“I don’t really know where the money goes, do you?”: online gambling and the naïve screenager

So, there I was, sitting at the 2011 Consumer Culture Theory conference luncheon. I was eating, but thinking about my agreement to write a chapter for this book. I had gathered data from a group of young online gamblers, but I was flummoxed by what I kept hearing. These young people didn’t seem to understand the legal, regulatory, or even the technical aspects of the games into which they were pouring hundreds or thousands of dollars. How could this be? Didn’t they care that they didn’t know much? And how could I possibly frame these findings of ignorance and apathy online in a way that made any sense to a reader of a book called Digital Consumers? And then I introduced the keynote speaker, Eszter Hargittai, and as I listened to her, my own data began to make a little bit more sense. But before we get to that story, let’s discover why online gambling is of interest to an emerging group of scholars.