ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine websites for children and by children as a type of virtual popular culture able to exist because of the Internet. We consider the Internet to be an efficient vehicle for transmitting children's popular culture, a popular culture phenomenon in its own right due to children's imaginative uses of the Web, and a fascinating but problematic research tool for investigating children's popular culture. Our investigation of websites complements the burgeoning area of research on children and computer play that tends to focus on computer games, such as that undertaken by Kinder (1991), Friedman (1995), Buckingham (2000), and Macnamee (1998, 2000). Our approach is in some ways similar to that of Tobin (1998) and Walkerdine (1998a) in that we are interested in the Internet and the Web as a cultural space. We focus on websites because the Web is a relatively more accessible space for children to enter than the world of elaborate computer games. The Internet can be accessed in many places – at school and in public libraries – although most children tend to use it at home. For example, in Canada, the survey “Young Canadians in a wired world” (Environics Research Group 2001) calculated that ninety-nine percent of children aged between seven and sixteen have access to the Internet, and eight in ten have access at home. In the United States, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, one in five children and youth aged between twelve and seventeen has a personal website (Lenhart et al. 2001). Indeed, in acknowledging the household presence of the home computer in Britain, Buckingham and Sefton-Green have coined the term “digital bedroom.”
