Childhoods produced (producing?), lived and shared by digital languages: what children say in front of screens
Childhood; Audiovisual Languages; Children; Social Networks; Heteroscience
This study aimed to understand the aesthetic creation process carried out by children when producing content in the digital world. The research was conducted on the social media platforms TikTok and Instagram, with the active participation of five children, from August 2023 to December 2024. Our understandings were woven through the meanings developed from dialogues grounded in the postulates of Mikhail Bakhtin's Philosophy of Language and his Circle, studies conducted from the perspective of the Sociology of Childhood, and thinkers whose works focus on Childhood Studies within the context of digital culture. Our methodological approach was the act of comparison, in which we weaved meanings to answer the questions we were currently asking about how children are living their experiences, constitutive of their childhoods, within the context of digital culture. The writing work anchored the studies developed by the GEPELID-UFRRJ research group on heteroscience enabling us to write a thesis text on an aesthetic level. Events arising from the research field inspired the construction of posts, a discursive genre in the digital space, in which we keep children's voices alive. We present, then, the division of this study into four events that allowed us to reflect on the agency, authorship, and active participation of children in communication processes in digital culture; to understand how audiovisual productions created by children constitute an aesthetic object and the authorial evidence expressed in each creation; and, further, to analyze the content expressed in children's aesthetic productions shared on social media platforms. Given the experiences shared with children on social media platforms and in the dialogue with the audiovisual productions they create, we understand that, when children assume authorial discursive positions on social media platforms, they aesthetically express nuances of their daily experiences and the contemporary cultural landscape. Thus, they delineate the social role of children and the place of childhood in digital culture.
considerations presented here.