Children have the right to accessible and reliable public sector communication. However, our understanding of children's perspectives on digital communication from the public sector remains limited. This study addresses this gap by analysing how children aged 10–11 (n = 18) evaluate a Swedish municipality's digital communication regarding leisure activities on websites and social media during group interviews. Using John Dewey's theory on judgement, the study identifies seven core principles children used in their evaluations: proximity, comprehension, inclusion, in-depth information, accurate information and authenticity, influence and mistrust. These findings can inform the development of public sector communication to better support children's rights.

Föreläsningen tar med er på en resa genom olika forskningsprojekt om digitala medier och digital kompetens som Carolina Martinez varit involverad i sedan 2011. Projekten handlar om allt från barns digitala praktiker och syn på internetreklam, till äldres utforskande av digital teknik och hur de utvecklar digital kompetens med barn och barnbarn. I förhållande till projekten gör hon också en personlig reflektion över sin egen resa med digital teknik, och hur utforskandet kan vara både kreativt och roligt.

The advertising practices of YouTubers and their impact on the views and comprehension of commercial content by young followers have garnered scholarly attention in recent years (Jakkola, 2022; De Veirman, et al, 2019). While existing studies offer nuanced insights primarily into children's advertising literacy, limitations in previous research emerge from a singular treatment of YouTubers' influencer marketing as a unified phenomenon (Van Dam & Van Reijmersdal, 2019). In contrast to prior work, we distinguish between sponsored content and advertising for merchandise among YouTubers, considering them as two distinct types of advertising. Merch advertising, in particular, is perceived to have a closer connection to the YouTuber as an individual than third-party sponsoring.Building upon this distinction, this study analyzes how children appropriate sponsored content and advertising for merchandise, recognizing them as two elements within the blurred context of the parasocial relationship between the child and the YouTuber. The study relies on group interviews with 19 Swedish children aged 10 to 13. Theoretical frameworks employed in the study encompass concepts of appropriation (du Gay, 2013), moral economy (Silverstone, 1994), and parasocial relations (Lou, 2022) to explore children's engagement with sponsored content and merch advertising.The results reveal differences in children's appropriation, with sponsored content deemed more problematic than advertising for merchandise due to its perceived greater interruptive, pervasive, and deceptive nature. Additionally, discussions on merch advertising center on merchandise as products, addressing both the relevance and problematic dimensions of merchandise in children's everyday lives.These findings underscore the theoretical significance of adopting a more nuanced understanding of YouTubers' advertising practices in research involving children, YouTubers, and advertising. Additionally, we anticipate implications for policy and encourage policymakers to incorporate the concept of a more fine-grained understanding of Youtubers’ commercial content in their future developments of advertising labeling (disclosure) and codes of ethics for influencer marketing (Ortová, Hejlová & Weiss, 2023) 

YouTube has become the number-one outlet for children’s programming and video entertainment (Ahn, 2022). In Sweden, children spend several hours a day on the platform (Statens medieråd, 2021:58). 60 % of children aged 9–12, and 80% of Swedish teenagers follow a YouTuber or influencer (ibid:83). This form of micro-celebrity constitutes an important part of children’s media culture and everyday life, contributing to commodification and commercialisation of childhood. YouTubers are not only singers, gamers or entertainers, they are “promotional intermediaries” (Jaakkola, 2020:239). Youtubers make a living from advertising products through sponsoring agreements (influencer marketing), or from advertising their own products and brands, in the form of merchandise (“merch”).

Even though the YouTuber is a widely popular phenomenon, we still know surprisingly little of it from a child perspective. There is a lack of in-depth knowledge on how the child audience perceives and engages with Youtubers as commercial actors (Jaakkola, 2020). In light of this, the aim of the present paper is to further our understanding of how children appropriate sponsored content and merch within the context of the para-social relation between child and Youtuber.

To study children’s appropriation of sponsored content and merch among Youtubers, we draw from an interview study with 19 Swedish children aged 10-13. The results reveal how children’s meaning-making mainly centered around the relevance or irrelevance of this media content within the context of their everyday lives, and their moral economy (Silverstone, 1994) was an integrated part of their discussions. Children also expressed how they engaged in financial and moral support in order to enable Youtubers’ content creation, for instance by purchasing merch or sponsored products, hence positioning themselves as active agents within the commercial media logic.

References

Ahn, R. J. (2022). Exploration of parental advertising literacy and parental mediation: Influencer marketing of media character toy and merchandise. Journal of Advertising, 51(1), 107-115.

Jaakkola, M. (2020). From vernacularized commercialism to kidbait: Toy review videos on YouTube and the problematics of the mash-up genre. Journal of Children and Media, 14(2), 237-254.

Silverstone, R. (1994). Television and everyday life. London: Routledge.

Statens medieråd (2021). Ungar & medier 2021 En statistisk undersökning av ungas medievanor och attityder till medieanvändning. [Young people & media 2021 A statistical survey of young people's media habits and attitudes towards media use.]  Availible at https://www.statensmedierad.se/rapporter-och-analyser/material-rapporter-ochanalyser/ungar--medier-2021 

From the very outset, the domestication approach was inspired by an ambition to inform policy debates. This was obvious in early delineations of the approach in the 1980s. However, later research inspired by the notion of domestication has often come to overlook this ambition. This chapter presents three examples of analyses that engage with the notion of domestication in everyday contexts, while also explicitly addressing policy. The first case is based on data collected two decades ago when home computers with Internet connections had started to become commonplace in Swedish households. The second case focuses on how Swedish teachers deal with children’s mobile phones in leisure-time centres. The third case draws on interviews with older adults covering their reflections on and use of ICTs. This chapter argues for and illustrates the policy relevance of domestication research, and points towards the future. As media technology develops, it becomes of continuous importance to offer insights from domestication research. Studies can contrast, challenge, and hopefully feed into the formation of insights into what is going on in and around media technology. To do so, policy relevance needs to be explicitly formulated and communicated to relevant stakeholders as an integral part of research practice.

Even though research on digital citizenship has expanded considerably during the last decade (Öztürk, 2021), there is still a limited body of research on teacher education and digital citizenship, especially when it comes to pre-service teachers’ ideas of how to teach digital citizenship in primary school (Lauricella et al., 2020; Richardson et al., 2021; Öztürk, 2021). This paper therefore aims to contribute with research on teacher education and digital citizenship through exploring how pre-service teachers reflect upon and make didactic choices when designing digital citizenship education for primary school pupils, in the context of a university course centered on critical, safe, responsible, and creative use of digital media (Hobbs, 2011; Öztürk, 2021).

The paper uses philosophical, pedagogical, and didactical perspectives (Bergson 1907/2007; Sjöström & Tyson, 2022) to 1) define some challenges and opportunities in designing digital citizenship education in teacher education, and 2) perform a qualitative text-analysis of 50 student papers in which pre-service teachers designed and motivated project-based teaching promoting digital literacy within Swedish leisure-time centers (children aged 6-12 years).

Preliminary results point towards both challenges and opportunities specifically concerning taking into account children’s own meaning-making processes in the design of digital citizenship education. Results also show how a majority of the pre-service teachers included safe and responsible use of digital media in their project proposals and motivated their didactic choices based on children’s use of social media and their mediatized everyday lives. They constructed original learning activities in which, for instance, teachers and pupils jointly create TikTok videos and discuss what constitutes responsible online communication.

This paper is relevant to Nordic educational research as it advances both philosophical and didactical understanding of digital citizenship education in teacher education. The paper thereby contributes with knowledge on both practical and theoretical challenges and opportunities of digitalization and technologies in education.