Media Proclivities, Preferences, and Perceptions of Digital Technology

This chapter explores children’s media tastes and preferences, moving from digital media to traditional or legacy media. Second, it analyses their perceptions of digital technologies as material aspects of their everyday lives and childhood. Both aspects of this chapter are important for understanding the children’s views about different media typologies and getting a sense of what each media does for or means to them. This chapter highlights the unfiltered opinions and concerns of teens regarding digital technologies and their uses. They gave quite revealing yet complex views of their digital media use and practices in ways that make Livingstone and Sefton-Green’s (2016, p. 4) description of children’s lives as an “intensely felt, bounded world of childhood” and one in which “much of children’s lives are relatively inaccessible to the adults around them,” quite relevant.