Where do you want to go tomorrow? Connecting children and the Internet

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 fear s about what it means to be modern. By providing a critical review of the b urgeoning (popular, policy, and-academic) literature that is emerging as de bates 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 t erms. Specifically, we argue that there is now a dominant story in circulat ion concerning what has been called the rise of a 'digital generation: albe it 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 te rms of time,in terms of space, and in terms of competence) in which this do minant story acts to construct discursively the cyberspace opened up by com puter-mediated communication as distinct from the 'here and now'. For all i ts seductiveness, however, we propose that this discourse is not adequate t o describe the complexities of what particular children might actually do w ith 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 'technolog y' on which simplistic notions of a cohort of 'cyberkids' are based, we con clude the paper with some preliminary ideas about how we might be able to o ffer more nuanced accounts of being connected.