About
Platforms like Roblox are developing at a dizzying pace, outpacing much of our scholarship. There is an urgent need to quickly understand KidTech platforms in order to protect children’s digital rights by supporting parents/caregivers, educators and policy makers in comprehending the implications of these shift digital infrastructures of Web3. But it is also urgent that we understand the commercial economies, technological affordances and digital cultures of this new form of communication and entertainment as Roblox, along with other KidTech platforms, have their sights on reshaping our digital worlds. The Digital Futures project aims to understand how content is produced, circulated, monetized and experienced on Roblox.
Project Aims
This project aims to address the following research questions:
What is content in the digiverse?
We are interested in exploring the technological affordances, technological constraints, and social media affordances that shape the commercial economies of KidTech. This project aims to understand how content is experienced, monetized, and datafied in these immersive forms of media.
How is content created in the digiverse?
The Digital Futures project explores the corporate infrastructures that mediate between brands and the Roblox platform in the creation of immersive experiences and the full spectrum of the “global community of creators” active on Roblox.
How is content experienced in the digiverse?
How do young people engage in these spaces? What does it mean to play in the spaces? How are play experiences shaped by the commercial logics of digital capitalism?
What is/ should be the policy that shapes the digiverse?
This project is interested in identifying which policies currently support young people’s digital rights and the interventions that must be made to protect them from commercial surveillance and from marketing that is disguised as content as Web3 quickly unfolds.
Research Team
The research team of the Digital Futures Project is comprised of researchers from Canada and the United Kingdom.
Principal Investigator
Natalie Coulter
I am an Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies and former Director of the Institute for Digital Literacies (IRDL) at York University, Canada. I am co-author of Media and Communication in Canada (9th ed) and co-editor of Youth Mediations and Affective Relations (2019) and author of Tweening the Girl (2014). My work focuses on consumer culture, media culture, and digital media. I am interested in how young people engage in such spaces. Currently, I am working on a book project entitled Kids and Digital Capitalism. I have published on such topics as tween girls, Canadian media, masculinity and Playboy, research harassment, children’s digital cultures and family media practices.
Research Stream Leads
Estee Fresco
Stream B (Spectrum of Robloxers) Co-Lead
Estee Fresco is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Her research lies at the intersection of sport, promotional culture, embodiment, and national identity.
Kim Wilson
Stream B (Spectrum of Robloxers) Co-Lead
TBD
Advisory Board
Kara Brisson-Boivin
Kara Brisson-Boivin, PhD, is the Director of Research for MediaSmarts, where she leads the planning, methodology, implementation, and dissemination of findings from original research studies and program evaluations. She is also an Adjunct Research Professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Carleton University. Kara collaborates with academic partners on tri-agency funded projects, as well as private, public, and federal organizations on issues including digital parenting, privacy, hate, misinformation, activism, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. She brings extensive publication experience across academic and public venues and regularly presents research to stakeholders through parliamentary committees, conferences, panels, keynote talks, and media interviews.
Brandee Easter is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. Her research focuses on how bodies are imagined, constructed, and experienced in relationship to technology. Working from rhetorical studies, she explores how arguments are made about, with, and in technology with the goal to better understand discourses of technological objectivity.
Patricia Nuñez Gómez
Full professor in Advertising, Complutense University. is Director of the Chair of Digital Communication in Childhood and Adolescence at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and Principal Investigator of the SIC 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 projects at this University. With over 25 years of research experience, she has specialized in communication and childhood, working within national and international networks such as UNESCO and UNICEF.
She is also leading and forming part of the team of other projects related to Children as INFLUIDENTITY, DIGITALFIT, and DIGHETICA.
Jonathan Hardy
Jonathan Hardy is Professor of Communications and Media at the University of the Arts London. He was principal investigator for the Branded Content Governance Project, 2022-2025 (ES/W007991/1) and leads the Branded Content Research Network. He writes and comments on media industries, media and advertising, communications regulation, and international media systems. His books include Sponsored Editorial Content in Digital Journalism (editor, 2023), Branded Content: the Fateful Merging of Media and Marketing (2022), The Advertising Handbook (co-editor 2018/2011), Critical Political Economy of the Media (2014), Cross-Media Promotion (2010), and Western Media Systems (2008). He is series editor for Routledge Critical Advertising Studies.
Dr Rebekah Willett is a Professor in the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. She has conducted research on children’s media cultures, focusing on issues of play, literacy, identity, and learning. Her publications include work on makerspaces, playground games, amateur camcorder cultures, family media practices, and children’s story writing. She has published in journals in the fields of education, childhood studies, media studies, and library and information science. In addition, she has co-authored and/or edited six books and contributed to numerous edited books and encyclopedia projects.
Graduate Student Research Assistants
Caitlin Donnelly
I am a Master’s student in the Communication and Culture program, specializing in fan studies with a focus on textile-based fan practices, particularly cosplay.
Marion Tempest Grant (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Communications and Culture program at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research explores British handicraft guilds, women’s work, and the Arts and Crafts movement. Her broader interests include art history, women’s history, digital humanities, visual culture, and the periodical press.
I hold a B.A. in Political Science and a Master's in Public and International Affairs from York University, and I am currently a PhD candidate in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies. My dissertation examines how Black teenage girls raised in predominantly white cities use online platforms to construct and sustain communities rooted in self-definition.
Project Partners
Coming soon.