Interrogating the speculative futures of children and technology

Over recent decades, the study of children’s digital lives has become an integrated part of childhood studies, but also a distinct sub-field exploring the particular opportunities and challenges that technology brings to children’s lives. This chapter addresses one of the conceptual challenges for this area of childhood studies – a focus on a ‘plastic present’ (Uprichard 2012) that always looks ahead to how ‘new’ or emerging technologies are shaping (or may shape) children’s lives. At the time of writing, the metaverse has become emblematic of this perspective. Though the metaverse is yet to become a widespread technological reality (and may never be), it has already begun to shape narratives of as-yet-unrealised impacts on childhood. This compulsion to keep up with digital innovation presents challenges for childhood studies, and particularly its critical theorisation of childhood, time and technology. In this chapter, I take the case of the metaverse as an emblematic example of how the study of children and technology risks being restricted to pursuing a constantly evolving, ahistorical, ‘near future’. This chapter draws on a historical frame to show that a critical study of children and technology benefits from looking backwards as well as forwards. Looking back to the 1980s and earlier debates surrounding children and virtual reality technologies, the chapter will explore how expanding the temporal frame of children and technology is important for framing present day debates, and can also help avoid the trap of viewing childhood in a plastic present.