The rapid expansion of access to and engagement with digital technology has transformed children's and young people's lives. Digital technology has changed social and educational spaces and the various microsystems surrounding children and young people that are a crucial part of their upbringing. When discussing digital technology, we often assume a causal relationship between technology and certain effects on society and how we live our lives. In thinking about children and young people’s use of digital technology, the idea of causality becomes augmented and, as we have often seen, this is paired with concerns about how this technology will harm the younger generation. Yet, we recognise that digital technology is used in the everyday contexts surrounding children and young people. The microsystems of the family, leisure time, education and civic participation involve activities as diverse as searching the internet for information to help with schoolwork, communicating with family members, gaming with friends and classmates, and voicing their opinions about political issues. In RIDE, the strand on digital upbringing is interested in understanding both the harmful versus beneficial effects of digital technology in the everyday lives of children and young people, but also focusing on the unimaginable opportunities for learning and development and personal exploration and growth that digital technology brings. Simultaneously, we believe that it is important to recognise that the very same qualities and characteristics of digital technology make these positive contributions possible, such as its immediacy, portability, intimacy, unconstrained reach and lack of supervision and regulation of content, all of which has made children and young people vulnerable and opened up a range of serious social, intellectual and wellbeing risks.
In our research, we aim to work with the concept of children and young people as agents possessing a mixture of vulnerability, resilience and autonomy taking part in the social shaping of digital technology and this requires a need for a conceptual model that illustrates and exemplifies where and how this activity takes place. When we consider digital technology as an object of social shaping, a networked version of ecological systems theory allows us to concentrate not only on where children and young people act and interact using digital technology in their daily lives but also with whom they interact. This requires also an interdisciplinary approach and collaboration in order to understand how and why digital technology interacts with and affects the various microsystems (developmental arenas) surrounding children and young people’s everyday lives.