From: Patrick Cox <ptcox_at_camden.rutgers.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:16:55 -0400

I think a lot about how tech in children's literature reflects reflects our conceptions about children and tech. I think of Patrick Carmen’s Trackers series, where young adults are incredibly tech savvy--so much so that the traditional book doesn’t quite contain them. Carman’s characters freque ntly reference their websites with passwords and the reader is prompted to put down the book and go online to check them. What’s on the website is part of the story.

And I think of Inanimate Alice. The text is entirely on-line and incorporates video, games, sound, music....The tech-y aspects of it increase gradually as the character ages, so it slowly introduces readers to more tech skills as they go along. http://www.inanimatealice.com/index.html Alice is, among other things, a developing digital designer and technology is used in really interesting ways as part of the story as much as to tell the story.

I think in these works technology is used to show “the digital child” a s something both kind of threatening and scary and “different” and also a s rich with potential. And that’s what I think of the current digital literature phase. There are a lot of new things going on in story telling that are changing “the book” and how stories are told, but the real rad ical change in children's and adult lit will come, I think, when the kids who are growing up with this digital literature start producing more and more of it. Right now, we’re just laying the ground work.

Patrick Cox PhD Candidate Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/

"In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer." Camus

"Don't let your studies interfere with your education." Henry Rutgers

"the jUdges of nOrmalitY are present everywhere." of course
Received on Fri 28 Sep 2012 11:16:55 AM CDT