An examination of youth Internet safety as a technology of governance, seen in panics over online pornography, predators, bullying, and reputation management. Since the beginning of the Internet era, it has become almost impossible to discuss youth and technology without mentioning online danger—pornography that is just a click away, lurking sexual predators, and inescapable cyberbullies. In this book, Nathan Fisk takes an innovative approach to the subject, examining youth Internet safety as a technology of governance—for information technologies and, by extension, for the forms of sociality and society they make possible. He argues that it is through the mobilization of various discourses of online risk that the everyday lives of youth are increasingly monitored and policed and the governing potentials of information technologies are explored. Fisk relates particular panics over youth Internet safety to patterns of technological adoption by young people, focusing on the policy response at the federal level aimed at producing future cybercitizens. He describes pedagogies of surveillance, which position parents as agents of surveillance; the evolution of the youth Internet safety curricula, as seen through materials on cyberbullying and online reputation management; and, drawing on survey results and focus groups, parent and child everyday practice. Finally, Fisk offers recommendations for a “cybersafety of everyday life,” connecting youth Internet safety to trends in national infrastructure protection and corporate information assurance.

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“This is the most culturally sophisticated history of the Internet yet written. We can’t make sense of what the Internet means in our lives without reading Schulte’s elegant account of what the Internet has meant at various points in the past 30 years.” —Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chair of the Department of Media Studies at The University of Virginia In the 1980s and 1990s, the internet became a major player in the global economy and a revolutionary component of everyday life for much of the United States and the world. It offered users new ways to relate to one another, to share their lives, and to spend their time—shopping, working, learning, and even taking political or social action. Policymakers and news media attempted—and often struggled—to make sense of the emergence and expansion of this new technology. They imagined the internet in conflicting terms: as a toy for teenagers, a national security threat, a new democratic frontier, an information superhighway, a virtual reality, and a framework for promoting globalization and revolution. Schulte maintains that contested concepts had material consequences and helped shape not just our sense of the internet, but the development of the technology itself. Cached focuses on how people imagine and relate to technology, delving into the political and cultural debates that produced the internet as a core technology able to revise economics, politics, and culture, as well as to alter lived experience. Schulte illustrates the conflicting and indirect ways in which culture and policy combined to produce this transformative technology. Stephanie Ricker Schulte is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas. In the Critical Cultural Communication series