Abstract
The Internet provides a different way of being-in-the-world. The ontological status of children today has changed and, consequently, they have to respond to a new challenge in their development. This change, in turn, creates new challenges for the society. In the first part of my article, I will point out that the image of the child used nowadays is a creation of the modern era and answers modern needs. The modern image is a result of a particular system of schooling, of transmitting created information. However, in a knowledge networking society, this system fails us and it should be replaced by a system that considers the child an actor equally important to the teacher in the educational process. The second part of the article analyses the characteristics of digital self-presentation made by children who believe that on-line identity is a ‘construct’ done by assembling items of life-style. Moreover, these assemblages take violent and shocking forms because of new media characteristics. In conclusion, I stress the need of character development as a response to possible personality disorders that accompanies the on-line loss of self in multi-media assembled selves.
A history of “childhood”
A study of childhood is based on the premise of the existence of a distinct, well-defined category of childhood. The first part of my article deals with this essentialist definition and with the contemporary criticism of it, in an attempt to re-evaluate the status of the child in the new media culture. Criticisms of authority, essentialist, and pyramidal-structured society during the mid-twentieth century claim a new approach regarding children, an approach precipitated by the rise of Internet, a general-purpose network and environment for games, creative expression, art, film and photography that allows individuals away from traditional structures to communicate, share and perform joint activities over computers.
“Childhood” is not a biological category. The term applies broadly to the stage of human development between infancy and adulthood. This category was constructed along with many other social categories and institutions at the beginning of modernity. This invention is contemporary with other separations and differences, like madness, clinic and prison as analysed by Foucault1, in the beginning of modernity as the way of establishing the essence of rational, white, adult man. Speaking and dealing with childhood today is indebted on the one hand to the discourses which separate childhood as an ontological category and on the other hand to anti-enlightenment positions that try to re-evaluate modern differences and to recognise the right of suppressed categories to speak for themselves.
It is only starting with the sixteenth century that children have had a different human condition than adults. As Philippe Aries, a French historian, shows by examining medieval works of art and school records, before the seventeenth century children were represented as mini-adults. The modern quest for an essence of human being isolated the child as an inferior category, a human being in spe, with no other purpose than that of being educated to become a full human being. According to this view, the child is not fully human and has characteristics that do not qualify him for an adult. Children are sexless, genderless, have no responsibility. They are to be protected or taught to behave. Children are either angelic creatures that do not tell good from evil and are powerless in front of society evils, or diabolic creatures, that must be limited in their actions until they learn the social norms.
Both approaches are based on the assumption that the child is incapable to relate appropriately in society. Contrary to this modern, “enlightened” position, Holloway shows that in fact adults also fail to qualify for the essence of adulthood:
‘The so-called hallmarks of adulthood: maturity, rationality, social competence, knowledge and so on are just as readily performed by a child as a grown-up. Likewise, adults can sometimes demonstrate naivety, gullibility and other less reasoned responses that are usually ascribed to children. Emotional and social competence is not therefore a stable attribute of a particular age but rather is a fluid, context-dependent performance that can be staged by children and adults alike.’ (Holloway, 2003, 95)
In fact, adults and children alike have their own contextual way of emotional and social competence.
Children and Education
The conception regarding the immaturity2 of a child gave birth to the identification of childhood with the educational stage of life, schooling. The child should receive the proper education in order to acquire the adult, mature stage. The considerations of the schooling process should emphasize the three stages needed to become a member of society: traditional, modern and contemporary. This threefold split corresponds to Sloterdijk's conception, which classifies communities in closed traditional ones, national-state communities and the open community of global village. To become a member of society means to develop the appropriate character, to acquire the relevant skills and to occupy the relevant place in society3.
In a traditional society, this process is partially predetermined by the conditions of birth. Usually one cannot transcend one's condition. In addition, the roles and skills in a traditional society are learned by doing and being a limited choice, a system for educating one as a member of society is unnecessary. The community is closed and there is only one way of doing things, not because it is impossible to do otherwise but because experimentation is a practice not accepted by traditional society. Speaking of techniques, Jacques Ellul shows that the medieval man prefers to improve its own capacities to do things with the existing technology rather than to change the way of doing, by inventing new technologies.
‘There was no great variety of means for attaining a desired result, and there was almost no attempt to perfect the means which did exist. ... Man tended to exploit to the limit such means as he possessed, and took care not to replace them or to create other means as long as the old ones were effective.’ (Ellul, 1965, 67)
The traditional image is changed by the modern ideology of “the best way,” as Ellul puts it. Therefore, there is a universal reason that everyone should follow and there is one best human being: the white adult man. As a result, children are raised into this image of the rational perfection and a unique way to pursue it. The modern national state requires the fulfilment of a never-ending project of construction of the perfect man and the perfect state. Modernity imposes an image, an essence of man that requires a system of education to instruct citizens into their roles. To sum up, education can no longer be left in the hands of individuals; society should try to respect one universal curriculum that will transform the raw human material (people) into modern citizens. The modern system in use today fails in a global society as the options have increased manifold, we can no longer aim for an essence to be learnt by everybody.
Modern schooling system
The schooling system is criticized by Illich as missing both its educational purpose and its informational process.
‘But if schools are the wrong places for learning a skill, they are even worse places for getting an education. School does both tasks badly, partly because it does not distinguish between them. School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. In most schools a program, which is meant to improve one skill, is always chained to another irrelevant task. History is tied to advancement in math, and class attendance to the right to use the playground.’ (Illich, 1971, 17)
The teacher is the supreme authority in the classroom who knows everything and the child is a raw material who should be informed/ created. On the one hand, the child should not have their own voice or thoughts, just to reproduce without knowing why, any information provided by the teachers. Reproducing the information gives the child no skills, no proper ways to deal with reality. On the other hand, the schooling environment is not educational, it does not develop a character in child, the habitual action as Aristotle calls it, because the teacher addresses the pupil with authority, as representing the system and the knowledge.
Baudrillard, Lyotard, and other post-modern thinkers see this transformation in the ontology of childhood as a result of the dissolution of paper-based written culture, a linear and authoritative culture that established the rule of one rational way of doing things. The authorities, as parent and teacher are rationally constructed, are to be criticised on this rational model. The constructed relationships by means of a written linear culture are in crisis because of the new media that takes the place of parents and teachers in a pluralistic, non-linear, and anti-authoritative way. Roger Fidler says in Mediamorphosis. Understanding New Media: “for little children, the television became a 'machine for revealing secrets'. [...] The television, especially after 1960, totally undermined this system and contributed to the dissolution of adult authority.” (Fidler, 2004, 103).
On the other hand, this independence of children regarding old authorities is accompanied by a similar independence of the parents who prefer to leave the education of their children to the hands of state education and live their lives in a society of endless consumption. As Baudrillard puts it, “the parents are those who liberate themselves from children.” (Baudrillard, 2001, 48) By breaking the necessary relationships of education between child and parent, pupil and teacher, the education, primarily that of child (that in modern times was realised at school and at home and only at home in traditional societies) has become an impersonal education.
Parents are too busy and want to liberate themselves for consumption while teachers become a simple formal entity with no power or authority. Therefore, the humanistic education, which is nevertheless a form of violence for Lyotard4, is transformed in the assemblage of pieces of networked education that surpasses and dismisses the limits imposed by a linear system of formation. Nevertheless, we cannot accept the McLuhan conception, or that of Illich, that networked and new media education will save us and will represent a revival of traditional and more natural way of being. On the one hand, there is no way back to the traditional society because the 'global village' is constructed by concatenation of (post)-modern metropolis. The 'global village' does not have the ethics of a village, and the modern ethics, in the form of Kantian categorical imperative, is being dismissed as irrelevant today.
On the other hand, there is no '(more) natural' way of doing things. The 'natural way' is just one of the interpretations of the modern 'best way'. The new media is not closer to human nature. As Hannah Arendt puts it, there is at best just a human condition but there cannot be a human eternal essence. Therefore, new media can at least better fulfil the contemporary needs of humans. The criticism of essence, (of a supposed essence of childhood in our case) determines a new image of children. They are no longer humans in spe, but full humans with rights, responsibilities, and the right to affirm their own culture. The childhood is no more a transitory period of life but a meaningful existence per se. As different from adults – because of modernity – children find in the new media the means to express themselves, to acquire a new ontological status. Sonia Livingston points out four characteristics by which this new media contributes to reshaping the childhood:
1. Multiplication of personally owned media, encouraging the privatization of media use.
2. Diversifying media and media content, facilitating wider trends towards individualisation.
3. Convergence of traditional media, resulting in a blur of traditionally distinct boundaries.
4. Expansion of interactive media, resulting in the transformation of a mass audience into an active anonymous and larger group of participatory users. (Holloway and Valentine, 2003)
The child becomes an owner of very powerful tools, like computers and mobile telephones, the gates of access to a world designed for autonomous modern adults. Children can no more be isolated because the Internet is open and free with all its goods and evils. Computers, that children are more literate in than their parents, are the tools by which the world is managed by adults as well as by children nowadays. Whereas there used to be a specific time and space of childhood, delimited by the modern assignation of essences, now the children occupy the same cyberspace without even the possibility of identification of the (mis)use.
The effects of this access are growing geometrically as the number of media and media contents is increasing indefinitely. Children do not have access to a 'modern' world of adults but to a different world (even so for modern adults themselves), a world build by negotiations in which children take part as well. They access a multitude of worlds in which there is no pre-established path. Each user can, and is obliged, to construct in its own way. However, a process of convergence of all media occurs, a bringing together, a Heideggerian Gestalt, which makes possible the creation of virtual objects and personas constantly reshaped.
In addition, the last process mentioned by Sonia Livingston, but certainly not the least, is the interactivity of this digital realm. This interactivity is like the Cinderella of the digital world. The first computer networks, Arpanet and Minitel, were not intended to be interactive. As conceived by its creators, they were just systems of network distribution of information. The possibility of interaction in the form of infotainment between users was considered initially a misuse of the network but it became the mainstream of the Internet. Given the tremendous power of today’s new media, forms of interactivity change to the point that forms of real-life world interactions do not easily apply to the Internet and mobile phone usage as well.
As we have seen so far, the image of child constructed from the seventeen century onwards, does no longer correspond to the realities brought about by new media. The current educational system seems to be ‘based on wrong premises’ from a contemporary point of view. If modern education was effective in creating the modern man, it fails to answer contemporary challenges. The child is exposed to an infinite amount of information; therefore, a school system based on the transmission of information is simply out of date. Nevertheless, the complexity of contemporary society is more than ever in need of education, an education capable to respond the necessities of our 'brave new world'. This need for education is apparent if we consider the development of adult education in recent years and in the large amount of requalification by many.
A new paradigm of teaching
What Ivan Illich puts as the development of skills following personal choices, I will consider in the next part of my article from the point of view of character development and the assemblage of lifestyles.
At the end of this section, I will consider two images of classroom that can show the characteristics of a new approach to education. Both classrooms are actually implemented. The first is a traditional classroom and the second is an IT classroom. What is peculiar to these IT classrooms is that they were not intended to be so, but the specific of content and material circumstances bring about a new model.
The traditional classroom is based on a pyramidal model in which teacher represents the authority, the keeper of information, of secrets that he transmits to pupils. The only role of pupils is to listen, learn, and reproduce that information. They are simply seen as tabula rasa to be written on. The channel of communication is one-to-many, because only the voice of teacher is allowed to be heard, so when a pupil speaks, it is to reproduce what the teacher says, any other behaviour being considered either a wrong answer or indiscipline.
The IT classroom model is lot more different. To emphasize this shift I will use a quote from Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine's Cyber-kids. Children in the Information Age; it analyses the specific geography of some IT classrooms in Great Britain, characteristics that are also present in a large majority of IT classrooms around the globe as well.
‘Perhaps one of the most noticeable aspects of the ICT lessons we observed in the case-study schools was their relatively relaxed atmosphere (Schofield 1997, 35). A research review of computers and classroom social processes, points to a number of studies. (For examples, see Chaiklin and Lewis, 1988; Davidson and Richie 1994; O'Connor and Brie, 1994; Schofield, 1995). Suggest that the introduction of computers into the classroom tends to be associated with “a shift in teachers' roles away from didactic whole class instruction towards more individualised and student-centred interaction.” [...] Children found ICT lessons more relaxed than other classes despite the fact many would eventually gain an educational qualification in the subject. This is because of the level of autonomy children have in relation to their learning. Pupils at Highfields, for example, described how their work in other lessons is strictly controlled by the teachers, and they are required to concentrate for long periods, listening to teachers, taking notes from the blackboard, or working from books. In ITC lessons by contrast, the pupils are taught as a group when a new task that will take several lessons to complete is introduced, but are then allowed working through this at their own pace soliciting help from the teacher as and when required. [...] This informality is emphasised for those pupils who are good at IT and therefore find the lessons less demanding. Though differences in ability are evident in all classes, they are more emphasised in those, which are not streamed by ability. Here, the brighter pupils can handle the work with ease and are left with time to themselves. Identified as one of the benefits of learning with computers, the relaxed classroom atmosphere that such student-centred teaching encourage, also have other implications. Most notably, social relations between children are more evident here than in strictly controlled classrooms where adult-child power relations are often more important. The IT lesson is thus a space within the school where teacher practice means pupil culture can come to dominate.’ (Holloway and Valentine, 2003, 49-50)
In conclusion, I emphasise on the characteristics of IT classrooms in opposition with traditional classrooms mentioned above. The IT classroom is based on a network model in which teacher does not represent the authority, but only a more informed peer. The role of pupils is to discover, to ask, and communicate in order to develop their paths in acquiring the skills of computer programming. The children are peers in a game of development. The channel of communication is many-to-many, because teacher and colleagues play the same role in class interactions. When a pupil speaks, he speaks his own voice, his own understanding of IT. That is more unexpected if we take into consideration that IT is a discipline as strict and as logical as maths. However, one important aspect that should be emphasised is the presence of the computer that is not only a tool but also an actant. Following the Actor-Network Theory of Bruno Latour (Latour, 2005), we should say that the computer is an actor as important as the teacher and pupils in IT classrooms. The geography of the classroom is dictated by the computer: pupils should look not at teacher but at computer and the class is formed by little groups. The computer is the first interlocutor of the child. To paraphrase a Heideggerian metaphor, which said that the voice of the master creates a classroom, here the IT, the computer is what brings together the actants. What is also very important is that in IT classrooms pupils do not reproduce what teacher said but they create and develop skills, they take part at and modify the classroom, they become active. These characteristics are emphasized in The Network Society by Jan van Dijk, in the chapter entitled “Psychology”, where he presents five opportunities of education in the new media age:
“1. Students will be able to manipulate subject matter themselves. The order, the speed, and even the complete contents do not have to be determined in advance. [...]
2. Making use of the many choices available in multimedia course material, students are able to learn by exploring and experimenting in open environments. [...]
3. Students may choose from several types of presentation, each with the same content. [...]
4. Course material used in multimedia education is extremely suitable for visualising, modelling, and simulating information. 'Playing' with this material proves to be a very valuable experience. [...]
5. Finally, interactivity enables the student to start a direct dialogue with a program in a device. This combination of hardware and software is called 'intelligent'. Students receive direct feedback and immediately know what they are doing wrong.” (van Dijk, 1999, 205)
Such, the process of education should become a form of entertainment. The new media culture makes a shift in the way of perceiving and experiencing the reality5.
The transformation of the schooling system as a whole into a new model is hard to acquire because teacher are not digital natives and they lack IT knowledge and skills that pupils are experts at. Indeed, teachers’ modern authority is destroyed in the new framework of the classroom but this is effectively how the things should work in order to develop pupils’ autonomous personalities, to let them speak, create and discover.
Cyber-kids
We have seen so far how the image of a child is being actively changed by a new media culture and how this, in turn, affects the current educational system. We focussed first on the schooling system because of two reasons. First, the powerful link created by modern culture between childhood and schooling has the consequence that the criticism and the research of children were mainly directed to school environment. Second, giving the fact observed by Baudrillard that parents tend to liberate themselves from children and the growing amount of time that children spend in new media environment (Internet, television, mobile phones), we can state that only two entities educate a child, school and new media. We now proceed to analyse the relation between children and new media from the perspective of how they live the networked virtual world.
First, let us clarify the term 'cyber-kid' used in our article. In 1985, Donna Haraway published the essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century in "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women". There she introduced the term cyborg to designate the ontological status of technologically transformed human beings.
‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. [...] By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are ‘cyborgs’. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of not only imagination but also material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.’ (Haraway, 1991, 49-50)
In our terms, the cyborg is the entity constructed through virtual networks. It does not have to be physically modified by technology. It is enough that nowadays our world is technologically orientated. Technology comprises digital technology, i.e. the Internet and mobile phones. We are hybrid beings constructed by a new understanding of being. To be connected means to understand differently our existence. In addition, our actions become mainly digital, virtual actions. The image of self is digitally constructed. The man with a computer connected to Internet or with a mobile phone is a different kind of being. The Heideggerian being-in-the-world has changed to a digital insertion in the networks. Therefore, we should reconsider the way children have to be conceptualized in a different way, especially because nowadays children are born in a technologically embodied world. They are digitally native. They are cyber-kids by birth.
Self-creation: One of the main characteristics that the digital realm exhibits is the necessity of self-presentation. On every social network site the child is obliged, by the structure of the site itself, to create his/her own image. Alternatively, to put it better, to re-create an identity. There are predefined tools, like avatars, layouts, fields to be filled in, that allow the child to choose an identity. Based on those choices a community is also instantiated, the links are automatically created. If the specific identity is more or less one's choice, the network dictates the patterns of construction. The structure of network is like birth characteristics that one cannot change. Each person receives a partial structure of himself or herself when they sign up. Moreover, if one does not choose an option, that field will receive a default value. As a result, the network itself is co-constituent of one's identity.
Multiple instantiation: But the construction of the self is not linear and differs from one environment to another. To construe an identity in Second Life differs from constructing an identity on hi5 or Yahoo Messenger. Each of them requires different information, different types of content. However, each of them requires a certain creation, a self-definition. In addition, the specific aim for connecting to a certain network requires the construction of an avatar with certain characteristics. One presents herself in a certain way on a date-site and in a different way on a forum concerned with cars. These identities could conflict with each other, and certainly they are not identical. Moreover, these multiple and different instantiations of users may be dealt with at the same time, shifting from one another. This process contributes to the fact that identity on the Internet (but with real-life consequence) becomes floating, unstable.
Self-experimentation: Generally, teenagers are inclined to self-experimentation. Digital media enhances this characteristic. The new media culture put a high value on being different and on self-experimenting. The multiplication of media correlates with a multiplication of modes of expression that are not only possible but become real. What is technologically possible is or will be instantiated. This need for experimentation seen in children produces content that blurs the limits and shock. For Heidegger, this need for experience of contemporary world is a consequence of nihilism and de-valorisation. If there are no new universal values to follow then we will be left with ceaseless experimentation.
Construction of life-style
In 1984, Albert Borgmann analysed the character of contemporary technology and presented the ubiquity of assemblage, a phenomena taking place in all domains of technological life. The reality is itemised, decomposed in its smallest constituting elements in order to reassemble them in products following the logic of technology assemblage. The logic of assemblage functions at every stage as the principle of deriving an indefinite number of products from some basic items. This itemised restructuring, the de-composition of basic elements, is accompanied by de-contextualisation. Elements should be extracted from their context to become pure elements for furthering life’s production line. Life-style is constructed in the same manner.
The only value of these items of life-style is their assemblage value, their capacity to be included in any other construction.
‘But when the supporting structure of daily life assumes the character of machinery that is concealed and separated from the commodities it procures and when these become isolated and mobile, then it becomes possible to style and restyle one's life by assembling and disassembling commodities. Life becomes positively ambiguous.’ (Borgmann, 1987, 92)
Life itself becomes a commodity. The identity online is an assembled identity. The child is confronted with a large variety of items of life-style that she has to assemble in order to construct her identity. Moreover, is it a matter of only one identity or of the stabilization of identities? The many identities she can, and should, assume are, and should be, constantly reshaped. The reshaping is not a matter of getting closer to the real self, but of creating a multitude of selves. This may result in the development of capacities of expression and of one's personality, but also in the loss of one's personality in the multitude of life-styles she assumes. “At best the increase of opportunities for information and communication will contribute to a universally developed personality.” (van Dijk, 1999, 216). However, if one cannot manage the digital assemblage, there can be also personality disorders. Jan van Dijk proposes four related personality types. First, there is the rigid or formalistic personality, people who cannot relate to others in a normal way but only as they relate with computers or other media. Then, there is a computerised personality, who perceives others as just another type of computer. The unsocial personality tends to relate only by means of computers as a safer environment, Finally, there is the multiple personality, whose roles played online surpass one's personality to such an extent that she is only those roles and nothing more.
The assemblage of lifestyles brings us to the problem of character. As Internet provides all necessary information, it also provides the necessary items to self-construction. Moreover, the new media culture is stringent in asking repeatedly for redefinitions of oneself. The Internet does not provide only information but also items of lifestyles as commodities in order for the consumer to construct herself. However, this eternal reconstruction becomes schizophrenia or paranoia unless there is a critical appropriation of those new media. For developing a character, one has to have one. This is true for technology and humans as well. Their characters shape each other in interaction. The problem with character is that one cannot acquire one if one does not have one yet.
‘Metaphysically, character is neither essence nor accident. Epistemologically, character is neither conceived nor perceived. Anthropologically, character is neither determination nor freedom. Character is a reality always in-between, “Neither universal essence nor particular accident, a limited determination and an equally limited freedom. In it lies the heart of the human condition.’ (Mitcham 2000, 133).
Similar to knowledge, which is not a summing up of the amount of items of information, the amount of items of life-style does not sum up in character. Aristotle defines character as produced by nature and habit. If one cannot form these habits, if one loses herself in the multitude of the selves assumed on the Internet, then the Internet becomes a weapon of self-destruction rather than a tool for self-creation. To be on the Internet means to create selves and communities by assembling items of lifestyle. The Internet requires the never-ending reshaping of oneself(s). Users' characters and the way the Internet looks like depend on each other because, as Bruno Latour shows in his Actor-Network Theory, humans and artefacts act together and shape each other. On the one hand, the particular path through the network shapes one's character. On the other hand, to create self(s) and communities and digital objects (software, content) means to build the character of the Internet. Children, in this case, are the first victims if they do not have the necessary tools to develop a character, to create a meaningful use of Internet.
Shocking identities
I will analyse now an example of children-produced content in order to extract some more characteristics of cyber-kids. The material is one of many homemade videos produced by teenagers that lift the skirts of unknown women on street. The videos posted on Youtube of gratuitous antisocial acts are neither a use nor an abuse of the network but an act induced by the specific disposition of contemporary technology. These acts were absurd if there were no record and no network to post the content. The record alone is not enough, because the posting part is more important. The academic 'publish or perish' is assimilated by Internet in the form of 'either post or do not exist'. Moreover, the content of every post should be shocking because of the immense availability of tremendously various contents on the Internet to the extent that things become very insignificant. The trifling nature of things and people in new media is the cause of the violent character of such posts. The other is perceived through media, the other is just an image. This behaviour of recording antisocial performances is also a consequence of candid camera shows. Nevertheless, there are many differences between candid camera and these videos. In candid camera shows, the focus is on the embarrassment of people in strange situations. In addition, there are ethical limits in the case of television. However, the children that created this type of content act as if others are media creations as well and the violence is purely experimental in character. These videos are centred only on shocking acts. These videos are not some extreme form of manifestation in new media but a normal characteristic.
Even the self-presentation of children is shocking. To post is to post something different. The children create exhibiting selves on Internet. Privacy and intimacy are understood in a different manner. First, it is because on-line relationships are unstable in the first stages. Consequently, the information given in on-line interactions presume a violent language, shocking content, lies as well as intimate things. The identity assumed online nevertheless has consequences for the real identity of children. They also construct themselves in real life as virtual identities. To be an Internet native means to see the real world as a continuation of the virtual world and not the other way around as older generations do. The categories of self-presentation for children in real world are therefore different and follow online patterns. This brings again the problem of character, of developing children’s personalities. Therefore, more than ever, education has become utterly important. Children should receive the tools for consistent self-creation because the Internet tends to dissipate the personality. Even if the Internet can provide the tools for exceptional self-expression, it does not encourage it. This education should not assume the inferiority of children but should take the children as partners in projects of consistent development in on-line environments because, as we have seen, the traditional school pattern is unproductive in educating children because of its false premises.
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Borgmann, Albert (1987). Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. The University of Chicago Press.
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Fidler, Roger (2004). Mediamorphosis. Idea Design & Print.
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Heidegger, Martin (1993). Basic Writings. Routledge.
Holloway, Sarah L. and Valentine, Gill (2003). Cyberkids. Children in the information age. Routledge.
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Mitcham, Carl (2000). On Character and Technology. In Higs, Erric and al. (eds.). Technology and the Good Life?. The University of Chicago Press, pp. 126-148.
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1 See M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception or Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
2Maturity and childhood are complementary concepts and questioning one of them undermines the other too. Maturity as opposed to childishness is a way to behave regardless of age.
3These categories are to be considered as ideal types, which tend to be predominant in a society or in certain domains. For example, medieval society had a schooling system that transformed the natural pagan into the Christian man. But at the level of schooling, there was no consideration of child as inferior to adult. “ Until the Second Vatican Council, each child was instructed that a Christian reaches moral discernment and freedom at the age of seven” (Illich, 1971, 26)
4 „Every education is inhumane because it cannot succeed without coercion and terror, and I think about the least controlled education, the least pedagogical one, that which Freud calls castration and make him say, related to 'good methods' of raising children, that anyway thing go from bad to worse” (Lyotard, 2002, 8)
5 “The distracted person, too, can form habits. […] Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” (Benjamin, 1998)
