Most welcome is Mediappro’s commitment to child-centred research, to integrating different methods, and to offering a calm voice distanced from the ‘moral panics’ that can throw policy into disarray. Contexts of use, they observe, are crucial; thus changes to social relations are slower, perhaps, than technological changes – evolution rather than revolution.

We are living in what Ulrich Beck terms ‘the risk society’: the opportunities and risks afforded by new media ecology go hand in hand – to benefit from online opportunities, society must, therefore, manage the risks, for restricting young people’s opportunities is hardly an option. But what exactly is the array of opportunities, and of risks, that Europeans are – and should be – most concerned with?

Countries differ in their values. ‘Bullying’ and ‘pornography’, to take two risks, are interpreted rather differently in different countries – even their linguistic translation is not straightforward. Culture matters: concerns regarding racism, or paedophilia, vary cross-nationally for complex and understandable reasons. Even within countries, questions of interpretation arise: crucially, children and parents often do not see eye to eye: what adults see as risky – meeting friends online, downloading music, providing personal information – is exactly what children see as opportunities, this perhaps explaining the uncomfortable fact that research does not yet demonstrate that parental rules, or educational interventions, really reduce risk.

As we variously make use of the Mediappro findings, comparative questions will be paramount. What are the regional or national similarities and differences across European countries as regards children’s uses of online technologies? Do these reflect persistent cultural differences – in values, parenting, attitudes – or do they, instead, reflect differences in diffusion, with all countries being on the same path to full adoption but merely at different points in the process?

Usefully, the Mediappro project draws our attention to a series of gaps – between parents’ and children’s perceptions of risks and opportunities, between growing access to new content while critical skills lag behind even among the ‘digital generation’, and between the activities and responsibilities of home and school in promoting awareness, each perhaps expecting the other to solve the problem. In seeking to understand how different European countries may advance awareness and safety initiatives, addressing these gaps seems a good place to focus attention.