Introduction: Generation ‘Text’

In this chapter I draw on observations from research spanning the last decade, in which I have been tracing paths that children, young people and adults have made through their online interactivity. Some of the data I analyse are drawn from the activities of those ‘early adopters’ who have pioneered the use of technology as a way of connecting socially (Wildfyre, 1997a; Verdi, 2004). Others whose texts I consider have been part of a generation of youngsters who have taken part in online activities alongside their peers and friends as part of a more recent popular culture interest in social networking sites (www.bebo. com; www.facebook.com; www.myspace.com), or who have used the internet as a way of developing confidence having lost friends and confidence through illness (www.AYME.org.uk). My research is rooted in literacy, language and education, and I conceptualise the internet as the single most transformative invention for these areas since the introduction of the printing press. The latter similarly increased the production of texts, therefore providing greater access to and dissemination of information; like social networking, it empowered individuals and brought social change (Vincent, 2000). We now inhabit a world where a woman from Iraq can keep a blog in English, accessible to a wide and internationally dispersed readership – enemies and sympathisers (Riverbend, 2003-07), and we are able to compare this with a female American soldier's images on a photosharing site and her blog that tells us of her life in base camp (tommigodwin, 2005). We inhabit a world where photographs can be taken on a mobile phone and be disseminated globally even before a journalist arrives (Wikinews, July 2005); in the same world, and using the same technology, we can play on a photo-sharing website, sending a wig backwards and forwards in a transatlantic online game (jenny, 2006). We can see Dylan Verdi's video blog where she regularly uploaded short films of her everyday life as a 12-, 13- and 14-year-old (Verdi, 2004), Wildfyre's websites and discussion boards about life as a teenage witch (Wildfyre, 1997b) and the schools and hospitals set up by others for cyber ‘babyz’, which they emailed to each other and wrote about in elaborate role-plays well into their teenage years (Davies, 2004).