Generation C: Childhood, Code, and Creativity

A. Goffman and the "Digital Native" Child development does not happen in a vacuum. As I have argued elsewhere, (120) the correct paradigm for conceptualizing human development is an ecological and contextualist one in line with the theory of Vygotsky, Bandura, and Bronfenbrenner: children develop in a particular context, and they are influenced by the tools their environment offers. (121) Essentially, development is a historically, culturally, and technologically specific construct--a dialectic conversation between the person and the environment. (122) For example, applying a contextualist approach to development, we know that a child with access to a computer and broadband from age two in the United States will develop in a fundamentally different manner than a child in Zambia whose first Internet access comes through a phone at age sixteen. These children's development is nonlinear (123)--the first child may demonstrate superior technology skills at age eight to those of the second child at age eighteen. The first child's skills may also significantly outstrip the skills of her parents, and parental supervision of children with superior technology skills presents a significant challenge for even the most diligent parent. Having established this mechanism of development and the complexity that technology brings, we next turn to the difficult legal questions surrounding childhood identity building, experimentation, and accountability. Two competing dynamics impact children's identity expression in digital spaces with respect to privacy questions--one internal to the child and one external. The first is an internally motivated need for identity building and expression in a community, and the second is the risk that the digital trail of this experimentation will limit future opportunities for the child through generating stigma. It is this set of developmental concerns relating to identity, privacy, and creativity that this section considers using the theory of Erving Goffman. 1. Impression Management: The Bureaucratization of Spirit The role of identity experimentation and its connection to human development is perhaps most associated with the seminal work of notable sociologist Erving Goffman. (124) Goffman introduced the concept of "impression management"--where individuals, like actors, attempt to influence a situation by conveying an impression that it is in their interest to convey. (125) In other words, individuals experiment with crafting and performing personas for themselves while monitoring the reactions of others (126) to these personas or characters. (127) In Goffman's words, "[t]he expressiveness of the individual appears to involve two radically different kinds of sign activity: the expression that he gives, and the expression that he gives off." (128) Goffman uses the metaphor of a play being staged in the theater to convey the dynamics of identity crafting. A person, like an actor, has the ability to choose his stage and props, as well as the costume for a specific audience. (129) The goal for the actor is to maintain coherence and to adjust to the different stagings and interaction with other actors. (130) In other words, for Goffman, it can be said that certain structural constraints both enable and limit agency and vice versa. It is precisely negotiating this tension between creating expression and creating an impression that children, particularly teens, are still in the process of learning to manage. Meanwhile, these child performances now simultaneously play out on two stages at once--one performance in physical space for a physical audience and a second in digital spaces for a (sometimes overlapping) virtual audience. For Goffman, it is of fundamental importance to have an agreed upon definition of the situation. Without a clear set of parameters and shared definition guiding the structure of a given interaction, the interaction lacks coherency and the actors' ability to manage impressions falters. …