Parenting/Internet/Kids

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers

The title, Parenting/Internet/Kids, slashed together, implies that we’re parenting both the Internet as well as kids. While meant to be playful, it also strikes a serious note and conveys a layered approach: we are not simply mothering children who have grown up in the internet age, but also “managing” the computer, a machine whose intelligence-cum-sentience is receiving increasing recognition as scholars ponder how we define being human in a post-human age. The collection examines how the intimate presence of computer technology in our homes and on our bodies affects family life. An equally pressing question is how the internet as a conduit to a global world has changed perceptions and enactment of parenting. The anthology tests the assumption that computer technology in the home has an impact on domestic life and family relations similar to that of electricity and home appliances during the post-second-world war period. It builds forward from research studying how mothers are affected by the affordances and dangers of online activity and computer technology by foregrounding questions of how the computer affects the family home and culture and parent/ child relations.

Topics linking computer technology to family life may include, but are not limited to:

• Principles and practices mothers use to regulate their own and their children’s online social media practices
• Influences and impacts of easy and constant access to the internet on family lives and relationships and spaces
• Adaptive effects of computer technology within the home on the roles, activities and responsibilities of mothers, mothering and motherhood (changing home entertainment and how we shop, pay bills, communicate and read)   
• Mediated reality through AI/social media/computer technology; the digital dinner table; screenings for one
• Current practices that represent and express [changing] cultural patterns and attitudes
• The internet as a closed feedback loop and instrument of social control; strategies developed to resist the power of the internet to shape and monitor how we act and think
• The (still untapped) liberatory possibilities of the computer; new soft wares and algorithms.