Changing Childhoods in the Early Era of the WWW

ongoing

Online connectivity permeates the lives of contemporary children. Nonetheless, the history of childhood and the World Wide Web (the Web) has not been studied—a lacuna which mirrors the wider absence of the Web in contemporary history despite its invention more than 30 years ago. WEB CHILD combines the history of childhood and the Web to investigate how the emergence of the Web as a new interactive and connected medium with little adult oversight impacted childhood at the turn of the millennium (c. 1995-2005). To study the Web’s wide-ranging influence, three countries have been selected for comparison: the United States, Denmark, and South Korea. These were all digital pioneers, but had very different cultures of childhood. WEB CHILD has four work packages (WPs). The first three cut across all three countries and investigate the Web’s relation to childhood on three analytical levels: conceptually, socially, and materially. WP1 asks how the Web’s relationship to childhood was conceptualised in the public sphere. WP2 asks how children used the Web. WP3 asks what kinds of Web content were built for children. Using the findings from the first three work packages, WP4 explores similarities and differences in the influences of the Web on childhood across the three countries. The analysis uses sources ranging from the Internet Archive’s archived webpages to news items, interviews, surveys, contemporary research, and internet guidebooks. It combines computational analyses of archived webpages, e.g. text-mining, link analysis, and analysis of encoded interactive features, with methods and sources more traditionally used in history. Using archived web material, the project ventures into what has until now been uncharted territory in historical research, even if such sources and related digital methods are indispensable when historicising the recent past.