Journal of Interactive Advertising

Children of the Platform Society: Generation Alpha, Beta, and Digital Advertising Cultures

The Journal of Interactive Advertising (JIA) is seeking submissions for its Special Issue Article Collection on “Children of the Platform Society: Generation Alpha, Beta, and Digital Advertising Cultures.”

Background and Scope:

Children of the newest generations, Generation Alpha (born after 2012) and Generation Beta (born after 2025), are growing up in a platform society, defined by Van Dijk, Poell, and De Waal (2018, p. 4) as “a global online platform ecosystem that is driven by algorithms and fueled by data”. As Nathalie Coulter argues in Kids, Kidtech and Digital Capitalism: The Fight for Our Digital Futures (2027), this platform society operates according to a capitalist logic in which user data becomes a key source of value creation, exploited for the profit of a few technology companies. Although such platforms were initially celebrated for their democratizing potential to connect users beyond traditional institutions, they have become deeply commercialized systems that monetize participation whose architectures and affordances are designed to monetize participation by extracting, processing and commercializing user data (Coulter, 2027).

Within this platform society, children are extensively datafied for commercial purposes, often even before birth, as parents share ultrasounds to announce pregnancies or videos from baby showers. The child-directed platforms that Coulter (2027) terms KidTech normalize data extraction by presenting datafication as beneficial, convenient, and inevitable. Despite significant information asymmetries between users and platform providers, families often have little choice but to trust technology companies to manage their data responsibly, fairly, and transparently. Also, constantly shifting platform trends, pressures from content creators, and rapidly evolving technologies such as generative AI continually draw younger generations and their families deeper into this datafied ecosystem.

Generation Alpha and Beta are therefore not just growing up with digital technologies; they are the first generations whose development has unfolded within continuously connected, algorithmically curated, and commercially structured digital ecosystems. Rather than moving between online and offline worlds, their everyday lives increasingly reflect what Floridi (2015) describes as an onlife condition, in which physical and digital realities coexist seamlessly. Touchscreens, streaming platforms, AI assistants, social media, gaming environments, and AI have been present in children’s daily routines since early childhood. Because of this, developmental milestones once rooted primarily in families, schools, neighborhoods, and peer groups now unfold alongside, and often within, commercial digital infrastructures.

This transformation extends beyond media use to the ways children develop identities, relationships, and consumer practices. Recommendation algorithms, creator cultures, virtual worlds, and interactive platforms increasingly shape how children discover interests, form friendships, evaluate products, and express themselves. Consumer research suggests that Generation Alpha understands brands, digital avatars, virtual goods, and platform participation as resources for constructing and communicating identity, belonging, and aesthetic preferences. Platforms function as “open texts” in which users combine visual symbols, digital commodities, and user-generated spaces to negotiate social status and self-expression (Rustandi & Sutisna, 2025). Likewise, creator-led media such as toy reviews, unboxing videos, lifestyle vlogs, and gameplay content provide behavioral blueprints through which children learn not only what to consume, but also how to feel, behave, and belong (De Veirman et al., 2019). Commercial messages are therefore increasingly embedded within entertainment, social interaction, and identity work rather than encountered as discrete advertising episodes.

These transformations also challenge long-standing assumptions about consumer socialization. Rather than simply acquiring marketplace knowledge from parents, Generation Alpha often engages in reverse socialization, introducing parents and other adults to emerging technologies, digital cultures, and platform practices (Sharma, 2017). Children are often more adept at navigating emerging technologies (e.g., AI) and may serve as socializing agents within their families, particularly by supporting functional digital literacy. As technologies continue to evolve, the roles of parents and educators (and the guidance strategies they use) are also being continually reshaped and challenged. Similarly, engagement with digital content appears to be driven less by celebrity status or polished production quality than by relatability, perceived authenticity, and psychological closeness to creators (Ayoubi & Sadiqi, 2026; Effendi, 2026). Emerging consumer research further suggests that traditional markers of brand heritage may matter less than immediate relevance, shared values, and opportunities for participation (Kumar, 2025). Together, these developments suggest that theories of consumer socialization, persuasion, branding, and advertising require renewed consideration within the context of platformized childhood.

As Cook (2020) demonstrates in The Moral Project of Childhood: Motherhood, Material Life, and Early Children's Consumer Culture, notions of childhood are historically contingent and continually evolving. Within advertising and consumer research, including our own, childhood is often approached through a developmental lens that positions children as vulnerable, innocent, malleable, and therefore heavily susceptible to (dark) marketing influences. For instance, consumer socialization theory portrays children as becomings who gradually progress toward consumer competence (e.g., John, 1999). In contrast, the liberalization and deregulation of children’s media markets in the 1980s reframed children as inherently competent consumers (Coulter, 2027).  Accordingly, advertisers and marketers treated children as a distinct consumer market, developing products, media, and marketing strategies specifically for young audiences. In this context, children were considered autonomous, empowered, and difficult to please.

Rather than asking whether children are vulnerable or empowered consumers, we argue, in accordance with Cook (2020), for examining how childhood itself is continually moralized and reconstructed through changing historical, technological, and commercial contexts. Similarly, Buckingham (2014, p. 9) emphasizes going beyond binaries of vulnerability versus empowerment toward a “more complex understanding of children’s consumer practices” by examining consumption as a fundamentally relational and social practice. Accordingly, the child and childhood should also be understood as a “discursive and social construction” rather than a fixed developmental category (Coulter, 2027, p. 19). Understanding the historical, technological, socio-economic, and cultural context of childhood is indispensable for understanding the child consumer in contemporary platform society. Consistent with the New Sociology of Childhood (Prout & James, 2003), we encourage researchers to consider children as social actors and beings in their own right who actively interpret, negotiate, make meaning of, and shape the (commercial) environments in which they participate.

Within the platform society, digital advertising has evolved beyond conventional persuasive messages into a broader commercial culture characterized by immersion, interactivity, personalization, and creator participation. Children are not only targeted as consumers but are actively solicited to become creators, co-producers, advocates, and distributors of brand promotion (Hudders, 2025). The boundaries between advertising, entertainment, play, familial relationships, friendship, and everyday communication have become increasingly blurred, raising important questions about how commercial meanings are experienced, negotiated, and normalized throughout childhood. Understanding these processes requires greater attention not only to children’s exposure to advertising but also to their lived experiences within platformized consumer culture. There is a pressing need to better understand how the digital advertising culture discursively constructs childhood and digital child consumers, and how children navigate these environments in which they are deeply immersed.

With this special issue, we aim to move research on children, media and advertising from the “children’s table” (Coulter, 2027, p. 153) to the head table and to search for, and hopefully find, the “missing child” (Cook, 2008) in consumer research. Despite the growing societal importance of children’s media use, consumption, and advertising experiences, research on child consumers has long occupied a peripheral position within the field.  Moreover, the child consumer is often implicitly constructed as “white, middle-class, heterosexual and able-bodied” (Coulter, 2027, p. 27). Greater attention is therefore needed to the diversity of childhood experiences through cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and inclusive research examining children’s participation in digital advertising cultures. At a time when policymakers increasingly debate restricting children's access to digital platforms altogether (Fegert & Melchior, 2026), a more nuanced understanding of how children experience, navigate, negotiate, actively use, and sometimes resist commercial digital environments is urgently needed. By foregrounding children’s perspectives and lived experiences, this special issue seeks to advance understandings of child consumers as active participants in increasingly datafied, algorithmically curated, and platformized worlds.

We invite conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions that examine children’s digital advertising cultures in a platform society. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary perspectives from advertising, media studies, childhood studies, communication, sociology, education, consumer research, and digital platform studies.

Suggested Topics:

We welcome submissions employing a wide range of methodological approaches. While surveys and experiments remain valuable, we particularly encourage scholars to consider conducting research using (longitudinal) observational, ethnographic, computational, behavioral, physiological, and other non-self-reported methods, as well as innovative mixed-method designs. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to providing an understanding of:

• how the childhoods of generation Alpha and Beta consumers are constructed, represented, moralized, and governed within advertising, platform, regulatory, and public discourses, including the roles of platforms, brands, influencers, and advertisers in shaping ideas about children’s rights, privacy, autonomy, well-being, and the nature of childhood.
• how platformization is reshaping childhood, including identity formation, play, learning, friendship, and consumer socialization within increasingly datafied and algorithmically curated environments.
• how children construct, negotiate, and express identity through commercial and digital practices, including engagement with brands, creators, digital commodities, virtual worlds, conversational agents, AI-mediated environments, algorithmic companions, and other forms of participatory consumption.
• how architectures, affordances, and commercial logics of platforms transform commercial persuasion directed toward children, including immersive, interactive, personalized, and AI-driven advertising practices and the ways these practices reshape children’s experiences of commercial culture.
• new theoretical perspectives on children’s consumer socialization, including reverse socialization, consumption as a cultural and social practice, and children's roles as producers of marketplace knowledge and digital cultures.
• consumption as a cultural and social practice through which children construct meaning, belonging, status, and self-expression, and how these practices reshape contemporary understandings of children’s consumer identities and marketplace participation.
• the commercialization of children's everyday lives, including the blurring of boundaries between advertising, entertainment, education, play, social interaction, and family life
• The roles of caregivers, peers, educators, policymakers, and other social actors in shaping children’s commercial experiences.
• innovative approaches for studying children's lived experiences within platformized consumer cultures, including participatory, ethnographic, psychophysiological, computational, and mixed-method designs, as well as historical and comparative perspectives on the evolving relationship between childhood, media, consumption, and advertising.
• children’s agency and participation within platformized consumer and advertising cultures, including how children create, appropriate, negotiate, resist, and contribute to commercial meanings as content creators, brand advocates, and active marketplace participants.
• diverse and situated experiences of platformized childhood, including cross-cultural, socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, gendered, and ability-related differences in how children navigate digital advertising and commercial environments across generations Alph and Beta.

Keywords: Digital Advertising Culture, Platform Society, Child Consumer, Generation Alpha, Generation Beta

(please contact Guest Editors for list of references)