A Window on the Wider World? Rural Children's Use of Information and Communication Technologies.

Abstract The possibilities which information and communication technologies (ICT) offer people (or groups) to overcome the friction of distance and the constraints of materiality mean that these technologies are seen to have particular relevance in rural areas which have been historically characterised in terms of their economic and social perpheriality. In this paper, we draw on empirical research with children and their teachers and parents, to explore the opportunities which ICT are seen to offer young people living in rural areas. First, we examine the information that children access on-line and how young people make sense of this expanded terrain. Second we focus on communication, by considering children's use of email and chat rooms. Third, we explore how this information and these modes of communication may be shaping young people's sense of place in the world. Our findings expose a clear contrast between the ambitious and future orientated ways in which adults imagine ICT will expand their children's educational and employment opportunities, and social and spatial horizons, and the everyday ways in which these technologies actually emerge for children in practice.

[1]  S. Holloway,et al.  Placing cyberspace: processes of Americanization in British children’s use of the Internet , 2001 .

[2]  Gill Valentine,et al.  Corked Hats and Coronation Street , 2000 .

[3]  D. Lupton,et al.  The Embodied Computer/User , 1995 .

[4]  Z. Sardar.  alt.civilizations.faq cyberspace as the darker side of the West , 1995 .

[5]  Gill Valentine,et al.  A safe place to grow up? Parenting, perceptions of children's safety and the rural idyll , 1997 .

[6]  Owain Jones,et al.  Little figures, big shadows: country childhood stories , 1997 .

[7]  Nick Bingham,et al.  Object-Ions: From Technological Determinism towards Geographies of Relations , 1996 .

[8]  N. Bingham,et al.  Institutionalising Technologies: Masculinities, Femininities, and the Heterosexual Economy of the IT Classroom , 2000 .

[9]  P. Cloke,et al.  Contested countryside cultures: otherness, marginalisation and rurality. , 1997 .

[10]  Lindsy Van Gelder.  The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover , 1991, Computerization and Controversy, 2nd Ed..

[11]  J. Little.  Feminist perspectives in rural geography: an introduction , 1986 .

[12]  P. Selman,et al.  Rural Restructuring: Global Processes and Their Responses , 1990 .

[13]  D. Janelle.  SPATIAL REORGANIZATION: A MODEL AND CONCEPT , 1969 .

[14]  Ziauddin Sardar.  Cyberspace as the darker side of the West , 1995 .

[15]  Margaret Morse,et al.  What Do Cyborgs Eat?: Oral Logic in an Information Society , 1994 .

[16]  N. Thrift.  New Urban Eras and Old Technological Fears: Reconfiguring the Goodwill of Electronic Things , 1996 .

[17]  J. Little,et al.  Women and the rural idyll , 1996 .

[18]  Michael Benedikt,et al.  Cyberspace: First Steps , 1991 .

[19]  H. Newby,et al.  Locality and rurality: The restructuring of rural social relations , 1986 .

[20]  Heinz Hengst,et al.  Negotiating `us' and `Them' , 1997 .

[21]  Donald G. Janelle,et al.  Measuring Human Extensibility in a Shrinking World , 1973 .

[22]  Gill Valentine,et al.  Children's Geographies : Playing, Living, Learning , 2000 .

[23]  G. Pope,et al.  A New Conceptual Model for Understanding Geographical Variations in Weathering , 1995 .

[24]  G. Valentine.  ”Oh Yes I Can.”“Oh No You Can't”: Children and Parents' Understandings of Kids' Competence to Negotiate Public Space Safely , 1997 .

[25]  C. Bullard.  Shaping technology/Building society , 1994 .

[26]  Roger Burrows,et al.  Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment , 1995 .

[27]  Gill Valentine,et al.  Where Do You Want to Go Tomorrow? Connecting Children and the Internet , 1999 .

[28]  N. Thrift,et al.  Class and change in rural Britain. , 1990 .

[29]  Anne Beamish,et al.  Communities on-line : community-based computer networks , 1995 .

[30]  K. Robins,et al.  Electronic spaces: new technologies and the future of cities , 1988 .

[31]  Jennifer S. Light,et al.  From City Space to Cyberspace , 1999 .

[32]  Madeleine Akrich,et al.  The De-scription of Technical Objects , 1992 .

[33]  A. R. Stone.  Will the real body please stand up?: boundary stories about virtual cultures , 1991 .

[34]  Michael Henry Heim,et al.  The metaphysics of virtual reality , 1993 .

[35]  Mark Taylor,et al.  Growing-up in the Countryside: Children and the Rural Idyll. , 2000 .

[36]  Roger Burrows,et al.  A Place in the Country? The Housing Circumstances of Young People in Rural England , 1998 .

[37]  C. Ward,et al.  The child in the country , 1988 .

[38]  Eleanor Wynn,et al.  Hyperbole over Cyberspace: Self-Presentation and Social Boundaries in Internet Home Pages and Discourse , 1997, Inf. Soc..

[39]  L. Harrison,et al.  `Neverending Love' and `Blowing Your Load': The Meanings of Sex to Rural Youth , 1999 .

[40]  Mike Crang,et al.  Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space and Relations , 1999 .

[41]  Douglas Kellner,et al.  Television And The Crisis Of Democracy , 1990 .

[42]  B. Latour.  We Have Never Been Modern , 1991 .