At its core, developmental and life-course criminology (DLC) is a framework focused on environments. However, the environments in which young people now spend their time look increasingly digital. Data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) showed that 12–13-year-olds had an average screen time of 3 hours per week (and 4 hours a day on weekends). This meant that up to 30 percent of a child’s waking time was spent in front of a screen. Those data are a decade old. The number has likely only moved in one direction since.
DLC was built around the street as a developmental environment that held specific properties for young people. It was a place that was unsupervised, bounded in both time and geography, as well as being peer-structured and spatial in nature. The street, for many people reading this, will have been a place where we rode bikes, and played with friends. This environment was a particular kind of place where kids grew up engaged in peer groups, both good and bad, and one that parents largely stayed out of.
Over the past decade or so, however, that environment has migrated online. But it would be a mistake to consider that the digital street is simply the physical street moved indoors. It is a different kind of environment entirely in two main ways.
The collapse of temporal and spatial boundaries
First, unlike the physical street, exposure to the digital street is no longer temporally or spatially bounded. Where the architecture of daily life used to generate natural breaks where young people would exit the street, the digital street does not support those same breaks. It is available at all hours of the day and the night, to anyone with a device. It is also no longer spatially contained. Where the physical street existed as one environment among several, each with their own norms and peer dynamics, the digital street bleeds across all of them.
Young people are ‘visiting’ the digital street at home, at school, in their bedrooms at 2am. The contextual separations that daily life once enforced have collapsed. Research tracking screen time trajectories across adolescence has documented that digital media is now a primary environment in which young people carry out core developmental tasks, including identity formation and peer relationships. This matters for DLC criminologists in particular as DLC’s core assumptions about how environmental exposures accumulate across development were calibrated against a world where those exposures were bounded.
The rise of algorithmically shaped environments
Second, the environment young people are visiting is also algorithmically responsive. The algorithm learns and adapts to the young person in real time, reinforcing prior engagement, as well as shaping and deciding what to show them next. The physical street never did that. It was governed by peer interactions and group dynamics, and far less governed by an omniscient algorithm that has access to more data than any street-level peer group ever could.
This is a genuinely new developmental mechanism and DLC does not yet have language for it. Goldsmith and Brewer’s concept of digital drift gets us part of the way there, extending classical drift theory to online environments to explain how criminal commitments form on the internet. But digital drift was developed to explain a specific mechanism of criminal involvement, not to ask what digital environments do to development more broadly across the life course.
That is a harder and, so far, a largely unasked question. More broadly, however, we see there being utility in a two-pronged approach whereby researchers consider the impact that this shift to the digital street has had on the young people they are studying, but also a more focused effort to understand it.
DLC research has given rise to transformative findings. However, it was built for a street and an environment that no longer fully exists for young people. This is not to say that the physical street does not continue to play an important role in the lives of some young people, given that access to digital technologies and environments remains deeply unequal. It is to say, however, that such a fundamental transformation in the lives of young people, so far, cannot be adequately captured by our existing frameworks. Digital environments matter, and increasingly they are being used by young people—but can our existing DLC frameworks actually see what’s happening in them?
About the authors
Dr Cameron T. Langfield is a Lecturer and developmental and life-course criminologist in the School of Social Sciences, at the University of Wollongong. His research interests lie in quantitative criminology, with a particular focus on the use of statistical modelling and data analytics to examine patterns of offending and justice system responses over time.
Dr Corrie Williams is currently a Research Fellow with the Transforming Corrections to Transform Lives Project, at the Griffith Institute of Criminology. She is a developmental and life-course criminologist driven by a strong commitment to build a robust evidence base to prevent children’s involvement in antisocial behaviour and entrenchment in youth justice systems.
References
Goldsmith, A., & Brewer, R. (2015). Digital drift and the criminal interaction order. Theoretical Criminology, 19(1), 112-130. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480614538645
Zhu, X., Griffiths, H., Xiao, Z. et al. Trajectories of Screen Time across Adolescence and Their Associations with Adulthood Mental Health and Behavioral Outcomes. J Youth Adolescence 52, 1433–1447 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-023-01782-x
