Children and Young People’s Digital Lifeworlds

This book explores the ways in which adolescents in Nigeria domesticate technology and the role of digital gatekeepers such as parents, guardians, and teachers in their digital lifeworlds. Using a child-centred framework, what emerges is a rounded and textured analysis of how technology fits into pivotal aspects of the lives of teenagers. Here, teens are understood as ‘actors’ rather than just users of media and technology. The digital lifeworlds of young people in advanced economies of the Minority World are well researched. In contrast, research focusing on pre-teens’ and teenagers’ digital practices and participation in Majority World such as Africa, is still fundamentally narrow. The book is relevant to fields like sociology, media studies, youth studies, mobile media studies, African studies, and global media studies.

“A significant and timely addition to the scholarly literature on media and children, providing insights into a Global South context while exploring the complex interplay of domestication, mediation, and agency of children and youth. This essential resource invites us to think deeply and reflect critically on the digital lives of our youngest generation. More than just a case study, this book’s greatest potential is that it actively advances and builds theory in the field.” (Tanja Bosch, Professor, Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa)

 

“Chikezie Uzuegbunam’s methodologically and theoretically rich book probes, beyond platforms, the prospects and pullbacks of children and young people's digital realities. It critiques digital technology's access, use, and pervasive presence among Nigeria’s adolescent age group. Uniquely, it should be praised for its powerful epistemic pedigree.” (Bruce Mutsvairo, Professor and Chair of Media, Politics and Global South, Utrecht University, The Netherlands)

 

“In a world saturated with moral panics, hysteria and hyperregulation on how children and young people interact, navigate, appropriate and make sense of digital technologies in their hyper-digitised lifeworlds, Chikezie Uzuegbunam has empirically, theoretically, methodologically and analytically put together a tour de force. This is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the complex, messy and unpredictable ways young Nigerians (and by extension Africans) engage with digital technologies in their everyday life.”(Admire Mare, Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media Studies, University of Johannesburg, South Africa)

 

“This important, well researched, critical and timely intervention on children’s digital citizenship in Africa – a youthful continent – instantiates with empirical insights from Nigeria the complex reality of children and youth as frontier mediators of digital possibilities, imaginaries and agency as a global phenomenon.” (Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town, South Africa)

 

“Far from treating children and young people as passive victims of an unscrupulous and underregulated internet but instead taking their perspectives and experiences seriously, Chikezie Uzuegbunam provides a much-needed, deeply contextual account of the digital lives of urban and rural teens in Nigeria. Writing from a country where nearly half of the population is under 15, this must-read book helps to centre majority-world voices in a subfield that has largely drawn on minority-world examples.”(Wendy Willems, Associate Professor of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK)

 

“Insightful and grounded in the daily digital lives of Nigerian youth, this book should be required reading for those interested in the digital lives of Africa's youngest generations.”(Richard Stupart, Assistant Professor of Communications and Media, University of Liverpool, UK)

 

“We now have this imaginatively conceived, comprehensively pitched, carefully conceptualized, rigorously researched, and thoughtfully written account… that deserves to be widely read, well beyond the specialist area of research on children and young people’s media.” (Gerard Goggin, Professor of Art, Communication and English, University of Sydney, Australia)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chikezie E. Uzuegbunam teaches media studies and is the MA programme coordinator in the School of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa. He holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Cape Town, and publishes around digital media, young people and technology, communication studies, AI, and misinformation.