Subjectivity in Cyberspace: Technorealism and the Merging of Virtual and Material Selves

Abstract

Children and adolescents now spend increasing amounts of their daily lives online and, despite media hysteria about its detrimental effects, a rising number of children’s authors are using fiction to explore the ways in which cyberspace can enrich young lives. Building on the argument established in Chapter 5 with reference to lateral surveillance and blogging, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that, within narratives produced for children and adolescents, cyberspace often functions as a communal, nurturing space that enables young people to achieve subjective agency. Over the past ten years, the textual representation of cyberspace in novels produced for adolescent readers has emerged as a new genre of printed books: technorealism. Narratives that can be classified as “technorealism” employ a range of linguistic and graphic techniques that mimic the use of online social media such as blogs, instant messages, chat rooms and message boards. This particular subgenre incorporates significant textual innovation (fragmented narratives, polyfocalised narration, genre mixing, linguistic experimentation and so on), but is also remarkable because it heralds a significant ideological shift in terms of how virtual reality is conceptualised. Hayles (1999) warns that the conventional dichotomisation between virtual reality and materiality will have the detrimental effect of devaluing physical presence.