With regard to parenting, it is clear that digital culture increasingly shapes this sphere of social life. Today, most parents and children are either active users or have some exposure to the digital world through messaging, video calls, social media, and group chats.
Before we dive into the core of the matter, we briefly explore the term “digital culture.” It is relatively new, as it was formulated in the 1990s following the evident interaction and influence of interactive digital reality on social and cultural life. A particularly early and significant deep discourse of the subject is the book Digital Culture (2002) by Charlie Gere, a British professor of media theory and history.
From Gere and other scholars, we gather an understanding of digital culture as the complex of systems of signification and communication which define our current networked way of life. It is a converging point of narratives and technology, and at the same time, a dynamic process that enables the communication and flow of social and cultural richness.
Scholarly, it is interesting to see the nuancing of Alvin Toffler, who futuristically coined the term “Prosumer” in his book The Third Wave (1980), to mean ‘individualised production by consumers’ by means of or empowered by technology, way before the conceptualisation of ‘digital culture.’
More interesting yet, another scholar, Axel Bruns, in 2008 coined a crucial term: “produsage,” meaning active production (prod) and consumption (usage) of user-led content, an apt term for the description of what digital culture actually is. (Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, 2008). These two sandwich the reality of ‘digital culture’ both in time and in sense, even as we make sense of it today.
With regard to parenting, there is no doubt that it is also an area of human social life that is not spared by the threads of the digital culture. Today, most parents and children are either users or have had some exposure to the digital world through messaging, video calls, social media, and group chats.
This exposure informs their sense of identity and self-presentation and ultimately, to some extent, their digital socialisation. With these realities comes a powerful push towards adaptation, an intersection at which dynamic and endless parents-children conflicts of knowledge and values occur.
It is an opinion that is open to critique, that most parents have reservations towards the digital culture due to the differences in the parenting they received and the persons they were formed into, as compared to the circumstances today and the future they futuristically predict, ceteris paribus.
Scholars consider this in one way to be a generational dynamic, categorising the parents who have only adopted technology later in life, using words of Marc Prensky (2001) as “digital immigrants” and children who have been raised within the networked and media environments as “digital natives.” These terms serve the learning purpose, but are not entirely devoid of debate.
For young people, alias digital natives, digital engagement is a normal part of their social life, as they have not known social life without it. Parents who have experienced life without digital engagement can easily distinguish between reasonable use and excessive or unhealthy patterns, especially in relation to the performance of other tasks and performance in studies.
In the same way, social media may seem to be an immediate and important aspect of peer belonging for the young ones, but parents would consider long-term impacts and the risks involved, such as physical and mental health issues, validation issues, exposure to harmful content, privacy and online safety, as well as the identity and morals that young people embrace and embody. It is two groups approaching the same reality from two different sides.
At the family level, many families mourn the waning filial and parental bonds due to engagement with the digital world. Family members may be together, but everyone is choosing entertainment from devices rather than enjoying shared life together. This creates parents who do not understand their children, and children who do not understand their parents, who harbour anger against them, and even crave to stay away from them. When this happens, both the dignified parental authority and the family bond are endangered.
Engagements in the digital world unveil the different and dynamic faces of the global digital culture. Cultures of consumerism, self-expression without boundaries, sought-for virality, as well as evolved expressions of romance, are among the notable ones. As evidenced by research, there is also a rise in digital addiction, moral relativism, attention seeking and clout chasing, hyper-sexualised youth culture, normalisation of porn and nudity, self-harm, narcissism and self-promotion, image curation for digital attention, body image obsession, instant gratification, conspiracy and misinformation, as well as a culture of disrespect, mockery of history, and risky behaviours.
While digital culture, “a way of life”, has come to stay, we ought to be keen on the cultures it globalises and normalises, as mentioned above, especially via the agency of social media. It is behind the very positive contributions as the technology meets the social world, that loopholes for abuse and harm grow deep roots. These, I believe, make parenting experiences different today, but they definitely don’t make parenting impossible.
Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation and a student at the Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines.
