Youth and techno-temporal spaces

Melanie Wong

By attending to time and space, we can identify and explore the unique moments in which meaning is created (Pahl, 2014). Rather than viewing time as a uniform flow that overlooks individual actions, it can be understood as shaped by shared memories and personal subjectivities, enabling us to question and challenge the dominant epistemologies that constrain these perspectives. In today’s increasingly post-digital world, the affordances of digital technologies allow youth to navigate a variety of learning spaces that are both school sanctioned and interstitial, or non-sanctioned (Wong, 2021). This fluid movement in and in-between learning spaces reveals how youth often engage in practices that diverge from school-sanctioned or institutional activities. Temporality in these interstitial, non-sanctioned learning spaces differs markedly from school-sanctioned environments, where institutional and colonial structures govern and restrict how students’ time is organised. The rigid structures of schools, dictated by bells and prescribed instructional hours mandated by government policy, allocate youth’s time with precision, down to the second.

Compton-Lilly (2016a) has asserted that “time acts as a constitutive dimension of people’s experiences that significantly affects how people make sense of their worlds” (p. 576). In the digital realm, how youth choose to fill their time highlights what they value but also how they are making sense of their world. Notably, when interviewing my research participants, who are school aged (ages 5 to 17) students in Canada, their answers are illuminating when it comes to temporality in the lifeworlds of youth in a digital age. These participants shared about their interstitial learning experiences, including time devoted to accessing and watching unknown experts on YouTube Howcasts to inform a school-sanctioned assignment (Wong, 2021) and Rap Battling in the in-between spaces to counter school-sanctioned activities (Wong, 2019). Although this research did not address time but rather space, these findings illustrate the ways that youth are choosing to allocate their time, and more importantly, the findings illuminate how temporality in interstitial learning spaces differ significantly from school-sanctioned learning spaces. In these interstitial learning spaces, students have agency to allocate time as they choose.

In my ongoing exploration of emerging technologies and technology-enhanced classrooms, I continue to notice the ways that youth push back against their institutional experiences by reconfiguring learning spaces into more playful ones. Other scholars have also looked at this notion of play in digital spaces (Edwards et al., 2026; Işıkoğlu et al., 2023; Stephen et al., 2020). Yet, digital play and time continues to be under-researched. When engaging in digital play, students’ conception and allocation of time, likely differs significantly from school-sanctioned spaces where research has documented how youth spend time engaging in digital play such as virtual worlds or video games (see Grimes, 2021; Pettersen et al., 2022). Hence, in these interstitial learning spaces, they are allocating their time in activities that differ significantly from school-sanctioned time allocation. Further to this, how we perceive time as adults differs from a child’s understanding and perception of time. We are socialised at a young age into certain practices of time (e.g. school starts at this time, play is during recess, during school hours we are engaging in school-sanctioned activities). But in interstitial and therefore unstructured learning spaces, time is not restricted and youth have more agency with how they structure their time allocation. Hence, I argue that it is important to consider how students perceive and use their time in interstitial learning spaces, as these contexts often provide flexible, self-directed opportunities that contrast with the structured, time-regulated routines of school-sanctioned learning environments.