Six books, all written before the coronavirus pandemic, explore how different aspects of technology may shape our lives in 2021 and beyond.
In Parenting for a Digital Future, LSE academics Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross watch numerous real-life parents navigate the tricky, shifting digital landscape. The parents they meet -- some the same ones they visited four years ago for Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green's The Class (2016) -- all hope that digital technologies will give their children better lives, but are unclear about how this will happen at a time when two children in the same family, just five years apart, may be grappling with very different technologies.
Today's 14-year-olds, for example, may choreograph video dances for TikTok, which didn't exist in 2015 when, at that same age, their 19-year-old siblings were testing out Instagram filters...which in turn didn't exist in 2010 when today's 24-year-olds were deciding whether they preferred Twitter, Tumblr or Reddit. Today's 29-year-olds grew up without smartphones and tablets. As Livingstone and Blum-Ross write, "The question was not just 'What kind of future will my child have?' but also 'What kind of world will they live in?'"
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