Towards Global Impact for Scholarly Impact: The Case of Global Kids Online

After a very enjoyable pre-conference on social media election campaigns, it’s now time for the main event to start: Sonia Livingstone’s keynote will open the ECREA 2022 conference, the first in-person ECREA conference since 2018, and the first in a Nordic country. Sonia’s focus, and indeed that of the conference overall (the overall theme is “Rethinking Impact”), is on the pathways to impact for scholarly research, with particular focus on scholarly engagement with the United Nations.

The UN buildings in Geneva are impressive, intimidating, and often empty. Entering the UN compound remains unusual for researchers; yet the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child had recognised the impact of digital media on children’s lives, and in 2014 required scholarly advice on its further research agenda. This also involves consultation with children – a task that is both fascinating and demanding. But what do we as media and communication scholars know about digital media that is of value to the UN and its policy-makers?

The UN process works through a set of documents that are called “General Comments”, which set out the current situation; this is informed by a consultation process involving the various stakeholders. The General Comment addressing the impact of digital environments on the rights of children took a substantial amount of time to evolve, and was published only in 2021.

Sonia’s and her fellow researchers’ paths to this were informed especially by the long-running EU Kids Online project, a multi-disciplinary, multinational network that gradually also involved a greater number of stakeholders from outside of academia, which increasingly sought to make its presence and its insights felt in policy-making. This is especially fraught in the context of children’s activity online, as there are so many more or less well-credentialled actors in this space, often with a particular focus on ‘cybersafety’. In each case, it is well worth exploring their organisational status, funding sources, ideological positioning, and other attributes. But there are also many smart, committed, experienced people and organisations in this space, who appreciate robust debate about their and our ideas. And frankly there is also plenty of poor research on the impact of digital technologies on children’s lives, perhaps especially from ancillary disciplines that have only a limited grasp on the fuller picture.

In 2015, then, EU Kids Online translated to the Global Kids Online network, producing an even broader range of multi-national and comparative insights. But how can we translate this to greater impact? What are are the modes of presentation that best help to generate such impact? Sonia showed a Global Kids Online video here that presented some of its findings, but few universities have the resources to reduce high-quality materials like this. Outputs should aim to have an impact on the academy; to have a conceptual impact (providing new concepts, definitions, and frameworks); to build capacity; to develop new languages for talking about the research at hand; and to produce real-world change.

Global Kids Online also addressed this last question by explicitly asking relevant government organisations in the countries it covered about exactly what impact they believed their research had had. But such answers were often piecemeal and inconclusive; a more ambitious aim is for this work to also feed into the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This shifts the research from the descriptive and analytic to the normative: turning theory and empiricism into a set of principles to be embraced by UN member states. This brings us back the the need for a General Comment on the impact of the digital environment on children’s lives, which would serve as the first step towards such a recognition.

But it was unclear which department within the UN would be responsible for developing such a document; eventually, the UK’s Children’s Commissioner asked Sonia to develop an evidence-based case for the development of a General Comment. After some time, the UN accepted this case, and with the support of a charity a process commenced towards this aim (creating yet more complexities and requirements, and a need to write in the particular language of UN documents). It took until 2021 for this General Comment to be finalised.

But this means that the word has only just begun, too – now, there is a need to make sure this document is respected and enacted around the world. For instance, protecting children from harmful information needs to be balanced with their right to access to information; age verification systems for certain online services need to be compatible with data protection needs (the EUConsent research project is now working on this task, for instance). “Online safety” initiatives are also sometimes misused as Trojan horses for the introduction of greater government or corporate surveillance of all users, of course.

While the Internet was not specifically designed for children, of course, there are now various government and corporate guidelines for taking into account the best interests of children. But this then means that the work of this effort is never done: the initial impact of the research means that there is a need to produce further, follow-on impact. Ideally, this moves us from the ‘push model’ or research impact (just put it out there, and someone will find it), the ‘pull model’ (work with other stakeholders on their invitation), or the ‘tactical’ or ‘political model’ (working with interest groups that have their own agendas) to the ‘interactive’ or ‘enlightenment model’, which imply a more genuine collaboration.

But this is time- and resource-consuming, and timing for such collaborations is everything (and thus the timing is possibly inconvenient) – but more positively, the quality of the research, the clarity of the concepts, and the ethics and integrity of the research matters. But this also requires further skills development on the part of researchers, not least in in vetting stakeholders and developing fruitful collaborations.