Children, Media as ‘Equipment’ and Worldliness

Abstract

In this chapter, we make use of two further Heideggerian concepts—worldliness and equipment. We show, using evidence from fieldwork with children in the three sites of research, Casablanca, Beirut and London, how Worldliness postulates a distinctive structure. We explore worldliness as a totality in which media is but one constituent, among many, in the everyday lives of the children. We unpack, using different examples from ethnography, the ways in which media technology, and the communicative processes it instigates, can shape children’s ontological experience of being-in-the-world. Thinking with and against Heidegger’s phenomenological approach, we argue that a study of visible ontological phenomena in and by itself fails to capture the complexity of children’s worldliness. While the children use the media texts intentionally for carving out ‘mnemonic’ and agential extensions of self, they also do so, we have observed, within hidden and unequal structures that put them at a disadvantage at the level of creativity, education, and other public service rights as young citizens.