The digital generation

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8
Introduction
The idea of a “digital generation” and the role of information and communications
technology (ICT) as perhaps the main signier and determinant of young people’s
lives have been prominent in public discourse related to youth for several years.
The label applied to the digital generation is often accompanied by concern about
risks (Byron, 2008; Livingstone et al., 2018), such as those related to wellbe-
ing and health (Goodyear et al., 2018; Mishna et al., 2010; OECD, 2018) and
online safety and security (Dowdell & Bradley, 2010; Livingstone et al., 2018;
Strasburger et al., 2010). Conversely, the advantages of digital technology and
social media for children and young people, such as faster, more engaged learn-
ing, cognitive skills development, awareness of social issues, social interaction
and inclusion, and civic participation and entertainment, are promoted (Poyntz &
Pedri, 2018; Tapscott, 2008).
In this chapter, using the case of Norway, we ask how a “digital generation”
can be identied. To investigate this question, we analyse Norwegian media
reports between 2010 and 2020, mentioning the use of ICT by children and youth.
In order to identify characteristics of the digital generation, we also use school-
based survey data.
In the discussion, we will concentrate on the concept of “moral panic”, which
is a well-established research tradition within media representations of youth
culture. Moral panic originally described both dramatic and dramatised public
reactions to youth culture from the 1960s onwards (Young, 2008). Concern for
children’s and youths’ digital media use and its harmful consequences parallel
previous moral panic over youth culture regarding, e.g. clothes, music, political
opinions, drug use, and sexuality. Common to earlier historical incidents and chil-
dren’s and youths’ digital media use now is mass media’s portrayal and accentua-
tion of a generational divide.
The digital generation as a social generation
As discussed previously in the introduction, the concept of generation is
disputed and variously applied in both popular and scientic literature. The
8
The digital generation
Representations of a generational
digital divide
Idunn Seland and Christer Hyggen
DOI: 10.4324/9781003129592-8
10.4324/9781003129592-8

134 Idunn Seland and Christer Hyggen
The digital generation
generation concept has been crucial for youth research’s development and
is still widely referenced to distinguish children from their parents, to label
certain birth cohorts or as a more thorough analytical tool to understand social
change.
Various generational labels are given to young people, portraying them as
cohorts with specic traits (Pickard, 2019), including labels concerning their rela-
tion to digital media and technology, such as the Nintendo generation (Green &
Bigum, 1993), the Playstation generation (Broos & Roe, 2006), the net genera-
tion (Tapscott, 1999), or even the thumb generation. More recently, scholars have
coined labels like the iPhone generation and iGen for certain birth cohorts, linking
their behaviour and traits to specic experiences with technology. One prominent
example is Twenge’s claim that “the complete dominance of smartphones among
teens has had ripple eects across every area of iGeners’ lives” (Twenge, 2017).
It has been argued that several of these generational labels lack rigorous scien-
tic support, precision, and adequate theoretical grounding (Furlong, 2013). The
age boundaries may be stretched to suit researchers’ needs, illustrating how many
of these concepts and labels are elastic, fuzzy generalisations (Pickard, 2019),
lumping all young people together, overlooking intragenerational dierences, and
nourishing intergenerational conicts by exaggerating possible generation gaps
(Woodman, 2016).
The seminal work on generations by Karl Mannheim can be seen as an
eort to distinguish the sociology of generations from such generalisations.
Mannheim proposed a theory of social generations in his eort to understand
how German youth contested ideas from their parents’ generation and how the
young generation became the source of new values and new political move-
ments (Mannheim, 1952/2001). In Mannheim’s understanding, two central
elements form a social generation: each generation emerges in a particular site
or location, and new generational locations emerge when the ways of life of
the previous generation in the same culture are no longer valued or realistic.
This implies that it is not necessarily sucient to be born at the same time
to be part of a generation. To be a social generation, a group needs to share
important experiences and challenges.
One particular experience shared by most Norwegian youth born after the
turn of the new millennium is smartphone access and use. The rst iPhone was
introduced in 2007, and by 2016 most Norwegian youth owned a smartphone
(Medietilsynet, 2016, 2020), allowing them to connect to the internet and access
social media. Whether this shared location and experience is enough to form a
digital generation by Mannheim’s standard is part of this chapter’s discussion.
Technological change aects everybody. However, the parents of today’s youth
did not have this particular experience during their formative years, which could
potentially create a generation gap in the sense that adults’ fear an escalating pace
of social change and loss of continuity between young and old generations. The
idea of a digital generation merely connects these fears and anxieties to technol-
ogy (Buckingham, 2006), echoing theories of moral panic and mediated youth
culture.

The digital generation 135
Moral panic and mediated youth culture
One way of viewing generational divisions and conicts arises from the study
of mass media representations of youth culture and the concept of moral panic.
This state of panic describes societal reactions to manifestations of deviance from
rules and behavioural norms perceived as necessary to uphold the boundaries
of civilisation (Falkof, 2020). Although the seminal studies on moral panic are
now approaching their 50th anniversary, the tales of young substance abusers
(Young, 1971), mods and rockers (Cohen, 1972), and youth gang muggings (Hall
et al., 1978) continue to inuence scholarly discussions on mediated youth culture
(Hier, 2019; Ingraham & Reeves, 2016; Wright, 2015).
Central to these studies is the perception of the “folk devil”, the evil entity
threatening what is commonly considered good and safe, denoting traditional
folklore logic resulting in a kind of witch hunt. In the studies by Young (1971)
and Cohen (1972), the folk devil was mediated through portrayals of youth cul-
ture as ethic (norm-breaking behaviour and actual crime) or aesthetic (clothes and
music) threats (Young, 2008). What follows is public outrage (i.e. panic) to vary-
ing degrees, voiced by public ocials, the police, civil society, and the audience,
regularly mixed with media commentaries. The culmination of moral panic is the
demand to “do something”, usually directed at formal regulation and/or punish-
ment to bring the folk devil back under social control (Hier, 2019).
From its origin in the 1970s, study of youth culture and in the sociology of
deviance, the empirical labelling model(s) of moral panic spread to various elds
in the 1990s, theorising the discursive perception of “the other” following gender,
religion, and minority studies (Falkof, 2020; Wright, 2015). The concept of moral
panic was then adopted by scholars of late modernity and the consequences of
industrialisation, connecting media-driven panics to societal fears of terrorism,
immigration, and environmental and ecological breakdown (Ungar, 2001). By
the year 2000, the concept of “moral panic” appeared both diluted and diverted
until the emergence of new digital platforms dominated by user-made content
and activity renewed scholarly interest in the dierent aspects of mediated panic-
related phenomena (Hier, 2019; Ingraham & Reeves, 2016).
Falkof (2020) calls for a revitalised approach to the study of public discourse,
bearing the marks of Cohen’s (1972) original denition of moral panic: a condi-
tion, episode, person, or groups of persons described as a threat to societal values
or interests and this threat’s nature presented in a stylised and stereotypical man-
ner. Falkof (2020) further views moral panic as a specic genre, a way of relating
to a given phenomenon by giving it a familiar design with well-known tropes
and narrative patterns. Falkof here maintains the ideas of folk devils violating
commonly shared beliefs of what constitutes a good society, the opposing actors
representing what is good and moral, the stories’ almost viral qualities as they
spread through media and the demand that authorities should solve the perceived
problem.
Staying true to the concept’s social constructionist core, Falkof (2020) pro-
poses an interdisciplinary framework as an analytic tool to explain discrepancies

136 Idunn Seland and Christer Hyggen
between what is empirically real and what is represented as real about a phenom-
enon. In the following analysis, we, therefore, use the concept of moral panic
to investigate how Norwegian media’s representations of children’s and young
people’s use of ICT are conceived and if there are objective reasons for a “panic”.
When we apply Falkof’s framework to perceptions of the digital generation, the
aim is to grasp from public discourse the stories told to make sense of insecurity
over technological and possibly also social and cultural change. These stories or
perceptions interpreted as sense-making eorts can serve to constitute collective
identities and boundaries between themselves and others (Falkof 2020, pp. 228,
232), in our case, between generations. Three of Falkof’s (2020, p. 235) analyti-
cal questions are particularly relevant to our current study, here slightly revised to
match our research question:
· What is being presented about the digital generation? Has this phenomenon
been recognised, has it been demonised, and what, if anything, does it stand
for?
· Does the presentation of the digital generation draw on pre-existing narra-
tives about risk and threat, and, if so, what are they, and how are their generic
features repeated?
· How does the presentation of the digital generation intersect with anxieties
that are particular to that context or time period, and in what ways is it a
part of a broader discursive frame?
The underlying presumptions and principles for these operationalised research
questions are elaborated and illustrated next.
Folk devils on the internet
The critical stage in a media-driven moral panic phenomenon is the labelling of
good and evil, i.e. the distance between “us” and “them”, bringing the so-called
folk devil to life (Wright, 2015). This image identies the scapegoat for what is
perceived to be bad or immoral, commonly associated with dispossessed groups
or subcultures (Ingraham & Reeves, 2016; Ungar, 2001). When distinct youth
subcultures emerged in the 1960s, their challenge to moral and behavioural norms
was further spurred on by this period’s rapid social changes aecting both class
boundaries and the parent-child relationship (Wright, 2015).
This underlying reliance on social change may also explain why moral panics
tend to recur, often following a familiar pattern. New media technologies have
their own place in moral panic studies, from 1950s agony over comic books,
demonisation of television and video games in the 1980s to contemporary fear
of cyberbullying, teenage sexting, and internet paedophilia scares (Falkof, 2020;
Staksrud, 2013, 2020). George and Odgers (2015) add to this list media cover-
age and parental concern over adolescents’ ICT use and social and health-related
risks. They nd fears that time spent on devices interferes with adolescents’ abil-
ity to develop eective social and relationship skills, concerns that multitasking

The digital generation 137
on devices is impairing cognitive performance and claims that device usage is
causing adolescents to lose sleep. These examples may illustrate how insecu-
rity over rapid technological and social development is projected onto youths’
changed leisure opportunities and habits, driven by what is novel and oering
opportunities for the emergence of subcultures in a recurring pattern.
For folk devils to be revealed to the public, moral panic stories routinely evolve
around the media’s use of experts or moral entrepreneurs to frame the events and
oer primary denitions of what is at stake (Ingraham & Reeves, 2016; Wright,
2015). As these experts and entrepreneurs produce authoritative images of social
reality (Hier 2019), scholarly interest in moral panic has typically centred on what
is real and what is presented to be real in such conicts. An exaggerated threat or
the disproportionality of a given problem serves to rouse emotions associated with
an actual state of acute fear, legitimising calls for action (Wright, 2015). At this
stage, the image of the folk devil or scapegoat allows the problem to be xed by
punishing or putting the evil under control by law, regulation, a ban, or improved
security (Falkof, 2020).
However, digital spaces and the perceived dangers of letting children, espe-
cially, go online contrast with the traditional concept of moral panics, as the
object of fear literally knows no borders. Even if internet crime can be punished
under national law, calls for regulation and protection will quickly encounter an
international jurisdictional void. Staksrud (2013; 2020) describes how media reg-
ulatory institutions in Scandinavia and Western welfare states transformed from
the 1990s from regulating, censoring and banning visual images, language, and,
above all, pornography to giving advice about age-based content suitability and
online protection.
Staksrud (2013; 2020) links this transformation to global, technologically
driven processes where welfare states’ social institutions have undergone struc-
tural, sociological changes that severely aect the relationship between the
individual and society. In essence, this relationship concerns the citizen’s civil,
political, and social rights, where the elevation of freedom to make one’s own
choices both liberates and excludes the individual from formerly dening social
structures historically embedded in Western welfare states. The result is that indi-
vidual children or their parents nd themselves alone to make choices based on
a mixture of consumerism and presumptive informed rationality. According to
Staksrud (2013), this naturally calls for new welfare state solutions, including
educational programmes for both children and parents. The school system, non-
government organisations, and the technology platforms, along with renewed and
thoroughly transformed regulatory institutions, all have a place in this new market
of information.
Data and methods
In this chapter, we investigate trends in the discourse on youth and digital media
over the last decade, following the smartphone’s introduction to most of the
Norwegian youth population, by analysing Norwegian media coverage from

138 Idunn Seland and Christer Hyggen
2010, including 2020. To investigate whether these reported trends are rooted
in actual experiences among youth, we apply data from Ungdata, the nationally
representative school-based youth surveys. Ungdata includes responses from 630
000 youth aged 13–18 since 2010. Ungdata cover various aspects of young peo-
ple’s lives, e.g. relationships with parents and friends, leisure activities, health
issues, local environment, wellbeing, and school issues. In addition, the surveys
include questions on media and ICT use.
Media coverage analysis
To identify newspaper articles about the “digital generation”, we applied the
search words “digital” and “children or youth” (in Norwegian) to the Norwegian
database A-tekst (now Retriever),1 limiting our search to 2010–2020. As this
search strategy yielded more than 13 000 results, we limited the search to a three-
month period every year between 2010 and 2020 and rotated the periods by the
quarter of the year. This reduced our net sample for analysis to 1124 hits while
maintaining the prerequisites for a randomised and representative result. Our unit
of analysis is the text excerpt containing the hit for our search string, meaning that
two or more references in one newspaper issue (i.e. both paper and digital, or both
the front page and the editorial) are registered as individual results. Also, press
releases and items from national news agencies could be picked up and included
in several newspapers, thus appearing more than once in our sample.
We copied the text excerpts (usually three to four sentences), the newspaper
name, and the publication date into an Excel worksheet. We then read the excerpts
and applied between one and three labels to each media story based on our under-
standing of the context where the keywords appeared. This expanded our net sam-
ple by 57 to a total of 1181 items (see Table 8.1). We omitted text excerpts with no
Table 8.1 Categories and samples of Norwegian newspaper reports 2010–2020 from the
A-tekst/Retriever database
Category Content of newspaper reports N
Digital threats Harassment including, bullying, sexting, online
soliciting
433
Physical or mental health issues related to digital use 60
Digital generation Reections on youths’ use of digital devices
in situations that were previously analogue, contrast
with parents
234
Digitalisation in
education
Digitalisation of educational institutions to improve
student learning
214
Digital or net-based games for leisure and/or
educational purposes
36
Digital competence The need for information, good conduct, or online
protection
204
Total 1181

The digital generation 139
relevant relationship between “digital” and “children or youth”. We also excluded
computer game reviews by adult professionals. In contrast, reports mentioning
such games in relation to how youths spend their leisure time were included.
One recent typology of media stories about young people using ICT (George &
Odgers, 2015) applies seven categories of parental worries. However, in our cod-
ing, it soon became evident that many news stories containing our search string
did not mention risks. Therefore, broader categories were constructed through an
inductive, bottom-up coding strategy (see Table 8.1).
In Table 8.1, our label “digital threats” overlaps with George and Odgers’
(2015) description of worries about whom adolescents are interacting with online
and what kind of information they share, and fear that children will be victims
of cyberbullying and online soliciting. Digital bullying or cyberbullying imply
that harassment or aggressive behaviour between schoolchildren takes place
using electronic technology (typically on social media), providing the potentially
anonymous perpetrator(s) with broader, around-the-clock access to the victim,
involving a wider audience and the possibility of humiliations persisting on a
digital record forever (Milosevic, 2015). Digital bullying may or may not involve
sexual harassment derived from what has popularly been termed “sexting”,
meaning the sending, receiving, and forwarding of nude, semi-nude, or sexually
explicit images, texts, or videos (Lee & Darcy, 2020; Van Ouytsel et al., 2015).
Items in our category “digital threats” also correspond to what George and Odgers
describe as interference with oine friendships, harming cognitive performance
and loss of sleep.
A digital divide between parents and children is the essence of our category
“digital generation”, supplemented by the digitalisation of education and gam-
ing. Our category “digital competence”, however, includes both fears that young
people’s online activities may leave a digital trace causing future problems and
“competence” as a solution to this and the other digital risks. In the analysis, all
the citations from Norwegian media were translated into English by the authors.
Ungdata
Ungdata is a large Norwegian database of school-based surveys that cover
youths aged 13–18. Ungdata allows us to track developments and trends in ICT
and media use among Norwegian youth. For this chapter, we apply data for the
period 2010–2020. During this period, some of the questions and measurements
have been changed, meaning that we have disrupted timelines for some variables.
Other questions are asked for shorter periods or at single time points.
We present descriptive analyses of trends in dierent aspects of ICT use for all
respondents, including total screen time, type of media used, digital bullying and
exclusion, sexual harassment/sexting and parental involvement in, and knowl-
edge of social media use among youth.
Screen time is measured for 2010–2020 by a question asking the respondents
to estimate their total screen time outside school hours, including TV, PCs, tab-
lets, and mobile phones.

140 Idunn Seland and Christer Hyggen
Type of media is measured by a question asking the respondents to estimate
how much time they spend every day on average using dierent kinds of media
like TV, video games and books (2010–2020), mobile games and social media
(2014–2020), and YouTube (2017–2020).
Digital bullying is measured variously in the dierent periods that Ungdata
covers. For the rst period (2010–2013), digital bullying is measured with two
questions on whether the respondents have received “bullying messages” on their
phones or while chatting on the internet. For the second period (2014–2016), it
is measured by one question on whether the respondents experience bullying or
threats from other youth via the internet or mobile phone. For the third period
(2017–2019), it is measured by combining two questions on whether they have,
during the last 12 months, ever been threatened via the internet or mobile phone
and whether they have, during the last 12 months, ever been excluded by peers
online. For the last period (2020), it is based on the following question: Are you
bullied, threatened, or excluded online?
Sexual harassment is measured by a series of questions in the 2020 surveys.
First, the respondents are asked whether they have sent nude pictures or sex-
ual content to someone. Second, the respondents are asked whether they have
received digital messages or images with sexual content from someone. Those
who have received sexual content are asked whether they thought it was OK to
receive these or not.
Parental involvement in young people’s digital lives is measured with a series
of questions from 2014 to 2020. First, the respondents are asked whether their
parents have set limitations for their social media use. Second, the respondents are
asked whether their parents know what social media platforms they use and what
they know about their activities online. Third, the respondents are asked whether
they hide some of their online activities from their parents.
Results
Following Falkof’s (2020) framework, we rst present the phenomenon “digi-
tal generation” based on the media articles from Table 8.1. We then present the
perceived threats of digitalisation to this generation. Finally, we present the calls
for solutions to this problem in the media coverage. To give an impression of
proportionality, the media coverage is supplemented by the relevant results from
Ungdata throughout the analysis.
Digital generation
Our category “digital generation” represents mostly positive or neutral news sto-
ries. We nd descriptions of children and youths as “digital natives”, often stating
this as a fact:
We now have the rst generation of digital natives, meaning people who have
grown up with the internet.
(Aftenposten, 13 July 2016)

The digital generation 141
Signicant parts of young people’s everyday lives take place in digital arenas.
(Adresseavisen, 5 October 2017)
Following statements like these, newspaper reports focus on various activities or
services now becoming digital to accommodate young people’s needs and inter-
ests. Examples are internet shopping, movies, radio and other media services,
school nurses, banking, and public information from authorities. Other stories
relate to how previous analogue activities or events must evolve into digital spaces
to attract the attention of children and youth, such as local libraries launching
digital reading contests for children, digital youth clubs and museums introduc-
ing digital entertainment, and learning activities to attract families with children.
A certain nostalgia marks these reports, reminiscing about how childhood was
before the introduction of generally available digital devices. Some newspaper
stories thus make a point about how theatre, storytelling, and reading aloud still
attract children’s attention even in a digital age.
Most newspaper stories relating to digitalisation in education are about schools
introducing digital devices like PCs, iPads, or tablets in learning situations:
Today’s children are born into a digital world, and we respond to that, says
principal NN.
(Bergens Tidende, 11 August 2012)
[The] internet and digital learning are about to revolutionise education.
(Grimstad Arbeiderblad, 6 September 2016)
Digitalisation in schools is further related to the use of digital pedagogical tools in
kindergartens, intended to stimulate basic language training for toddlers. In both
sectors, signicant results in terms of improved learning are expected. This opti-
mism is particularly evident in the so-called gamication of mathematics, tech-
nology, and science in primary and secondary schools, using digital tools, apps,
and contest-like modes of instruction on digital devices.
Disregarding this liberal access to digital devices in schools, newspaper reports
in our sample also show that Norwegian 15-year-olds ranked just about average on
the PISA test2 on digital reading in 2015. Also, doubts about whether digital devices
correlate with academic success are present in our sample. This doubt is expressed
in criticism of teachers’ digital competence. Moreover, newspapers publish letters
from parents wanting their children to have time o from screens when in school
and report on schools banning students’ use of mobile phones during school hours
to prevent digital bullying and stimulate face-to-face socialising during recess.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming impression of media stories in this category is a
drive for modernity, where digital developments in society are met with excitement
and certain awe at the younger generation as compliant with this development.
As reported in the media, the digitalisation of young lives involves an increase
in screen time both in and after school. Using Ungdata to track total screen time for
Norwegian boys and girls aged 13–18 years for the period 2014–2020, we nd that

142 Idunn Seland and Christer Hyggen
youth spend more time in front of a screen in 2020 than they did six years prior. In
2014, 55% of the boys and 47% of the girls spent more than three hours a day in front
of a screen every day outside school hours. In 2020, the number had risen to 62%
for boys and 57% for girls. In parallel, the media landscape is rapidly changing and
evolving with the introduction of new digital and social media. Time spent in front of
a screen does not necessarily mean the same thing in 2020 as it did in 2010. Both the
level of interaction with the screen and the content are changing.
Traditionally, youth have spent much of their spare time watching TV. However,
this is no longer true, at least not the way it used to be. Whereas more than 20% of
Norwegian youth spent more than two hours watching TV every day in 2010, this
was true only for about 8% in 2020. The trend is similar for boys and girls, even if we
observe a greater decline among girls than among boys. Knowing that greater num-
bers of youth spend an increasing total amount of time in front of a screen means that
they have moved their attention towards other types of screens than the TV.
The greatest shift we observe in this period is the shift in attention towards
social media. In 2014, nearly 25% of the boys and 43% of the girls spent more
than two hours using social media every day outside school hours. In 2020, this
applied to almost 40% of the boys and 65% of the girls.
In contrast to these trends, the number of youths spending time gaming is rela-
tively constant. Boys dominate in this area. For the last decade, about 40% of
boys have spent more than two hours everyday gaming on a console or a PC. In
addition, about 14% of the boys spend more than two hours every day gaming on
tablets or mobile phones. Even if many girls play games, they spend considerably
less time gaming than boys of the same age.
The observations on Norwegian youth over ten years conrm the general
assumptions in the media coverage on the digital generation. Young people
spend an increasing amount of time in front of a screen, and the nature, content,
and activities of this screen interaction are changing. Youth spend an increasing
amount of time online.
Digital threats
Our category “digital threats” presents the risks involved in children’s and adoles-
cents’ ICT use, as portrayed in media and reported in Ungdata. Two excerpts from
our sample of newspaper articles state:
Digital bullying is now becoming widespread in Rjukan. In the new app Ask
.f m, young people no more than 12 years old are called cheap3 and ugly.
(Rjukan Arbeiderblad, 26 October 2013)
Every day, thousands of children and young people experience bullying via
mobile phones or the internet.
(Raumnes, 14 September 2020)
In 2003, Medietilsynet, the Norwegian Media Authority,4 launched its survey of
children and media consumption. The subsequent biennial reports (2008–2020)

The digital generation 143
from Medietilsynet are frequently quoted sources on the prevalence of digital
bullying in our newspaper sample, along with results from local Ungdata surveys
throughout the period.
An academic commonly consulted by newspapers in the rst half of the period
under investigation is Elisabeth Staksrud, whose book Children in the Online
World: Risks, Regulations and Rights (2013) has been highly inuential in the
Norwegian debate and policymaking on this subject. However, the sources most
frequently referenced in the news stories on digital bullying in our sample are the
private foundation Barnevakten (i.e. “The Babysitter”), established in 2000 to
advise parents on children’s use of media, and a campaign entitled “Bruk hue”
(i.e. “Use your brain”). “Bruk hue” visited schools, public libraries, parent meet-
ings, and other public arenas, promoting advice and warnings from Barnevakten
representatives in conjunction with health professionals and Telenor, a major
national supplier of digital content for children. A typical example in our material
following this discourse is a local newspaper article reporting the previous night’s
public meeting visited by the “Bruk hue” campaign, informing parents about the
risks of digital bullying and violence for children using digital platforms. The
newspapers often refer to how institutions in the local community take a stand
against digital bullying and encourage parents to do the same:
Many young people live signicant parts of their lives on social media, and
digital bullying is on the rise. Now the school and the local police urge par-
ents to learn more about their children’s digital everyday lives.
(Aust-Agder Blad, 19 November 2013)
The concept of digital bullying or cyberbullying is complex, as is the concept of
traditional bullying (Englander, 2019). Cyberbullying may take several forms that
are hard to grasp through surveys. However, most children and youths will know
when they experience bullying and be able to report this when asked. The digital
transformation of this threat implies a shift in arenas for exposure, from open bul-
lying in school or other physical arenas to online forums, online platforms, and
social media. This makes it harder for parents, teachers, and adults to monitor
activities and potential threats. In addition, omnipresent social connectivity on
smartphones makes it harder for victims to avoid bullying situations.
The questions used to capture digital bullying or violence in Ungdata have
evolved during the observation period. The proportion of youth who have experi-
enced digital bullying is thus not directly comparable across time. However, some
important observations can be inferred from Figure 8.1. Experiences of online
bullying and violence are relatively common. Digital bullying is more widespread
in lower secondary schools than in upper secondary schools. There are no trends
towards either an increase or a decrease within any of the observation periods,
suggesting that the level of digital bullying is relatively constant over time, even
if the use of social media, as well as total screen time, is rising.
Newspaper reports in our sample do not necessarily distinguish between sexual and
non-sexual harassment when warning against young people’s ICT use. It is important

144 Idunn Seland and Christer Hyggen
to note that sexting (sending, receiving, or forwarding sexually explicit material) may
take place between consenting partners and in an atmosphere of trust and/or irtation,
intimacy, and sexual exploration and may thus have a special value for teenagers
using technology with which they are comfortable (Anastassiou, 2017). However,
sexting may also be coercive, non-consensual, or be accessed or requested from
children by adults, which obviously contrasts with the phenomenon’s potential inno-
cence. Possible consequences of cyberbullying and non-consensual sexting overlap
with feelings of shame and low self-esteem, reputational damage, negative eects on
school performance, social isolation, physical discomfort, self-inicted harm, depres-
sion, and suicide (Lee & Darcy 2020; Milosevic, 2015). Notably, newspaper articles
in our sample report on a theatre ensemble touring local schools with a play on digital
bullying titled “Hengdeg” (i.e. “Go hang yourself”).
As we can see from Figure 8.2, sexting is not uncommon for Norwegian youth.
At the lower secondary school level, about 10% of boys and 12% of girls have
sent nude pictures of themselves to someone. At the upper secondary level, more
than one in ve have done the same. Slightly more girls have shared nudes than
boys. However, many more girls than boys felt some level of pressure to do so.
In many cases, youths are also at the receiving end of sexting. From Figure 8.2,
we see that girls are slightly more exposed to this than boys, and it is more common
among youths in upper secondary than in lower secondary school. More youths at
lower than upper secondary school nd it oensive, and whereas most girls who have
received images with sexual content do not think it was OK, most boys do.
Digital competence
The call for digital competence in our sample of media reports may be seen as the
older generation’s main response to the threat of children being victims of digital
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
Boys LS Boys US Girls LS Girls US
Figure 8.1 Percentages of Norwegian youth in lower (L) and upper (U) secondary schools
(S) experiencing online bullying or violence 2010–2020. Period (P) 1 (2010–
2013), n = 49 098. P2 (2014–2016), n = 178 623. P3 (2017–2019), n = 281 145.
P4 (2020), n = 35 623.

The digital generation 145
bullying and reduced health. However, such competence is also the main response
to schools’ perceived shortcomings in delivering improved learning results. The
two following citations are telling examples:
Children often have good digital competence, but they may lack social com-
petence. Do not be naive and trust your child never to be mean to anyone on
the internet.
(Sarpsborg Arbeiderblad, 16 October 2013)
After the Millennium, theories emerged on how youths, being surrounded by
digital tools, would learn to use them naturally. (…) Recent research shows
that this is not the case: children will not automatically learn from technology
how to use it in a good way.
(Klassekampen, 8 February 2018)
Here, an important division in the concept of digital competence is displayed: even
as children and young people will be more familiar with ICT than their parents
and older generations, they may not be able to use it with moral responsibility.
The former way of assessing “digital competence” is closely connected with our
category “digital generation”, where the use of digital devices is expected to pre-
pare children for future working life and rapid technological development. The
latter meaning of “digital competence” here relates directly to our category “digital
threat”. Children’s and young people’s immature understanding of formal rules of
privacy and social norms of good conduct and moral and personal responsibility are
described as the main problems behind these threats. In the newspaper reports, key
solutions are emphasised as children and youth learning critical thinking and criti-
cal understanding of ICT, placing the responsibility both with parents and teachers:
Adults should be present where children and young people live their digital
lives.
(Telemarksavisa, 25 February 2010)
0
Sent
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
Boys LS Boys US Girls LS Girls US
Received
Boys LS Boys US Girls LS Girls US
Pressure No pressure not OK OK
Figure 8.2 Percentages of Norwegian boys and girls in lower (L) and upper (U) secondary
schools (S) who have sent (n = 14 262) or received (n = 14 154) digital sexual
content, 2020.

146 Idunn Seland and Christer Hyggen
Digital competence is a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes (…).
I believe the school has a major responsibility for educating our children in
these respects.
(Dagsavisen, 26 September 2016)
Again, the “Bruk hue” campaign and related measures directed at parents are
given media coverage. By inviting parents to these meetings, the schools encour-
age parents to talk to children about ICT use, to ask what happens on the platforms
the children engage with, and to generally be good role models and give their chil-
dren a moral digital upbringing. The following excerpt from a local newspaper
written by a primary school principal inviting parents to a meeting about bullying
gives a good example of this joint responsibility:
The talk will address what we as parents may do to develop our children’s
good digital judgement and social skills online.
(Hadeland, 29 April 2019)
The media analyses thus identify parents’ role in the online activities of the
digital generation as important. Common advice presented in the media is to
encourage parents to take an active part in the digital lives of the digital genera-
tion. One way of doing this is to set rules for their children’s social media use
or talk to them to gain insight into what their social media activities consist of.
Another is to place the responsibility for digital competence on teachers and
schools.
As we can see from Figure 8.3, there is a clear trend towards increasing per-
centages of Norwegian boys and girls subject to parents who set rules for their
social media use. Nearly 50% of the girls in lower secondary education agree or
strongly agree with a statement about having parents that set rules for their social
media use. Youths in upper secondary education are less subject to similar rules
than youths in lower secondary and girls more than boys.
Most Norwegian youths agree or strongly agree with a statement about having
parents with knowledge about their social media activities. More girls than boys
and a higher proportion of younger than older youth have parents with knowledge
about which social media platforms they are using, who they are communicating
with, and what types of interactions they are part of. We observe a trend towards
an increasing number of youths with parents who are involved in their social
media activities.
It seems that the observed increase in parental involvement in their children’s
social media activities is met with an increased need for seclusion amongst
Norwegian youth. The number of youth who agree or strongly agree with a state-
ment about hiding at least part of their activities on social media from their parents
is on the rise, in particular for the youngest users.

The digital generation 147
Discussion
The perception of children’s and youths’ ICT use gathered from Norwegian
newspaper articles from 2010 until 2020 is ambiguous, where this age group’s
ascendancy into a new technological reality is met with admiration, excitement,
ambition, and fear. The “digital generation”, a term used generously in newspa-
per articles, covers all these notions where something perceived as new clashes
with something portrayed as old: the digital versus the analogue. As excitement
rises from the modern world’s general technological advancements, young peo-
ple’s seemingly natural engagement with this new reality is described with a
certain awe. Naturally, this admiration spurs ambition, and young people are
expected to be at the forefront of learning and general mastery of their digital
environment.
However, as young people are expected to be technological pioneers, the
possible dangers of them being insuciently equipped upon entering uncharted
digital territories also create distinct worry and alarm amongst adults, as repre-
sented by the newspapers. This worry increases with the perceived opaqueness
of the digital platforms and spaces used by young people, where they can oper-
ate without parental supervision or even parents’ knowledge (Staksrud, 2020).
Ungdata shows that most young Norwegians have parents who know what kind
of social media platforms they use and what kind of online activities they take
2014 2015
Rules
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2014 2015
Knowledge
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
2014 2015
Seclusion
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
10%
0%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Boys US
Girls LS
Girls US
Boys LS
Figure 8.3 Percentages of Norwegian boys and girls in lower (L) and upper (U) secondary
schools (S) with parents who have set rules for or have knowledge of their
social media use or who hide some of their social media activities from their
parents, 2014–2020, n = 169 212, 169 252, and 167 956, respectively.

148 Idunn Seland and Christer Hyggen
part in. Parents are also involved by setting rules for social media use and online
activities. By observing trends from 2014 to 2020, we see an increase in parental
involvement through increased knowledge amongst parents and a slight increase
in the number of youths that are subject to rules regarding their use. Conversely,
we observe a rising trend during the same period in the number of boys that hide
parts of their social media activities from their parents.
The fear of threats to young people’s safe internet use is both distinct and
blurred in the newspaper stories. Digital bullying stands out as the most con-
crete and frequently mentioned problem, but digital bullying is entangled with
a larger body of risks and misconduct generally stemming from the premise
of young people being on their own on the internet, encountering things they
are unequipped for or making bad choices. However, Ungdata shows that digi-
tal bullying, at least in terms of experiences of bullying, harassment, and/or
exclusion, aects between 10 and 25% of the Norwegian youth population. As
the consensus will be that bullying, including digital bullying, is bad, the real
phenomenon may appear less overwhelming than indicated by the newspaper
articles. However, this does not prevent digital bullying from being an over-
whelming problem for young people being harassed (Milosevic, 2015). Sexting,
by contrast, is more ambiguous in the adolescents’ experiences recorded by
Ungdata. About one in ve Norwegian teenagers in upper secondary schools
have shared nudes, and 84% of the boys and 72% of the girls did this with-
out feeling pressured to do so. About 45% of the students in upper secondary
schools have received digital sexual content, and 90% of the boys and 56% of
the girls are “OK” with this. This aligns with previous research on sexting being
an integrated part of young people’s courting practices and explorations of sex-
ual identity (Lee & Darcy, 2020), with a potential for non-consensual sharing
and image-based sexual abuse (McGlynn & Rackley 2017).
Following the framework of a moral panic, Falkof (2020) asks what is
being demonised in the media about young people’s behaviour. In our case
of the “digital generation”, the answer is not totally clear, as the villains or
folk devils are not only the individual bullies or the unknown people mak-
ing or posting scary or threatening things on the websites or platforms being
utilised by the children and youth. The problem is also the pitfalls of the
technology itself, eliciting behaviour that one would perhaps abstain from in
the analogue and commonly acknowledged more transparent world, i.e. being
mean, malicious, criminal, or lewd. When Falkof (2020) consequently asks
what this possible demonisation stands for, an answer would be lack of control
and safety in a contemporary online world, contrasting with the oine world
where children are perhaps more protected by rights and regulations than ever
before (Staksrud, 2020).
This lack of control in digital spaces was rst described in relation to so-called
video nasties and console gaming in the 1980s (Staksrud, 2013). Interestingly,
gaming takes up only a minor space in our sample of newspaper articles between
2010 and 2020, a nding that also surprised us. When gaming is mentioned
in our sample, it is mostly about “gamication” of educational material and

The digital generation 149
opportunities, intended to make learning in school more interesting and palatable
to the digital generation. If we ask, following Falkof (2020), whether the presenta-
tion of the digital generation might draw on pre-existing narratives about risk and
threat, we see that the “video nasties” might very well be alive on social media.
Here, we nd a regular continuation of a pre-existing narrative bringing violence
and pornography to the touch of younger children’s ngertips, where previously
these dangers took place in adolescents’ dens in families where parents were pre-
sumed to be either absent or careless, i.e. unsuited for bringing up their children
safely. The absence of parents is still portrayed as the main problem for children
and youth encountering unwanted or possibly damaging experiences on the inter-
net and may therefore constitute what Falkof (2020) has described as a broader
discursive frame for panic over digital media.
Conclusion
If a generation can be identied by common experiences, children’s and young
people’s widespread use of smartphones with built-in Wi-Fi might constitute such
an experience. However, as adults all over the world acquired and adapted to
smartphones at the same time, is this trait sucient to acknowledge children and
young people growing up with the internet as a distinct generation?
In this chapter, we have argued in the line of Staksrud (2013) that the surge in
smartphone sales and use involving children being given direct access to the inter-
net from their own handheld devices coincided with another similarly encom-
passing but less visible change concerning media regulation. All over Western
Europe, institutions originally established to regulate, censor, and even ban visual
images and media language expressions underwent a signicant transformation
towards giving advice on media content and user safety. This transformation,
aligning with other welfare state institutions allowing for a broader range of indi-
vidual choice, also meant that the responsibility for risks became individualised
or, at least in part, removed from the same institutions. While today’s children
are left to make an almost indenite range of their own choices in using digital
devices online, their parents are expected to keep track of, regulate, educate on,
and protect their children from online risk. This situation is in stark contrast to
the parents’ generation growing up in an era when state institutions for direct
media regulation, with age limits and watershed rules for television broadcasting,
still functioned. We suggest that this experience may actually be the real, den-
ing common challenge distinguishing today’s children and youth as the “digital
generation”.
A return to strict regulation of the new media landscape to protect children and
young people from the harms we have described in this chapter seems to be the
only consumer choice that is unavailable in the current situation. Here, other wel-
fare state institutions have been forced to compensate. We see this compensation
most typically in schools and even in kindergartens, where children are meant to
be not only digitally adept but also digitally competent, meaning developing criti-
cal thinking about digital media. Again, this puts pressure on the older generation

150 Idunn Seland and Christer Hyggen
of teachers, many of whom have not had the same experiences as young people
using the internet, meaning that schools run the risk of lagging behind no matter
what their digitalisation eorts are. Here, schools and parents are new allies but
also possible antagonists in this new market of information, leaving room for new
entrepreneurs and brokers of protection and advice, where some children may pay
a high price for everybody’s freedom on the internet.
Notes
1 A-tekst/Retriever is a Norwegian database covering print, online sources, broadcast,
and social media https://www .retrievergroup .com/.
2 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) is the Organisation of Economic
Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) standardised measuring of 15-year-olds’
ability to use their reading, mathematics, and science knowledge . https:/ /www .oecd .
org / pisa/.
3 “Cheap” here denotes being sexually available and undiscriminating.
4 The Norwegian Media Authority (Medietilsynet): https :/ /me dieti lsyne t .no/ en /ab out -m
ediet ilsyn et/.
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