Beyond the boundaries of the sacred garden: Children and the Internet

Concern about children and the Internet is the latest in a ritu-al cycle of moral panics surrounding new technologies. Such panics often focus on children and are related to adult anxi-eties surrounding the transgression of boundaries including those between adult/child, private/public, and work/leisure. They are also founded on technological determinist accounts of media and an essentialist view of childhood. The authors of this article argue that the Internet, as other media before it, plays an important role in the socialisation of the young and that children need to be recognised as active participants rather than passive recipients of multimedia messages. In any case, as the sociologist David Buckingham (2000) emphasised, the proliferation of new technologies, together with the increased fragmentation of audiences, now render almost impossible the “protection ” of the young by the adult members of electronic societies. His claim is supported by a recent Australian study by Nightingale, Dickerson and Griff (2000) that highlighted the important role media play in the transi-tion from childhood to adulthood along with children’s adeptness in circum-venting adult control. Consequently, there needs to be a shift away from the current emphasis on restriction and protection, to a focus on communication and consultation between adults and children. Quigley and Blashki Beyo … the electronic media play an increasingly significant role in defin-ing the cultural experiences of contemporary childhood. Children can no longer be excluded from these media and the things they repre-sent; nor can they be confined to material that adults perceive to be good for them. The attempt to protect children by restricting their ac-cess to media is doomed to fail. On the contrary, we now need to pay much closer attention to how we prepare children to deal with these experiences; and in doing so, we need to stop defining them simply in terms of what they lack. (Buckingham, 2000, p. 16