The paradox of play: How Dutch children develop digital literacy via offline engagement with digital media

ABSTRACT

This paper considers how children develop digital literacy through offline practices of play. By inventing games, children rehearse and build up the competences, knowledge, and skills necessary to engage with online technologies in later life. While prior studies on digital literacy and play have explored children’s digital interactions with media, children’s play around media is increasingly traversing online-offline boundaries. Consequently, we argue that to fully comprehend how children build up understandings of the digital, paradoxically, we should also consider how they engage with digital media in offline settings. Drawing upon participants observations of 8–12-year-old children attending afterschool childcare (N = 77) and in-depth interviews with children, their parents, and pedagogical staff in The Netherlands, we develop a typology of practices of converged play through which children replicate, remix, and re-enact digital media in everyday life. Our findings emphasize that children’s digital literacy is foremost a social practice developed primarily in relation with others, within and beyond the digital realm. Thus, we argue that taking a sociocultural and non-media centric approach to play is vital for understanding children’s development of digital literacy, in a way that does justice to children’s continuous exposure to and immersion in digital media in everyday life.

Impact Summary

Prior state of knowledge: Play is instrumental for how children develop the ability to deal with digital media. Existing research finds that by inventing games, children practice and build up the digital literacy necessary to navigate an increasingly digital society in their later life.

Novel contributions: Prior research has primarily focused on how children’s online interactions with media foster their digital competencies, knowledge, and skills. We find that children’s engagement with the digital in offline settings is equally essential for understanding how children build digital literacy.

Practical implications: This study has practical implications for pedagogical staff, parents, and teachers aiming to facilitate children’s digital literacy, indicating that facilitating offline play around digital media can help children learn informational skills, knowledge about media production and social norms around technology.

KEYWORDS:

• Afterschool childcare
• audience studies
• children
• converged play
• digital literacy
• ethnography
• non-media centric approach
• sociocultural theory

Play enables children to explore and learn about the world (Bodrova & Leong, 2015) by imitating situations they observe and internalizing their experiences (Arnott et al., 2020). This also applies to their development of digital literacy. Growing up in a media-saturated culture, being able to deal with the increasing presence of digital technologies such as smartphones, social media and online games in their daily lives has become an important part of children’s learning. Yet, despite the pervasiveness of digital media, we still know surprisingly little about when and how play exactly contributes to children’s digital literacy (Edwards, 2013a; Kumpulainen et al., 2020). Previous work around digital literacy has primarily focused on structured forms of learning and how digital literacy is developed in formal educational contexts, such as schools (Meyers et al., 2013). Studies that do consider play, on the other hand, tend to discuss how children learn playfully with instead of about digital technologies.

This paper explores the role of children’s play for developing digital literacy. Building on Hobbs’ work (Hobbs, 2017), we define digital literacy here as the constellation of knowledge, skills, competencies, attitudes, motivations, trust, and insight necessary to thrive in digital societies. While previous studies on children’s digital literacy have mostly focused on online media use (e.g., Bird & Edwards, 2015, Kumpulainen et al., 2018; Wohlwend, 2015), we argue that to fully understand how children build up understandings of the digital, paradoxically, we should point our gaze towards the way children engage with digital media in offline settings. Recent work shows that children recreate and integrate the digital media they use not just within, but also outside their digital play, including forms of imaginative play, role play and outdoor play (Arnott et al., 2020; Huh, 2017; Potter & Cowan, 2020). Moreover, children’s other developmental processes, including how they learn to make social connections and build up cultural capital, have become inextricably linked to their development of digital literacy (Ragnedda & Ruiu, 2020). Yet, to what extent offline play around digital media contributes to children’s understanding of the digital remains mostly unexplored.

In this study, we therefore ask how children between ages 8 and 12 develop digital literacy through offline play. We take a child-centric perspective to explore how their everyday practices, experiences and interactions with digital media shape their understandings of the digital. Drawing upon participant observations of children at four afterschool childcare locations in The Netherlands, we present a taxonomy of practices of converged play (Edwards et al., 2020) that help children build digital literacy, that can neither be classified as fully analogue nor as completely virtual. Such knowledge can give more insight into the development of digital literacy in informal everyday contexts and shed light on the implications of the increasing collapse of online and offline domains for children’s digital literacy practices and understandings.

Literature Review

A long history of work in developmental psychology, pedagogical sciences and educational sciences has studied how play can support children’s learning processes. In line with Bandura’s (1971) social learning theory and Vygotsky’s (1967) sociocultural theory of play, such studies typically conceptualize play as an important resource for growth and development, through which children can experiment with the different behaviors they see around them (Papadopoulou, 2012). Gaining experience is vital for learning how to use media, where studies around television, for instance, have shown how by doing, children learn to process, comprehend and make sense of mediated realities (Anderson & Hanson, 2010; Buckingham, 2004).

With the increasing omnipresence of digital media in children’s everyday life, scholarly work increasingly addresses the educational effects of digital play. While scholars initially voiced concerns about the potential negative impact of playing with digital technologies for children’s cognitive, social, and cultural development (see Bremer, 2005 for an overview), recent empirical findings point towards the opposite. For instance, previous studies have found that digital play can stimulate children’s reading and writing abilities (Nash, 2012), mathematical skills (Jowett et al., 2012) and artistic skills and creativity (Leung et al., 2020). Despite the increasing body of work that explores the role of digital technologies for children’s learning, how children develop digital literacy through play still remains relatively unexplored, especially regarding older age groups (see Mensonides et al., 2023, for an exception). In line with Hobbs (2017) focus on the outcomes and relevance of digital literacy in everyday life, we draw upon Kumpulainen et al. (2020, pp. 475–476) conceptualization of digital literacy practices to uncover how children’s understandings of the digital take shape in their behaviors. Such practices may require skills across four domains:

1. operational: being able to competently use digital tools;

2. cultural: being able to make meaning and collaborate with others with digital technologies, acknowledging cultural norms and rules;

3. critical: being able to critically reflect, analyze and engage with digital media; and

4. creative: being able to interact and communicate with digital technologies.

Studies have primarily focused on more formal and structured interventions (such as media education) for fostering such abilities (Falloon, 2013; Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016), at the expense of the play-based development of digital literacy taking place in children’s other everyday settings. Such neglect may stem from the way technology and play have traditionally been positioned as antagonistic, painting a picture of children as passive and inert media consumers who no longer engage in any imaginary, creative or physical play (see Edwards, 2013a, for an overview).

Recent work, however, emphasizes the variety, creativity and vibrancy of children’s digital play across different age groups, arguing that children should be viewed as active agents who make sense of and internalize their media experiences through playful exploration, including imaginative and symbolic play (Kumpulainen et al., 2018; Livingstone & Pothong, 2022; Potter & Cowan, 2020). This echoes earlier findings that media texts, whether analogue or digital, foster creative forms of make-believe, regardless of age, gender and across cultural contexts (Götz et al., 2014). This highlights the importance of studying how children play around digital technologies and under what circumstances this contributes to their development, rather than a priori dismissing digital media “as irrelevant, or deride them as potentially harmful environments” (Marsh, 2010, p. 36). Studying play in the context of digital literacy is significant, as it can give us insights into how children perceive, understand, and engage with digital technologies. Moreover, gaining a more in-depth understanding of how children learn to use technologies through play is important for teachers, parents, and caretakers to be able to facilitate children’s explorations through which they make sense of the digital and to help them build the literacies necessary to navigate the contemporary digitalized society.

Following Vygotsky (1978), this study adopts a sociocultural view of play. Thus, we conceptualize the playful development of digital literacy as a situated and interactional process, in which diverse meanings and learnings are negotiated through children’s interaction with their social and material environment (Potter & Cowan, 2020; Potter & McDougall, 2017). While aspects of digital literacy may be developed individually, children primarily use, play and make sense of media with and in relation to others, such as relatives, friends or classmates (Pfaff-Rüdiger & Riesmeyer, 2016). Thus, taking into account the cultural, historical, social and everyday contexts of children’s play is vital for understanding how such practices of meaning-making are constructed (Huh, 2017).

Consequently, this paper employs an ethnographic approach, drawing upon longitudinal participatory observations to understand the social processes and interactions through which children come to learn about the digital, develop norms around technologies and acquire habits of media use. Moreover, in this study, we explicitly employ an emic approach, viewing digital literacy as a pragmatic resource that children can draw upon when considered appropriate, meaningful or relevant. Thus, rather than most digital literacy studies that examine to what extent children’s knowledge and practices match predefined lists of digital literacy knowledge and skills, we are interested in children’s actual media use and the impact that digital technologies have in their everyday life. What do children themselves experience as meaningful for building up understandings of the digital? And what is the role of play within these sensemaking processes?

Prior work discussing when and how play may contribute to children’s digital literacy has, understandably, mainly focused on digital play. Studies here have addressed how digital play may facilitate technological elements of digital literacy (i.e., learning how to operate digital devices) (Wohlwend, 2015), as well as the mastery of computational thinking (Dee et al., 2020) and creative digital literacy knowledge and skills (Kumpulainen et al., 2020). Yet, such an approach ignores the many forms in which digital media nowadays manifest in children’s offline activities.

Paying attention to how children engage with digital media beyond virtual settings is important for two reasons. First, in our contemporary media-saturated society, play increasingly moves across children’s physical and virtual domains and integrates material and immaterial practices (Marsh, 2014; Pettersen et al., 2022). For example, Edwards (2013b) found how in their pretend play involving dolls and teddy bears, children regularly re-enacted narratives from the online and TV shows that they had watched. A similar study by Huh (2017) revealed how children integrate digital content as sources of free play, transforming the online game space to create “their own play space, which may include not only the digital game, but also dancing and jumping within a physical space” (p. 192). Thus, online and offline play are intrinsically linked and increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Second, treating online and offline play as separate ignores how the presence of digital media has become interwoven with many other developmental processes of children (Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016). For instance, digital media affect how children playfully form their identity (Parry & Scott, 2019), form and maintain friendships (Carter et al., 2020), and discover the world outside their familiar environment (Arnott & Yelland, 2020). Such interrelations are also evident from findings in digital inequality research, that consistently shows how unequal distributions of digital capital cannot be separated from pre-existing differences in social and cultural capital, for instance around education and income (Ragnedda & Ruiu, 2020). Considering children’s engagement with digital media in offline settings can therefore also give insight into the interrelations between these developmental processes and the development of digital literacy. Consequently, this paper is guided by the following research question:

RQ1:

How do Dutch children between ages 8 and 12 develop digital literacy through offline play?

Methods

Methods and sample

To explore how children playfully build up understandings of the digital, this paper draws upon longitudinal, weekly participant observations of 8–12-year-old children (N = 73; 37 girls, 36 boys) at four afterschool childcare (BSO) locations in a major regional city in The Netherlands, conducted from February-July 2019. Play in this age group remains relatively under-researched but is crucial for the development of children’s digital literacy: in these formative years, media habits develop that are likely to sustain for the rest of their lives (Zilka, 2016). Afterschool childcare is an interesting space to study the role of play in children’s development of digital literacy, as it is a third space that temporally and spatially mediates the context of the school and the home (Vered, 2008). Thus, children experience less spatial, temporal, and physical restrictions on play than they would do at school in an educational space that emphasizes play as a means for learning and development. Finally, our research was conducted in the context of The Netherlands, a highly digitalized country. Recent survey research among parents of 7–12-year-olds shows that Dutch children typically have multiple media devices at home, with the television, smartphone and gaming consoles being the most used devices. Children’s favorite media activities are YouTube, TikTok and online gaming (Mediawijsheid, 2021).

Answering calls for more longitudinal, socio-culturally nuanced research on children’s digital literacy (Kumpulainen et al., 2020), we followed the children intensively over the course of four months (two months per location), to gain in-depth insights into their experiences, practices and attitudes of digital media use and how these are developed in different social contexts. Additionally, using convenience sampling, we interviewed a selection of the observed children (N = 17; 12 girls, 5 boys) using drawing exercises, to understand their perceptions and experiences of digital media from the point-of-view of the children themselves. Finally, we conducted parent interviews to gain insight into the family context of some of the children, as well as individual interviews and a focus group with the senior pedagogical staff at the four locations.

To include children with both more and less vulnerable backgrounds, with the help of managers and policy advisors at a local childcare organization, we selected locations in different socioeconomic areas: one with predominantly low-educated residents with relatively low income levels (A), two neighborhoods with a mix of low- and middle-educated citizens (B & C), and one area with predominantly high-educated, affluent residents (D). Three locations had a dedicated 8–12-year age group; one location had a 6–8 and a 9–12-year play group. Although all participating childcare centers were part of the same organization, each site had its own activity program and media policy. Each location was associated with two or three primary schools in the area. This meant that most children did not only know each other from afterschool childcare, but were also connected through the school, the neighborhood and/or the local sports or hobby club.

Participant observations

Each group of children was observed for two months in total by two of the authors. These changed locations every month to prevent becoming less perceptive to everyday routines and processes. Via the pedagogical staff, parents were asked to sign an informed consent form for their child(ren)’s participation in the research, which was approved by Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen (approval no. 61991802). Both children and parents had the opportunity to withdraw from the study at any time.

During the study, we adopted the role of participating observer. This means that we did not just observe, but occasionally also joined the children in playing sports or games or chatted with them. This way, the regular course of events at the center was disrupted as little as possible. Moreover, this approach allowed the observers to gain the children’s trust and to build rapport.

We introduced ourselves to the children as researchers with an interest in how children are growing up today. Thus, we did not mention digital media directly, taking a non-media centric perspective (Krajina et al., 2014). Soon, however, it became clear that due to their centrality in children’s everyday life, media came up during the observations without asking. After mapping children’s social networks and location’s spatial and temporal structures in the first observations, we therefore gradually shifted our focus to media specifically. For example, we paid closer attention to media-related behavior during observations and initiated conversations with the children when they were engaged in media-related activities. No media-related activities were organized by the observers; children and pedagogical staff initiated these of their own accord.

During our observations, we kept written field notes and made drawings and voice notes, giving a chronological overview from our personal perspective of the observed events, as well as observations regarding spaces, structures, dynamics, processes, atmosphere, and personal reflections on our own role during the observation process. Every two weeks, we discussed these materials within the research team to exchange initial findings between locations, which sometimes resulted in additional focus points for subsequent observations.

Interviews

During the second month of observations, we conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews at each location with a selection of the children, by means of a drawing assignment. Children were asked to draw their favorite activities and to talk about them while drawing. This icebreaker allowed us to probe for media-related behaviors, perceptions, and experiences. For example, we asked children about their social media use around the activity mentioned (e.g., a WhatsApp group with their football team), whether they looked up information about their interest online, and whether any media were present during the activity. Interviews lasted up to 30 minutes, until the moment the child started losing its attention. During the conversation, we took handwritten notes.

Finally, we interviewed parents of five of the observed children (N = 7), across locations, about their perceptions of their child’s media use, their attitudes towards media and their own media habits. These interviews took place at the family’s home after the observations had ended and were conducted by the researcher who had previously observed the child at the afterschool childcare. Additionally, we hosted a focus group with three senior pedagogical staff members (representing three locations). Each interview was audio recorded and fully transcribed for qualitative coding.

Data analysis

All field notes, drawings and interview transcripts were imported in Atlas.ti for qualitative, inductive analysis, using a grounded theory inspired approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). In a first round of open coding, the data was analyzed line-by-line by two of the authors for children’s practices, experiences, norms, knowledge, skills and restrictions around media, their interlinked developmental processes around exploring the world, growing resilience and building social capital, as well as the media content, platforms and devices used. Re-reading the material, similar initial codes were then merged or renamed into a set of more focused, transcending categories, to identify similarities across the dataset. This process was supported by memo writing and regular discussion meetings with the research team to discuss the coders’ interpretations of the research results. For this paper, the material related to one of the resulting categories, “offline play as a means for developing literacy”, has been re-analyzed in a third round of coding. Through this iterative process, we develop a taxonomy of practices of hybrid play through which children re-enact digital media and develop digital literacy in everyday life.

Results

Our participant observations and interviews emphasize how children are no longer living with, but in media (Deuze, 2011). Engaging in various converged play practices, the children we observed seamlessly integrated online and offline forms of play. Not only are offline-online distinctions difficult to draw in a hybrid media environment (Huh, 2017; Potter & Cowan, 2020), more importantly, children themselves do not necessarily experience such boundaries as meaningful or relevant:

Liam (8), Oliver (10) and another child play a [physical] game about shooting. The three talk about ‘being revived’, ‘shots’, ‘kills’, ‘HP’, ‘drugs’, ‘shields’ and ‘grenades’. I ask what they are actually doing and they explain they are playing Fortnite. When I respond, surprised, that they play Fortnite in real life, not on a device, they find [my surprise] strange. Re-enacting Fortnite, clearly, is the most normal thing in the world”. (Neighborhood B, observation)

Based upon our data, we develop a taxonomy of such “traditional-digital converged” types of play (Edwards et al., 2020) through which children build up understandings of the digital (see Figure 1). These practices can be placed on a continuum based on the degree to which digital media or children structure forms of (semi-)analogue play. First, digital media are most dominant in situations where they shape non-digital play when online games are reconstructed in offline settings, re-enacting social dynamics, norms, and values around digital media use outside the virtual. In a second type of play, digital media invite practices of offline play, through which children explore the world and acquire cultural capital by replicating and interpreting media. Finally, at the least intrusive end of the spectrum, digital media merely facilitate the remixing and reproduction of media content in non-digital forms, supporting processes of self-expression, identity formation and developing creativity.

Figure 1. Types of traditionally-digitally converged forms of play.

Digital media as shaping play

First, we distinguish practices of play through which children re-enacted the social dynamics of the online world in the offline games that they play. In such “mimesis” practices (Marsh & Bishop, 2013), media texts strongly structure children’s play through media characters, the imaginary worlds and the narrative possibilities that they present. Engaging in this type of converged play enables children to collectively explore, negotiate and learn social norms and values around the digital. Re-enacting digital games offline, consequently, leads to a cyclical and iterative process: through analogue play, children make sense of social norms in the digital realm, which then further affects their future online gameplay, etcetera.

Across locations, children would frequently re-play popular online games on the playground, often with remarkably similar rules that bridged the different neighborhoods where we observed, such as Roblox multi-player game Murder Mystery. In Murder Mystery, players are assigned the role of Murderer, Sheriff, or Innocent Bystanders. The objective of the Sheriff and Innocents is to discover who is the Murderer, while the Murderer wins the game if s/he “shoots” the other players first. Children across the four childcare centers re-enacted Murder Mystery as a form of outside play using the same rules, characters, and principles as the online game, but rather than the computer assigning roles randomly, the children would draw pieces of paper or straws. When re-enacting the game, children did not only assign media characters to pre-existing games such as playing tag, but also, transformed the complete system of the game to an analogue setting, a practice that Marsh (2014) described as “gaming the game” (p. 126). This included its rules for winning and losing, “right” strategies for playing the game, and modes of interaction with other players. Echoing findings about how children engage with non-digital media texts, different genders tended to re-enact different games, showing how boys and girls tend to exclude each other from their make-believe worlds (Götz et al., 2014).

In addition to re-enacting games offline, talking about digital media helped children to develop pro-social online behavior, with knowledge about the digital acting as a common frame of reference for children to connect. For instance, children would frequently discuss strategies for playing games. We also regularly overheard children agreeing to meet up in Fortnite (boys) or on TikTok (girls) later in the day, when at home where they would typically have less strict restrictions on media use. Helping each other progress in online games by exchanging virtual artefacts or following each other on TikTok further consolidated children’s friendships across online-offline divides. Children’s online and offline social spheres were strongly interwoven and consequently mimicked similar social hierarchies, norms and values. For instance, almost all children owning a smartphone used WhatsApp with the consent of their parents (despite the legal minimum age of 16 in The Netherlands for using social media), but most only communicated on the app with people they knew offline: family, friends, classmates, or neighbors. Similarly, most boys did not use Fortnite’s option to randomly select other competitors, but played with people they already knew, either on-site (with siblings or parents) or online.

Children’s inclination to help others in play, regardless of whether that game takes place on- or offline, was also visible in our observations of digital game play. A common source of conflict between the children and staff was children wanting to continue watching others playing Roblox games on the computer after their turn had ended. While the staff tended to dismiss this as “standing around” that stopped children from moving on to another activity, children themselves perceived this as a meaningful way of spending time. Watching others play taught them about game strategies they could employ themselves, but also provided an opportunity to showcase their knowledge and skills to help others and gain social status within the group. Consistent with previous findings (Carter et al., 2020; Vered, 2008), children would not watch passively, but actively engage with each other’s games, sometimes even operating a keyboard together. Moreover, while staff worked with lists where children could sign up for individual 10-minute time slots, the observation showed that when offered the opportunity, the children actually preferred playing online games together. Thus, fears around digital play as de-socializing children and directing them towards individual, passive modes of play may be unfounded.

However, we also observed digital media acting as a means for social exclusion. Having many followers on social media, possessing digital artefacts in games (e.g., outfits for avatars or “v-bucks” in Fortnite) and owning devices by popular media brands were perceived by children as social status symbols. Aaron (10) stressed how he owned an iPhone, dismissing the smartphone of one of the researchers as “skeer” (slang for “cheap”). We also heard children refer to their phones as “just an Android”, clearly considering the operating system as inferior to iOS:

Iris joins and sits with us. The children discuss whether they have a phone or not. Iris says: “I have an iPhone SE. My whole family has Apple. We’re a real Apple family.”

(Neighborhood C, observation)

A final example of how digital media may invite anti-social behaviors is the use of language children inherit from online game play. For instance, children addressed others as “noobs” (Mila, 10) to assert power positions and get their way, although such attempts were not always successful. This demonstrates how elements of digital media use might be employed by children to exclude, “downgrade,” or (re)gain control over others, both on and beyond the virtual playground.

Digital media as inviting play

Second, we observed numerous examples of how children replicate digital media content, devices and production processes through offline play, a process that has been described in the literature as “allusion” (Marsh & Bishop, 2013, p. 68). While these practices do not foster creativity in the sense that (fully) new, unique, or original ideas are being produced (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996), such play does facilitate the exploration of media. Imitation games help them to make sense of the digital and to discover the outside world via the interpretation of online content.

We regularly observed children copying media content in their drawings, speech, songs, and other creative expressions. They repeated lines from popular online videos and advertisements, and painted logos from YouTubers whose videos they enjoyed during crafts. As several scholars have argued (Malaby, 2006; Vered, 2008), knowledge around digital media – whether it is correctly being able to replicate the movements of Fortnite avatars or knowing how to play a popular online game well – constitutes a form of cultural capital that allows children to integrate within the group. When replicating media content, children were quick to correct each other when one of them made a mistake, such as forgetting a line when copying the text of a video clip. This distinguishes them as experts, while positioning the other children as novices. Beyond the social level, however, talking about media with others also helped children to build up understandings of media content, genres, and producers. Children were eager to show us their expertise and knowledge about digital media: when asked about TikTok, for example, Iris would immediately stand up to demonstrate some of the dances she had learned from watching short videos on the platform.

While we mostly observed cases where media content inspired imitative play, children also engaged in more imaginative forms of socio-dramatic and pretend play around media devices and production processes. At the location in the low SES neighborhood in particular, becoming an influencer was among children’s top ranked career aspirations. In one of the parent interviews, a father described how his daughter would craft a “camera” to play “vlogger”:

It can be a pack of tissues, so to speak, “this is a camera,” then she just puts something down and [talks] to it, or she makes a screen out of cardboard. “Hi everyone, thank you for watching, we’re making slime now” (laughs) and then it’s turned into a camera. And sometimes you’re not allowed to talk during […] because that’s a sacred moment for her, her and her screen.

(Neighborhood B, parent interview, father of 10-year-old girl)

This exemplifies how children make sense of the digital by translating virtual spaces into physical artefacts, which are then used as platforms for storytelling and meaning-making (Bird, 2019; Pahl & Rowsell, 2011). By building an imaginary world around these objects, children bridge what they see online with their physically-located play contexts in their everyday life (Potter & Cowan, 2020). Such converged play travels across spatial and social contexts; while the practice discussed above took place in the home, we saw similar examples in afterschool childcare, where children for instance made TV screens out of cardboard to play with. These practices may support children’s basic understandings of media devices and productions, and how these platforms and technologies need to be operated.

Moreover, we found that the integration of digital devices in offline play allows children to develop information literacy, such as learning what keywords to use or how to operate voice command when using a search engine. Across locations, pedagogical staff used a tablet to keep track of the children present and who had been picked up by their parents. With the staff’s permission, this iPad was frequently used to support analogue forms of play during quiet time periods. Crafts activities, such as drawing, would often start with a child googling a picture on the staff’s iPad. Sometimes, this was initiated by the pedagogical staff, but children also regularly suggested themselves that they – or the researchers – could find more information by using a search engine. Having grown up with a world of information at their fingertips, they had become accustomed to solving problems in this manner. When we, for instance, asked Charlotte (9) whether she could explain TikTok to us, rather than discussing the app at length, she recommended that the researcher would “type TikTok on Google”. Children’s ability to search for information online also became clear from how they tended to reach for online solutions to overcome hurdles while playing; for example, we saw children looking up YouTube videos to learn how to make slime or how to solve a Rubik’s cube.

Thus, by integrating digital media in their offline play, children help each other to build operational and informational literacy. Simultaneously, we found that for the development of critical literacy and learning to reflect on the (potential) consequences of one’s own media use, such peer support tends to be insufficient (see also Kumpulainen et al., 2020). For instance, when searching for information, the observed children selected the top Google result without considering the other information presented. Nor did they question or check the veracity of the information they encountered. Reflective abilities were also still developing regarding online safety. While children could easily reiterate their parents’ warnings about befriending strangers on social media or sharing passwords, most could not explain why such behavior might be potentially risky.

For example, Zoe (11) explained that she could have an account on the Roblox gaming platform even though she did not meet the required minimum age of 13, because she “never entered her own data.” This tactic allowed her to play games on Roblox, while simultaneously meeting the data privacy rules her parents had set. Yet, Zoe struggled to explain why protecting her personal details was important: “because then- what will happen- I don’t know what will happen. But I don’t want to know either.” This highlights the role that pedagogical staff, parents and other adults can play in fostering children’s early critical thinking skills, which, in contrast to operational literacy, may be more difficult to attain intuitively through everyday media experiences.

Digital media as facilitating play

The final category of converged online-offline playing practices that we identified is the remixing and (re)production of media content, what Marsh and Bishop (2013) describe as “syncretism” (p. 68). Such practices draw upon children’s knowledge about media productions, genres and formats. Children for instance invented new songs, dances or games based on YouTube or TikTok videos.

Although some children created content on social media, such as Larissa (9) who said to make TikToks daily, many parents were wary of their children sharing material on social media. Natalie (11) mentioned how she used to have YouTube and made vlogs but wasn’t allowed to post them anymore after her parents intervened. Rather, children would use TikTok, YouTube, and to a lesser extent, Instagram, for watching other users’ content, with such texts facilitating creative play beyond the digital:

Iris and Sarah draw something from TikTok. It’s an interesting sort of “game”, where they write down a word and draw various symbols around it. I ask them what they are making, and they tell me that this is from TikTok. […] Iris and Sarah stand up to do the dance that goes with it and sing: “I need your love, I need your time, I need to be free with you tonight”. They write their names on a white sheet of paper and draw symbols around their name while they are singing. […] They sing again and again because they try to draw faster and faster, but Luca (9) thinks it doesn’t sound good and says that they should quit singing.

(Neighborhood C, observation)

While these girls participated in a TikTok challenge, their aim was not to record or share it. Rather, they used social media as inspiration for small games they could do together.

Second, online gaming facilitated forms of offline play. At one location where Fortnite was immensely popular, boys organized “dance contests” that went beyond mere replication. While dancing, they integrated movements from multiple digital videos and games. A jury, similar to those of TV talent shows, then rated the dancer’s performance:

The little dances the children do resemble the dances of meme videos and Fortnite, although the children do not refer to it this way explicitly. The jury is changing more often now, although Aaron (10) is always in it. He does stand up however to demonstrate what he calls “the wiggle”. I see two children do the Running Man and the Carlton (modern dances). Liam (8) just does (from my point-of-view) random movements.

(Neighborhood B, observation)

Finally, children built physical games around media characters. As Woodfall and Zezulkova (2016) point out, in contrast to adults and media producers, children tend to experience media as platform agnostic and holistic. Engaging with media in ways that traversed adult-induced distinctions, the participants in their study created “media universes” (p. 104) in which not platforms or technologies but media characters – and their place within children’s lived media experience – were most significant. Indeed, we found examples of children’s media worlds not only tie together multiple texts and platforms, but also bridge virtual and non-virtual spaces:

Other children are playing some sort of “tag”. Jasper (11) is the “catcher” and says he is Chucky or Momo. When I ask who Momo is, Tara (11) says I can look it up on my phone, so I do that – Momo is a scary internet doll that occasionally pops up in YouTube videos. Larissa (9) says that Momo is sometimes in Peppa Pig videos. But she has seen a picture on Facebook that Momo is in prison.

(Neighborhood A, observation)

This excerpt shows how while media productions may start out on one platform (e.g., YouTube), children tend to engage with the same stories and characters in multiple settings (e.g., Facebook, the physical playground), integrating different contexts. Similar outdoor pursuit games were played as part of media worlds around the characters of Granny and Chucky, where one child was assigned the role of the media character and then needed to “catch” the others.

Remediating media content in offline settings can be seen as activities of multimodal meaning-making (Potter & Cowan, 2020). In addition, however, the remixing and reproduction of memes, games, videos and other media also draws upon children’s creative abilities, allowing them to practice with exercising agency in relation to media, how to interact with them and how to communicate with others via the recreation of media content (Kumpulainen et al., 2020). Such skills are increasingly important in today’s participatory media environment, where audiences are not just passively consuming media content but also actively employ digital media to meet personal, relational, or civic ends (Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2019). Our observations demonstrate how elements of such creative media literacy might be playfully developed within, but also beyond the digital.

Conclusion

Previous work around play and digital literacy has already shown how children’s playgrounds have come to encompass virtual spaces (e.g., Arnott et al., 2020; Huh, 2017; Kumpulainen et al., 2018). Our study finds that, in parallel, the digital also seeps into children’s analogue play on different levels. Our taxonomy distinguishes a multitude of converged play practices through which children playfully develop digital literacy both within and beyond the digital realm, as to them, such distinctions are not always meaningful.

Our findings show how children learn to make sense of the digital realm through translating digital play to the physical playground by re-enacting, replicating and remixing online media offline. The integration of digital media in offline play requires them to build up knowledge about media characters, genres, devices, and production. It demands that they interpret the media content that they encounter online and teaches them digital knowledge and skills, such as searching for online information, and social norms about how to behave online. Yet, our findings also emphasize the limitations of play as a means for developing critical literacy, beyond children’s operational, cultural, and creative abilities. While with age, the children we interviewed became more able to articulate the motivations for their online behavior, most found it difficult to identify possible consequences of online actions. This stresses the need for adult support to encourage children’s critical reflections about their everyday media use, for example around datafication, privacy and online safety, to equip them to navigate an increasingly digital society. While some online activities were clearly gendered, with boys and girls for instance drawn to different online games and different social media, we did not find clear differences in terms of their impact for children’s development of digital literacy. Our observations also show remarkably few differences between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, with children across locations engaging in similar media-inspired activities and showing comparable digital literacy knowledge and skills.

Our findings have important implications for the study of children’s digital literacy. The ubiquity of the digital in their everyday life underlines the necessity of expanding our gaze from online interactions with media towards the various manners in which children use and repurpose their physical surroundings for making sense of digital media. This requires research methodologies that allow for capturing how digital media technologies and contents travel across particular material contexts, designated spaces and periods of time. Moreover, the digital spans multiple social contexts as mobile media travel with children from school to afterschool childcare to the sports or hobby club to the home and connect them with others within all those spheres, highlighting the need for a child-centric, rather than context-specific, approach.

On the conceptual level, our findings also raise questions about “what we talk about when we talk about the digital” (Pettersen et al., 2022, p. 2). Building upon arguments of scholars who have previously advocated for letting go of binary distinctions between online versus offline play and instead positioning play practices on a digital ─ non-digital continuum (Edwards, 2014; Marsh, 2010), our results show that from the child’s perspective, we may problematize the notion of the digital as a distinct spatial or material category itself. This resonates with the recent use of the “post-digital” as a concept to capture people’s increasingly hybrid everyday practices, that may be better suited for understanding the way the digital seeps into children’s imaginations, creations and performances (Bird, 2019; Pettersen et al., 2022; Ryberg et al., 2021).Finally, our study has implications for media educators and pedagogical staff who aim to support children in their development of digital literacy. The converged practices we find offer a multitude of opportunities to integrate digital media education within children’s offline play activities, to stimulate their digital knowledge and skills while simultaneously supporting other developmental processes, such as exploration, creativity, and sociability. Thus, the pervasiveness of digital technologies in children’s daily life demonstrates that digital media education can no longer – if ever possible – be pigeonholed within specific spaces or contexts, calling for educational approaches that firmly integrate the development of digital literacy within the broader context of everyday life.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Astrid de Bruin and Henriët Bathoorn for their invaluable help with the set-up of and for their feedback during this research project. We are grateful for the warm welcome and support that we have received from the location managers and (senior) pedagogical staff at the afterschool childcare locations. We also want to express our gratitude to the children and their parents who participated in this research. Last but not least, we would like to thank Anna Van Cauwenberge for all her work and support to make this pilot project a success – we are happy to continue our collaboration in the NWO supported project ‘Informed Citizenship for all. Digital Literacy as Prerequisite for an Inclusive Society’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This publication is part of the project ‘Growing up with media. Digital literacy and media literacy in children’, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Stichting Kinderopvang Groningen (SKSG), grant no. KI.18.004.

Notes on contributors

Joëlle Swart

Joëlle Swart is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on changing everyday news use and how people develop habits, skills, and knowledge around media in digital environments. She sits on the editorial board of Digital Journalism and has published widely in journals such as New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and Media, Culture & Society.

Hanne Stegeman

Hanne M. Stegeman was a junior researcher on this project. She is currently a PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam and Marie Jahoda Visiting Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on labor processes in adult webcamming. Her research interests are online sex work, digital intimacy, online activism, and platformized labor.

Lucy Frowijn

Lucy Frowijn was a junior researcher on this project. She is currently a media analyst with the Dutch Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. She obtained a research master’s (cum laude) in Media and Culture at the University of Groningen in 2021. In previous research projects, she focused on digital literacy as well as discourse and self-presentation in contemporary (online) media, particularly zooming in on authenticity in influencer culture on Instagram, published in Cultures of Authenticity.

Marcel Broersma

Marcel Broersma is Professor and Director of the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. He is Academic Director of the Dutch Research School for Media Studies (RMeS) and one of the coordinators of the national UNL Digital Society research program. His research focuses on the interface between the digital transformation of journalism, social media, changing media use, and digital literacy and inclusion.