This last week I was at the Goldsmiths PhD Sociology student’s annual trip to Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Park.
As part of an ice-breaker session we used a mish-mash of various materials to build representations of our research in order to introduce the other attendees to our projects. The picture accompanying this post was my effort to build a model using bits of foam, card and PLENTY of glue.
So what does it represent? Hopefully you might have been able to deduce that this the model is a loose representation of a children’s sandpit with a castle (made from sand), a bucket and a spade. Through these various constituent elements i’ve tried to provide an allegory for how, in my mind, my research topic is configured. The first important thing to note is that it is a sandpit and not the beach. The sandpit is an area delimited for children to play within, as represented by the red band around the edge. (This is not to say that children always stick within this boundary!) Adults set this boundary and within this boundary play can, supposedly, occur safely. This is also true of children’s websites where, within the website itself, children are monitored to ensure their safety. The sand is a substance which can be manipulated and provides children the opportunity to exercise their imagination. Websites, though to varying degrees, also offer children a space within which to manipulate and arrange aspects of the site through play. Children may also play socially in the sand; collaboratively building objects such as sand castles. Many websites also provide a social experience and the means for children to communicate and interact through the site. Sand castles themselves are a fairly standard use of sand, and in a sense children share a framework for understanding certain uses of sand (such as for digging and building certain structures), however each sand castle can be styled individually by a child. Many interpretations of websites by children are duplicated across the site and originality of use occurs in slight differences of expression. Finally, the bucket and the spade represent the tools which have been specifically designed and provided by adults for children to use within the sandpit. The bucket, though not very visible in the image, is decorated and both are colored in a way to be attractive to children. Designed specifically for certain forms of play and use. Many tools and functions of websites have been designed in a similar way, often in a way that allows children to interact with that specific brand.
What’s also important in this model are the missing elements, in particular the children and adults. Thus the limitation of this allegory is that children and adults act upon these sites and engage with them through computers from geographical variant locations. The sand pit has a virtual existance and is in a constant state of re-intepretation and re-configuration, never actualised.
