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Accepted Paper:
Childhood and/in datafied capitalism: children’s and young people’s perspectives on digital surveillance.
Eleni Theodorou
(European University Cyprus)
Katerina Mavrou
(European University Cyprus)
Spyros Spyrou
(European University Cyprus)
This paper presents findings of a study on youth’s practices and experiences of digital surveillance. It explores how children and youth in Cyprus understand and practice acts of digital surveillance as part of a broader question on the reconstitution of childhood in the era of datafied capitalism.
Paper Abstract:
Children’s and youth’s interactions in the industrialized world are mediated by technology, are marked by the production of large amounts of (meta)data, and have intensified children’s and youth’s experiences of/with the digital, giving way to what researchers have described as datafied childhoods (Mascheroni, 2020). A big part of datafied childhood is dataveillance (Van Dijck, 2014), that is the surveillance of people based on their online data; a characteristic of a new political and economic order Zuboff (2019) has called ‘surveillance capitalism’. However, notwithstanding calls for a more critical examination of children’s and youth’s lived experience with digital surveillance and its implications for children’s rights as data subjects (Lupton & Williamson, 2017), little is known on how children and youth make meaning of and engage as watchers and watched in acts of dataveillance and self-surveillance in the context of surveillance capitalism. This paper presents findings of a qualitative study on youth’s practices and experiences of digital surveillance. Using personal interviews, focus group interviews and a speculative design component with 15-19 year-old participants, we sought to explore how children and youth in Cyprus understand and practice acts of digital surveillance as part of a broader question on the reconstitution of childhood as a result of digital surveillance technologies (Marx & Steeves, 2010; Steeves & Jones, 2010) in the era of datafied capitalism.