A “Post-digital” Continuum of Young People’s Experiences of Online Harms

Studies suggest that young people’s lives are digitally mediated and the risks and opportunities of being online are experienced and given meaning at the intersections of online–offline contexts (e.g., Nelson et al., Journal of Literacy Research 52:101–107, 2020). This chapter discusses findings from focus groups and a survey conducted with young people in England in 2021 about their experiences of and perspectives on “online harms” in the context of their wider lives. It examines the social contexts and patterning to online harms and how participants constructed risk, responsibility, and opportunity as concerns individuals, groups, networks, and platforms. The findings suggest that digital safety interventions should take a critically informed, rights-based approach to supporting young people’s “post-digital citizenship.” Meanings and experiences of harm should, moreover, be conceived of as unfolding across a continuum rather than through a binary of risk and resilience. While young people are navigating broader social contexts and network platform affordances, they are nevertheless active and interactive in the creation and maintenance of conditions of harm, including regarding the roles and responsibilities placed upon those deemed “at risk” to protect themselves. It is thus argued that young people need to be enabled to identify problems and act as ethical citizens within intersecting online–offline networked realities.