Online connectivity permeates the lives of contemporary children, sparking endless debates about how digital media influence childhood today. 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.
‘Changing Childhoods in the Early Era of the WWW’ (WEB CHILD) is an ERC consolidator project, which investigates how the emergence of the Web as a new, interactive, and connected digital space influenced childhood at the turn of the millennium. In doing so, WEB CHILD provides a much-needed reflective backdrop for present-day discussions about children and digital media. Simultaneously, the project breaks new ground in the fields of childhood and Web history. It stretches childhood history into lesser-explored timeframes using novel methodologies and untapped sources. And it also meets the necessity for histories of the Web scoped widely enough to go beyond national borders and examine the connected information system as a global phenomenon. To study the Web’s wide-ranging influence, three countries have been selected for comparison: the United States, Denmark, and the Republic of Korea (South Korea). These were all digital frontrunners when the Web emerged but had very different cultures of childhood.
In studying the history of the Web in relation to childhood, the project takes on a significant challenge yet to be addressed in contemporary history: It provides an innovative history of how the Web became a digital, social, and cultural phenomenon penetrating essential cultural aspect of modern societies. The analysis starts in the mid-1990s when the Web emerged and made the internet a mass medium. It ends in the mid-2000s after the new technologies had made content generation and participation easy, and all three countries had more than 75% internet penetration in homes, making the Web part of everyday life.
Preliminary probing has yielded several highly relevant leads for the investigation, showing similarities across the three countries despite their otherwise different childhood cultures. Firstly, archived webpages show how producers and child users were interested in the new medium’s interactive and connective features from an early stage in all three countries. Secondly, the advent of the Web appeared to have disrupted established child-adult hierarchies, leading to optimistic notions of children as “digital natives,” more tech-savvy than adults. Simultaneously, however, pessimism arose regarding children’s heightened vulnerability to online dangers such as sexual predators, rampant consumerism, and internet addiction.
Building on these observations, WEB CHILD goes beyond the state-of-the-art in childhood and Web history, asking: How did the global phenomenon of the Web influence childhood in South Korea, Denmark and the United States, c. 1995-2005? The main question is operationalised via four sub-questions, each corresponding to one of WEB CHILD’s four work packages (WPs):
To answer its research questions, WEB CHILD conducts a comprehensive analysis where each work package takes a separate analytical approach across the three countries. The first (Cultural Ideas) investigates the formation of cultural ideas about childhood in relation to the Web. The second (Web Usage) explores children’s usage of the Web. The third (Online Spaces) analyses online spaces made for children. The fourth research question is answered by comparing the results of all three work packages across the three countries to explore similarities and differences and the reasons behind these. In merging the three analytical approaches of WP1-3, the project offers the first comparative, globally framed history of how the Web as a cultural, social, and digital phenomenon became a part of childhood.
WEB CHILD’s analysis combines many sources ranging from re-born digital sources (this is the technical term for webpages saved in web archives) to news items, interviews, surveys, contemporary research, internet guidebooks. Combining computational analyses of re-born digital sources with methods and sources more traditionally used in history, WEB CHILD will pioneer approaches that integrate re-born digital material in historical analysis, paving the way for other historians who wish to use material from web archives.
The central concepts of WEB CHILD are ‘childhood’ and ‘the Web.’ Inspired by new cultural history, both are treated as a historical construction impacted by cultural, social, and digital factors varying across time and space. These concepts also varied within the nation-states the project compares, but it has established basic definitions for analytical and scoping purposes.
The part of childhood of interest to WEB CHILD stretches from around reading age to adolescence. Mastering reading was a prerequisite for navigating the heavily text-based early Web. Adolescence was the time when a young person’s need for adult support and oversight typically changed due to a multitude of factors. Technically, the Web is defined as the system that uses HTML markup language, URL locators, and transfers information through the HTTP protocol.
Studies explicitly incorporating transnational and global approaches into their research design are still rare in Web and childhood history. Volumes in both fields often provide a global outlook by having separate chapters from different countries. WEB CHILD makes a united investigation of the influence of the Web in three otherwise very diverse countries on three continents. It adopts a comparative analytical framework. The juxtaposition emphasises the shared conditions which made the Web part of childhood across the countries, but also possible differences between them.
The comparative analysis is combined with a new global history approach, which helps to highlight how the global structures of the Web impacted the three selected countries. With its criticism of traditional historical comparison of nation-states, new global history stresses the impact of global processes not only across nation-states but also within them, e.g. children in rural and urban areas might have been affected differently by the Web. Because of the project’s pioneering nature, its ability to draw on established historiography within its specific area is limited. Consequently, detailed hypotheses about the specific reasons why the Web impacted childhood similarly and differently are not developed at this stage. However, WEB CHILD draws on major literatures in the fields of childhood and media history to develop explanatory frameworks as the analysis proceeds.
WEB CHILD’s wide geographical, analytical, and methodological scope accommodates the need to uncover the overlapping and diverging trends that the global structure of the Web brought to the countries selected for comparison. Traversing uncharted territories, it goes beyond the state-of-the-art in both childhood and Web history, delivering an important historical analysis of relevance to a wide range of fields interested in the evolving relationship between childhood and the ever-expanding digital realm across the globe.
