A Digital Coming of Age: Nine Accounts of Youth Spent Online
Project details
- Year
- 2022
- Programme
- graphic-design
- Practices
- commercial
- Minor
- Data Design
A Digital Coming of Age: Nine Accounts of Youth Spent Online is a book about growing up with and on the internet.
I pose one big overarching question: What was it like to grow up online?
What does it mean to be online? What does it mean to exist in a space that is not here nor there, a space that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere? It’s a uniquely new way of being, which my generation has been grappling with, and the generations to come will continue to grapple with.
The early years of my childhood were spent in an in-between phase of the internet. Email was not the shiny, cool new technology anymore, but mass social media wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today just yet. It appears that as my generation was navigating the time between being children and becoming adults, we were tangled up in the internet’s own transitory period.
And although growing up in this virtual environment feels like a universal experience many of the young people with access to the internet can in some capacity relate to, time and time again I’ve felt like no one that I knew actually understood what all of it really meant. Anyone born into the world pre-personal computer did not grow up with these technologies, so how could they understand? Growing up online is an entirely novel concept, the internet is with no precedent and we are all collectively experiencing it for the first time.
I tackle the big question in the form of a publication which documents this new experience in young people’s lives through a series of interviews-turned-conversations and my own writing.
Find more of my work on my website!