Kids, KidTech, and Digital Capitalism

Uncovering the workings of the KidTech industry, this book explores how capitalism operates in digital spaces that are geared toward children and how this impacts children's everyday lives. This book foregrounds the social, cultural, and economic logics of capitalism and the historical trajectories of how children, childhood, and what it means to be a child have been shaped by these logics throughout the 20th century. This is followed by three core sections of the book, which examine present concerns. The first explores how young people are now entangled in digital capitalism as data, the second traces how children are recruited into producing digital content and-by extension-value for digital corporations, and the third explores how KidTech platforms are increasingly constructing digital spaces that isolate children from parental involvement. The book concludes by questioning the wider implications of KidTech on children's rights and its long-term consequences. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of fields including digital media studies, children's media studies, internet studies, media policy, children and youth studies, digital governance studies, and beyond. It will also be of interest to educators and policymakers seeking to understand the complex workings of children's digital lives. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

Natalie Coulter is a Professor in Communication and Media Studies at York University. Her research focuses on young people's digital cultures, children's media, girls' culture, and digital capitalism. She is the Past Director of the Institute for Digital Literacies (IRDL) and a founding member of Girls' Studies Research Network (GSRN). She is co-author of Media and Communication in Canada (2025) and author of Tweening the Girl (2014). She has published widely on such topics as digital media, social media, consumer culture, gender and youth culture, Canadian media, masculinity and Playboy, research harassment, and the social impacts of digital technologies.

Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Introduction: Digital Kids, Digital Worlds Chapter 2: Born to Shop? A History of the Youth Market Chapter 3: Fun and Free: Theorizing KidTech and the Workings of Digital Capitalism Chapter 4: Kids as Data: The First Fully Datafied Generation Chapter 5: What's the Difference? Play as Work in Digital Playspaces Chapter 6: Playing in the Moated Walled Garden: KidTech, Roblox, and the Metaverse Chapter 7: Digital Kids, Digital Citizenships, and Rethinking Our Digital Futures Index