We Enter a Time of Calamity: Informed and ‘Informated’ Youth Inside and Outside Young Adult Fiction

Abstract

Young people's interactions with new media and communication technologies are currently popular subjects of debate and analysis in academia, the media and young adult science fiction. But while academic research increasingly highlights the complexity and individuality of the relationships between young people and new media technologies, pop culture artefacts such as recent young adult science fiction and the news media often resort to oppositional portrayals, particularly of what I will call 'informed' versus 'informated' youth. In such binaries, the informed young person is one who uses information and technology for personal growth and social transformation. Its opposite is the 'informated' young person. Hardt and Negri (2000) use the term 'informatization' to refer to the post-industrial economic processes of the postmodern era (p. 280), but I am using the term here to evoke the sense of being inflated, bloated or overloaded with information. The informed young person may be depicted positively in young adult fiction and the media, but its nemesis has become a fearsome spectre, reflecting popular anxieties and fears about the Information Age. The informated young person has access to unlimited information but is not informed, can communicate effortlessly across time and space but has nothing to say, and is surrounded by an ambient network of peers but remains isolated, alone and adrift. In this paper, I aim to explore how recent science fiction and other pop culture artefacts have depicted the relationships between young people and ICTs (information and communication technologies), especially in light of relevant scholarly research in order to ascertain the relevance such portrayals might have for young people's lived experiences.