T
he kinds of issues with which the just the economic and military, implica- worldwide war to influence the whole
term “globalisation” permits us to tions of this event have proved predictably world.
engage are hardly new. Some of vast and are still unfolding. Similarly, the
them are, in fact, quite familiar and have mid-1990s mark the opening and the Children and Childhood
received copious attention in the different expansion of the internet for civilian use
social sciences. Contact between geogra- (i e, as opposed to the use of the techno- This brief background is useful to begin
phically distant societies and cultures logy on which the internet is based, by an inquiry into the relations between
through the ages, for instance, has been the armed forces which had existed for globalisation and childhood, inasmuch as
a major theme in history. Conquests and quite some time). Moreover, modern this background indicates the emergency
subjugation, colonisation and extraction telecommunications have shaped social or mid-storm character of this or, for that
of resources comprise the subject matter history for more than a century. Hence, matter, any inquiry into the socio-cultural
of a vast body of research and theory- the internet cannot be described as a aspects of globalisation. It is highly likely
building in economics and political break, yet it does mark a radical increase that quite a few points in our inquiry will
economy, social anthropology and com- in the speed, quantum and nature of make us wonder whether they are relevant
parative studies cutting across disciplines. long-distance communications. Its social or directly related to globalisation. For a
It is difficult to separate these phenomena and cultural implications are complex and process which is far from mature or com-
from the ones currently addressed as generative. plete, the parameters of inquiry into its
“globalisation”. Indeed, the global predis- The collapse of the USSR and the East effects cannot be firmly drawn. Similarly,
position of capitalist extraction of natural Bloc, on the one hand, and, on the other, if the process has a threat component,
resources has received so sustained an the availability of the internet for civilian starting with the threat of its irreversibility
articulation from scholars for so long [e g, use, together provide the context in which – which the ideologues of globalisation
Baran 1957; Galeano 1998] that the pro- the relations between institutionalised never fail to underline – it can hardly
cesses we currently notice when we dis- structures of the state and the market are be referred to with the unemotional
cuss globalisation can hardly deserve to changing all over the world. The change objectivity associated with the social
be called incipient. Neither the economic is mediated by entrenched or historically sciences, especially when the topic is a
and political, nor the technological and shaped relations of power. This is why the highly vulnerable category called child-
cultural features of the content of globali- so-called underdeveloped countries have hood. While children do influence adult
sation are new. Yet, if the term persists, been pushed to structurally adjust their relationships and the social ethos, the
and even appeals to some, it must be national economies to be in tune with the agency we can attribute to them in any
because it draws attention to a sense of demands of global markets. Though these sociodrama is hardly of an active or
break in contemporary world history markets are described as “global”, they are independent kind.