Tac: Is a well-being based social media for tweens possible?
Tac stands for:
Think, Ask and Check.
A critical thinking framework developing from research into what a well-being based social media could look like for tweens. The features of the platform will aim to expand children’s opportunities for well-being, and see how current social media could inhibit or support that incentive. This gives birth to a new kind of social media concept, called Tac, which aims to show a way social media can operate both bottom up and top down - equipping children themselves, but also holding corporates and government accountable to better digital policies for children that broadens their opportunities for well-being.
Why? Children are born to a world still finding its way living online. Every child born will have more data stored on them than the child before them. Yet children are a sub-category. This is best demonstrated through legal lag: the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) was not developed concurrently or close after, but 11 years after the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Children are an afterthought—not intentionally, just unfortunately—like most minority groups in society, yet we should emphasise thoroughly the value of children not only morally but societally. Children are confined to an adult-based system, and therefore with adult-level structures, which includes online products and services. This is a social experiment that has left children behind. This project is re-looking at what resources impact our children, like digital platforms, in order to aid or hinder children’s well-being, agency and opportunities, most powerfully captured (yet not enough) by children’s rights.