Childhood is persistently universalised and used as a political recourse towards commercialisation, legislation and regulation of most, if not all, media technology. Our cultural entry online has only relocated this contingency. Through the course of its evolvement in technologically advanced cultures, the net has become axiomatic with the decentralisation of discourse, unregulated communication, infinite reproduction of information and transgressive sexualities. This axiom appears to reterritorialize (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 1987, 1983) accepted spaces of childhood and childhood sexuality in specific. The urgency of a critical engagement with political, pedagogical and commercial discourses that have mediated (and been mediated by) the net spurs my Phd thesis, alt.cyberkids: contingencies of childhood in the digital age.

The child oscillates between the celebration of h(er/is) technosophistication (Buckingham 2000; Downes 1998; Griffith 1998; Katz 1996; Turkle 1996; Wilkinson 1995) and lamentation over h(er/is) lost ‘innocence’ (Buckingham 2000; Johnson 1998, 1997; Postman 1992, 1983). In their deconstruction of the ‘cyberkid myth’, Facer and Furlong (2003) suggest that, ‘[y]oung people, like technologies, are constructed within current popular discourse as the natural inheritors of future societies, and young people’s mastery of technologies is read off as inevitable through a process of conflation of these two ‘future trajectories’…The cyberkid myth, then, derives both from future visions of technology–human relations and from long-standing discursive constructions of the role of children in society, generating a ‘shorthand’ for the relationship between children and technology’ (452). In this climate it is ‘adults who are believed to have most to lose, as children’s expertise with technology gives them access to new forms of culture and communication that escape parental control’ (Buckingham 2000: 5).

Playing on Foucault's genealogical understanding of the 'orders of discourse' (1991a) structuring socialisation, accentuates the connection between the material and discursive function of language on the contingent biopolitical bodies of childhood and the net (Foucault 1980; 2004 [1975]). Sefton-Green has highlighted that the net redefines conventional definitions of childhood and adulthood through social usage rather than in terms of biological age (1998: 4). Whilst reformulating this understanding somewhat, I am interested in the ontological impasses arising from these reterritorializations of adulthood and childhood: If neither occupy their traditional normative spaces, what are the implications and for whom? Holland (2004) goes as far as contending that over recent years notions of childhood within variant matrices have mutated to the degree that (what she constitutes as) the traditional image of childhood innocence survives only as a form of kitsch. Ten years on from the current relocation of this debate online, I aim to explore the forms by which discourses of specific subjective matrices begin to function intertextually with those of related matrices: diffusing, mutating and eventually parodying discourses on which they build.

The thesis began in 1998 with a critical exploration of Anglo-American print media discourses surrounding childhood, the net and sexuality between 1995 and 1999. This was followed by alt.cyberkids: rituals of resistance?, a multimodal analysis of under twelves' reconfigurations of these discourses through concessive/resistant online interactions. This website has since developed in conjunction with the wider PhD research, initially to fulfill a need to aggregate the research data produced by this group of children. It has since become a platform for evolving reflexive explorations of the ways multi-authorship, logo(de)centrism and multimodal hypertext mutate genealogical paradigms.

The choice of alt.cyberkids as title for the thesis is an ironic play on the alt. prefix Usenet originally gave to, and long shorthand for, an entire ecosystem of online newsgroups. In this context, it has an intentional connotation with The Cyberkids website, an epitome of the commercialisation of children’s net culture. In retrospect, it renders transparent the thesis’ attempt to evoke an alternative discourse to the ‘cyberkid myth’ (Facer and Furlong 2003). Children's views on the medium’s possibilities and restrictions are the counterpoint to remediated discourses that (by in large) exclude any but 'legitimised' adult voices. Overall, this thesis engages with my own subjective constitution by (and reconstitution of) the modernist frameworks I seek to critique (Haraway 1998: 3). It struggles with its own reiteration of the subjective positioning of children.

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