Conclusion

Abstract

For children living in the Western world at the start of the twenty-first century, regular access to technology is simply a routine part of life. Computers are now omnipresent in classrooms and homes, and many of the social and practical aspects of daily living have been transferred online. Children are also highly proficient users of technology their skills often surpassing those of their parents. Despite this reality fictional narratives produced for young readers have continued to pursue an anti-technology agenda, representing technoscientific developments as something that should be regarded with fear and scepticism. This negative representational paradigm has been maintained for a number of decades — but since the mid-2000s has slowly started to shift, thanks to the emergence of a growing subset of novels that have sought to engage with children’s positive real-life experiences of technology and represent it within narrative as having a constructive effect on human subjectivity and society. These fictions show, in their exploration of the various relationships that arise between human subjects and technology, a preparedness to deconstruct traditional understandings of what it means to be human. As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, these fictional narratives use the theme of technology to interrogate the status of the human subject in the modern era — employing motifs such as robotics, cybernetics and digital surveillance to critique established humanist concepts of selfhood.