Where Do You Want to Go Tomorrow? Connecting Children and the Internet

Abstract

In the late 1990s, use of either of the words ‘childhood’ or ‘internet’ is enough to signify at a stroke many of society's contemporary hopes and fears about what it means to be modern. By providing a critical review of the burgeoning (popular, policy, and academic) literature that is emerging as debates about ‘childhood’ and ‘the Internet’ take centre stage in the ongoing struggle to define the future of our ‘virtual geographies’, what we seek to do in this paper is to unpack some of the assumptions that underpin both terms. Specifically, we argue that there is now a dominant story in circulation concerning what has been called the rise of a ‘digital generation’, albeit one, as we show, that can be read in two diametrically opposed ways. In the central part of the paper, by characterising the Internet as the latest in a long line of ‘frontier’ technologies, we identify three senses (in terms of time, in terms of space, and in terms of competence) in which this dominant story acts to construct discursively the cyberspace opened up by computer-mediated communication as distinct from the ‘here and now’ . For all its seductiveness, however, we propose that this discourse is not adequate to describe the complexities of what particular children might actually do with particular Internet-based tools in particular settings. By drawing on a variety of work (from both within and outside of the discipline) which has begun to open up the undifferentiated categories ‘children’ and ‘technology’ on which simplistic notions of a cohort of ‘cyberkids’ are based, we conclude the paper with some preliminary ideas about how we might be able to offer more nuanced accounts of being connected.