Datafied childhoods: Contextualising datafication in everyday life

Abstract

The article focuses on early childhood as a critical site of datafication and dataveillance. First, it provides an overview of approaches that situate the datafication of childhood within the new business logic and modes of governance called ‘surveillance capitalism’. Second, it presents approaches that theorise how surveillance culture has been normalised in a range of everyday family practices, including those supported by pregnancy and parenting apps, baby wearables and the Internet of Toys (IoToys). Finally, it develops the argument that we need to understand data traces as socially situated and account for the everyday embedding of algorithms in early childhood and family life, if we want to avoid the essentialism that characterises much of the debate around surveillance culture in the lives of young children.

Educational and Social Exergaming: A Perspective on Physical, Social, and Educational Benefits and Pitfalls of Exergaming at Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Afterwards

“…Second, media-driven topics include understanding the exergames' features such as the motion sensors, which are often readily accessible in the form of visual, performance-based feedback. This could also facilitate a visual approach to complex topics such as the ubiquity of technology and the associated generation, measurement, and surveillance of data in daily life (Mascheroni, 2020).…”

“My kid, my rule”: Governing children’s digital footprints as a source of dialectical tensions between mothers and daughters-in-law

“…Sharing tend to decrease as a child grows into adolescence, possibly as a request from the child himself / herself . In this regard, scholars have argued that early childhood, in particular, is a critical site of datafication for children (Mascheroni, 2018a), which is "the ability to transform almost every aspect of social life into online data" (Mascheroni, 2018b, p. 517). Taken together, these data support that sharing pictures of children on social media is a common habit for parents today in the global North.…”

Data (il)literacy education as a hidden curriculum of the datafication of education

“…Datafication, then, refers to the process whereby most of our everyday practices, both online and offline including aspects of the world not previously datafied and measured, such as social relations and emotions (Mascheroni, 2018) -are converted "into online quantified data, thus allowing [...] real-time tracking and predictive analysis" (Van Dijck, 2014, p. 198). As pointed out by several authors (e.g., Breiter & Hepp, 2018;Mascheroni, 2018;Sadowski, 2019), datafication can be considered a defining phenomenon of our contemporary mediated lifeworld. Various examples support this claim.…”

“…Children, too, are "objects of [a] multitude of monitoring devices that generate detailed data about them" (Lupton & Williamson, 2017, p. 780). The datafication of childhood takes place in various forms, as the numerous downloads of pregnancy and parenting apps, the increasing sales of wearable devices aimed at babies and children, and the growing market of Internet-connected toys all show (Mascheroni, 2018). As soon as children own smartphones, the amount of data collected from them increases rapidly, as mobile phone ownership makes the Internet much more available (Merikivi et al, 2016), and intensifies the collection of data.…”