Dear AoIR
Colleagues and Friends
I am excited to share the launch of my new book from Routledge,
“Kids,
KidTech, and Digital Capitalism: The Fight for Our Digital Futures”.
The book is available as an
Open Access publication.
If you are interested in teaching the book in your class this year, I am open to guest lectures and call-ins and would love to speak to your students.
About the book:
Uncovering the workings of the KidTech industry, this book explores how capitalism operates in digital spaces that are geared toward children and how this impacts
children’s everyday lives.
For internet researchers, the book offers a critical look at how platforms, datafication, and digital capitalism are shaping children’s experiences and the broader social and political worlds of the internet they inhabit.
Conversational and personal in approach, the book uses observational anecdotes to illuminate broader theoretical insights into children’s changing relationships with digital
media and digital capitalism.
Ch1: Introduction - Digital Kids, Digital Worlds
Ch2: Born to Shop? - A History of the Youth Market
Ch3: Fun and Free - Theorizing KidTech and the Workings of Digital Capitalism
Ch4: Kids as Data - The First Fully Datafied Generation
Ch5: What’s the Difference? - Play as Work in Digital Playspaces
Ch6: Playing in the Moated Walled Garden - KidTech, Roblox, and the Metaverse
Ch7: Digital Kids, Digital Citizenships, and Rethinking Our Digital Futures
Biography: Natalie Coulter is an Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies at York University. Her research focuses on young people's digital cultures, children's media, girls' culture, and digital capitalism. She is co-author of Media and Communication in Canada (2025) and author of Tweening the Girl (2014).
ENDORSEMENTS
Coulter provides a compelling and critical examination of the colonization of children by the lucrative KidTech industry, which encompasses an array of digital platforms for play and learning, fueled by Big Tech’s deep capitalization and design of obtuse infrastructures that envelope and construct the datafied child. From the origins of the youth marketplace in the Victorian Era to today’s wildly popular Roblox metaverse platform, Coulter demonstrates the stakes of this insidious mode of unregulated digital capitalism, which troubles children’s digital and privacy rights.
In an engaging style, Natalie Coulter ushers readers through the complex, dynamic and oh-so-consequential
world of KidTech, from its “pre-tech” origins in the 19th century to the ubiquity and seeming boundlessness of contemporary Web3 immersion. In the process,
Kids, KidTech and Digital Capitalism invites critical engagement with emergent—and ever-marketized—notions of children and childhood that are curated to fit the embedded logics of digital capitalism. Coulter sprinkles humor throughout her serious challenges
to academics and non-academics alike to rethink conceptions of rights, sovereignty, play and consumption in light of the ongoing construction of a moated, walled garden of KidTech.
--Daniel Thomas Cook, Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University—Camden and author
of The Commodification of Childhood