Digital futures and current frictions: The technocrisis of childhood socialization

Digital childhood today unfolds within a technocrisis: a condition in which pervasive digital infrastructures and algorithmic logics outpace the ethical, institutional, and social frameworks needed to govern them. Through a composite case study of an Irish primary school, in this article we examine the frictions that emerge as communities respond to the saturation of childhood by smartphone technologies. We argue that the governance of digital childhood is not merely about protection, but about the production of socially and economically legible subjects—disciplined for life within data-driven systems. Drawing on Albert Borgmann’s concept of focal practices, we explore how local actors reintroduce friction, intentionality, and care into children’s digital lives. These situated interventions challenge the presumed inevitability of technological progress and offer modest but meaningful alternatives to platform-driven futures. Our study contributes to debates in digital anthropology, science and technology studies, and the politics of socialization by showing how resistance to digital saturation is enacted not through grand refusal, but through everyday acts of recalibration and relational repair.