RESOURCES: Review - Online world helps young people to develop
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Cyberkids: children in the information age
This is a book about what happens in practice when children and technology come together. There is so much speculation and assumption on this front that such an empirically grounded account is to be welcomed. Inevitably, it dissects the perspectives of both the boosters (those who maintain that virtual relations will supersede conventional social relations, in only positive ways) and the debunkers (who project similar arguments, but only in a negative vein).Holloway and Valentine based their study in three secondary schools, using a questionnaire to secure data on children and young peoples use of new information technologies. This formed the basis for an inquiry into the use of computers in the school and home. They present a complex picture developed from the provision of computers, adult practices and how young people respond to opportunity and regulation.Although sometimes frustratingly wrapped up in the language of sociology and social geography, the book has three important messages. First, the crude separation of online and offline activity is quite untenable. Computers may correspond or conflict with identity development and peer group association, but young people will make them fit, or circumvent them accordingly. Second, engagement with technology is multi-faceted and produces highly differentiated outcomes, in terms of space (home and school), gender and (sometimes) ethnicity. Third, fears that new technologies may be producing a generation of socially isolated nerds or, even worse, a population that is vulnerable to the virtual nightmare of an electronic Sodom appear to be largely unfounded. Young peoples use of computers is generally well balanced and sophisticated, lending weight to their capacity to be responsible social actors in their own right.In short, the authors point to a myriad of possibilities for the ways in which new technologies link to the social and spatial worlds of young people. They even tentatively propose a classification in which different groups of young people negotiate and manage the relationship between online activity and their broader selves. But, unlike so many such studies, the authors do not stop at theoretical framing but move on to their policy implications. Political preoccupations about the future promise of new technologies for the information age are unlikely to yield fruit unless greater attention is given to how young people relate to new technologies now.Reviewed by Howard Williamson, senior research associate at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff UniversityCyberkids: children in the information ageby Sarah Holloway and Gill ValentinePublished by RoutledgeFalmer 2003. Price 18.99, 180 pages. ISBN 0 415 23059 4