Several decades into the age of digital media, the ability to leave one’s childhood and adolescent years behind is now imperiled. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, it is evident that a majority of young people with access to mobile phones take and circulate selfies on a daily basis. There is also growing evidence that selfies are not simply a tween and teen obses­sion. Toddlers enjoy taking selfies, too, and whether intentionally or unintentionally, have even managed to put their images into circula­tion. What is the cost of this excessive documentation? More spe­cifically, what does it mean to come of age in an era when images of childhood and adolescence, and even the social networks formed during this fleeting period of life, are so easily preserved and may stubbornly persist with or without one’s intention or desire? Can one ever transcend one’s youth if it remains perpetually present?

The crisis we face concerning the persistence of childhood images was the least of concerns when digital technologies began to restruc­ture our everyday lives in the early 1990s. Media scholars, sociolo­gists, educational researchers, and alarmists of all political stripes were more likely to bemoan the loss of childhood than to worry about the prospect of childhood’s perpetual presence. A few educa­tors and educational researchers were earnestly exploring the poten­tial benefits of the internet and other emerging digital technologies, but the period was marked by widespread moral panic about new media technologies. As a result, much of the earliest research on young people and the internet sought either to support or to refute fears about what was about to unfold online.

Kate Eichhorn’s work explores the history of media technology and its impact on our lives. She is an associate professor of culture and media at the New School and the author, most recently, of Adjusted Margin. Buy on Amazon. Harvard University Press

Some of the early concerns about the internet’s impact on children and adolescents were legitimate. The internet did make pornography, including violent pornography, more available, and it enabled child predators to more easily gain access to young people. Law enforce­ment agencies and legislators continue to grapple with these serious problems. However, many early concerns about the internet were rooted in fear alone and were informed by longstanding assump­tions about youth and their ability to make rational decisions.

Many adults feared that if left to surf the web alone, children would suffer a quick and irreparable loss of innocence. These concerns were fueled by reports about what allegedly lurked online. At a time when many adults were just beginning to venture online, the internet was still commonly depicted in the popular media as a place where anyone could easily wander into a sexually charged multiuser domain (MUD), hang out with computer hackers and learn the tricks of their criminal trade, or hone their skills as a terrorist or bomb builder. In fact, doing any of these things usually required more than a single foray onto the web. But that did little to curtail perceptions of the internet as a dark and dangerous place where threats of all kinds were waiting at the welcome gate.

While the media obsessed over how to protect children from on­line pornography, perverts, hackers, and vigilantes, researchers in the applied and social sciences were busy producing reams of evidence­-based studies on the supposed link between internet use and various physical and social disorders. Some researchers cautioned that spending too much time online would lead to greater levels of obesity, repetitive strain, tendonitis, and back injuries in young people. Others cautioned that the internet caused mental problems, ranging from social isolation and depression to a decreased ability to distinguish between real life and simulated situations.

A common theme underpinning both popular and scholarly arti­cles about the internet in the 1990s was that this new technology had created a shift in power and access to knowledge. A widely reprinted 1993 article ominously titled “Caution: Children at Play on the Infor­mation Highway” warned, “Dropping children in front of the com­puter is a little like letting them cruise the mall for the afternoon. But when parents drop their sons or daughters off at a real mall, they gen­erally set ground rules: Don’t talk to strangers, don’t go into Victoria’s Secret, and here’s the amount of money you’ll be able to spend. At the electronic mall, few parents are setting the rules or even have a clue about how to set them.” If parents were simultaneously con­cerned and clueless, it had much to do with the fact that as the decade wore on, young people grew to outnumber adults in many regions of what was then still commonly described as cyberspace. Practical pa­rental questions became increasingly challenging to answer and, in some cases, even to ask: Who had the power to impose a curfew in this online realm? Where were the boundaries of this new and rapidly ex­panding space? And what sorts of relationships were children es­tablishing there? Were young people who met online simply pen pals who exchanged letters in real time, or were they actual acquain­tances? Could one’s child have sexual encounters, or just exchange messages about sex online? There was nothing new about parents worrying about where their children were and what they were doing, but these worries were exacerbated by new conceptual challenges. Parents were now having to make informed decisions about their children’s well­being in a realm that few of them understood or had even experienced firsthand.