Technical Mediation of Children’s Onlife Worlds

This chapter offers an analysis of various technical media in children’s and young people’s everyday lives in a world in which the boundaries between life online and life offline are increasingly blurred in terms of s.c. ‘onlife’. Drawing on Latour’s notion of ‘technical mediation’, the authors use two empirical examples to analyse how contemporary children’s ‘onlives’ are enacted through interrelations between human actors and technical devices. The first example explores various forms of technical mediation between a two-year-old toddler and a music-making App in a home setting. The second example highlights the interrelations between a five-year-old and virtual reality technologies in a Makerspace workshop associated with the FabLab Berlin. The analysis of the two empirical examples leads into a broader discussion about learning and education in contemporary ‘onlife’ worlds.