Canaries in the Data Mine: Understanding the Proprietary Design of Youth Environments

Canaries in the Data Mine offers an account of the lived experiences and cultural expectations of young people growing up in digital environments increasingly owned by others and designed for profit. At the book’s core is a participatory research project that first interviewed New York City teens about their digital habits and then engaged a group of five young people in designing the prototypical platform of their time: a social network. In this engaging book, Gregory T. Donovan penetrates beyond the interface to consider the digital geography of contemporary youth, arguing that understanding what young people are grappling with portends what is, or will soon be, felt by society at large. Drawing from in-depth interviews and design workshops, he shows how informational capitalism is reproduced at an intimate scale as well as how involving young people in digital design can foster capacities for reworking and resisting the conditions of a rising rentier society.