This paper focuses on one of the most cited definitions that popularised digital citizenship in educational research and advocacy. The departure point for this work has been the prevalence of the concept of digital citizenship as an effort to account for the implications of digitalisation in contemporary societies. The paper provides a critical account of Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey’s definition of digital citizenship which has been endorsed by several influential child advocacy organisations including Common Sense Education, Media Literacy Now, CYBERWISE, the Obama Foundation, the UN Alliance of Civilisation (UNAOC), UNESCO, and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). The paper discusses Ribble and Bailey’s definition of digital citizenship in view of the scholarly theorisation of the concept of citizenship and the way the authors envision civic culture in the digital realm. In this analysis, the socio‐cultural implications of the extensive adoption of Ribble and Bailey’s definition in educational settings are being considered. It is being argued that through utopian solutionist narratives this approach weighs in on the debate on citizenship in the digital era against the backdrop of a climate of concern regarding the children‐new media relationship and the role of education promoting an educational agenda.
The paper attempts to illustrate the ideologies facilitated by the mainstreaming of Ribble and Bailey’s model of digital citizenship and the advancement of commercial agendas of the educational technology industry. It is being argued that the depoliticised understanding of citizenship underpinning the concept of digital citizenship is peddled in education by means of the appropriation of progressive pedagogical concepts which normalise edtech practices of surveillance and profiling and undermine the ‘risky’ creative forces of the pedagogical relationship and young people’s critical encounters with digital technology.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)