Liberal Capitalism and the Online Interaction of Minors

ORCID

Abstract

Under liberal capitalism’s hyper-connected online life, the period between childhood and adolescence is far from constituting the psychosocial moratorium crucial to the development of young people’s identity envisaged by Erikson (1995). Due to the unique affordances of online digital technologies, young people’s online interactions can extend to a seemingly unlimited global audience which could expose them to a range of online harms whilst also leaving a permanent digital footprint that could compromise future employment prospects or result in a criminal record. With the introduction of the Online Safety Act 2023, the now predictable narratives illustrating the tension between safeguarding young people online whilst also respecting the hard-won freedoms of liberalism and the right to privacy are reignited. Yet existing debate has thus far remained trapped within a circular discourse of risk management and subsequent knee-jerk legislative and policy responses underpinned by rational choice theories. Premised on flawed conceptualisations of subjectivity, these accounts fail to explain how the wider socioeconomic context shapes the formation of young people’s identity and in fact actively encourages the normalisation of a range of harmful online behaviours. Considered in this context, it will be argued that, far from situating online harm as the result of a lack of digital literacy or failure on the part of young people to manage their own online risks, it in fact arises out of economic conditions that liberal capitalism deliberately engineers for its own gain.Adopting an ultra-realist theoretical perspective is instrumental in enabling this research to break out of the exhausted cyclic nature of current debate by incorporating the social, political and economic context in which the motivations and desires central to this study originate. In particular, this original contribution incorporates a transcendental materialist theory of the formation of subjectivity which permits an in-depth exploration of the liberal capitalist consumer society into which young people are socialised and how this shapes their subjectivities, desires and subsequent online behaviours. Drawing on qualitative data from a variety of sources including an extended sample of 11- 18-year-olds in schools and a youth group in a typical urban setting in the Southwest of England, as well as digital safety leads, parents, teaching staff and the sexual health charity Brook, it illustrates how key social institutions actively encourage young people’s reliance on online digital technologies. In short, it is argued that liberal capitalism’s aggressive individualism and egocentric economic mentality is instrumental in shaping young people’s motivations and, subsequently, their more harmful online interactions, in addition to deliberately encouraging young people to spend extensive time online to maintain their standing among their peers, despite an increasingly wide range of social and cognitive harms.

Awarding Institution(s)

University of Plymouth

Supervisor

Oliver Smith, Daniel Gilling

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2025

Embargo Period

2026-12-31

Deposit Date

December 2025

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

This document is currently not available here.

This item is under embargo until 31 December 2026

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