The Digital Is Kid Stuff

How popular debates about the so-called digital generation mediate anxieties about labor and life in twenty-first-century America “The children are our future” goes the adage, a proclamation that simultaneously declares both anxiety as well as hope about youth as the next generation. In The Digital Is Kid Stuff, Josef Nguyen interrogates this ambivalence within discussions about today’s “digital generation” and the future of creativity, an ambivalence that toggles between the techno-pessimism that warns against the harm to children of too much screen time and a techno-utopianism that foresees these “digital natives” leading the way to innovation, economic growth, increased democratization, and national prosperity. Nguyen engages cultural histories of childhood, youth, and creativity through chapters that are each anchored to a particular digital media object or practice. Nguyen narrates the developmental arc of a future creative laborer: from a young kid playing the island fictions of Minecraft, to an older child learning do-it-yourself skills while reading Make magazine, to a teenager posting selfies on Instagram, to a young adult creative laborer imagining technological innovations using design fiction. Focusing on the constructions and valorizations of creativity, entrepreneurialism, and technological savvy, Nguyen argues that contemporary culture operates to assuage profound anxieties about—and to defuse valid critiques of—both emerging digital technologies and the precarity of employment for “creative laborers” in twenty-first-century neoliberal America.

Digital technology has changed the parenting territory dramatically in recent years. Suddenly we've been tasked with preparing kids to be safe, happy and successful, not just in the real world, but in the online world as well. Martine Oglethorpe is part of a new breed of parenting educator who nimbly stays abreast of technology changes while keeping one foot firmly grounded in the timeless ways that make families strong.Martine skilfully combines her professional expertise with the lived experience gained by guiding her own children down the pathway to being skilled, savvy digital citizens. In these pages lies the blueprint for parenting kids in the digital age. It shares how to be engaged in the digital lives of our children without being overbearing or burdensome; to know when to tread lightly as a parent and when care and caution need to be taken.

Performing Contemporary Childhoods: Being and Becoming a Viral Child examines the changing nature of contemporary childhoods by exploring how children’s and young people’s digital media create new ideas about youth agency. Visual cultures of childhood have been traditionally traced in photography. Material cultures of childhood have been likewise traced in archives, scripts and even toys. This book shows that performance cultures and their digital literacies – expressed in viral forms such as TikTok dance challenges, tweets and viral GIFs – create new ideas about childhood by positioning young people as authors and owners of their self-representations. With the global pandemic in its immediate backdrop, the book finds that reshaped social relations and a context of crisis in our political, social and ecological realms cultivate nostalgia for ideals of innocent childhood that only promise to be disrupted by the complex, ambiguous and ultimately resistive acts young people appear to generate for and about themselves. This book is ideal for students and scholars of childhood studies, performance studies, social and cultural history and visual and digital culture.

Media Criticism in a Digital Age introduces readers to a variety of critical approaches to audio and video discourse on radio, television and the Internet. It is intended for those preparing for electronic media careers as well as for anyone seeking to enhance their media literacy. This book takes the unequivocal view that the material heard and seen over digital media is worthy of serious consideration. Media Criticism in a Digital Age applies key aesthetic, sociological, philosophical, psychological, structural and economic principles to arrive at a comprehensive evaluation of programming and advertising content. It offers a rich blend of insights from both industry and academic authorities. These insights range from the observations of Plato and Aristotle to the research that motivates twenty-first century marketing and advertising. Key features of the book are comprised of: multiple video examples including commercials, cartoons and custom graphics to illustrate core critical concepts; chapters reflecting today’s media world, including coverage of broadband and social media issues; fifty perceptive critiques penned by a variety of widely respected media observers and; a supplementary website for professors that provides suggested exercises to accompany each chapter (www.routledge .com/cw/orlik) Media Criticism in a Digital Age equips emerging media professionals as well as perceptive consumers with the evaluative tools to maximize their media understanding and enjoyment.

As a sequel to Archaeogaming: an Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games, the author focuses on the practical and applied side of the discipline, collecting recent digital fieldwork together in one place for the first time to share new methods in treating interactive digital built environments as sites for archaeological investigation. Fully executed examples of practical and applied archaeogaming include the necessity of a rapid archaeology of digital built environments, the creation of a Harris matrix for software stratigraphy, the ethnographic work behind a human civilization trapped in an unstable digital landscape, how to conduct photogrammetry and GIS mapping in procedurally generated space, and how to transform digital artifacts into printed three-dimensional objects. Additionally, the results of the 2014 Atari excavation in Alamogordo, New Mexico are summarized for the first time.

From how to deal with cyberbullying to the strange, true stories behind Barbie and G.I. Joe, media insider Bill Ratner takes an inside look at our wired-up world in a fascinating book—part memoir, part parenting guide—for the digital age. Landing his first job in advertising at age fourteen, Ratner learned early that the media doesn't necessarily have our best interests at heart. His career as one of America’s most popular voiceover artists and his life as a parent and educator gives readers a first-hand look at the effects of digital media on children and what you can do about it.

From the author of the bestselling Becoming a Graphic Designer and the editor of Adobe Think Tank comes this clear overview of the field of digital design This complete guide to the evolving digital design disciplines opens the door to today’s most sought-after job opportunities in Web, video, broadcast, game, and animation design. Featuring over 45 interviews with leading digital designers and more than 225 illustrations, the book covers everything from education and training, design specialties, and work settings to preparing an effective portfolio and finding a job. This is an ideal starting point for anyone considering a career in the digital design world. Steven Heller (New York, NY) is the co-chair of the MFA Designer As Author program and co-founder of the MFA in Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He is the author or editor of over 100 books on design and popular culture, including Becoming a Graphic Designer (0-471-71506-9). David Womack (New York, NY) writes about trends in design and technology for numerous publications and consults on digital strategy for leading organizations. He is the editor of Adobe Think Tank.

Nothing is more synonymous with the twenty-first century than the image of a child on his or her smart phone, tablet, video game console, television, and/or laptop. But with all this external stimulation, has childhood development been helped or hindered? Daniel Dervin is concerned that today's childhood has become unmoored from its Rousseauist-Wordsworthian anchors in nature. He considers childrens development to be inextricably linked with inwardness, a psychological concept referring to the awareness of ones self as derived from the world and the internalization of such reflections. Inwardness is the enabling space that allows ones thoughts, experiences, and emotions to be processed. It is an important adaptive marker of human evolution. In The Digital Child, Dervin traces the evolution of how we have perceived childhood in the West, and thus what we have meant by inwardness, from pre-history to today. He identifies six transformational stages: tribal, pedagogical, religious, humanist, rational, and citizen leading up to a new stage, the digital child. This stage has emerged from current unprecedented and pervasive technological culture. Dervin delves deeply into each stage that precedes today's, studying myths, literary texts, the visual arts, cultural histories, media reports, and the traditions of parenting, pediatrics, and pedagogy. Weaving together approaches from biology, culture, and psychology, Dervin revisits who we once were as a species in order to enable us to grasp who we are becoming, and where we might be heading, for better or worse.