically, caregivers have enacted various tactics to mediate their children's practices around digital media. However, the design of technologies for children fails to account for different approaches to caregiving and the relationships between caregivers and children, instead focusing on the caregiver and the child as separate entities. The goal of our framework is to enable designers to consider the caregiver-child relationship by adapting the persona design tool to account for the relationship between caregivers and children. Drawing from prior research from user experience on persona development and communication on parental mediation theory, the framework outlines five phases to be used as a guide to develop caregiver-child dyadic personas. A dyadic approach to persona design explicitly highlights the relationship between two individuals (in this case, caregiver and child). We suggest that designing with dyadic personas enables designers to be more aware of nuances in caregiver-child relationships and can surface opportunities to facilitate collaboration between caregivers and children around interactive media.