Abstract
When critics consider young people’s practices within cyberspace, the focus is often on negative aspects, namely cyber-bullying, obsessive behaviour, and the lack of a balanced life. Such analyses, however, may miss the agency and empowerment young people experience not only to make decisions but to have some degree of control over their lives through their engagement with and use of technology, which often includes sharing it with others in cyberspace. This was a finding of research conducted by Nicola Johnson, which also informs the two novels considered in this article, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and Brian Falkner’s Brainjack. The article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of acts of resistance (Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of our Time, 1998) to demonstrate how these fictional representations of hacker heroes make a direct address to their readers to use their technological expertise to achieve social justice. Rather than hacking primarily to “see if they can do it,” the protagonists of these novels acknowledge the moral ambiguity of hacking and encourage its responsible use.
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Notes
The former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd led the Digital Education Revolution, but as of July 2010, the Minister for Education Julia Gillard became the Prime Minister of Australia. It is unlikely that the computers will now be called “Gillard-tops.”
MySpace is slightly different in that the background templates (skins) are often particular to the individual as there is a wide range of possible options.
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Dr. Debra Dudek works at the University of Wollongong as a Lecturer in English Literature and as Director of the Centre for Canadian-Australian Studies. She is also President of the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand. She has published internationally on Australian Literature, Canadian Literature and Children’s Literature. In her current research, she analyses representations of ethics, emotions, and monsters in texts for young people.
Dr. Nicola Johnson is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University in Gippsland. She is involved in teaching a range of professional and theoretical units within the Primary program, the Graduate Diploma of Education program and Open Universities Australia. As well as exploring constructs of technological expertise, Nicola is currently investigating the labeling and psychopathologisation of heavy Internet users.
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Dudek, D., Johnson, N.F. Return of the Hacker as Hero: Fictions and Realities of Teenage Technological Experts. Child Lit Educ 42, 184–195 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-011-9137-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-011-9137-0