ABSTRACT
Jon Katz’s (1996) polemical rhetoric encapsulates a sense of momentous and far reaching social change, locating the young at the heart of an on-going revolution. However, his article about the ‘rights of kids’ in what he calls the digital age, actually rests on far more mainstream assumptions about the young, best summed up in the banal lyrics of a song, recently popularized by Whitney Houston, ‘The children are our future’. Children both represent and quite literally embody our, or at least our societies’, future. Of course the platitudinous truthfulness of this statement, that children will grow up and become adults in the future, tends to obscure its ideological construction. As Chris Jenks (1996) has recently argued, it is not so much physical children who represent the future but our notion of childhood itself. Modern industrial life has constructed the special and privileged space of childhood not only as a walled garden to keep out the concerns of the adult world but-to pursue the horticultural metaphor-to nurture from seed the adult plant. In a similar vein the historian Carolyn Steedman (1995) has shown some of the literary and artistic ways in which children are conceptualized as icons of growth and development, tracing the history of this construction over the last couple of hundred years. Yet, perhaps the most salient image of a contemporary child in western society is a picture of a rapt face staring entranced at, almost into, the computer screen. This image is powerful not just because it encapsulates the hopes and fears within popular narratives of childhood but because it also tells a parallel story, the narrative of technological progress.
