Denaturalising the digital child: Genealogy, obligations, and the governance of mediated futures

Contemporary children’s digital rights discourse increasingly assumes that children’sfutures are inherently digital and that their flourishing depends on safe, optimisedparticipation in digital environments. This article challenges that assumption bydenaturalising the figure of “the digital child” and the associated presumption of“digital futures” with a particular focus on schooling as a primary institutional sitewhere digital inevitability is produced and normalised. Drawing on Simone Weil’sclaim that obligations precede rights, and using Foucauldian genealogical analysis, thearticle examines a purposive corpus of children’s digital rights instruments andeducation digitisation strategies to trace how four recurring regimes ofproblematisation—protection, participation, agency, and skills/future readiness—converge to render digital-by-default schooling morally obligatory and practicallydifficult to refuse. The analysis identifies structural contradictions that arise whendigital rights-based aspirations are pursued within platform political economy anddatafication logics, including safety-through-surveillance and participation-as-optimisation. The article concludes by proposing an obligations-first recalibration forchildren’s digital rights in compulsory education: a standards-based approach thatforegrounds necessity, proportionality, reversibility, and contestability, and that treatsnon-digital and low-digital provision as ethically significant options rather than asregressive alternatives to a presumed digital-by-default futures.