Digital mediation is central to how children and youth grow up in the global North and in much of the global South today. In taking account of this situation, of late researchers have tended to draw on a sociology of the child in conjunction with an examination of how digitization is changing the experience of childhood itself. This article also begins by tracking key social, economic and cultural changes in young people's lives. We then link these changes to the immersive media life many children around the world are living today, and note the worries this raises among parents, educators and others. To conclude, we identify the paradox of participation that is shaping children's digital culture and forcing researchers and others to reconsider the relationships between consumerism and civic life.Growing up in the global North and in much of the global South today means learning the language of consumer media culture through a constant diet of screen images, audio tracks, and print messages that compete with schools and families as the primary storytellers and teachers in children's lives. Research from various quarters (Buckingham 2007;Cook 2004;Critcher 2008;Kline 1993) reminds us that this situation is not new, but the mediation of young people's lives is now thread through with digital technologies and practices that produce new tensions and possibilities shaping how children and youth play, feel, and think together.The media is, and always has been, larger than life. We live in its constant presence, even when we are not plugged in and turned on. As a consequence, it is now virtually impossible for children and youth to imagine what it would be like to grow up without the Internet, television, video games, and pop music. Such media welcome young people into the culture, values and mores of contemporary life in most of the world's cultures (Tufte and Enghel 2009). The result is contemporary mediascapes provide a powerful and complex catalogue of symbolic and affective commodities, including 'characters, plots and textual forms', that young people use to produce scripts about themselves and the 'imagined lives' of others (Appadurai 1996, 35-6). This is what it means to say our lives are mediated today; who we are, what we know, and how we act are all experiences now lived out as electronic and digitally mediated life.In taking account of children's digital lives, recent research has tended to draw on a sociology of the child in conjunction with an examination of how digitization is changing the experience of childhood itself (e.g.
