‘In Virtual Space, You Will Never Die!’

Abstract

This paper refers to a selected fragment in an ethnographic study on children’s subjectivization processes through digital technologies concerning children’s interaction with the digital world and how their different cultural tendencies reflect virtual space. Children’s digital world experiences, and their new media preferences have become an important part of their peer culture. Studies on children’s peer cultures and on the effects of technological devices on human beings commenced in the 1990s within various disciplines, for example, Aarsand studied children’s interest in computer games, while Turkle focused on human-machine relations. During the 2000s, virtual space changed the trajectories of those studies into other fields. However, studies focusing on people’s interaction with technology have rarely been directly related to children’s agency, or the sociology of childhood. Therefore, this research presents a new approach to childhood studies by using traditional concepts with changing perspectives. The main purpose of this study is to reveal how children’s peer cultures and also individual agencies have been shaped through digital technologies including online activities. For this whole study, various techniques were used to analyse children’s interactions with the virtual world by focusing on their opinions regarding technological development in the world. The parts selected for this paper are based on several clips of interviews, the topics of which are: freedom in virtual space in a comparison with real – virtual worlds on the basis of their limit(less)ness; the possible relations between humans and machines; the possibilities of surviving on ‘internetlessness’; children’s relations with online games according to social media preferences, and interaction with virtual spaces in general.