Abstract

PEREIRA, Rita Ribes. Between the (en)chant and the silence of mermaids: about the children’s (no)place at the (cyber)culture. child.philo [online]. 2014, vol.10, n.19, pp.129-154. ISSN 1984-5987.  https://doi.org/10.12957/childphilo.2014.10197.

The present text has as a main goal to discuss the relations between childhood and contemporary culture. More so, that the social space the children occupy in the cyberculture became a very contradictory one: for in one hand we see such children with a natural inborne expertise; and on the other hand, we see them as unprotected and fragile beings. It is an attempt of delimitating and having a closer approach of a subject of research in a constant process of transformation, with cultural, psychic and social changes that are involved, that affects the way of producing knowledge and the research itself. It demands then a methodological and theoretical construct in a constant and vertiginous process, that more than counting on the knowledge historically accumulated seems to be diving into a vortex at the crossroads of ours incertitude. The line of reasoning we intend to partake with the reader begins initially with the data research of the production of arguments on the children´s relations with the internet that go around their daily routine and the researches of academical and official nature. On a second instance, we look into the market´s discursive production in order to observe how the making of sites, targeted speciffically to childrens, relates itself with prerrogatives of such specialized knowledge. At last but not at least, we show a philosophical approach of such speeches sustained metaforically by the homeric narrative and Franz Kafka’s reading of Ulisses’encounter at the mermaid’s island. Through this path we intend to analyze tendencies that emerge from the production of knowledge about childhood and cyberculture and, altogether, to think on the ethical and methodological chalenges that such subject imposes to childhood’s researchers.

Keywords : Childhood and Cyberculture; Children and Internet; Research with Children.

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