Childhood in current technological contexts: A reinterpretation of practices in the process of the construction of children’s corporeity

Abstract

The present paper takes child discourse as its starting point. The everyday expression “me meto en Internet” (i.e. “I get on the web”), as used by boys and girls in a grade school in a district of Barcelona, suggests the idea that the media and the information highway are inscribed in current childhood experiences. Talking with fifth grade boys and girls in a series of intentional dialogues whose purpose was to ask about the school’s role in the construction of children’s corporeity, it was made clear that we needed a new analytical stance in order to unravel the interpretations of eleven- and twelve-year-old subjects about their own corporeity, taking into account the universally disruptive intrusion of the media. From a constructionist point of view (Guba and Lincoln, 1994), this paper describes how this irruption represents a gate to access certain practices that call for an adult exploration. The text in this study is in itself a narrative account – i.e. a ‘story’ in the sense that Clandinin and Connelly (2000) ascribe to this word – in which my voice is combined with the students’ discourse, as well as with various theoretical schools of thought. The paper finds its inspiration in the assumption that childhood, as a social category, no longer resembles the image that we adults take for granted as a faithful representation. Our outdated image of childhood, drawing from our life experience and a professional training forged in past contexts, is but an idealized representation of children as dependants – beings completely conditioned by the adults on whom they rely for support. This image, however, has been shattered by the presence of the media and other technological novelties that foster new ways of being, feeling and living. Technology summons up new possible worlds for child agents, allowing for more complex ways to think about themselves while interleaving new processes of identification and un-identification between discourses and practices that make up their selfknowledge and also offering them the consent and the space to be. Operatively, a body is not only a pillar of support, but it also provides a certain degree of character that goes into the making of a possible identity. The ultimate purpose of this paper is to explore the embodied subjectivity of today’s childhood in order to understand how child subjects reinterpret themselves when facing media discourses and practices, and who provides them with information and entertainment that spreads and reaffirms the image of an ideal body.

Key words: agency processes, corporeity, technological contexts, narrative inquiry.