Children of the Platform Society: Generation Alpha, Beta, and Digital Advertising Cultures

Editors

• Liselot Hudders, Ghent University
• Steven Holiday, The University of Alabama
• Regina Ahn, University of Miami

Description

This special issue addresses how Generation Alpha and Beta, the first generations growing up within datafied, algorithmically curated platform ecosystems, experience commercial digital environments and advertising cultures. Children in these generations navigate seamlessly blurred boundaries between online and offline worlds, where algorithmic recommendations, creator content, and virtual participation increasingly shape their identity formation, consumer practices, and social relationships in ways that fundamentally differ from previous generations.

The issue seeks to move research on child consumers from the periphery to center stage by examining how commercial platforms construct, represent, and govern childhood while recognizing children as active social agents. It welcomes interdisciplinary perspectives that explore the theoretical, empirical, and methodological dimensions of children's participation in platformized consumer culture, moving beyond traditional vulnerability-versus-empowerment binaries toward more nuanced understandings of children's lived experiences within commercial digital infrastructures.

Potential topics

• How childhoods of Generation Alpha and Beta are constructed, represented, moralized, and governed within advertising, platform, regulatory, and public discourses
• How platformization reshapes childhood, including identity formation, play, learning, friendship, and consumer socialization within datafied and algorithmically curated environments
• How children construct, negotiate, and express identity through commercial and digital practices, including engagement with brands, creators, digital commodities, and virtual worlds
• How platform architectures, affordances, and commercial logics transform commercial persuasion directed toward children, including immersive, interactive, personalized, and AI-driven advertising practices
• Theoretical perspectives on children's consumer socialization, including reverse socialization and children's roles as producers of marketplace knowledge
• Consumption as a cultural and social practice through which children construct meaning, belonging, status, and self-expression
• Commercialization of children's everyday lives and the blurring of boundaries between advertising, entertainment, education, play, and family life
• Roles of caregivers, peers, educators, and policymakers in shaping children's commercial experiences
• Innovative methodological approaches for studying children's lived experiences within platformized consumer cultures, including participatory, ethnographic, computational, and mixed-method designs
• Children's agency and participation within platformized consumer and advertising cultures as content creators and brand advocates
• Diverse and situated experiences of platformized childhood across socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, gendered, and ability-related dimensions