Abstract
Contemporary children’s digital rights discourse increasingly assumes that human flourishing depends on safe, optimised participation in digital environments and that institutional futures are inherently digital. This article develops a genealogical theory of “the digital child” as a mediated subject produced through the convergence of digital rights discourse, platform infrastructures, and compulsory institutional environments. Using schooling as a paradigmatic site of compulsory media participation, it denaturalises the presumption of “digital futures” by showing how digital inevitability emerges through policy genres, infrastructural dependence, and limited refusal. Drawing on Simone Weil’s claim that obligations precede rights and on Foucauldian genealogy, it analyses children’s digital rights instruments and education digitisation strategies. It traces four recurring regimes of problematisation—protection, participation, agency, skills/future readiness—through which digital-by-default participation becomes morally obligatory and practically difficult to refuse. It concludes by proposing an obligations-first framework for governing mediated futures in compulsory contexts, foregrounding necessity, proportionality, reversibility, and contestability as evaluative criteria for media governance where participation is infrastructural and not voluntary.
Keywords
Introduction and literature review
Across contemporary media environments, participation in digital systems is governed as both inevitable and desirable. Access, inclusion, and future readiness are routinely articulated through platforms, data infrastructures, and optimisation logics that render digital participation a baseline condition of institutional life. While these dynamics are often discussed in relation to commercial platforms or everyday media use, they are particularly consequential in compulsory institutional contexts where participation is difficult to refuse and media infrastructures increasingly organise access, recognition, and belonging.
This article advances a genealogical theory of “the digital child” as a mediated subject produced through the convergence of children’s digital rights discourse, platform infrastructures, and compulsory institutional environments. It conceptualises this figure as a historically contingent form of media governance through which particular assumptions about participation, agency, safety, and futurity are stabilised as common sense. Schooling is analysed not simply as an educational sector, but as a paradigmatic compulsory media environment in which participation in digital systems is infrastructural, routinised, and difficult to refuse.
Here, compulsory mediated environments refer to institutional settings in which participation is practically mandatory and core functions are routed through media infrastructures, such that opting out carries material penalties (e.g. loss of access, recognition, institutional legibility). As a result, schooling provides a critical site for examining how mediated futures are governed under conditions of limited consent and heightened institutional obligation.
While schooling provides the primary empirical focus, the mechanisms analysed here are not specific to education. Similar dynamics increasingly characterise other institutional media environments, including welfare systems, health platforms, migration and border infrastructures, and digitally mediated civic and administrative participation. In these contexts, participation is likewise infrastructural and difficult to refuse, and rights-based frameworks often operate within platformised systems. Analysing schooling as a paradigmatic case thus enables a broader theorisation of how media governance produces subjects under conditions of infrastructural inevitability—one that is already shaped early in childhood. In this sense, the extension to other domains is theoretical and points to areas for further empirical work.
Within contemporary institutional policy discourse, children’s rights are increasingly articulated through a digital register. In education, this is especially visible: access to learning is reframed as access to digital systems; participation is realised through platforms; and future readiness is defined in terms of digital competence and datafied engagement. Influential scholarship has helped consolidate this shift by arguing that children’s rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) must be interpreted and realised within digital environments (Livingstone and Third, 2017). As these framings are institutionalised, they not only protect children in mediated contexts but actively configure participation in digital infrastructures as the normative condition of institutional belonging. Childhood becomes legible as a digital project, and digital participation as a governance baseline, not a contingent choice.
This institutionalisation is most visible in education-focussed rights instruments and policy frameworks, including the UNCRC’s General Comment No. 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment (UNCRC, 2021), alongside national and transnational education strategies that link children’s rights to access, participation, and benefit within digital and AI-enabled systems (UK Government, 2025a; OECD, 2025; World Bank, 2024).
In compulsory institutional settings, these frameworks contribute to a subtle but consequential shift: Digitisation is no longer framed as a contingent pedagogical or organisational choice, but as a moral and institutional obligation. Children’s digital rights discourse thus does not merely respond to technological change; it participates in producing digital inevitability as a governing assumption of institutional life.
This matters because compulsory institutions are not neutral sites of media participation. They are characterised by asymmetries of power, limited meaningful consent, and heightened state responsibility, albeit to varying degrees across geopolitical contexts. When such institutions become dependent on platform infrastructures, participation is no longer a matter of individual media use but is institutionally enforced. In this context, rights-based framings that prioritise “safe participation” can inadvertently stabilise a deeper infrastructural settlement, embedding data-intensive systems into the core conditions of children’s learning, development, and futures.
This article does not contest the legitimacy or importance of children’s digital rights, nor the necessity of protecting children from harm in mediated environments. The field itself is internally diverse and contested. The concern here is that contemporary children’s digital rights discourse increasingly functions as an implicit theory of childhood and futurity, and that compulsory institutions such as schooling have become key sites where this theory is enacted. Within policy and practice, digital participation is routinely treated as the default condition of equitable institutional inclusion, while digitisation is framed as an unavoidable pathway to personalisation, opportunity, and future readiness (European Commission, 2025; UK Government, 2025a, 2025b; UNICEF, n.d).
This is not to claim that rights are merely rhetorical or ineffective, but to take seriously a central insight in critical rights theory: Rights can operate not only as constraints on power but also as modalities of governance that organise political attention, legitimate particular arrangements, and help produce the very subjects they purport to protect (Brown, 2004). Framed this way, children’s digital rights discourse becomes analytically legible as a governance grammar for mediated participation, not simply a set of safeguards for it.
As a result, childhood is increasingly configured as a project of continuous digital optimisation—measured, predicted, monitored, and “improved” through platform infrastructures and analytics. This configuration is not merely descriptive of technological change; it operates as an anticipatory mode of governance in which imagined futures are mobilised to organise present institutional reform (Berten and Kranke, 2022; Oomen et al., 2022).
At the same time, structural conditions—data extraction, behavioural tracking, inferencing, procurement dependency, and the displacement of non-digital practices—are frequently recoded as secondary “risks,” obscuring their character as political-economic arrangements that must be open to refusal or reversal (van Dijck et al., 2018; Williamson and Eynon, 2020). Digital rights discourse increasingly positions digital technologies as the environment of modern institutional participation, while ethical and regulatory attention is directed towards improvement, optimisation, and management, with limited attention to contestation of the underlying infrastructures. The result is a narrowing of the conceptual terrain within which mediated futures are imagined and governed.
This article develops that claim through two theoretical orientations. First, it draws on Simone Weil’s claim that obligations are morally prior to rights. Writing long before the emergence of digital media infrastructures, Weil argued that obligations are unconditional and precede any institutional articulation of rights: “A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations” (Weil, 1949: 2). In The Need for Roots, she warned that modern societies risk producing “uprooted” subjects—deprived of depth, continuity, attention, and meaningful social obligations—through forms of organisation that substitute mechanical processes for ethical judgement (Weil, 1949).
Although formulated in a pre-digital context, Weil’s critique is strikingly resonant with contemporary mediated environments characterised by perpetual connectivity, algorithmic modulation, gamified feedback, and the fragmentation of attention (Yeung, 2017). Her emphasis on rootedness, attention, and non-instrumental regard provides a normative counter-foundation to digital rights frameworks that take participation within existing infrastructures as their starting point. On this basis, the article advances an obligations-based theory of media governance for compulsory institutional contexts, shifting the evaluative question from how participation can be made safer or more inclusive to whether particular media arrangements honour what is owed to subjects prior to, and independently of, their participation.
Second, the article employs a Foucauldian genealogy as a theoretical analytic to examine how mediated subjects are produced through recurrent regimes of problematisation (Foucault, 1977). It traces how four such regimes—protection, participation, agency, and digital skills/future readiness—interact to consolidate the figure of “the digital child” as a common sense, while displacing more fundamental questions about enforceable obligations owed to children across institutional settings.
From a genealogical perspective, “the digital child” is not a natural or inevitable subject of modernity, but a policy artefact generated at the intersection of rights discourse, governance priorities, technological imaginaries, and platform political economy.
The argument here concerns ordering, not wholesale rejection of mediated participation. Rather, it is that the prevailing “digital rights” paradigm too readily converts a contested infrastructural settlement into a developmental and moral horizon. By integrating obligations ethics with genealogical theory, the article proposes a conceptual framework for understanding how media governance produces subjects whose futures appear digitally pre-scripted. In doing so, it reopens analytical and normative space for non-digital and low-digital forms of participation as legitimate media arrangements, challenging their framing as deficient alternatives to a presumed digital-by-default future.
The paper proceeds by first theorising how “digital inevitability” is produced as a governance achievement; it then shows how four regimes of problematisation stabilise digital participation as obligatory; and closes by proposing an obligations-first account of media governance for compulsory mediated environments.
Theoretical framework: Genealogy, mediated inevitability, and subject formation
This article approaches digital inevitability as a problem of media governance: a historically produced condition in which particular infrastructures come to appear necessary, natural, and beyond legitimate contestation. Here, genealogy is operationalised through attention to the repetition and accumulation of problematisations across policy, research, and advocacy domains. To theorise this process, it mobilises Foucauldian genealogy (1977) as a theory of mediated subject formation, moving beyond approaches that treat it as a method of policy evaluation or document analysis. Its temporal scope is therefore non-linear, concerned with how recent policy, infrastructural expansion, and knowledge production converge to sediment digital inevitability.
From a genealogical perspective, concepts that appear stable or self-evident—such as “digital participation,” “future readiness,” or “the digital child”—are treated as effects of historically contingent problematisations and not as neutral responses to technological change. As Foucault argues in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, genealogy attends not to origins or teleologies but to “events. . . in their most singular form” and to the “minute deviations” and “accidents” through which regimes of truth are assembled (Foucault, 1977: 139–146). Its critical force lies in revealing the arbitrariness of institutions and challenging the belief that present arrangements are universal or necessary. In this sense, genealogy exposes how what comes to be accepted as “evidence” or “truth” is historically produced and therefore open to critique (Foucault, 1988: 11). Figures such as “the child,” “the learner,” or “the digital citizen” are thus not natural entities but effects of discourse, institutional practice, and technological mediation—what Foucault describes as “fictions that we have forgotten are fictions” (Foucault, 1977: 144).
This insight is central to the present analysis. Within contemporary children’s digital rights discourse, the figure of “the digital child” is increasingly treated as a natural and self-evident subject—one whose participation, learning, and future prospects are presumed to unfold within digital environments. A genealogical approach, however, reveals this figure to be a historically produced artefact, assembled through the convergence of children’s digital rights advocacy (e.g. 5Rights Foundation, n.d; Digital Child Rights, n.d; Digital Child, n.d), global policy agendas linking rights to digitisation (UNICEF, 2025), public–private partnerships, and the infrastructural expansion of platform systems within compulsory institutions (Decuypere et al., 2025). “The digital child” is not the reflection of an inevitable technological trajectory; it emerges as a governed subject produced at the intersection of rights discourse, institutional priorities, and platform political economy.
Schooling is analysed here as a paradigmatic compulsory media environment in which these dynamics become especially visible. Policy instruments, strategy documents, and advocacy frameworks produced by national governments, transnational organisations, and research networks are treated as sites where mediated futures are actively assembled, authorised, and normalised. What matters analytically is how their repeated problematisations—of risk, inclusion, skills, innovation, and future readiness—accumulate across institutional contexts to stabilise digital participation as the default horizon of legitimate participation. While schooling provides the empirical focus, the mechanisms identified here are characteristic of compulsory mediated institutions more broadly, for example, welfare systems, health platforms, and forms of digitally mediated civic and administrative participation where participation is increasingly infrastructural and refusal is structurally constrained.
A key mechanism through which this stabilisation occurs is futuring. In genealogical terms, futuring operates not as prediction but as a technology of governance through which uncertainty is rendered administrable. Imagined digital futures are mobilised to organise present institutional action, framing digitisation as an urgent and necessary response to anticipated social and economic change. Futuring acquires material durability once it is priced and budgeted. For example, UNICEF’s estimate that achieving universal digital learning would require an initial investment of US$1.4 trillion positions digital learning not as a contingent policy option but as a global baseline (UNICEF, 2021). Similarly, national strategies to “tackle digital exclusion” are operationalised through dedicated funding streams and programmes of systemic reform (UK Government, 2025b). When futures are funded and operationalised, they begin to appear inevitable.
Once digitised futures are framed as urgent and investable, they also become programmatic. They invite research priorities, evaluation regimes, and partnership architectures oriented towards making those futures work. UNICEF’s Digital Education Strategy 2025–2030, for instance, centres “equitable, scalable and evidence-based solutions,” and emphasises collaboration with industry and research partners to scale “evidence-backed” digital models (UNICEF, n.d). Through such arrangements, normative claims about participation and inclusion are translated into programmes, metrics, and infrastructures. These render digital participation materially unavoidable, while obscuring the contingent political, economic, and epistemic processes through which these futures are assembled.
Futuring practices also reorganise institutional attention and scholarly labour. As digital childhood and participation are problematised as urgent objects of governance (OECD, 2025), they shape which questions come to appear timely, actionable, and worthy of sustained investigation (Livingstone and Third, 2017). By coupling narrative claims about the future with datafication, comparison, and alignment techniques, futuring becomes socially performative, transforming imagined futures into present policy imperatives (Oomen et al., 2022). Across these processes, the learner is reconfigured as a continuously legible data subject—a form of subjectification characteristic of contemporary platform-mediated institutions—whose progress is rendered actionable through dashboards, scores, and automated interventions (Barassi, 2020).
Against this backdrop, the article advances an obligations-based theory of media governance as a normative counter-foundation to rights-centred frameworks. This is also where critical accounts of rights are instructive. Brown (2004) argues that rights do not simply restrain power; they can consolidate a “minimalist” moral politics that centres protection while leaving intact the political-economic arrangements through which vulnerability is produced. Read alongside genealogy, this clarifies why an obligations-first approach is not an ethical supplement but a theoretical reordering: It restores the question of enforceable duties that must constrain infrastructures before participation can be declared a right.
From this standpoint, the analytical focus shifts away from improving participation within existing digital infrastructures and towards examining how those infrastructures come to be positioned as obligatory in the first place. Instead of treating mediated participation as a neutral or inevitable condition of institutional life, the analysis asks how justificatory burdens are distributed—specifically, how responsibility is placed on children and families to adapt, comply, and self-manage, while the necessity of infrastructural arrangements remains largely unquestioned.
In compulsory institutional environments, this reorientation foregrounds a prior evaluative question: What conditions must institutions meet before embedding particular media systems into everyday participation? When rights-based frameworks presuppose digital infrastructures as the terrain of inclusion, historically contingent arrangements risk being stabilised as universal norms. An obligations-first perspective instead treats mediated participation as something that must remain bounded, contestable, and reversible—particularly where refusal is structurally constrained and participation is institutionally enforced. It is this reordering of analytic attention—from participation within infrastructures to the conditions under which infrastructures are rendered obligatory—that informs the analysis that follows.
Analytical findings I: Mechanisms of producing “the digital child”
Drawing on the genealogical framework developed above, this section presents three generalisable mechanisms of mediated subject production through which “the digital child” is constituted as a governing figure. While examined through the institutional setting of schooling, these mechanisms are characteristic of compulsory media environments more broadly, where participation is normalised through the alignment of digital rights discourse, platform political economy, and authoritative knowledge production. Mutually reinforcing, these mechanisms are: (1) The translation of children’s digital rights discourse into institutional participation; (2) Platformisation and datafication as infrastructural governance; and (3) Academic imaginaries that stabilise digital-first futures as desirable and inevitable.
Translating “digital rights” into compulsory media participation
The dominance of the digital-rights paradigm in children’s media scholarship has played a crucial role in reframing digital engagement as central to children’s participation, learning, creativity, and citizenship. Livingstone and Third (2017), for example, argue that the child functions not merely as a beneficiary of rights, but as a figure through which cultural anxieties and future-oriented investments are negotiated. From a genealogical perspective, this insight helps explain how children are mobilised not only to justify protection from harm, but also to legitimate particular technological arrangements and mediated futures.
However, when digital environments are treated as the implicit background for rights realisation, the conceptual horizon of children’s rights narrows. The productive tension between protection and participation identified in digital rights scholarship can come to stabilise digital participation itself as the primary—if not exclusive—arena in which rights are imagined to be exercised. In this framing, the digital environment appears as a legitimate and necessary space of participation, while its status as a historically contingent and politically shaped infrastructure that actively (re)configures how rights are enacted, limited, or transformed is left largely unexamined.
This dynamic becomes especially consequential when digital rights discourse travels into compulsory institutions. Instruments such as General Comment No.25 (UNCRC, 2021) provide an important normative framework for protecting children in digital environments, yet in institutional contexts they can translate into a presumption that participation in digital systems is required in order to fulfil children’s rights to education, access, and inclusion. Similar assumptions are reinforced through “best interests” and “child-centred design” principles that focus on making digital systems safer for children while leaving the necessity of those systems largely unquestioned.
National and transnational policy frameworks further entrench this translation. Strategies promoting AI-enabled and platform-based education routinely present digitisation as essential to quality, equity, and future readiness, treating digital systems as necessary and rarely open to contestation. (UK Government, 2025a; Carvalho et al., 2025). Genealogically, these developments are significant because they contribute to the production of “the digital child” as a rights-bearing, risk-navigating, continuously data-generating subject whose participation in mediated systems is presumed. The necessity of digital participation is rarely questioned; instead, it becomes an effect of repeated policy articulation and advocacy, institutional uptake, and moral framing. What appears as a pragmatic response to technological change reflects alignments between rights discourse, governance priorities, research agendas, and commercial infrastructures. Moreover, Bernotaite and Karseth (2025) show how future imaginaries gain authority through repeated circulation, datafication, and visual storytelling—transforming contingent projections into seemingly self-evident policy imperatives.
In this sense, digital rights-based framings do not simply protect children within compulsory institutions; they also contribute to normalising a vision of childhood and children’s futures as increasingly tethered to digital systems. A genealogical approach does not deny the potential benefits of digital engagement, but it insists on reopening questions that tend to be foreclosed by digital inevitability—whether the dominance of these infrastructures in compulsory childhood spaces is necessary, desirable, or compatible with the broader obligations owed to children. Those obligations must precede, and should constrain, any particular technological configuration.
Platformisation and datafication as infrastructural governance
A second mechanism operates through the platformisation and datafication of institutional participation. A growing critical literature situates education technology and AI within broader dynamics of platform governance, in which everyday activities are rendered legible, comparable, and actionable through data infrastructures (Decuypere et al., 2025). In schooling, acts such as attendance, behaviour, performance, and wellbeing are translated into data points that circulate within platform ecosystems.
Platforms do not merely mediate participation; they structure it. They define defaults, shape interactions, and establish what counts as evidence of engagement or progress. Within such infrastructures, children’s participation becomes inseparable from data production, and learning is increasingly governed through dashboards, metrics, and automated interventions.
In this context, digital rights-centred approaches risk producing what Bietti (2020) describes as functional critique: improving safety and compliance at the edges while leaving core logics such as data extraction, behavioural optimisation, procurement lock-in remain intact. The result is a narrowed horizon of intervention in which the ethical task becomes managing participation within digital media platforms while the institutional dominance of platform infrastructures remains largely unquestioned.
Platform infrastructures thus govern by producing legibility—rendering the child intelligible as a continuously monitorable participant.
Academic imaginaries and the stabilisation of digital-first futures
A third mechanism operates through academic and research imaginaries that render digital and AI-enabled futures of learning both desirable and inevitable. Influential strands of AI-in-education scholarship present intelligent systems as increasingly capable partners in learning, communication, and pedagogical support (Wegerif and Major, 2024). While often attentive to ethics and design, these accounts frequently take the continued expansion of AI in institutional contexts as a starting assumption, with limited attention to whether this expansion remains a contestable choice.
The significance of these imaginaries lies in how they render certain futures thinkable and others implausible. By projecting personalised, dialogic, or ethically aligned AI as integral to educational progress, such scholarship helps stabilise a digital-first horizon in which children’s futures are increasingly imagined as co-evolving with intelligent systems (Wegerif and Major, 2024). Academic authority, conceptual frameworks, research agendas, and evaluative vocabularies thus actively contribute to making those futures appear desirable, inevitable, and worthy of institutional investment. As a result, digital participation comes to be treated as a baseline of inclusion, no longer a provisional arrangement.
Analytical findings II: Regimes of problematisation and the normalisation of “digital-by-default” participation
Building on the mechanisms identified above, this section traces how digital-by-default participation is stabilised through overlapping regimes of problematisation. These regimes—protection, participation, agency, and skills/future readiness—do not operate sequentially, but interact to produce a common-sense understanding of mediated participation as necessary, desirable, and unavoidable. These regimes characterise governance across compulsory mediated institutions such as schools, where participation is both morally charged and infrastructurally enforced.
Protection: Safety as a technology of governance
Digital technologies have long been promoted as solutions to institutional problems, with successive waves framed as remedies for inequality, inefficiency, and failure (Watters, 2021). Alongside these promises, research on children’s digital media use foregrounded both opportunities and risks (De Haan and Livingstone, 2009), contributing to policy frameworks that emphasise safe participation.
In compulsory institutions, however, protection increasingly functions not as a limit on digitisation but as a rationale for its regulation and expansion. Safeguarding responsibilities are operationalised through monitoring infrastructures—filters, logs, risk-scoring systems—that render participation continuously visible and actionable (Williamson and Eynon, 2020). From a genealogical perspective, protection operates as a hinge through which disciplinary and security mechanisms are introduced (Foucault, 1977, 2008). Care becomes routinised surveillance, particularly in settings where meaningful consent is limited and refusal carries institutional cost.
Participation: Equity, inclusion, and moralised adoption
A second regime reframes digitisation through participation. Access to devices, platforms, and connectivity is cast as a moral imperative of equity and social justice. Digital participation is aligned with fairness, citizenship, and rights (UK Government, 2025b; see also European Commission, 2025). Genealogically, this marks a shift from protection to responsibilisation (Foucault, 2008): Digitisation is no longer an optional enhancement but a condition of legitimate participation.
Early accounts framed participation as a site of expanded autonomy, decentralised coordination, and democratic possibility, in which networked environments lowered barriers to entry and enabled individuals to organise, communicate, and produce outside hierarchical control (Benkler, 2006). Contemporary participation discourses in education and children’s digital rights implicitly inherit this normative promise. What was once framed as an expansion of freedom increasingly operates as a requirement of inclusion, thereby transforming participation from a right into an obligation.
Within this regime, non-digital or low-digital practices are gradually recoded as inadequate or exclusionary, while hesitation or refusal is framed as deprivation, not as a legitimate institutional choice (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; van Dijck, 2013). Participation thus operates as a moralised norm, rendering alternatives increasingly illegible within dominant imaginaries of inclusion and progress (Bucher, 2018).
Agency: Self-management within data infrastructures
A third regime emphasises agency in which children are positioned as active participants who must develop digital competence, self-regulation, and “responsible” engagement. Through instruments like digital citizenship curricula, dashboards, and self-tracking tools, agency is reframed as self-management within platform environments. As Foucault’s analysis of technologies of the self suggests (Foucault, 1988), such arrangements do not simply empower; they reorganise governance by aligning subjectivity with visibility and measurement.
“Agency” is reconfigured as self-management inside platform environments. Students, for instance, are invited to monitor their own progress through dashboards, internalise performance metrics, and align their behaviour with algorithmically defined norms (Perrotta and Selwyn, 2020). Agency thus operates as responsibilised self-governance, with autonomy—understood as the capacity to meaningfully choose, refuse, or exit particular infrastructural arrangements, including low- or non-digital forms of participation—constrained by institutional penalties and personal costs.
Skills and future readiness: Governing through anticipated futures
Finally, skills and future readiness consolidate digitisation as destiny. Digital competencies are framed as essential for employment and societal participation (OECD, 2024). This regime reflects what Foucault describes as biopolitical governance (Foucault, 2008). Populations are shaped in anticipation of future economic needs, and education and civic participation are organised around optimisation, prediction, and comparability.
Uncertain futures are “tamed” through datafication, benchmarks, and skills frameworks (Pattersson and Nordin, 2023). What matters increasingly is what can be measured, standardised, and aligned with economic imperatives. The ethical consequence is a narrowing of educational purpose, one which is tethered to future utility and in which children risk being treated instrumentally as means to economic ends (Means, 2018) at the expense of recognising them as persons owed care, attention, and rootedness in the present (Weil, 1949).
Across these regimes, a contemporary institutional common sense takes shape: Participation must be digital because equity requires access, access requires platforms, and platforms require data. This circular logic naturalises digital participation as the default condition of legitimacy within compulsory mediated institutions—producing “the digital child” as a governed subject whose future is quietly pre-scripted through infrastructures presented as inevitable.
Discussion: Contradictions in digital rights-based media governance
This discussion advances the paper’s central theoretical claim—that contemporary children’s digital rights discourse functions not only as a protective framework, but as a mode of media governance that stabilises digital inevitability within compulsory institutional environments (Brown, 2004). Rights here operate not merely as normative safeguards, but as organising principles that help render particular infrastructural arrangements legitimate, necessary, and beyond contestation (van Dijck et al., 2018). When rights-based aspirations are pursued within platform political economy and futuring logics that position digitisation as unavoidable, a series of structural contradictions emerges. These contradictions arise when rights are articulated within infrastructures dependent on data extraction, optimisation, and institutional lock-in (Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Srnicek, 2016).
The purpose of identifying these contradictions is not to dismiss children’s digital rights or the necessity of protection in digital contexts, but to show how rights-based frameworks, when detached from enforceable obligations, can reorient ethical attention away from the conditions under which participation itself is imposed (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). In compulsory media environments such as schooling, this shift has profound consequences for how childhood and future belonging are governed, as anticipatory claims about inclusion and progress are translated into present-day institutional dependencies (Oomen et al., 2022).
Rights versus obligations: Elaborated entitlements, diluted duties
Within education, children’s digital rights are increasingly articulated as entitlements to safe access, participation, and benefit from digital learning environments. These entitlements are now widely embedded in policy frameworks that promote digital inclusion, personalised learning, and responsible participation. By contrast, the corresponding obligations on states, school systems, and vendors—to limit data extraction, prohibit manipulative designs, and mandate system audits, or guarantee meaningful refusal—remain comparatively weak, fragmented, or slow-moving (Helberger et al., 2018).
This asymmetry produces a conceptual inversion. Where digitised schooling is adopted to “realise” the right to education, children’s rights become increasingly conditional on compliance with platform infrastructures. Participation is framed as an entitlement, yet refusal becomes practically constrained. In this configuration, digital rights discourse expands while obligations remain underdeveloped (Hillman, 2025). The result is a form of governance in which children’s rights are expressed within infrastructures but do not shape or constrain them.
From an obligations-first perspective, this inversion is not incidental but diagnostic. It reveals how rights-based media governance can legitimise infrastructural settlements by treating them as the necessary conditions of participation and placing them beyond ethical and political limitation.
Participation versus optimisation: “Personalisation” as a vehicle for capture
Digital participation is frequently justified through claims of empowerment through interactivity, collaboration, and personalised support. Children’s educational interactions—clicks, completion times, error patterns, affective signals—are rendered into data points that feed modelling, prediction, and intervention.
Policy futuring strengthens this logic by treating data as a source of legitimacy. Educational activity becomes evidence that can be visualised, compared, and mobilised to justify further technological expansion (Bernotaite and Karseth, 2025). Adaptive learning and learning analytics illustrate this contradiction. Systems that promise “personalised learning pathways” operate as forms of algorithmic governance (Gulson et al., 2022)—they translate learning into measurable micro-events, calculate proficiency or risk, and deliver automated recommendations that nudge subjects towards predefined trajectories.
The contradiction here is structural. Participation is framed as empowerment, yet operationalised as a data-production loop that intensifies optimisation. Uncertainty, which is central to learning and development, is recoded as inefficiency to be reduced, displacing its role as a space of exploration (Bucher, 2018). This logic reflects a broader mode of media governance in which participation becomes the mechanism through which subjects are rendered governable (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Foucault, 2008).
Agency versus infrastructural lock-in: Choice inside compulsory environments
Digital rights discourse frequently elevates “agency” as a normative ideal, positioning children as autonomous subjects who should exercise choice and self-determination in mediated environments. In compulsory institutional contexts, however, agency is materially constrained by infrastructural dependency.
A system that presents itself as unavoidable already exercises a distinctive form of power. In platformised environments, participation increasingly operates as a condition, not a choice. When core communicative, administrative, and social functions are routed through a narrow set of infrastructural platforms, opting out no longer signifies the exercise of agency but instead produces absence, exclusion, or institutional invisibility (Bucher, 2012). Participation thus becomes a prerequisite for recognition, coordination, and inclusion, while the capacity to “choose otherwise” is structurally hollowed out by the social, educational, and administrative penalties attached to non-participation. From a media governance perspective, this marks a shift from participation as a right to participation as an infrastructural obligation—one that operates prior to, and often beyond, the language of rights and agency.
In schooling, this dynamic produces a distinctive form of institutional lock-in. Children’s “choice” is reduced to navigating settings, dashboards, and pathways within systems they cannot meaningfully exit. Schools face procurement dependencies, teachers are compelled to align pedagogy with platform affordances, and students are required to accept monitoring as a condition of participation. Agency thus operates less as autonomy than as responsibilisation as subjects are tasked with self-managing within environments whose terms they cannot contest (Nieborg and Poell, 2018).
This logic characterises contemporary media environments more broadly, particularly where platforms function as infrastructures that organise participation in everyday social and institutional life. Social interaction, information access, and civic participation are increasingly organised through a small number of commercial platforms that operate as infrastructural gateways to participation (Nieborg and Poell, 2018). Under these conditions, opting out rarely entails selecting an alternative medium; instead, it results in informational absence, social marginalisation, or loss of institutional legibility. Participation operates less as an expression of agency than as a condition of recognisability within mediated publics. Power here is exercised not through overt coercion, but through the normalisation of infrastructural dependence (van Dijck, 2013)—rendering agency procedural, responsibilised, and increasingly compatible with governance without options for resistance.
Safety versus extraction: Safeguarding through surveillance
Safety is central to education technology governance. Schools have safeguarding duties, and digital environments introduce genuine risks. However, in many institutional deployments, safety is operationalised through surveillance—tools that scan communications, track browsing, flag keywords. These systems can embed children in panoptic infrastructures where safety is achieved through data capture and behavioural inference. Where compliance or “child protection” demands verification or monitoring, the response can be intensified data collection (Zeide, 2017). Even when intended as protective, such systems can enlarge the scope of educational data collection and create new vectors for error, bias, and downstream reuse. The contradiction is that measures framed as protective deepen extraction and institutionalise monitoring as normal schooling practice.
Inclusion versus inevitability: Equity narratives that entrench digital dependency
Inclusion is one of the most powerful moral imperatives within children’s digital rights discourse. In schooling, inclusion often appears as device programmes, platform rollouts, and “closing the digital divide” strategies. These efforts can be motivated by genuine concerns about disadvantage.
Yet inclusion narratives can also function as engines of inevitability—and as a politics of “fatalism” (Brown, 2004: 462), where the horizon of justice contracts to managing harm within an assumed infrastructural order. If justice is equated with digital participation, then expanding platform infrastructure becomes indistinguishable from expanding children’s rights, and refusal becomes legible only as exclusion or deprivation.
This framing risks two outcomes. First, it can legitimate procurement-led digitisation without adequate public debate about the trade-offs like surveillance, dependency, human pedagogical devaluation, and the commercial shaping of curriculum and classroom routines. Second, it can marginalise robust non-digital public goods—for example, low-tech and no-tech pedagogies, physical spaces of socialisation and civic participation—by portraying them as inferior substitutes for “modern” education and modern acts of human connexion. This mirrors how platformisation dynamics prioritise technologically mediated forms of participation and production, structurally sidelining alternative modes of sociality and cultural practice (Nieborg and Poell, 2018), and reflects the broader mediatised construction of social value where non-mediated forms are rendered less legible or desirable (Couldry and Hepp, 2016).
A genealogical point is crucial here. Inclusion discourse can quietly re-code the baseline of educational legitimacy. If digital participation is treated as the default condition of equitable schooling, then “low-digital” or “non-digital” educational choices become harder to defend, even when they may better serve children’s developmental needs. A key technique here is “backcasting” (Bernotaite and Karseth, 2025: 166). It starts from a desirable future and uses it to legitimise changes framed as necessary in the present.
These contradictions show how digital rights-based aspirations can be absorbed into governance and market logics that stabilise digital inevitability, pointing to the need for an obligations-first recalibration that is capable of constraining digital infrastructures, not merely reforming participation within them.
Conclusion: Obligations-first governance of mediated futures
This article has identified an ordering problem in contemporary children’s digital rights discourse: Participation in platform infrastructures is increasingly treated as the presumptive terrain of inclusion, while governance labour is directed towards improving it, even as the infrastructures that impose it remain insufficiently justified.
Under conditions of platform political economy and anticipatory governance, this dynamic consolidates what Brown (2004) describes as a contraction of political imagination—a shift from contesting an imposed order to managing harm within it. In compulsory institutional contexts, this contraction is especially consequential because it converts a historically contingent infrastructural settlement into a moral horizon of participation and futurity. The central theoretical claim advanced here is therefore not a critique of digital rights as such, but a re-specification of what media governance must account for when participation is infrastructural and difficult to refuse—the obligations that precede rights and must constrain the conditions under which mediated participation is organised.
Recentring obligations also reorders what is counted as harm and benefit within compulsory mediated environments. When “safe participation” becomes the dominant frame, structural features of platformised institutions—extraction, optimisation, lock-in, and surveillance tend to appear as mitigable risks, obscuring their role as constitutive conditions of participation itself. Schooling makes this dynamic especially visible because participation is mandatory and refusal is costly, but the same logics increasingly characterise other institutional media environments where access to services, recognition, or belonging is mediated through platforms.
An obligations-first approach reverses this evaluative asymmetry. It treats non-digital and low-digital arrangements as ethically and politically significant media settlements in their own right—forms of participation that can protect social spaces from continuous visibility, behavioural inferencing, and optimisation logics.
On this basis, the article proposes an obligations-first framework for governing mediated futures in compulsory institutional contexts. Intended as a normative-analytical lens for evaluating mediated participation, it is intentionally portable and extends beyond education to other compulsory or quasi-compulsory settings such as welfare systems, health platforms, migration and border infrastructures, and digitally mediated civic and administrative participation. It articulates four obligations—necessity, proportionality, reversibility, and contestability—as diagnostic criteria for evaluating whether mediated participation can plausibly be considered voluntary, rights-respecting, and ethically justified under conditions where refusal is structurally constrained. Tensions between these obligations—for example, between inclusion and reversibility—are treated as sites of contestation to be worked through in context, without presuming fixed hierarchies between them.
Necessity
Governance must be able to demonstrate the institutional good being served and show why it cannot be achieved through non-digital or lower-data alternatives. This shifts justification away from general appeals to modernisation, efficiency, or future readiness and towards a burden of proof grounded in institutional obligation.
Proportionality
Where digital systems are deployed, data collection and inferential processing must be strictly minimal relative to the stated purpose. Proportionality must address not only data volume, but the governance consequences of behavioural tracking, risk scoring, and the normalisation of continuous visibility.
Reversibility
Institutions must be able to withdraw a system without educational or administrative penalty, infrastructural collapse, or coercive substitution. Reversibility directly targets lock-in as a governance problem, not merely a procurement inconvenience: Participation cannot be treated as voluntary where withdrawal is practically impossible.
Contestability
Those subject to mediated participation must have meaningful avenues to refuse, challenge, or bypass infrastructural arrangements without stigma or disadvantage. In schooling, this includes pupils, families, and teachers; in other institutional contexts, it includes the relevant publics whose participation is infrastructurally enforced. Contestability entails the ability to question system outputs, demand explanations and audits, and insist on alternative routes for participation to institutional recognition.
These obligations reposition children’s digital rights within a governance architecture capable of constraining infrastructures, not merely improving participation within them. They also clarify how the paper contributes to media theory by conceptualising “the digital child” as a mediated subject produced where rights discourse, platform infrastructures, and compulsory participation converge; and it shows that digital inevitability is not a technological condition but a governance achievement sustained through protection, participation, agency, and future readiness regimes. The theoretical move is not from rights to rejection, but from rights-as-participation to obligations-as-conditions. This shift makes it possible to evaluate mediated futures without treating the digital as the default ground.
For media scholarship, an obligations-first reorientation shifts attention from optimising participation within digital systems to examining how inevitability itself is produced and stabilised—through budgets, policy programmes, evidence regimes, and inclusion narratives that render platforms institutional common sense. This includes treating low-digital and non-digital arrangements as analytically substantive media formations, and recognising refusal, withdrawal, and infrastructural absence as sites through which power and obligation become visible.
The question that follows is therefore not how to optimise participation in digital systems, but how to govern mediated futures when participation itself is a condition of institutional belonging. An obligations-first framework keeps futures genuinely open by refusing to moralise infrastructural dependence as progress, and by insisting that compulsory institutions owe subjects—especially children—conditions of participation that remain limited, contestable, and reversible before, and independently of, any particular technological configuration. The proposed framework is therefore intended to open empirical inquiry by providing a normative lens through which the governance consequences of mediated participation can be interrogated across institutional contexts.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.