Co-Constructing Digital Futures
- Type
- Book chapter
- Venue
- Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children
- Year
- 2023
- Topics
- digital-literacy
Citation
O’Byrne, W Ian; Turner, Kristen Hawley; Paciga, Kathleen A; Stevens, Elizabeth Y. (2023). Co-Constructing Digital Futures. Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children.
Abstract
This chapter examines how families can work with children to understand privacy, security, algorithms, and participation in digital spaces. Rather than imagining protection as something adults simply impose, it argues for a co-constructive model in which children and caregivers make sense of digital life together.
This chapter looks at what happens when conversations about children’s rights, digital tools, privacy, and algorithms move out of the abstract and into family life. It asks what it means for adults and children to think through these questions together rather than treating children as passive recipients of digital policy decisions.
Why This Matters
One of the key tensions in digital literacy work is that adults often talk about children as if they are only vulnerable, and rarely as if they are already active participants in digital life. This chapter pushes back on that framing. It treats children as meaning-makers inside digital systems and asks what support, language, and structures families need to navigate those systems together.
That makes this chapter useful well beyond parenting. It speaks to teacher education, media literacy, and digital rights work more broadly, because it insists that literacy is relational. People learn how to live with technology in conversation with others, not in isolation.
📄 Full Text
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Continue Reading
- DL 297 — the newsletter issue where I shared this chapter during the MIT Press open review process
- Digital Literacy — the broader grove that situates this work within questions of power, agency, and education
- Teaching Philosophy — the pedagogical through-line behind this and related work