Children, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace (original) (raw)
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Ideas of Childhood and Digital Technology in the Information Age
This is a full text of my thesis, submitted in 2006. The thesis begins by arguing that the mid 1990s witnessed a proliferation of popular, political and academic discourses of childhood and technology, which characterised children as ‘digital natives’ and which presented children’s seemingly natural facility with digital technology use as heralding the potential for new relationships between children and adults. In order to understand the implications of these representations, the thesis: 1. Conducts a review of the literature of childhood studies, and of childhood in the context of new formations characterised as the ‘information society’; 2. Examines the relationship between language and society, exploring specifically the concepts of ‘hegemony, articulation, recontextualisation, and appropriation/colonisation’ drawn from Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe, Bernstein and Hall’s analyses of the role of discourse in political and social change; and 3. Develops a metholodology based upon Critical Discourse Analysis, in order to provide an account of the relationship between discursive representations of childhood and the social practices and institutions in which these representations are enacted or resisted. The data analysed in the thesis comprise: 1. New Labour political speeches between 1996 and 2001, focusing specifically upon Tony Blair’s speeches and upon the chain of texts linking Blair’s 1996 conference speech, the Stevenson Report and the National Grid for Learning 2. 997 newspaper articles from the years 1997 and 2001, analysed through both a corpus analysis and detailed textual analysis of selected articles 3. 5 Interviews with 6 families in the home conducted between 1998 and 2000 On the basis of this analysis, the thesis contends that, while children were repesented as having significant agency and ‘natural affinity’ with digital technologies in this period (representations which did challenge traditional adult-child relations of the ‘dominant framework’) this new form of agency was colonised within wider educational policy to act as a warrant for a ‘personalisation’ of educational provision and a de-articulation of childhood from the institutions of home and school. This process of colonisation serves to obscure the differences in resources available to different children in achieving agency in the context of the ‘information age’, and serves to create equivalences between different social groupings acting with very different political and social agendas.
Children and the Internet: New Paradigms for Development in the 21 st Century
2000
Development in the 21 st century will be determined, to a large extent, by the thought, action and imagination of young people. This in turn, is shaped by the education system. This paper examines the current systems of education and analyses why they are often perceived as irrelevant. A new structure of for determining what should be taught and in what order, is proposed. The paper goes on to describe the results of several experiments conducted in the area of self-instruction. Based on observations from these experiments as well as from constructivist theory, an approach named Minimally Invasive Education is proposed and the process described. The analogy and role of self-organising systems in future education is mentioned. Introduction: Do we need a new paradigm? Human development in the 21 st century will depend on how we cope with an explosion of knowledge. We have learnt more in the last fifty years than we did in the last fifty thousand. Or so we believe. This explosion is a consequence of networking. Humanity is networking itself rapidly into a single collective consciousness. Like a beehive, or a coral reef, or even a snowflake, the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. This then is the Gestalt of German psychologist Karl Jung. Made possible by a technology that he could never have imagined. This article is about education and the shaping of this collective SuperMind. Architects of the 21 st century The present century will be built by children born since 1980 or so. The oldest of these are in their early twenties when this article is being written (May, 2000). While these young architects of the young millennium will use the ideas and wisdom of preceding generations, much of these will not be relevant to them. It is important to realise that a lot of human experiential knowledge is no longer valid, relevant or even correct, today. These children will need to create many new paradigms and solutions to strange new problems. Imagination, creativity and lateral thinking will become the most important agents of change. And change is what the new century will be all about. Schools, classrooms and life The children who will shape the new century are being brought up in an educational environment that has remained mostly unchanged for over a thousand years. Education is "received" in schools. Schools are generally organised into classrooms, libraries, workshops, laboratories and playing fields. Instruction is given mostly in classrooms and the outcomes evaluated through examinations. Life in the 21 st century is considerably different from that in previous times. Homes are smaller, families are more mobile than ever before. As a result, most children need to change schools two or more times. Money and material success are considered the goals of modern living. As a result, students often perceive their school education to be irrelevant to their lives, now and in the future.
tripleC-Cognition, Communication, Co-operation, 2010
We propose to build up a philosophy of the Internet instead of building up its scientific theory. Our philosophy of the Internet includes several components of the philosophy of technology, information, communication, culture and organization because we use four different coexisting contexts for the better understanding of the nature of the Internet: the technological, the communication, the cultural and the organism ones. This philosophy of the Internet shows that the Internet is the sphere of a new mode of human existence, basically independent from, but built on and coexisting with the former (natural and societal) spheres of existence, and created by the late-modern humans. , human existence man aims: to build up a specific community. Every element of the human communities and the community itself are created by communication. Communication via Internet is a technology of building up virtual, open, extended communities. A deeper understanding of the communication via Internet is based on a communication situation analysis, including considerations on the active role of the media, the specificity of computers as communication machine, and the possibility of the highest level of individual control of the situation. From communication point of view the Internet is an intentionally created and maintained network of artificial, extended, virtual communities which are based on networked communication machines and individual human control over the communication situations.
How Do Online Communication Technologies Shape Contemporary Generation of Digital Age?
While digital technology has been with us from early 19th century, its accelerated introduction into mass-culture can be roughly attributed to mass-marketing of Personal Computers, the PCs, in 1980ies (Reimer). Since then in mere 30 years every sphere of human life has been subjected to some degree of digitization, be it on the level of use of simple calculator, digital watch or mobile phone, or active online “surfing”, blogging, actively partaking in multiuser networking and gaming or working in the IT-related field. This situation not only signals of the ever accelerating largely techno-centric social transformation, but also pinpoints the paradigmatic shift of global world culture towards Information Society, described by Toffler as the society of Third Wave. "In a Third Wave economy, the central resource – a single word broadly encompassing data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values – is actionable knowledge” (Dyson, Esther; Gilder, George; Keyworth, George;Toffler, Alvin ). Even within this earliest phase one can already identify evolutionary phases of development, which can be very generally described by the concept of convergence, conglomeration or even consumption-unification. This convergence is taking place on the technological, economic, social and personal levels. Technologically one witnesses a combination of miniaturization and multipurpose approaches, leading to more and more advanced mobile personal computers at the same time possessing traits of communication devices, cameras, flashlights, navigation systems, television sets and entertainment platforms (a smartphone). Economically both in terms of management, control, production, time and location, we witness convergence of human worker with software and hardware, which are able to incorporate ever-growing multitude of functions. A miniature device is able to provide one with knowledge and in part skills of an engineer, developer, designer and producer, gradually heading for substitution of human workforce or at least enabling for outsourcing of most projects on the local level (work from home) and the global level (research and development abroad, joint real-time international development). Now the central element in human experience is that of personal and social life, which, notwithstanding the importance of issues of class, labor, means of production, et cetera, is the core of everyone’s experience (social networking). At the same time personal computers incorporated and at large substituted diverse forms of entertainment (music, television, cinema, library, sports, sex…), work (coding, writing, researching, banking, calculating…) and communication (audio, video, textual, experimentally even sensory). As a consequence, while digitization didn’t replace physical production and existence, it certainly assumed an equally important role and altered the ways in which we perceive and evaluate reality (time, space, social norms).