MOTIVATIONS

In the early stages of my doctoral research I had the opportunity to observe the satisfaction that Julian Sefton-Green and Hannah Davies drew from the young people's cybercafé they ran every weekend at The Performing Arts and Media College, at The Interchange Studios in London. The cybercafé enjoyed an informal atmosphere wherein a multicultural diversity of children and teenagers explore intermedia unrestricted by content filtering of any kind. The college's primary objective was, and continues to be, to offer youths marginalised by society priority online access in order to,

…develop a model of 'informal education' describing diverse models of informal pedagogy as a well as considering how teaching and learning is situated in the different social context of a community-based, training-orientated arts organisation... This should have important implications for the development of curriculum and pedagogy within schools and colleges if our sector were able to engage in productive dialogue with formal education, sharing models of good practic (The Performing Arts and Media College, homepage).

Influenced by the productivity of such an environment, I coordinated alt.cyberkids. The central motivation of alt.cyberkids was to offer children a space, outside the realms of home and school, where they were able to experience the net in relative autonomy. Turkle and Papert (1990) have argued that the techno-cultures that evolve around computers occur in a wide variety of locales (131). As Grossberg also indicates, 'if youth lives in postmodernity, it also lives in many other places and contexts' (quoted in Furlong et al. 2000: 2). Indeed by 1999, a range of policy initiatives had been introduced in the UK aimed at ensuring wide access to networked technology, including the provision of informal ICT learning centres in leisure centres and youth clubs around the country, as well as support for commercial ventures in newly-marketed ‘cybercafés’ (Wills 1999; Blair, cited on BBC News, 11 September 2000). Yet, unlike the pedagogical model of The Performing Arts and Media College, my aim was to coordinate a club that sought to evade both prescription and proscription; a space where the cyberkids felt comfortable enough to do exactly what they wished, through this particular medium of consumption, production and interaction.

In their study of school-age children and college students’ computer programming, Turkle and Papert (1990) suggest that the diversity of approaches to programming suggests that equal access to even the most basic elements of computation requires accepting the validity of multiple ways of knowing and thinking, an epistemological pluralism (129). Yet, whilst ‘the computer as an expressive medium supports epistemological pluralism, the computer culture often does not’ (132). They observed ‘people reacting poignantly to what they felt as a pressure to conform to an officially imposed style’ (ibid.). They encountered a ‘discrimination in the computer culture that is determined not by rules that keep people out but by ways of thinking that make them reluctant to join in’ (ibid.). They suggest that a creative, user-centred approach to computer use encourages users to abandon traditional routes to gain knowledge through experiment and play (ibid.). Following Turkle and Papert (1990), I sought to evoke a space conducive to experimental epistemology, where research subjects and researcher alike circumvented parental and pedagogical figurations. I clarify the reasons behind such a choice further in the RATIONALES section of the case study. Suffice here to state that, in retrospect, such a research context shares similarities both intellectually and practically with the ‘personalised learning environment’ developed by Green et al. (2005); an environment that conforms to the user, rather than the user to the environment.

SUSTAINING OR RESISTING LOCI OF POWER

Rituals of Resistance?

figure 5.2.1 Rituals of resistance?

Considering Foucault's biopolitical body , this personalised environment allowed me to explore the extent to which the children's, as well as my own, priori locations within these loci of power come into play, nonetheless. I have so far focused on the manner in which remediations of institutionalised discourses inform popular ideas about what it means to be a child. I have argued that the inception of the net, and the cultural debates it has spurred, has provoked new discussions in the mediasphere about the boundaries of both childhood and adulthood. The multimodal analysis of the Anglo-American mediasphere grounding the thesis sparks two central considerations that merit redress. Firstly, children are prevalently the object, rather than the subject, of such discourses. This motivates a qualitative exploration of children's own verbalizations and textualizations (in other words, rendering through texts) of their experiences of the net. To what extent do children sustain or resist, and in turn internalize, external perspectives on children's 'appropriate' use of the medium? Secondly, the printmedia analysis has already emphasised the ambiguous location of children within such discourses. Childhood vacillates between multiple, at once mutually influential and conflicting mythopoeia, all of which bring the degree to which children are capable of self-censorship into play. Hence, it is essential to witness how children themselves negotiate the boundaries of their own biopolitical body and their own virtual existence.

This analysis shares similarities with Messenger-Davies & Mosdell (2004, 2001) explorations of the extent to which children can be established as consenting agents. Though their report for the Broadcasting Standards Commission (2001) problematizes the consent of child actors in adult media productions, their findings are nevertheless of influence to the current analysis:

We believe that to a very great extent children are capable of making up their own minds. As soon as a child is verbal, that is from three or four onwards, maybe even earlier, he or she is capable of giving consent, or not, to participation in adult activities. Such consent should be taken seriously (15).

Yet, theirs is an affirmation of the child's 'right to refuse' participation in media production, in contradiction with parental wishes (ibid.). Whereas, in the present analysis I aim to ascertain the extent to which children have the capacity to refuse or accept participation in net consumption and production, in contradiction with popular discourses about the appropriate boundaries of childhood net spaces.

EXPANSIVE REALISATION

Here I share an affinity with Miller & Slater's conceptualization of 'expansive realisation' in their Virtual Ethnography of Trinidadians' use of the net (2000). In this instance, I am particularly concerned with the ways in which children recognise or 'realise' themselves through this specific sphere of material culture. Miller & Slater suggest this dynamic of objectification between identity and the net can be thought of in two interrelated ways:

In one case, which we have dubbed 'expansive realisation', the Internet is viewed as a means through which one can enact - often in highly idealised form - a version of oneself or culture that is regarded as old or even originary but can finally be realised: through these new means, one can become what one thinks one really is (even if one never was). What might be characteristic of the Internet is that this 'realisation' is indeed 'expansive' through the global interconnections offered by the Internet (ibid.).

Therefore, the present application of the concept of 'expansive realisation' is a recognition that children engage with net culture through variations of their own identity that are both expressed and transfigured through that encounter. If we are to follow Miller & Slater's line of argument through to its zenith, then, can children (like all groups subjected to continual objectification) undermine Foucault's notions of the biopolitical body through their use of net technologies? Can they circumvent local loci of power by actively participating in worldwide online networks that can be synthesised into their familiar local reality? It is essential to reiterate one of the guiding principles of the thesis: the dynamism of cultural identity. The Predicament of Culture - Clifford's challenge to the anthropological conceptualization of the finite locus of culture, within which the village is evoked - may be a valuable source here. His conceptualisation is analogous to McLuhan (1961) notion of the net as a 'Global Village'. In its place, Clifford connotes the spatial and temporal traversal of cultures - whether literally or metaphorically. Every cultural locality is an intersection of diverse, mutable cultures. Similarly, I have already gone some way to establishing childhood culture, not as a unified and localised entity but, as one that is in continuous motion. It is a 'borderland culture' (Clifford 2002: 110), characterised by diaspora and particular to each individual child. It is a culture that oscillates between the private and the public, the personal and the social, the virtual and the physical, the unified and the fragmented.