Young children's touchscreen habitats, habituation, and habitus

Informed by media studies approaches that seek to understand everyday media use, this paper focuses on the context, content, and conduct of young children interacting with touchscreen devices. It draws on ongoing qualitative research with families and children aged from 0 to 5 (n=40+) in their domestic media settings in Melbourne, Australia. The research builds on established ethnographic approaches to domestic technology consumption and use, utilising methods such as household technology tours, interviews, participant observation, and child-guided demonstrations of use. The paper extends the analysis of young children’s touchscreen habitats and habituation through the concept of habitus, in which children’s acquisition and embodiment of dispositions towards touchscreen devices is understood as produced through the accumulation of experiences and their embeddedness within cultural norms surrounding new media technologies.