Youth development under digital surveillance: challenges, opportunities, and future directions

Digital technologies now operate as developmental infrastructures, shaping how young people learn, relate, and form identities. This paper develops a Vygotskian framework for analyzing youth surveillance, complemented by Foucauldian and Deleuzian perspectives on power and control. We argue that contemporary surveillance systems do not simply observe youth but reorganize the relational and cultural conditions of development. Drawing on research across three analytical layers—situated environments, systemic infrastructures, and transformative horizons—we show how surveillance channels developmental pathways toward legibility and prediction. At the same time, youth enact situated forms of agency that reconfigure these systems. The paper concludes with policy and design implications that foreground developmental dignity, epistemic justice, and youth co-authorship of digital environments.