Parental mediation, YouTube’s networked public, and the baby-iPad encounter:mobilizing digital dexterity

Abstract

This study collected a sample of YouTube videos in which parents recorded their young children utilizing mobile touchscreen devices. Focusing on the more frequently viewed and highly-discussed videos, the paper analyzes the ways in which babies’ ‘digital dexterity’ is coded and understood in terms of contested notions of ‘naturalness’, and how the display of these capabilities is produced for a networked public. This reading of the ‘baby-iPad encounter’ helps expand existing scholarly concepts such as parental mediation and technology domestication. Recruiting several theoretical frameworks, the paper seeks to go beyond concerns of mobile devices and immobile children by analyzing children’s digital dexterity not just as a kind of mobility, but also as a set of reciprocal mobilizations that work across domestic, virtual and publically networked spaces