Educating Digital Citizens at Risk: Private Actors, Neoliberal Policies, and Individualising Narratives
摘要
Private organisations interested in funding and developing educational programmes and resources to keep young people safe online have proliferated in the last decade: from Google to Disney, from 5Rights Foundation to Netsafe. With differing agendas, social media platforms, EdTech companies, foundations, philanthropies, and social enterprises are currently dominating the debate over online safety education. There has been minimal scrutiny of the underlying narratives about digital citizenship and technology that these online safety education actors espouse and seek to transmit. These narratives, however, have widely influenced education policies at both national and global levels. In this chapter, we explore the actors and policy discourses of online safety education in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand. We present the results of a ‘network ethnography’ of the actors influencing online safety education policies in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and a discourse analysis of such policies. This ‘topological approach’ allows us to better understand not only the flows and spaces of configuration of digital safety discourses but also the private interests involved in the spread of narratives that contribute to what Bauman calls the ‘individualisation of social risk’.