Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
In this presentation, Farrah Eva Nabila discusses an ethnography of children’s digital lives in a densely populated urban settlement, examining how AI-driven algorithms shape their everyday rhythms and aspirations. Based on months of fieldwork—including participant observation, daily
vignettes, and interviews with children, parents, and local youth leaders—Nabila's study explores how smartphones and tablets, often purchased on instalment by working-class families, become the primary infrastructure for leisure, play, and access to knowledge. Children typically spend 5–6 hours a day on devices after school, gathering in narrow alleys or shared verandas to watch YouTube, play Roblox, or scroll through TikTok. Rather than producing content or engaging creatively, they are locked into passive algorithmic entanglement—a cycle of endless, AI-curated consumption reinforced by autoplay and recommendation systems. Importantly, this digital environment also shapes children’s desires: they express wishes to own expensive gadgets, become influencers, or achieve wealth, reflecting the aspirational culture produced by platform capitalism.
Nabila's ethnographic work highlights a layered form of data injustice: children’s attention is systematically monetized by global platforms while they remain excluded from meaningful digital literacy programs, curated educational content, and protective infrastructures. Nabila argues that digital inclusion in the Majority World must go beyond device access to include spatial justice—public play spaces, community libraries, and grassroots digital literacy initiatives—so that children’s free time is not entirely colonized by algorithmic systems. By linking small lives to big systems, her study contributes to global debates on AI governance, data justice, and urban childhood, challenging dominant smart city imaginaries that presume technology inherently empowers its youngest users.
In this presentation, Farrah Eva Nabila discusses an ethnography of children’s digital lives in a densely populated urban settlement, examining how AI-driven algorithms shape their everyday rhythms and aspirations. Based on months of fieldwork—including participant observation, daily
vignettes, and interviews with children, parents, and local youth leaders—Nabila's study explores how smartphones and tablets, often purchased on instalment by working-class families, become the primary infrastructure for leisure, play, and access to knowledge. Children typically spend 5–6 hours a day on devices after school, gathering in narrow alleys or shared verandas to watch YouTube, play Roblox, or scroll through TikTok. Rather than producing content or engaging creatively, they are locked into passive algorithmic entanglement—a cycle of endless, AI-curated consumption reinforced by autoplay and recommendation systems. Importantly, this digital environment also shapes children’s desires: they express wishes to own expensive gadgets, become influencers, or achieve wealth, reflecting the aspirational culture produced by platform capitalism.
Nabila's ethnographic work highlights a layered form of data injustice: children’s attention is systematically monetized by global platforms while they remain excluded from meaningful digital literacy programs, curated educational content, and protective infrastructures. Nabila argues that digital inclusion in the Majority World must go beyond device access to include spatial justice—public play spaces, community libraries, and grassroots digital literacy initiatives—so that children’s free time is not entirely colonized by algorithmic systems. By linking small lives to big systems, her study contributes to global debates on AI governance, data justice, and urban childhood, challenging dominant smart city imaginaries that presume technology inherently empowers its youngest users.
