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ABSTRACT
Around the world policymakers are exploring the kinds of skills and competencies that teenagers need to have to contribute to society as digital citizens. Based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child framework, and informed by critical analysis of discourses around digital citizenship, this paper explores the competencies already demonstrated by many adolescents and addresses the priorities identified by policymakers. It compares the top-down adult policymakers’ blueprints for digital citizenship with the performances of citizenship by many young people, who mobilise digital resources to communicate with powerful others as a means of progressing their aims. Drawing upon examples of small-scale teenage activism, and linking these to some of the big questions of the age: climate change, gender equity and social justice, the paper moves beyond discussions of tech-addiction and online passivity to investigate adolescents’ strategic engagement in digital spaces to achieve a more equitable future.
Acknowledgments
This paper has been supported by the Australian Research Council via ARC Discovery Grant DP190102435: ‘Perceptions of harm from adolescents accessing online sexual content’, which includes Professor Lelia Green, Professor Brian O’Neill, Professor Elisabeth Staksrud, Dr Liza Tsaliki, Mr Kjartan Ólafsson, and Associate Professor Debra Dudek as Co-Investigators. The author is grateful to the ARC for their support, and to the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), the University of Canberra, and the Museum of Australian Democracy for sponsoring the keynote speech at the 25th anniversary ANZCA Annual Conference (2019), of which this paper is the formal record.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Lelia Green
Lelia Green has been researching young people’s lives online since 2002. She is the author of Communication, Technology and Society (Sage, 2001); The Internet: An Introduction to New Media (Berg, 2010); and co-editor of Narratives in Research and Interventions on Cyberbullying Among Young People (Springer, 2019); Digitising Early Childhood (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019); Framing Technology: Society, Choice and Change (Allen & Unwin, 1994) and The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children (Forthcoming, 2020). Lelia has been a chief investigator on 6 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grants and 7 ARC Linkage Projects. She is a past-President of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association and Professor of Communications in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia.