Sefton Green y Bukingham Digital Visions.pdf

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Media TechnologiesJournal of Research into New

Convergence: The International

DOI: 10.1177/1354856596002002071996; 2; 47Convergence

Julian Sefton-Green and David BuckinghamDigital Visions: Children's 'Creative' Uses of Multimedia Technologies

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Digital VisionsChildrens Creative Uses of Multimedia

Technologies

Julian Sefton-Green andDavid Buckingham

Abstract: This article describes some findings from recent research intoyoung peoples creative uses of new technologies in the home. The firstsection considers a range of theoretical perspectives on childrens

relationship with digital technologies. It interrogates popular andacademic claims about the potential of the computer as a means forfacilitating creativity. The main body of the article presents quantitativeand qualitative data from the study, focusing on the ways in whichchildren learn to use new technologies, parental regulation in the homeand the role of new technologies in sustaining peer group cultures. Theanalysis therefore aims to situate the use of computers within widersocial and cultural contexts and practices. This raises further questionsabout the relationship between digital technology and the formaleducational system; the use of technology to define boundaries betweenchildhood and adulthood; and assumptions about economic andvocational futures for young people in this area.

Introduction Children and new technology are terms which are often yokedtogether in discussions about the nature of contemporary social change.Indeed, such discussions are not limited to academic speculation aboutthe effects of new communication forms: they have increasingly becomea central theme in popular debate. In the 1995 British party politicalconference season, for example, both Left and Right announced newinitiatives to connect schools to the so-called information superhighway.

Although the details and implications of sucha

connection probably didnot make sense to many people, the talismanic conjunction of childrenand computers was presumed to have a salience with the electorate andto offer hopes for a better future. Likewise, the marketing of many kindsof new technologies is suffused with assumptions about the young: on theone hand there is an emphasis on their apparent street credibility (as incampaigns for Sega or Nintendo computer games), while on the otherthere are assertions about the inherent educational value of CD-ROMs or

personal computers.At the same time, of course, popular anxieties aboutchildhood often focus on new media forms like the computer game,which are

typicallyheld to

be responsible forthe

impending collapseof

the established social order.

In many respects, these discourses can be seen to derive from an older

set of hopes and fears about science and technology. On the one hand,

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we have a utopian belief in the efficacy of technological invention -the white heat of technology; whife on the other, we have the fear of atechnological nightmare - as portrayed in the dystopic visions of movies

like Ridley Scotts Bladerunner (1982) or James Camerons TheTerminator (1984). Yet the advent of the micro-chip and the commercialsuccess of the personal computer have reformulated these competingphilosophies in acute and pertinent ways for the new millennium.

These contemporary forms of technophilia and technophobia relate tochildren and young people in a unique fashion.As Carolyn Steedmanhas shown, children are often conceptualised as icons of growth anddevelopment; and new technology is seen to offer similar hopes oftransforming contemporary society into a better one.~Likewise, concernsabout the

changing nature of childhood -or

indeed about its apparentdisappearance - have become inextricably bound up with wideranxieties about the impact of technological change.3The concept of theaudio-visual generation seems to have become a shorthand way oflabelling these hopes and fears; and it clearly illustrates how eachcategory seems to have become a way of talking about the other.

This conjunction of children and new technology is thus rather morethan a rhetorical claim or a facile marketing device. On one level, itclearly does reflect changing realities - for example, the fact that all

young people growing up todaywill work with

computersat some

pointin their adult lives. Yet on another level, it also raises questions abouthow we describe and conceptualise social change - and indeed, abouthow we might imagine the future.As we have implied, these debatesare inevitably bound up with much broader ideological, moral andsocial motivations; and yet they often float free from any discussion ofthe concrete realities of childrens lives, or of their actual uses of thesenew technologies. Our central aim in this article is to offer areassessment of these claims in the light of some empirical evidence.While we begin with a review of the various research perspectives

which might be brought to bearon

these questions,our

major emphasisis on the particular, and what amounts at times to the banal. In thisway, we seek to offer a materialist challenge to some of the theoreticalfantasies which are typically embodied in notions of the audio-visualgeneration.

In certain respects, our broader theoretical perspective here relates backto much ea-rher accounts of the role of technology in social and culturalchange. In very different ways, Raymond Williams work on televisionand Sherry Turkles analysis of the psychological dimensions of

computingseem to transcend the

technologicaldeterminism which

increasingly characterises debates in this field. Williams argues thattechnology cannot be seen either as a wholly autonomous force or aswholly determined by other social developments: on the contrary, weneed to look to the complex interrelationships between political, social,

institutional and economic interests if we are to explain the ways in



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which new technologies come to be developed and used.4 Turklesargument is, of course, much more concerned with the individual

personality; but she too suggests that the potential uses of computers are

largely dependenton the

waysin which

theyinteract with

existingcognitive and emotional structures.~These analytical approaches stillseem to offer a sensible corrective to the successive waves of hype andfear which characterise debates about the effects of new digitaltechnologies.

Nevertheless, the increasing range of these new technologies, and theirdiverse uses in communication, education, entertainment and economicproduction also require us to extend the frameworks developed by theseearlier analyses. In particular, we might want to explore how thepersonal computer can function as a production technology, rather than

merely as a new method of consumption - and indeed how it mightcontribute to a broader blurring of distinctions between the two.

It is childrens uses of new digital technologies for the purposes ofcreative production, particularly within the domestic sphere, that formsthe focus of our discussion in this article. Perhaps inevitably, consideringquestions of production and creativity in this context requires us toproblematise the ways in which these concepts are often used. The termproduction typically refers to completed texts destined for consumptionby others; although there is no reason why it should not also refer to themore informal - and perhaps unfinished - texts which are generatedthrough more casual forms of engagement. Likewise, creativity tends tobe used to describe a particular range of formal artistic competencies;although it can also refer to much more general qualities of thought orbehaviour. In general, we would argue that the use of new technologiescan blur the distinctions between these narrower and broader

conceptions of production and creativity: what counts as a text - orindeed as a creative work of art - becomes subject to a wide variety ofdefi-n-ffion5.6 On the other hand, the use of such terms can also reflect on-enthusiastic fuzziness of thinking promulgated by the market; and it may

neglect the distinctive challenges of cultural production for young peoplein favour of a romanticised notion of childrens natural creativity. Thefollowing sections set out to disentangle some of these terms from thevariety of meanings which have accreted around them.

Creative One dominant strand of the debates we have referred to above is themachines emphasis on the creative potential of the home computer.Advertisers

and other advocates of digital technology have repeatedly extolled theways in which it brings creative production - whether in written oraudio-visual form - within reach of the ordinary consumer. The

computer,it is

argued,will democratise

cultural production:it will make

children creative.

This emphasis on the creative potential of the personal computer hasbeen a prominent theme in writing around the new technologies. This is



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obviously apparent, for example, in advertisements for theAppleMacintosh, and in the new age hippy rhetoric of magazines like Mondo2000. But it can also be found in the reflections of academic critics like

Myron Tuman, Richard Lanham and George Landow.7 These critics,most of whom work within departments of literary study, offer theoreticalaccounts of the ways in which. writing on, or with, or betweencomputers is transforming conventional literacy practices. For example,Landows analysis of the new literary form of hypertext argues thattechnological developments are driving cultural innovation. He sees thisnew form as a concrete manifestation of the poststructuralistreconfiguration of the relationship between reader, writer and text. Evenmore sceptical critics like Michael Heim make the case that thetechnology in and of itself changes traditional activities: Software

transforms knowledge beyond the limits of printed writing. Wordprocessing leads to the more fundamental activity of thoughtprocessing

Most of the evidence for these sorts of claims derives from projectsundertaken within well-resourced USA universities. For example, Tumanargues carefully and persuasively that his literacy and literary studyprogrammes utilise new technology in ways that might well change thetraditional teaching of writing and the study of literature. Lanham goesfurther, arguing that new technology is radically transforming the

relationship between the arts and participatory democracy:... we have come to view the small private computer as a newexpressive device for the arts and letters, not simply acomputational engine but a rhetorical and graphical one as well.With the newer generation of small and very small portablecomputers, electronic notebooks as they have inevitably beencalled, these trends have been reinforced. We can now carryaround with us our personal expressive engines.And an explosionof digital instruments for musical and artistic composition and

performance has enfranchised the public imagination in genuinelynew ways. We can, then, chart one area of the electronic invasion:a democratic movement from big to small, impersonal to personal,citadel to coat pocket.9

There are a number of symptomatic assumptions within this extractwhich are worth discussing in more detail. First of all, we have the ideaof the machine as an expressive device. Whilst computers are capableof doing many things, we would argue that they are not and cannot beexpressive - that surely is a human faculty. Similarly, the idea that weall

mightneed, make use

of,or even have access to,

personalexpressive engines, seems very much like the rhetoric of a salesperson.The idea that owning the machine will bring about an outpouring ofexpression is another questionable presupposition: in fact, for mostpeople, computers are tools which are specifically obtained and used to

- fulfil particular jobs.And finally, the nature of Lanhams democratic



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franchise needs to be questioned. Who, we might ask, has voting rightsin this new democracy? Before it is reasonable to talk about a digitaldemocracy, we need to look more carefully at the availability both ofthe

technologyitself and of the

abilityto use it.

Although Lanham refers to the use of computers in musical and artisticcomposition and performance, most of his argument, like that of Tuman,is concerned with verbal output. More detailed writing about the use ofcomputers for creative purposes within the visual or musical domaintends to adopt a rather different perspective. Here, it seems, theargument about the use of technology to produce art has already beenwon, although there have been some notable attempts to theorise thenew digital avant garde - a trend which is equally noticeable in up-market magazines like Wired. Thus, the new aesthetic of computergames like Myst,ll or the new artistic forms of multimedia 12 arepromulgated and discussed; and this theoretical approach also seems tounderlie the evaluation of more popular forms of entertainment, such asdiscussions of interactivity or genre in computer games.&dquo; What is

problematic about this work, however, is the attempt to extrapolategeneral theories about the production, circulation and reception of newdigital forms from the analysis of the forms themselves: the discussionsremain unavoidably rooted in forms of textual analysis or in moregeneralised speculations about the inherent qualities of particularforms of technology. indeed, the technology appears to over-determinethe discussion, in the way early theoretical analyses of other mediaforms like cinema and television initially focused on formalist questionsand concerns. Whether in the analysis of images from the Gulf War,Super Mario games or the work of artists on the Net,14 discussions ofthe nature of creativity within these different cultural forms often seemsto be largely pre-empted by a consideration of the technology.

Creative youth With the important exception of Turkles study, very little of the work wehave discussed makes explicit reference to young people - despite theircentral position both as producers and as users or consumers of such

technologies. By contrast, studies of young peoples relationships witholder media have frequently emphasised their particular creative role.Perhaps the most well-known study within this tradition is Paul WillissCommon Culture.15 Drawing on a range of earlier work by Nava,McRobbie and Jones,1 Willis draws a vibrant picture of young peopleactively engaged in the consumption of media forms, includingtelevision, video, magazines and music. While this approach draws onthe tradition of ethnographic research on youth culture established by theBirmingham Centre, it also has much in common with the po-pu[iVapproach to Cultural Studies most frequently associated with the work of

John fiske,&dquo;with

its emphasison the

popularas a

formof

ideologicalresistance to the dominant culture.

While there have been several criticisms of the optimism of his

approach, and of the adequacy of the evidence,18 Willis does at least



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attempt to provide empirical support for what is often a primarilytheoretical position. Most significantly in terms of our concerns here, healso goes on to consider forms of cultural production by young peopleacross a range of media - for example, in music making or magazineproduction (of the fanzine variety).A similar argument is advanced byAngela McRobbie in her study of the roles young people play in thefashion industry, through buying, selling, designing and making newand second-hand clothes.19 Yet while McRobbie focuses on theeconomic dimension of entrepreneurship, Willis is concerned tosynthesise the consumption and production of popular culture into amore over-arching form of symbolic creativity. McRobbie seescreativity in terms of the economic conditions of production andexchange within the marketplace; whereas for Willis creativity is a more

generalised dimension of subjectivity or identity formation, in whichyoung people are all the time expressing or attempting to expresssomething about their actual or potential cultural significance

While such arguments offer an important challenge to traditionalnotions of creativity, they may also run the risk of blurring thedistinctions between consumption and production - not least in terms ofthe different economic and institutional constraints under which theyoccur. Thus, many critics have pointed to the creativity which isentailed in the use of purchased commodities to create new symbolicmeanings; and such activity is often seen, in de Certeaus terms, as aform of poaching, whereby the weak resist the power of the strong.&dquo;Dick Hebdige, for example, offers a classic account of the ways inwhich groups such as mods and punks appropriated, customised anddisplayed commodities as part of their broader resistance to socialconditions.&dquo; From this perspective, consumption becomes a form ofbricQlage, in which goods are selected, combined and manipulated inorder to define new forms of personal or group identity. Theseprocesses are, as we shall see below, interestingly similar to the kindsof

creativityoffered

bysome

contemporarysoftware

packages.Nevertheless, we would also argue that there are distinct limitations inthis model of creative consumption; and that there are crucialdistinctions - or at least significant differences of degree - between theappropriation or manipulation of existing texts and the production ofnew ones.

In fact, there is now a growing body of empirical research into youngpeoples production of popular cultural forms, both within and beyondthe context of formal schooling. For example, the work of the CockpitCultural Studies

Department,which used

photographywith

working-class young people on the margins of the education system, is now well-documented.23 There are several ethnographic accounts of youngpeoples creative productions, most notably in the area of popularmusic, such as the detailed Swedish study, In Garageland.24 In addition,

action research studies of media education classrooms have also



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analysed students work in a broad range of media forms, includingvideo, photostories and magazines.&dquo;

While these approaches are complementary, their focus is slightlydifferent. Like Willis, the work of the Cockpit focuses primarily on thecultural politics of style and resistance, whereas the action researchstudies in which we ourselves have been involved have focused more

directly on the question of what and how students might be learningfrom such activities. Nevertheless, all this work points to significanttensions between the skills and competencies that young people mightdevelop by themselves, with peers or in other informal social networks,and those that need to be taught - whether within the formalenvironment of the school or the more informal one of the youth club. 26Such work has also sought to develop a more fully theorised notion ofcreativity in the context of collaborative media production, which goesbeyond the asocial and somewhat mystical terms in which this is oftendefined. 27

However, with very few exceptions, neither the sociological studies ofyouth culture nor the studies of media production in or outside schoolshave included new technologies in their foCUS.21 Whereas the workdescribed in the previous section above might have been over-reliant onthe theoretical study of technology, it could be argued that questionsabout technology as such have been conspicuously absent from studies

of young peoples cultural production. In relation to young people, ithas been the embryonic media form of the computer game - that is, atechnology of consumption - which has attracted most interest andacademic attention in this respect.

Domestic While older technologies such as video still attract their share ofconsumption and anxiety, moral panics about media effects have quickly been grafted

creativity onto the computer game: such games have now almost overtakentelevision as the dominant focus for concerns about the break-up offamily life and for alleged increases in social violence. While there hasbeen research which has

soughtto substantiate such

claims,29much of

the most productive research on computer games has focused on theiruse within the home and in the context of other media technologies.3Here, close observation and attention to the micro-processes of use and

meaning have redirected the sterile obsession with effects towards abroader sense of how media technologies might function in the homeand within everyday life; and in this respect, the research has clearlybuilt upon earlier work on the uses of television and video.3 The studiescollected by Silverstone and Hirsch, for example, show how informationand communication technologies function within what they term themoral economy of the household - which

theydefine as a

transactional system, dynamically involved in the public world of theproduction and exchange of commodities and meaning.32 Thus, thevarious empirical studies in their collection discuss computers in relation

to changing patterns of work; in relation to definitions of public and



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now an increasing attention to the social and interpersonal dimensionsof computer use. For example, the trilogy of books edited by Beynonand Mackayl contextualises discussion about technology in educationwithin a broad

political and sociologicalassessment of the

meaningof

technology within modern societies. The authors attention to thediscursive formation of the concept of technology leads them intoimportant observations about the relationships between technology,social progress and what they term technological literacy (in otherwords, understandings about the social role of technologies).There is as yet, however, little research or discussion about the

potentially creative uses of new technologies, except from within theconventional paradigms of production within particular curriculumareas. Thus, there is innovative work in theArt and Design curriculumwhich uses new technology in exciting ways; and there are a number ofongoing small-scale enquiries and development projects in this area.Likewise, English teachers have increasingly recognised the potential ofcomputers in the area of creative writing.42 But on the whole, thesedevelopments have not been seen to require a more broad-rangingredefinition or rethinking of pedagogy in these subject areas.

What tends to remain unacknowledged here is the fact that students willnow bring with them into school a whole body of knowledge, skills,competencies and ambitions derived from their out-of-school experience

of computers.As we shall see, this can cause practical difficulties initself; but it also has much wider pedagogical implications. From ourperspective as media educators, it requires us to consider therelationships between young peoples informal cultural competencies(as consumers and users of digital multimedia technology in the contextof leisure) and the ways in which these competencies might be usedand developed in formal schooling, particularly through the creativeuses of technology in arts subjects. Thus, there is a need to investigatethe ways in which young people might draw on their informal culturalcompetencies in their work at school; and how their experiences of the

formal curriculum might then impact back on their leisure uses of thetechnology. It was the first of these issues, framed by the larger contextsdescribed above, which became the focus of the research reportedhere.

This question of the relationship between home and school uses ofcomputers has, however, been investigated from the inverse perspective,most notably in the study by Giacquinta et al. on educational computingin the home.43 Undertaken over ten years ago, when computers wereseen by many as a solution for wider social concerns about illiteracyand

decliningeducational

standards,this

study exploredthe

ways

in

which computers were used in middle classAmerican homes for whatthe authors call educational computing. Their findings, which are inmany ways parallel to our own, in fact show little evidence of this sort

off activity; and much of their work discusses the relationship between



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- the availability of media technologies in the home (TVs, computers,etc.);

- their sources of information about digital technologies (magazines,TV, etc.);

- their involvement in consuming digital technologies, for example,through playing computer games;

- the nature of their creative uses of digital technology (graphics,animation, music, etc.).

The results from this survey were analysed and about 45 students ineach school were then interviewed in small groups comprising three orfour students of the same age. These were students we identified as

being high users of digital technology for creative purposes. Inparticular we talked to students whose survey responses indicated thatthey used computers for graphics work, animation and possibly musicor video production. These discussions were open-ended in nature,covering issues such as the following:- exactly how much, and what sort of, digital production work these

students were doing at home;- the particular software/hardware configurations which were being

used;- who had taught them how to use the relevant programs;- how the use of computers was encouraged or regulated by parents

and peers;

- the extent to which digital production as an activity, or the results ofit, were shared among wider family or friendship networks.

Finally, we were able to visit four homes and observe these studentsworking in situ. This gave us a clearer idea of the limitations andpossibilities of particular configurations of the technology and of thesocial and interpersonal contexts in which the work was carried out. Wealso talked to their parents to gain a more rounded picture of the familycontext and to probe their aspirations surrounding their childrens uses ofnew technology.Each of these three stages - the survey, the small group discussions andthe home visits - enabled us to gain different insights into a complexpicture. To some extent, the use of different methodological approachesdid make possible a degree of triangulation; although our discussionalso draws attention to the limitations of information gleaned from onlyone approach. The following account is organised around the majorthemes that emerged from our enquiry. Throughout, we attempt tointegrate critical commentary with an appraisal of methodologicalreliability, which remains an especially sensitive issue in any research

- with young people.



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Fads and figures The survey was administered during whole school tutorial time to bothschool populations in the summer term when both years 11 (ages ~15-16) and 13 (ages 17-18) had left after taking their terminalexaminations. In the end this left us with a

relatively equal spreadof

respondents in years 7-10 (ages 11-15); only 4.5 per cent of ourresponses were from year 12 (aged16+). We can thus feel confidentthat our enquiry reflects the perspectives of school students aged 1 1-15.It will be seen later that the picture of early and mid-adolescent lifewhich emerged is significantly particular to these age ranges. It leavesfurther scope for looking at both younger children, pre-adolescents andthe 16+ age range more generally defined as youth.The overall picture of the sample obtained from the survey is containedin the tables below. Only 1,165 of returned surveys were usable in the

end, of which a small proportion were incomplete. The lower number ofreturns for Year 9 (ages 13-14), and for Southfields, was due to adifficulty in administering surveys to that year group in that school.

Answers relating to demographic facts, and to ownership, interest andusage of new technology were coded. Digital production, therefore,refers to the extent of respondents use of new technology for creativepurposes, such as graphics, animation, video editing and musicproduction. The category of high interest in technology refers to aquestion about the respondents reading of magazines or TVprogrammes about new technology and computers.

Table 1:

Demographiccomposition of the

sample, bypercentage

(missing observationsnot reported)

We had asked the

respondentsto

identifytheir social class in two

categories: working and middle. Fifty-one per cent described themselvesas middle class and 40 per cent as working class.Although we will use

_ this information to plot against other factors below, these bald figures



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Table 2 : Results of the

survey, by numbers ofcases observed

(missing observationsnot reported)

The figures in eachcell refer to (a)

number of cases

observed, ~~Jpercentage ofcolumn

per subsection and

(c) percentage of row

per subsection, inthat order.



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raise a number of methodological questions which relate closely to theconcerns of our enquiry. First of all, we should be sceptical about theprocess of self-description in general, but particularly in relation to

young people answering questions in potentially uncontrolled situationswhere they may have had the opportunity to talk to one another. Thisalso begs the question not only of how accurately children mightdescribe their own class position, but also of how the class position ofyoung people might be defined in any case. Given the complexnetwork of factors which define social class membership, and the natureof inter-generational mobility, it would obviously be a mistake to equatethis with the earning power of the main breadwinner in the families

Nevertheless chi square tests (which allow one to relate two or more variables tocommon sense

expectations) clearlyindicated that there were more middle-class

children at Northfields and more working-class children at South fields (X2. (1) =75.90, p~.0001 }. This tallies with staff knowledge and perceptions about thecomposition of both schools and therefore suggests that in statistical terms the useof class as a variable does have a certain validity. This was further borne out bythe fact that there were significant differences in the quantity of media technologyavailable in the students homes: respondents at Northfields reported a high level ofmedia technology in their homes, while the respondents in Southfields reported thereverse. These basic class differences reflect national statistics, for example, asobtained in the National Household Survey.46 This pattern of availability haspredictable implications for the use of technology: our high digital producers -that is, children who claimed they used computers at home at least for graphicswork, and possibly for animation and music also - were also those who had ahigher than average quantity of media technology in the home.As the quantity ofmedia technology in the home was higher at Northfields than Southfields, it isreasonable to assume that children from middle-class homes were more likely to beadvantaged in being high digital producers.However, this apparently straightforward finding is directly contradictedby the fact a higher percentage of respondents at Southfields (28.2 percent) claimed to be high digital producers than at Northfields (20.3 percent). This might suggest that some of the survey responses were

misleading; and this was confirmed by some of the subsequentdiscussion groups - especially at Southfields - where it emerged thatsome respondents who had claimed to be high digital producers in factwere not. Common sense might suggest that these young people haddeliberately misled us, either because young people tell lies as a matterof course (as some of the parents and teachers we came acrosshelpfully pointed out) or perhaps because the administration of thesurvey may have encouraged students to compete with one another.&dquo;

However, there is a further possible reason here, which raises somemore

fundamentalissues.

In the follow up discussions,we were

particularly struck by the way in which students answered questionsabout their own activities from the point of view of their machines.When asked if they made animations, they often implied that they did;

but when pressed, they admitted that they could; and when pushed



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further, said that their machines could, even if they did not actuallyknow how to do this themselves. This is, in our view, symptomatic of the

ways in which computers are often talked about: the key concern is notso

much what theyare

used for,or

what theirusers

have donewith

them, but what they are tlreoreticallY capable of - according to themarket specifications.

Finally, we come to the question of gender.Again, our results wereperhaps predictable. Males were not only more interested than femalesin the broader culture of new technologies but there were significantlymore males who were high digital producers than might be expectedby chance {X2. (2) = 27.49, p


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This shared use of computers often led to a pedagogic relationshipbetween members of the household, where older brothers, dads, andmore rarely mums and sisters, taught younger members how to use the

equipment. Sometimesolder

relatives, especiallythose in

full-timeemployment but living at home, had bequeathed cast-off machines toour respondents. In some cases, shared usage had led to friction andcompetition; but most of our interviewees implied that this process hadsettled down, and that guidelines about family usage were enforcedthrough voluntary self-policing.In general there were two kinds of equipment in use. First, there was thenew or newish PC with Windows installed, with at least a 386processor chip. Secondly, some respondents had anAmiga orAtari ST,often up to five or six years old, but nevertheless computers which coulddouble up as production machines or work stations and gamesmachines. More often than not, the households had already begun aprocess of technological specialisation, in which particular spaces andmachines had been reserved for single purpose use, such as wordprocessing or games playing. This is particularly ironic given the multi-purpose potential of the modern PC - a theme which is stronglyemphasised in marketing; but it also shows the way in which the moraleconomy of the household can influence technological configurations.

For students with access to PCs, the ubiquity of Windows was

overwhelming and - we are tempted to add - restrictive.Althoughmany students were fluent word processors, the graphics Paintbrushprogram in Windows does not allow the same range of manipulation ofshape, colour, form and texture as the Deluxe Paint program many hadinstalled onAmigas. In the case of the latter, many students had alsoexperimented with elementary animations, which are easily added ontotheAmiga program in modular fashion. On the PC, making music waslimited to programs like Octamed or Jukebox, which allow one to writeon musical staves and to get different instruments to play the samenotes. Only a few students had their home computers linked up with

MIDI and used the computer as a home mixing desk. Some studentstalked about the ways in which a module on the Nintendo Super MarioPaint allowed them to transpose pre-recorded musical sounds ontodifferent instruments, in a similar manner to the PC.

We will return to this issue of the potential implicit within certaintechnological configurations of program and machine; but, three moregeneral observations are relevant at this stage. First of all, many parents(that is, purchasers) saw the potential of computers essentially in termsof hardware. They felt that money needed to be spent once and once

only,on the kit. While this is not at all unreasonable in view of the cost

and the marketing strategies which are employed, experienced users ofcomputers know that it is the range of software available which

significantly determines what the machine can do. This same principleemerged in the study by Giacquinta et al, referred to above, which



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found that parents did not know how to support their childrens use ofthe computer beyond what the child could find out from its peers.

Secondly,the market

strengthof Windows is

effectivelya

monopoly;and for hard-up young people, this significantly limits their access to abroader range of programs. By contrast, we came to sympathise withthe rather romanticised view of the Amiga moment which looks backfondly at this machine as a democratising agent of change. TheAmigawas the peoples machine, not least because the software was cheapor easily copied, and was often available in the public domain or onthe front covers of magazines. This last source had furnished one boywith video titling software, and is a good indication of how softwaremight be used and exchanged outside the market hegemony ofWindows.

The third issue raised by the students use of software packages is thetension between the easily usable pre-prepared aspects and the abilityto produce from scratch. In their graphics work, for example, manystudents appeared to rely heavily on CliR-Art - in other words,manipulating existing images from a bank of stored illustrations.Students also talked about mixing music in 5fierer~masfier, which similarlyuses prepared snippets of sound. In neither of these programs are thetechnical limitations absolute: one can add original material to theimage or sound bank. Nevertheless, the students

descriptionsof how

they used these programs seemed to reflect what we came to call lego-creativity : it was possible for them to make things, but the buildingblocks were factory made. The theoretical reverse of this approachwould be to write software for oneself; yet although the hacker is nowa standard youth stereotype, we did not find any students who wereactually programming computers themselves.

Of course, one of the reasons why home computers have become sopopular is that one does not now need the sorts of specialised skills tomake the machines compliant in the way one did ten years ago. Multi-media authoring, as it is sometimes called, does not necessarily requirea fluency in programming languages, although it does require afamiliarity with the range of choices which are available. Indeed, it isinteresting to note in this respect how definitions of computer literacyhas shifted over the past 10 to 15 years. The emphasis now is nolonger on programming, but on coming to terms with the increasingpotential and complexity of the software. indeed, it is conceivable thatthe processes involved in programming are now possible throughworking 4vithin published software programmes, rather than workingunderneath or inside the language of the machine itself.

In this respect, it is perhaps more accurate to say that there is acontinuum - rather than an absolute distinction - between off the-shelfuses of software and programming or authoring original material.

Nevertheless, the students whom we interviewed were very much



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confined to one end of this continuum - and hence to a limited andsomewhat superficial manipulation of the more obvious pre-givenoptions made available by the programs. This may, of course, be partlya function of

age:several students talked about elder

siblingsor

relatives who use theAmos programs on theAmiga, allowing one tomake simple interactive games, but on the whole this age groupseemed to find the prepared packages complicated enough.

However, it is misplaced to think of technical configurations as beingconfined to the main machine: peripherals can be equally important.Interestingly, we did not find any students who had access to graphicspads, thus restricting all artwork to being drawn by mouse. This is, aswas noted by virtually all the students we talked to, extremely difficuit.Afew students had colour printers at home, but here - as with the studentswho had good quality black and white ones - the expense was oftenseen as prohibitive. None of our respondents was able to run off orprint out images of any quality or quantity, which again had seriouslimitations for the scope of possible use. Of the students we interviewed,we only found three or four with modems and Internet connections athome. Some of these were mainly used for parents businesses; andwhile one boy had had his modem confiscated for accessingpornography, the usual argument here was that they were tooexpensive to run. On the other hand, quite a few households hadscanners -

though theyseemed to be

semi-permanentlybroken - and

other input devices, although we could only find one student who hadlinked up video input and playback to his machine at home. He wasalso the most sophisticated user of MIDI and other musical playbackdevices.

Despite such isolated cases, most of the students here reported someform of disappointment with the technology - and it is worthemphasising that many of them came from families which were, by anystandards, comfortably off.As many of the students recognisedthemselves, the machines they had at home promised more than theywere capable of delivering. Thus, many identified lack of RAM or harddisk size as delimiting the kind of work that they could produce. Onestudent spoke quite poignantly of a utopian role for the school in thisrespect:

... if there was a place where you could share your ideas withpeople and they wouldnt turn you away, like a place whereeveryone could use a computer, like with massive memory, where

everyone could save something and share your work ...

This rather wistful observation seems to be born out of a sense of failurewhich arises from isolation - from a situation in which atomised

individuals work on solitary machines which are in themselves, like thepeople working on them, limited by their circumstances. This is not to

imply that these students did not derive any pleasure or sense of



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achievement from the work they had carried out on computers; but thatin talking about it, such pleasures seemed less salient than a sense offrustrated possibilities. This fantasy of a place to share ones ideas, andto

playin the

luxuryof massive

memory,is one that

suggestsa fruitful

role for schools and other community centres.

Mucking about Possibly the most surprising result of our survey was the proportion ofwith pictures young people, especially from the lower age range, who indicated that

they were high digital producers. On the basis of casual observationsand previous research, we had expected to find no more than a coupleof these (across the whole age range) in any school. In fact wecategorised nearly 20 per cent of our sample as high producers, on thegrounds that they claimed to be using computers for media productionof some kind; and this included 26.4 per cent of Year 7 students (11-12year olds), as opposed to 5.1 per cent of Year 10 (14-1~ year olds).The students we then selected for the small group discussions hadindicated that they used computers at home for at least one of thefollowing: graphics work, music production, animation, video editing orsurfing the Internet. In addition, we had asked them to indicate if theywere involved in more traditional methods of media production such asvideo, photography or music making.

What became clear very quickly in these discussions, however, was thatour definition of what constituted digital production and the studentswere very different. Whilst we were interested in the systematic use ofdigital technology for production purposes, it became clear that thisimplicit model was at least somewhat misplaced. Our model wasimplicitly derived from the descriptions of cultural production in theacademic studies of Willis or McRobbie, discussed above; andperhaps, beyond that, from more traditional conceptions of artisticproduction. However, when we asked students to describe what theyhad actually made on computers the most common response was thatthey hadnt. They drew just for fun ... when Im bored. I muck aboutwith pictures or I just mess around were almost universal responses.Even one of the more difficult animations - a sequence of a train goinginto a tunnel, which had taken one boy several months - had only beendone because, he said, he was bored. Instead of planned orstructured production, the picture was of casual, occasional or time-filling activity with graphics or animation programs.

These respondents clearly used computers as a way of occupyingthemselves when lonely and bored. In fact, they recognised this pattern ofusage and to an extent were quite happy with it. The kinds of programswe were interested in were thus valued not because of their enormous

creative potential, but because of their fiddliness. They were sufficientlydemanding to warrant sustained attention, but accessible enough to use.

This impression that young people used computers as a kind of timefiller was supported by several other repeated observations. Many



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students described when they would use their machines in terms of lowpoints in the week. Thus, the production programs were most frequentlyused in the evenings and at weekends, when there was little else to do.We will see below how this meshes with

parental regulationof the

technology; but it is worth noting that these times were especiallyidentified by the younger children (of whom there were more in the firstplace). Often these students expressed an indifference towards otherentertainment media such as television; and it is possible that semi-structured messing about with the computer may have fulfilled similarfunctions. Indeed, we would suggest that this pattern and type of usagemay reflect the changing nature of childhood: as studies have shown,children are now spending more and more time confined to the home,not least because of parental fears of crime and traffic accidents.oBefore

theyare seen to be old

enoughto go out alone, children may

have few alternatives to spending time with electronic media.Significantly, the older pupils in these discussions referred to work theyhad done on the computer in the past, when they had been morerestricted by circumstances: for example, one girl talked about the factthat she didnt use the computer any more because she now spent allher time playing football.

Of course, it would be wrong to neglect the potential of such apparentlyaimless forms of messing about or casual play, either in terms of

creativityor in terms of the

learningthat

theyafford.A great deal of

informal computer use - from the early experimentation of the pioneersto the contemporary practice of surfing the net - involves a process ofunstructured exploration: yet this is precisely how new discoveries orcreative possibilities are often identified.As in discussions of childrensuses of television, it is important to avoid the implication that the onlyproductive uses of the medium are those which are conventionallyeducational and goal-oriented. Here again, we may need to moveaway from a notion of production as necessarily involving pre-planned,structured activity - as work rather than play. Nevertheless, thereremain important

qualitativedifferences between making

fully fledgedproductions and this less structured kind of activity; and, we wouldargue, these differences are often overlooked in the excitement thatsurrounds new technologies.

The social and the One further concern of our study was with the social and interpersonalsubjective dimensions of computer use. Our experience of media production in

schools has led us to view the use of media technology as a highlysocial - and indeed sociable - activity.51 Likewise, playing computergames can lead to a shared sense of sub-culture and group membership,and can often be a communal (if competitive) activity.52 However, wewere struck by quite how isolated our interviewees uses of theirmachines appeared to be. For example, very few children seemed toshow their work to anybody else, though the youngest students did admitto showing their drawings to parents or relatives. Of course, we should



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not confuse quality of contact with quantity: occasional moments ofsharing can, after all, be as important as sustained involvement.Nevertheless, very few siblings admitted to working together, with agegaps often

being presentedas insurmountable differences. This

frequentlyled to age-specialised machines, where the Super Nintendo orMegaDrive games machines were seen to be suitable for youngersiblings and the serious computers for older ones. By the same token,graduating to the family PC orAmiga and spending frustrating timeworking out how to animate was implicitly seen as a rite of transition toadulthood.

Similar points emerged from the discussion of computer games. Weasked precise questions about the kinds of games our respondentsplayed and also about the relationship between games machines andother computers. Initially we had speculated that there might be a newinteractive aesthetic; that the experience of playing or consuming gamesmight lead to a radically different engagement with digital textualforms. However, we found very little evidence of this. Indeed, as weshall see, the work that the students did produce was remarkable for itsconformity and conservatism. Even if that line of questioning might needto be followed elsewhere, there was nevertheless an interestingcommonalty of responses to these questions. Nearly all our intervieweesexpressed a lack of interest in beat em ups or shoot em ups, andfaster speed games generally. The games they seemed to prefer werethe god games, exemplified by titles like Theme Park or SimCity. Theexperience of being in control of unfolding events, of building upinformation or creating new fantasy worlds slowly and carefully were allidentified as crucial to the pleasures of this genre.

Of course, the students might have felt there was some status to begained from presenting themselves as preferring these more intellectualand arcane games. Computer game genres are already surrounded bycomplicated taste classification systems, and the games from this genreare generally considered more adult and highbrow than the Doom

variety. 53Alternatively, we were led to the hypothesis that there might bea personality type who preferred playing or thinking in this way; andthat this type was also more disposed to explore the potential ofcomputers for production. While we are cautious of psychologisticexplanations of this kind, we do feel there is a need for furtherexploration of these more subjective dimensions of computer use; andin this respect, Turkles developmental analysis still provides interestinghypotheses. 54

On the bedroom We made strenuous and repeated efforts to collect examples of workwall:

producedat

home;but to little avail. We met between 60 and 70

marketplaces and pupils in our small discussion groups, but were given work by no moreaudiences than half a dozen. There may be a number of reasons for this, some of

which are methodological and might be corrected in future research.Some students may have forgotten to give us material, or may not have



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trusted that we would return it, or may have brought work when wewere not visiting the school that day. There were also practical reasons:printers were broken or animations too large to put on disk. Moresignificantly, there is a sense in which the context of the research mayhave determined what we were able to discover in this respect.Adults

conducting research with children - particularly in the context of schools- inevitably invite particular kinds of approved responses; and whenthe research is concerned with aspects of students out-of-school culture,children might justifiably be suspicious about its motives. 55 In thissituation, their apparent reluctance to let us see their productions mighthave reflected a degree of wariness about being judged.

However, it also became clear that despite the number of students whoclaimed to use these programs, they rarely seemed to make completedproducts.Again, some of the explanations here are technical.Frequently there did not appear to be enough hard disk space to storework. However, we felt that the root of the problem was that students ofthis age generally have little reason for making products in the firstplace.

In fact, the students descriptions of what they actually produced werequite varied. Graphics work often entailed drawing planes, comiccharacters like Spiderman, cars, and designing dresses. Indeed,students who told us about this work talked about it in terms of

doodling; and offered self-appraisalsas

to whether they were gooddrawers or not. The animations that were described would also fit intothis category: there were stick people failing over, cars crashing, trainsgoing into tunnels. in other words, the narrative content was oftenminimal, and was frequently an excuse to learn the program. The sameattitude was apparent in the case of music.Again, we were given noproducts; and frequently this was accompanied by the excuse that thestudent was not terribly musical, but that they were just messing about.

These comments raise quite explicitly the question of technical skill, not

onlywith the

computer itself,but also in more conventional modes.

What kinds of skills one might need to learn in order to become adigital producer? We would argue that, while children might enjoymessing around with music or graphics programs, they still needaccess to the conventional repertoire of competencies and aptitudes ifthey are to produce more complex or meaningful work. Whencompared with older technologies like crayons and paper, the computercan appear to give a degree of polish to ones work; but this is clearlyrather different from developing a facility with the forms andconventions of a given mode of expression.

The second kind of work the students produced was in the form ofwriting, although in fact we did not ask to see any of this. What ismore, most of the writing which was described was for school projects.

- Frequently students identified their best work not as independent



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On the other hand, the study does suggest that there may be someblurring between the worlds of the professional and the amateur: thenewsletters, signs and bar mitzvah videos that might have been thepreserve of small businesses in the past are now

easilywithin reach of

the dedicated hobbyist. Right across our sample, a significant numberof parents were working from home; and they were obviously in astrong position to support their childrens access to computers in thedomestic environment. In this sense, our findings appear to confirmcommonly held beliefs about the broader socio-economic processes thathave surrounded digital technologies - for example, the increasingmulti-skilling of a small elite, and the move away from the smallbusiness into the home.

Finally, we need to consider the role of potential audiences and

marketplaces in this discussion of creativity. In all our interviews, werepeatedly asked the students to describe their best piece of work, or apiece that they were proud of. However, very few had answers to thisquestion, primarily because only a few had ever completed products orshared them with a wider audience. Indeed, many students referred toschool projects by way of answer here, precisely because school hadimposed the discipline of finishing and presenting work. However,outside of school, there are very few opportunities for distributing orexhibiting young peoples cultural productions; and beyond theadmiring parent, or those who might happen to see a picture stuck onthe bedroom wall, there is little sense of wider possible audiences.

To some extent, of course, this is a function of age. Primarily because oftheir economic dependency, young people of this age are very unlikelyto be active in a cultural marketplace in the first place.Although it is notunknown for younger children to be performing or producing work for awider audience, this largely occurs within the separate province ofyouth arts. Most studies of music-making, for example, concentrate onolder youth. 57 Yet music is, in this respect at least, somewhat of anexception, since in this field it clearly is possible for young people to

develop an audience for their work and tomove into a professional

circuit. There is no obvious or easily accessible equivalent for the otherkinds of media which might be produced using this technology, at leastoutside of specialised avant garde circles. The public forums ornetworks simply do not exist - though there may be more opportunitiesof this kind in other parts of the world. 58 From this point of view, puttingtitles on bar mitzvah videos, however conservative and limited, is oneof the few kinds of opportunities which is likely to be available to youngpeople within a supportive and parentally regulated economicframework.

The role of the school, and indeed of other formal educationalinstitutions, is more problematic; but it may also offer more possibilitiesfor future research and development. We did not have the opportunity

_ to gain either schools perspective on the use of new technology within



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the curriculum; and this is an oversight we would like to rectify.Nevertheless, we talked to students about this issue, and theirperspective was revealing. In a general sense, school is a positivemfluence. The community of peers and teachers does provide apotential audience for cultural products; and students can receivefeedback and learn to work to deadlines.All of these things arenecessary to the processes of cultural production. On the other hand,the use of technology is largely constrained and determined by therequirements of the formal curriculum. There are likely to be fewopportunities for experimentation with graphics or animation programs:on the contrary, the technology will primarily be used as a means ofimproving the presentation of existing work. When we talked to studentsabout the work they did on computer within the curriculum, they werepredictably - and perhaps unreliably - scathing. On the one hand, theyclaimed that they were often more fluent users of the machines thantheir teachers; while on the other, they did not like the dedicatedprograms, such as those for design and realisation, that they weretaught. They were critical of front-of-class teaching styles which led themthrough a program, of large teaching groups and of the lack ofcompatibility between home and school machines. Many were alsodismissive of the slower and less powerful equipment at schoolcompared to the home.

There are many issues here which would repay closer scrutiny. None of

the students criticisms should be taken at face value - but neithershould they be ignored. In particular, we were depressed by the overallemphasis in both schools on typing and presentation of written material,when students were talking to us about needing guidance on how touse animation or audio editing software. The constraints imposed bycurrent funding policies and by centralised curriculum planning areobviously a significant limitation in this respect. Nevertheless, we wouldsee much potential in the use of schools and youth service provision toenhance and develop the home use of computers for creative purposes.Schools can provide a form of community patronage by commissioning

and showing work, and creatinga sense of audience

and localculture

which would provide a necessary counterbalance to the individualisingpotential of these technologies.

Learning the In the absence of schools fulfilling this function, it has been the familytechnology and the home which have provided the most salient context for learning

digital production. In this final section, we will explore some of theways in which the technology was mediated and regulated in the home,and the ways in which this may have hindered or assisted childrens

learning.

One of the first questionswe

asked in the small group discussion wasabout who had taught the students how to use the equipment.Althoughanswers may not have been wholly reliable, two main patterns

_ __ emerged. On the one hand, we had the notion of the digital



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autodidact. From this perspective, as some of our parents also implied,the children were seen to learn naturally through fiddling orexperimenting, in same way they are assumed to learn how to speak oreat. One

boy,for

example,claimed that he had been

givena computer

when he was four to set him on his way. We would not want tounderestimate the potential of this method of learning; and indeed,many of the young people were proud of how much they had achievedthrough self-teaching.

Nevertheless, they were also quite insistent about the need for a teacherfigure. This was more often than not an older initiator, who hadstarted our respondents off. The childrens accounts of their relationshipwith these various initiators tended to emphasise the fact of workingwith an older person, in a way which appeared to reflect upon theirown maturity.At Northfields, this role was often fulfilled by a moredistant relative, such as a cousin or young uncle or even the friend of a

sibling; whereas in the more enclosed working class community ofSouthfields, it was more likely to be a close relative, a parent or anolder brother or sister. The initiator was usually older except when he orshe became a collaborator in middle adolescence. Thus, the older highproducers tended to work with friends on projects, whereas theyounger ones claimed they worked alone; and this was confirmed byour home visits. However, we feel this says as much about peer

friendshipactivities as it does about computers. Mid-adolescents

generally have more freedom to stay late at friends houses thanyounger children; and in this respect, the degree of access to computersis largely determined by other constraints on young peoples leisuretime.

Nevertheless, this is obviously an important issue in terms of learning.As has been shown in educational contexts, working with peers enableslearners to progress, whereas isolated one-to-one work at the computerscreen requires a high level of competence in the first place.59 Althoughsome students had members of the immediate family who were activeusers of IT, in general those students with access to wider family andpeer networks were in a much better position in this respect.Access tospecialised prafessionals gave middle-class children a distinctadvantage here. This could perhaps be seen as a particular instance ofthe workings of cultural capital - that is, the broad set of social andeducational competencies that are differentially distributed betweenclass groups.

In addition, we have to account for the role of gender here.As we haveshown, most of our high producers were boys. Likewise, with the

exception of a couple of mothers who were employed as clericalworkers and one who was pursuing a degree in education, the rest ofthe initiator figures were also male. This was most clear in the case ofBen, the musician, described above. Bens father, a solicitor, had bought

- computer equipment for business purposes. This included a modem and



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o Compuserve account, which the father had apparently opened inorder to help him find spare parts for hisAmerican car. Promoting Bensuse of the technology seemed to provide a way of relating to his son.On the other hand, it was noticeable that where the initiator was female

and working with a younger sister, work on the computer tended to bewritten, in a way which reinforced the role of the computer as a word

processor - an extension of the typewriter. It has been observedelsewhere 60 that parents have often purchased computers for girls inorder to equip them for gender-specific roles as modern secretaries -despite the ironic contradiction that such a role is disappearing (or atleast significantly changing) in a computerised workforce.

The other factor affecting access is of course that of parental regulation.Many of the students indicated that buying computers was seen by their

parentsas a

wayof

securingtheir childrens educational

future; andthis

was confirmed by the parents whom we met. However, this desire toinvest in their childrens future was often mingled with contradiction: atone end of the spectrum, one mother said that computers were a

necessary evil; while at the other a father argued that all childrenshould be taught programming.Anxieties about the negative effects ofcomputer games were a significant factor here. One younger boy saidhe ended up using the graphics and animation packages because hismother wouldnt let him play games except at weekends. By contrcst, avoluble and possibly imaginative group of 1 ~-year-olds at Southfieldsdescribed a

keyboardcode

theycould enter so as to

replacethe

gamesscreen with a page of writing in order to delude the casual parentalobserver.Another couple of boys said their mothers were concernedabout physical damage (such as eyestrain) through excessive attentionto the computer. However, only one student reported that his fatherlocked away the computer (which was anyway more strictly used forwork purposes); and we only found one boy who had had his modemconfiscated because of accessing pornography (or so we deduced fromthe giggles and embarrassment). By contrast, on all our home visits wefound parents who trusted their children, and who were not worried bythe Internet except in terms of

phonebills.All the older children

(14+)described themselves as having absolute freedom as regards when, andfor how long, they had use of the equipment.

We noted as a matter of some irony that if initiators tended to bemale, most regulators tended to be female. Yet again, this dimensionsuggests how our specialist interest raises other, more general questionsabout the ways in which childrens leisure time, and thus their culture, isstructured and controlled. Equally, we were struck by the ways in whichthe older, more middle-class boys appeared to regulate themselves,mixing school work sensibly with computer use and clearly divergingfrom the media stereotype of the computer addict.

Conclusions It would be at least premature to draw major conclusions from this

small-scale piece of research. Nevertheless, we hope that this study will



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encourage a more general questioning of the kinds of claims which aretypically made for the so-called digital revolution. In particular, wewould challenge the idea that computers can in themselves transform

young peopleinto creative cultural

producers.While

computersare

undoubtedly occupying an increasingly important role in youngpeoples leisure time, factors such as age, social class and genderremain significant determinants on individuals access to, and use of,such technology. We should look to these larger questions about socialinequality before embracing the idea that the digital revolution hascome of age.6,

Nevertheless, there are several more specific implications here in termsof cultural and educational policy.Above all, we need to consider theways in which young people learn to use the technology.As we havenoted, much can be discovered through unstructured messing around;but at present, many young people are struggling to learn how to usecomplicated programs and machines. Whether young people canpersevere to the extent that they are able to maximise the use ofequipment at home would seem to be a comparatively hit-and-missaffair. In terms of creativity, we have argued that the sense ofaudience - the opportunity to present and exhibit work for others - iscrucial.As we have suggested, computers often tend to be used merelyto improve the surface presentation of creative work; and they seem to

encouragea limited form of

clipart

production.These are features that

have been associated with postmodern aesthetics; but they couldequally be attributed to an absence of skill and of audience. Schoolscould play a significant role here; but at present they seem to offer anunduly narrow definition of what counts as creative output - in the formof written work - and to neglect many of the broader opportunitieswhich the new technology might present.

Access to home computers is possibly as important a part of thedistribution of cultural capital as access to books; yet without supportand development it can easily lead to a reinforcement of the status quo.Many parents think they are buying shares in their childrenseducational futures, when in reality they are merely reproducing thedifferent levels of labour value current in our society. Without suitablesoftware, without teaching, without opportunities to make and circulateproducts, young people may end up merely replicating existing socialinequalities - and at the same time further feeding the profits of the bigcomputer multinationals.

It may be that we might have uncovered more evidence of creativeproduction work through using other methods.And it may be that thecreative flowering of the digital revolution has yet to arrive. Yet theauthors of the study of educational computing undertaken in the USAover ten years ago presumably also thought its time had come.62 Likethem, we would argue that without the social envelope surrounding the

- use of home computers, genuine educational computing will be as rare



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as the creative uses of computers we set out to discover - for reasonswhich are to do with limitations of software, with economics and withparental guidance and control.At the same time, we may need tobroaden and to rethink our assumptions about what counts as creative

production -or indeed as educational computing. Yet in our view,

these problems will not be resolved through abstract rhetoric, butthrough creative forms of social and educational policy.

Acknowledgements The empirical research described in this paper was funded by theArtsCouncil of England as Digital Visions: New Opportunities forMultimedia Literacy. We would like to thank theArts Council, andparticularly Viv Reiss, for their support for this project; andAbigail Bilkusand Frances Berry, who conducted the statistical analysis. We wouldalso like to thank Leslie Haddon and Micheline Frenette, whose thoroughand perceptive comments gave us a great deal to think about! Ofcourse, responsibility for the arguments presented here remains our own.

Notes 1 See D. Buckingham and J. Sefton-Green, Multimedia Education:A Curriculumfor the Future? in Literacy in the InformationAge, eds. B. Rubin and R Kubey(New Brunswick: Transaction, 1996).

2 See C. Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of HumanInteriority, 1780-1930 (London: Virago, 1995); and for criticism of the newreligions of technology,A. Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science andTechnology in theAge of Limits (London: Verso, 1991).

3 See N. Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (London: W.H.Allen, 1983)and J. Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on SocialBehaviour (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

4 R. Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Glasgow: Fontana,1974).5 S. Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (London: Granada,

1984).6 Cf. the discussion of art and creativity in Raymond Williams The Long

Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961).7 M. Tuman, Word Perfect: Literacy in the ComputerAge (London: Falmer, 1992);

R Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and theArts (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1993); and G. Landow, Hypertext: TheConvergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1992). Despite the different institutional locations ofthese writers, the convergence of arguments is symptomatic of the largerdiscourse surrounding the powers of the PC.

8 M. Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1993), p. 43.

9 Lanham, op. cit., p. 200.10 See, for example, some of the contributions to P. Hayward (ed), Culture,

Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century (London: John Libbey,1991); P. Wombell (ed), Photovideo: Photography in theAge of the Computer(London: Rivers Oram, 1991); and M. Lister (ed), The Photographic Image inDigital Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).

11 See J. Carroll, Guerrillas in the Myst, Wired (US), 2, no. 8 (August 1994), p.69.

12 SeeA. Dewdney and F Boyd, Television, Computers, Technology and CulturalForm, in Lister, op. cit., pp. 147-69.

13 See D. Myers, Computer Game Genres, Play and Culture, 3 (1990), pp. 286-301 ; M Fuller and H. Jenkins, Nintendo and New World Travel Writing:ADialogue and T. Friedman, Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and



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52 See Buckingham, Just Playing Games.53A parallel argument here might be the way that Thornton uses the work of

Bourdieu to describe subcultural capital based on taste-judgements: S. Thornton,Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).

54 Turkle, op. cit.55 For a discussion of these and related methodological issues in relation toresearch on children and television, see D. Buckingham Children TalkingTelevision: The Making of Television Literacy (London: Falmer, 1993), particularlyChapters 3 and 4. Such difficulties might have been overcome in this instancethrough using observational methods - although of course these too are notwithout their problems.

56 See Giacquinta et al., (op. cit.)57 For example, in Jones, op. cit., Willis, op. cit. or Fornas et al., op. cit.58 See the description of demo competitions and conventions in Scandinavia: G.

Smith, Digital Graffiti, Wired, 1, no. 3 (June 95), p. 60.59 See Scrimshaw, op. cit.

60 J. Wheelock, Personal Computers, Gender and an Institutional Model of theHousehold in Silverstone and Hirsch, op. cit., pp 97-112.61 See Murdock and Golding, op. cit.62 See Giacquinta et al, op. cit.

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