Recolonising the Digital Natives: The Politics of Childhood and Technology from Blair to Gove

Abstract

In the late 1990s, as the World Wide Web was being presented as heralding a new ‘Information Society’, children’s reportedly intuitive capacity to use new technologies began to provide a new set of metaphors for talking about adult–child relationships. In this context, the now familiar ideas of the ‘digital native’ and the ‘digital immigrant’ were born, which presented children as natural citizens of a new world order and adults as analogue trespassers, trying to keep up. Even shiny new Prime-Ministers-In-Waiting professed themselves daunted by children’s capacity to enter into this new world: Ask me my three main priorities for Government, and I tell you: education, education and education. The first wonder of the world is the mind of a child. I sometimes sit reading a paper or watching TV, and look up to see my children at a computer, and marvel at what they can do; using that computer as easily as we read a book. (Tony Blair, speech to Labour Party Annual conference, 1996)