Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

The Internet at Play: Child Users of Public

Internet Connections
Christian Sandvig
Department of Speech Communication
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This article reports an ethnographic study of a subsidized computer center for children
in an inner-city library. Unsurprisingly, young children play with the Internet. Surprisingly, this creates conflict with the justifications given for such centers by adults and
public policy, leading to an atmosphere of tension between differing understandings of
the Internets purpose: as a place for ritual and play vs. as a place for the transmission
of information and for work (Carey, 1989). Theories of play based on Huizinga (1950)
and Gadamer (1989) are used to explain Internet play. The study finds that the narrowly instrumental rationales of public policy about the digital divide are rehearsed
and repeated in everyday conversation at the center, even to the extent that childs play
is denaturalized and seen as a problem that must be corrected.
doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00302.x

Introduction

In the late 1990s, subsidized computers and Internet connections in public places
were often proffered as an answer to the digital divide, the concern that in an
information society those without the economic resources to access information
technology are disenfranchised from participation in public life. A variety of projects
and people worked within this rationale to provide the public free access to computers and Internet connections at schools, libraries, and community centers. Yet,
despite large public investments and a small amount of public debate about these
centers, little is known about exactly how they have been used. In place of this
knowledge there is a vague overarching narrative of technological progress and the
preconception that public Internet access remains in the realm of the educationally
and economically disadvantaged (Lee, 1999, p. 346), at least where free public
computers are concerned. More specifically, the typical rationale for free computer
centers in public places presumes that the Internet is essentially a transmitter of
important information that is to be learned and that this justifies its subsidy. This
is sometimes called the digital library metaphor for the Internet (Stefik, 1996, p. 6)
or the library model of public Internet provision (Dobscha, 2004). This vision of
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Internet use underpins the policy mechanisms that produce and subsidize publiclyfunded computer centers.
This article describes a study that employed ethnographic methods to examine
a computer center reserved explicitly for children in a socioeconomically depressed
area of San Francisco, California. As this article will show, the details of public
Internet use by young children stand in contrast to the public rationales and cultural
justifications that are usually given for Internet use. Children, as any parent could
guess, play with the Internet. Careys (1989) useful distinction between transmission
vs. ritual communication suggests that the idealized vision of the Internet as a transmitter of information (the library metaphor) weighs heavily on the minds of the
users and providers at these centers. Children playing with the Internet do not look
up facts. Their play does not resemble the transmission of extrinsically useful information and the closing of the digital divide. This leads to surprise, anxiety, guilt,
and even despair among adults, despite the expectation common to other circumstances that young children like to play.
There is a well-developed interdisciplinary literature that would predict and
explain this symbolic and ritual (using Careys term) Internet use: interdisciplinary
theories of play (Gadamer, 1989; Huizinga, 1950). However, due to the ideological
baggage accompanying play, a play-theoretic approach to subsidized public Internet access is likely to remain unpalatable among policymakers and some researchers.
While it is acceptable to use public funding to build childrens playgrounds, playing
with public computers is not yet as respectable. This article draws on the literature on
play to explain childrens use of public computing in San Francisco and to show how
play inverts much of what is known and expected of computer use. It also investigates the way in which the idealized notions found in public policy and law about
the digital divide and the information economy become fodder for everyday arguments among parents, children, teachers, and librarians about what Internet use
ought to be like.
The Dominant Approach: Public Internet Access as Transmission
Some technologies readily suggest their uses, the way that a glove looks like it will fit
your hand. Computing is not so simple since it consists of radically multipurpose
devices that could be put to a variety of ends. Stefik (1996) explains that metaphors
and stories used to describe the Internet are as important to understanding it as the
capabilities of the technology itself. Metaphors about the Internet such as electronic
library, virtual reality, and electronic marketplace contain lessons: Some uses
are always valued and others are devalued. For instance, historically the computer
has been readily acceptable as a device of production, and the appropriation of
public funds to support access to it has been appropriate when couched in terms
of creating productive members of society or moving society as a whole toward an
information economy (Castells, 1996). Across the developed world, major policy
initiatives in the 1990s sought to subsidize computer-mediated communication for
these and other reasons. The United States passed the Telecommunications Act of
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1996 and expanded the concept of publicly-subsidized universal telephone service

(universal service, see Mueller, 1997) to include new technologies like the Internet
(Aufderheide, 1999; Hammond, 1997). Unlike prior telephone subsidies, the 1996
Act proposed an institutional model in which schools and libraries are the chief
access point for otherwise disenfranchised Internet users, and they receive substantial
public funding to provide free Internet service. In the U.S., this program cost from
$2.25 billion to $4.6 billion per year from 1998 to 2004 (for estimates, see Ellig, 2006;
Hausman, 1997; Jaeger, McClure, & Bertot, 2005).
The concept of universal service is uniquely American in that rationales for it are
unlikely to be based on equity or welfare (Rapp, 1996). Instead, U.S. policies employ
economic rationales and focus on system benefits. In this manner American arguments for universal service are very comparable to those for universal education
(Sawhney, 1994). These policy goals map to the transmission model in Careys
understanding of communication as ritual vs. communication as transmission
(Carey, 1974, 1977, 1989). The notion of communication as transmission is premised on the archaic use of the word communication to mean physical movement,
and in this sense communication is meant to be the transfer of some discrete thing
(such as news, information, or knowledge) between otherwise disconnected
entities (such as minds, people, or computers). This sort of communication echoes
the high value placed on rationality since the enlightenment (for more detail,
see Peters, 2001, ch. 2). Carey argued that transmission is a privileged idea of
communication.
Public policy and culture generally reward what Carey might term the secular
use of a computer to retrieve information over a distance. This is the library model
of the Internet mentioned earlier. Public Internet access as transmission is an instrumental use of a computer to seek and deliver information. It is consistent with
rationales both to realize economic and efficiency gains as compared to other forms
of communication and to develop a more productive workforce. Consistent with
current policys emphasis on the school and library (both well-established sites for
the transmission of knowledge via books), subsidized access to the Internet in public
places can be rationalized as granting the ability to transmit skills and information to
the poor and uneducated.
Previous Scholarship and the Problems with Transmission
To date, there are only a few other studies of free public Internet access points, and
they have been largely exploratory. Only one comparable study was observationally
based; it considered a free library setting and discussed children (Balka & Peterson,
2002, 2004). Research in the community informatics tradition has considered free
community technology centers, but has not considered children (for a review, see
ONeil, 2002). The conclusions of these studies are not yet coherent, although Balka
and Peterson (2004) suggest that free computer users in Vancouver, Canada were
often children and some already have access to the Internet via other means. Additionally, a research brief about libraries generally noted that public Internet access
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points often manage to reproduce oppressive limits on the groups they are designed
to help, specifically women and the elderly (Dobscha, 2004).
Communication in Internet cafes has received more attention, but this research
is less relevant in that what motivates users to pay for Internet access has been
a primary concern. Studies of cybercafes have found that each cafe can evolve
a particularistic local culture (Miller & Slater, 2000; Wakeford, 2003). One early
study rejected the notion that public use in a cafe involved the positive features
usually associated with publicness, or that public use was that different from solitary
private use (Lee, 1999).1
Some of the previous studies of Internet access in public places are vulnerable to
Careys critique, introduced earlier, that researchers privilege transmission-related
rationales for communication. For instance, using a similar research design to the
present study, Balka and Peterson (2004) found that current use of the Internet in
libraries is inconsistent with the goals articulated in current public policies (p. 152;
see also Balka & Peterson, 2002), and Dobscha (2004) found that [p]ublic internet
spaces.do not seem to be serving the needs of those they were initially supposed to
be serving (p. 161). This sort of conclusion in policy analysis research depends upon
a false sense of surprise. In fact, one should expect an examination of any law or
public policys enactment in everyday life to be substantially different from the ideal
representation of behavior made by a statute or a speech. Whether jaywalking or
Internet access is at issue, the law and policy about a topic is a special kind of valueladen language often used to specify ideals and norms; it is never a description of
what actually happens in the street (Moore, 1978). A number of researchers (including the author) have made the mistake of expressing surprise that subsidized Internet
connections do not actually result in a disenfranchised child ready to sit down in
front of the computer for an afternoon of job training to better herself. As Lee (1999)
notes, an unnecessary focus on governmental rhetoric characterizes much of the
work in this area (p. 346).
The study described here began as an exploratory study with a theoretical framework that emerged inductively. Early in this research, the relevance of play theory
became clear, and the question of what users ought to do with the Internet
emerged from a disproportionately large number of the conversations observed in
San Francisco. As this study will explain, users largely did not conceive of the Internet
as the transmission of economically valuable skills and information. However, children expend considerable effort to demarcate and defend their non-instrumental
use, while adults worry and feel guilty about the fact that the use of these centers does
not fit the ideals specified by policy to address the digital divide.
Why this should be so surprising is one of the puzzles this study addresses. Other
communication media are readily acceptable as sites for play. In the context of communication research on children co-viewing television with siblings and adults, television has been found to be a stimulus to imaginative play (Singer & Singer, 1976)
and an object around which play is actively organized (Reid & Frazer, 1980). Earlier
research which focused exclusively on online discourse (Danet, 2001; Ruedenberg,
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Danet, & Rosenbaum-Tamari, 1995) also explained the Internet in terms of play.
Even newspapers, a communication medium often associated with the transmission
of information (news), have been studied as objects of play (Glasser, 1982, 2000).
Play and a Relational Technology
In contrast to the idea of transmission, one might expect that children not yet
familiar with the connotations of computing and these debates in public policy
would be free to justify the computer as not merely useful for transmission, but also
for what Carey terms ritual communication, a relational use of computers as a way
to maintain society across time rather than exchanging messages across space (Carey,
1989). In ritual communication, it is not the exchange of information that is relevant, but the cultural understandings developed through an interaction. As early as
1974, Carey criticized communication scholarship for its lack of interest in symbolic
and ritual communication. However, a wide variety of interdisciplinary scholarship
outside of communication has considered ritual communication within theories of
play (for a comprehensive review, see Sutton-Smith, 1997). As Huizinga stated flatly
in 1950, ritual is play (p. 5). In the years since Careys critique, communication
scholarship has begun to address this issue in research on a variety of media and is
beginning to incorporate the link between ritual and play. Understanding communication as play invites us to .think beyond the rational, utilitarian, extrinsic, and
almost always instrumental reasons individuals give for their attention to, and interest in, the programs and publicationsand now Web sitesof their choice
(Glasser, 2000).
In other words, while computers, televisions, and newspapers may transmit skills
and information, people also play with them with little expectation of acquiring
anything from them directly (cf. Glasser, 1982; Stephenson, 1964, 1967). While this
approach has also been used to understand computer-mediated communication
(see, e.g., Danet, 1995, 2001), the most widespread work on computer-mediated
communication is largely from a functional psychological perspective (e.g., Turkle,
1984, 1995) or focuses on play within the topic of maintaining ties within virtual
communities (e.g., Jones, 1995, 1997, 1998; Smith & Kollock, 1999).
When considering play, a large, diffuse literature from a number of fields
proposes functional understandings of specific kinds of play at the level of the
individual. While play may be non-instrumental from the perspective of the player
(play may seem useless), a great deal of scholarly effort has been expended to
demonstrate that play is adaptive and useful. This approach is a straightforward
evolution from the earliest writing about play (see Rubin, 1982). In the 18th century,
Friedrich von Schiller envisioned play as the necessary expenditure of surplus energy.
Karl Groos in 1901 found play to be the elaboration and perfection of learned
behaviors. Genetic psychologist G. Stanley Hall envisioned play as useful catharsis
in his recapitulation theory. Since it is in fact quite difficult to demonstrate that
most play is functionally useful and adaptive, other literature instead takes the
approach that the word play is a linguistic waste-paper basket for activities that
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are mistakenly grouped together in common speech, but should be theoretically

distinct (Millar, 1968, p. 11). Individual approaches most common in social psychology have the positive effect of then being able to functionally explain some play
forms as need satisfaction, social learning, socialization, or personality development,
but this leaves a wide swath of what is usually termed play embarrassingly unconsidered.
A distinctly different approach that will be employed here developed in the
literature of sociology: an approach that proceeded without much regard for either
the general conception of play used by the [earlier] philosophers and psychologists,
or for their conclusions (Giddens, 1964, p. 80). This view begins with the idea that
the assignment of the signifier play to diverse activities in diverse contexts is no
accident. The most frequent contemporary starting point in this tradition is Johan
Huizinga (1950), who articulated play as an activity that is freely chosen, bounded,
outside ordinary life, and totally absorbing for the player (p. 13). Huizinga argued
that some play is present in all elements of life across history. Indeed, cross-cultural
examinations find remarkably parallel evolution of concepts for play (Huizinga,
1950) and games (Csikszentmihalyi & Bennett, 1971) in different societies. Huizinga
defined play in opposition to seriousness, a limiting formulation that seems true only
for contemporary society, and perhaps not even then (Anchor, 1978). He also
defined play as an activity connected with no material interest (Huizinga, 1950,
p. 13). A somewhat modified approach recalls Veblen (1899) and understands play as
leisure and class signification (Hearn, 1976/1977), or as a way for society to [leave]
hope in the dispossessed that free competition is still possible in the lowly stations of
life (Callois, 1961, p. 115).
The present study, following Glasser (2000), follows this broader approach and
employs Gadamers relatively recent philosophical analysis of play (1989) with the
theoretical framework introduced by Huizinga (1950). In this thinking, every game
presents the [person] who plays it with a task.the purpose of the game is not really
solving the task, but ordering and shaping the movement of the game itself
(Gadamer, 1989, p. 107). Gadamer argues that it is an error to consider play at
the level of the individual (p. 104). Instead, play is fundamentally relational; it is
a mode of being subsuming both the object of play and the consciousness of
players. This mode requires, not necessarily literally another player, but something
else with which the player plays (pp. 105-106). Play is then experienced subjectively as relaxation or pleasure, even though it may require considerable effort,
because it absorbs the player and in this way frees her from the burden of initiative
(p. 105). The player makes decisions, but their consequences are limited to the game.
Play requires a demarcated space to play (a playing field, explicit or implicit) and
may be limited in time. Play is ordered and has rules, although the rules may not
be written down (Huizinga, 1950). While play may involve a task, it has no external goal as such, and is often self-renewing or repetitive (Gadamer, 1989, p. 103).
Finally, games are voluntary, and playing a game can be a way to express freedom
(Huizinga, 1950).
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An Ethnography of Place in San Francisco

This study investigates the meaning and use of public Internet access via ethnography of place at Electronic Discovery Centers (EDCs) in the San Francisco Public
Library System. Public in this case refers both to a resource available to anyone
(not even a library card is required), and also to a service supported by government
funding. EDCs are clusters of computers in library branches throughout the city
equipped with high-speed Internet access and childrens software titles. These clusters are available to use for no charge and are reserved exclusively to serve children
under the age of 14 and the adults who accompany them. In the mid 1990s, programs
similar to the EDC were ascendant as the preferred way to provide universal Internet
access across the country.
Fieldwork for this project consisted of four parts. Most central are (1) nonparticipant observation and (2) open-ended interviews with children, parents, librarians, and library volunteers at the Electronic Discovery Center. In addition, this
project draws from (3) analysis of internal library documents such as sign-up sheets
and (4) internal and external documents published by the library to describe and
evaluate library programs (such as San Francisco Library Commission, 1998a,
1998b). Fieldwork began in January 1998 and continued for two years.
Non-participant observation and open-ended interviews were conducted at EDC
locations over a six-week period from May to June 1998. Primary data collection was
spread over 20 sessions averaging four hours each.2 Observation/interview sessions
occurred at various days and times. Childrens librarians at the center reported the
times when the EDCs were busiest, and observations were then made during a variety
of days and times within this subset.3 Secondary data collection involved follow-up
visits to the Main Library EDC at various days and times to answer specific questions
that arose during later analysis. Concurrently, a quantitative study of Internet traffic
was also conducted, the results of which are reported elsewhere (Sandvig, 2003).
Children generally are required to sign up for 30-minute time slots on the computers in the EDC. In order to gain an (admittedly rough) estimate of EDC use, in
addition to the observation and interviews detailed above, the childrens librarians
stringently required that all users sign up and were extremely careful that all use was
recorded for a 10 day sample period (six days during the week and two weekend
days). The sign-up sheets during this period were then used to estimate traffic.
Setting: The Electronic Discovery Center
Most observations took place at the Main Library, a recent and striking addition to
the landscape of the Civic Center area of San Francisco. In 1988, San Franciscans
approved a $109.4 million bond measure to construct a new main library building
and renovate aging branches. Facing City Hall across Marshall Square, the sevenlevel result is an example of ultramodern architecture. Off-white tones and metallic
colors highlight the wide, arching stairways that enjoy natural light from skylights
above the central atrium. Truly impressive in scope, New Main contains 11.4 miles
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of open stacks and 24.6 miles of closed stacks (City and County of San Francisco,
1995).
Nearly as impressive as New Main itself is the startling contrast of the pristine
library building and the adjacent neighborhood of the Tenderloin, one of San Franciscos poorest. Although as the flagship of a large library system New Main draws
patrons from throughout the city, those living near the library had a per capita
income of $14,556 in 1999, with 20% of residents below the official poverty threshold
(U.S. Census, 2006a, 2006b). Income levels were similar in five of the six surrounding
census tracts. In comparison, the per capita income in San Francisco as a whole was
$34,556 (U.S. Census, 2006a).
Beyond simple motives like the addition of much-needed space, the construction
of the new main library was an attempt to give a modern face to an institution
created over 100 years ago. The Fisher Childrens Center is the location of New
Mains EDC, and the EDC is an example of the effort to modernize the librarys
mission and services. The Fischer Center is an airy, brightly-colored series of rooms
on the second floor providing comfortable furniture sized to the dimensions of small
children, exhibition space for reading stories and meeting authors, large windows,
and sunny spots to play and read. The Center houses New Mains collections of
books, periodicals, and videos for children in several languages, presided over by
a long, curving wooden librarians desk at the center, usually occupied by two childrens librarians.
The EDC consists of three islands of computers in the Fisher Center. These
islands are located on one side of the wide entryway and fenced by a wall to one
side (containing the Fisher Centers bulletin board), half-height book stacks to the
front (picture books and videos) and rear (foreign language books), and the librarians station. Each square pedestal supports four computers arranged in groups of
two, and each group of two computers has an attendant collection of three childsized chairs.4 Filtering software is not employed by the library. Two round
child-sized tables are nearby, as are two adult-sized well-cushioned chairs for larger
visitors. The space of the EDC is loosely demarcated by half-height shelving and
not closed off on any side. If the library has any visitors at all, there is always a
steady flow of people moving near and sometimes through the area (see Figure 1).
Observations were generally done from the child-sized tables in the EDC with
a laptop computer. While at the EDC, the researcher attempted to be unobtrusive,
but sat close enough to patrons to overhear conversations and to observe details of
computer use. During later sessions, non-participant observation was occasionally
interrupted for brief, open-ended interviews with children, adults, librarians, and
library volunteers. The open nature of the EDC made obtaining informed parental
consent impossible, as many children visit the library without a parent. As a compromise, printed notices informing visitors that they may be observed as part of
a research study were posted prominently. The researcher dressed professionally,
wore a library ID card at all times, and carried a clipboard when present in the
Centersimilarly equipped library staff members are a common sight there. In
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Figure 1 The Electronic Discovery Center (EDC) in the Fisher Childrens Center, San
Francisco Main Library. Two of the three islands of computers are visible. Notice that
more than one person typically uses each computer.

addition, in follow-up visits some patrons at the center who consented were photographed.
Introducing the Internet as an Object of Play

From 110 to 200 children used the EDC each day. Each child signed up for about 50
minutes on weekdays and about 30 minutes on weekends. Collaborative use of one
computer among several people is a common tactic at the EDC, so these figures
underreport use. About one child in 10 also brought along an older child (such as an
older sibling or babysitter) or adult (such as a parent or grandparent) who used the
computer with the child. On average, children probably remained in the Center for at
least one hour.5
The EDC computers were intended by the library not simply as a means to access
the Internet, but also as a vehicle to provide an extensive digital collection (City
and County of San Francisco, 1996). A large list of childrens software titles on CDROM is available from a customized menu interface that users see when they sit
down. Internet access from these computers was a single menu item out of 36 total
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items, but it was the most popular activity at the EDC, especially for older children,
and it accounts for approximately half of all computer use.6 The three most frequent
uses of the Internet at the EDC were (1) participating in text-based real-time chat,
(2) playing arcade-style games,7 and (3) playing multi-user dungeon games (MUDs/
MOOs).8 Note that playing MUDs and MOOs was not a popular activity in society
generally during the fieldwork done for this study, yet MUDs and MOOs were
regularly played as late as 2000 in the EDC. Their popularity here indicates the
degree to which users of the EDC have managed to form their own local ideas about
Internet use.
Viewing static Web pages about any topic was much less popular than any of the
three above activities encapsulated within a Web browser. When Web pages were
viewed, there often did not seem to be a goal in mind that predated the immediate
interaction with other children. While center administrators and parents often
explained the use of the center by saying that children could look up resources
on the Internet that would help them with their homework (invoking the library
metaphor), in the authors two years of fieldwork there was only one occasion in
which a child came to the EDC with a specific information need already in mind and
then looked up web pages about it. A separate quantitative analysis of Web traffic at
the EDC (see Sandvig, 2003) found that when Web pages were viewed, they were
designed to convey information about a specific topic or subject about 12% of the
time. However, watching the children use the EDC demonstrates that they use
a variety of strategies to choose which Web pages to look at, and these rarely (if
ever) resemble the transmission of information. For example, one common technique to choose Web pages is free association, where children type words like coke,
pokemon, and backstreetboys into the URL box of the browser, hoping that
something will appear. Yet, when a page does appear, the child does not pause to
read it. Instead, they free-associate another topic. Browsing itself is made into
a game where the goal is to load a variety of colorful web pages quickly. That is,
games are usually sought as the content of choice in the EDC, but even when they are
not, the Web itself is easily transformed into a game.
Children and adults carry on simultaneous, complex interactions with each other
while using the EDC. In chat and dungeon systems, they consider the EDC to be what
Goffman (1959) would call the back region relevant to the mediated interaction,
and several children participate in staging what should be done in the front region,
that is, the chat or game system, through advice, discussion, and negotiation. In this
fashion, children were typically simultaneously engaged in face-to-face interaction
with peers, parents, and library staff, while engaging in mediated interaction via
MUDs, MOOs, chat, and computer games. Even email composition is accompanied
by interpersonal interaction in the form of advice and collaboration.
Identity Play and Conversation Play at the EDC
As noted above, web-based chat and visits to MUDs/MOOs were very popular ways
to use Internet connectivity at the EDC. Children were drawn to conversations where
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they could pretend to have other identities and interact in situations that they would
not encounter face-to-face. These acts of masquerade and identity play online were
the focus of much early research about Internet communication (e.g., Turkle, 1995)
and come as no surprise here. However, online identity play in the EDC is complicated by the motive to interact socially face-to-face with friends while interacting
socially on another level (or in another frame; see Danet, 2001) while using the
computer.
To elaborate, children from 13-14 were drawn to chat about otherwise forbidden
topics. One child repeatedly visited several chat rooms and offered (by typing) to,
give you a long, kinky massage. Despite this, they often appear unfamiliar with the
meaning of their words. Another child filled out a personal profile on Yahoo! chat,
using the menu of choices to indicate that he is an Executive in the Finance/
Banking/Insurance industry. He then visited several chat areas for his 30-minute
session, pretending to be this imaginary person. I do insurance, he typed. He
masqueraded as an adult primarily to watch other conversations without participating, except to comment on his mask. Voyeurism and role- or identity play are
common play forms among children; however, even when the purpose of Internet
use was ordinary conversation, this was managed as play.
Arguably, much of human conversation is playful in some way, yet users of the
EDC went to some effort to ensure that their conversations were playful. The Internet was used conversationally in the EDC via chat and instant messenger software.
Groups of children that know each other often sat together and, from separate
computers, accessed the same chat area. They spoke out loud to coordinate their
actions in the chat (You tell him!) and to confide insights about the other users
(Do you think hes old? I think hes old). This is again a way to increase the
complexity of a conversational situation by adding frames and complexity.
Email is often emblematic of a transmission view of communication since it
involves the delivery of information or messages. Yet even the majority of email
use was best interpreted as play. Children tended to send email to other children, and
overall composed short emails that in content were very similar to chat conversations, such as discussion of shared events that resembled communication-as-play.
The body of some email messages contained only nonsense words or gibberish,
making the game of email simply the sending and receiving of the message. The
opening of free Web-based email accounts was a favorite topic of conversation,
especially among children around 10 who usually lacked the knowledge of how to
open an account, yet desired access to the game of composing, sending, and
receiving email that the older children played. Both younger and older children
conceptualized email in this way, sometimes referring to their desire to play mail
or play email.
Producing Unusuability in a Fundamentally Social Context
As can be seen so far in this description, childrens use of the EDC at the public
library is fundamentally social, in contrast to Lees (1999) earlier findings from an
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Internet cafe. In the atmosphere of a library, most children are not shy about
mingling with strangers of similar age. Groups of children use several computers
at once and shout questions and advice to each other. Novices stand by and observe
those who are more skilled, adopting successful Internet search strategies and noting
interesting URLs (see Figure 2). Parents often accompany children into the EDC and
watch or use the computer with their child. A volunteer explains, parents and
children will come [here] together, especially with the small ones. Usually the
child will know more about these things than the parent. (This was observed to
be true in perhaps half of the parent/child pairs.)
Children will often look at the computer screen of the child next to them and ask
questions like, oh, you got that? I didnt get that, and, how did you get in there?
Children that have already had 30 minutes on the computers will linger in the EDC
to give advice to other patrons like, use bombs! and you have to use shields now
or youll die! These catcalls can be more distraction than help, but they sometimes
produce questions like, what next? Children were clearly engaged in over the
shoulder learning (Twidale, 2005) in these interactions, but the topics learned were
most often the user interface features of games.

Figure 2 A young child offers unsolicited advice to a stranger, speaking loudly so as to be

heard over the headphones.
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943

However, collaborations often inverted the usual idea of how people share computers. Multiple children (or children and a parent) often used one computer at the
same time. These pairs devised sharing arrangements that turn the computers user
interface into a game, such as, you use this part of the keyboard and Ill use this
part, and Ill do the mouse and you do the keys (see Figure 3). These arrangements are not about learning to use computers efficiently. Typing while sharing
a keyboard is quite difficult! But setting goals such as keyboard sharing during an
arbitrary task is a way to produce a game. This generates a large amount of discussion
between users: Go up! Go down! Dont read it ALL! recalling Careys admonition that one purpose of ritual communication is to produce interaction. In an
extreme example, a mother and child used a drawing program together by sharing
the trackball at the childs insistence. They turned the drawing program into a game
by attempting to draw a particular form (a house) while both of them simultaneously
used the device, each person with one hand overlapping the other (see Figure 4).
Drawing a house with the predefined shapes available in the drawing program is
a task that either the child or the adult could easily accomplish alone, but they chose
instead to perform this task together even though that made the task very difficult.
In instances like these, children and adults worked to produce unusability if it
seemed like it might lead to more social interaction. In this, the structures of play as

Figure 3 Two children make a game of using the computer by dividing responsibility for the
input devices: Ill do the mouse and you do the keys.
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Figure 4 A mother and daughter add a level of complexity and structure to an open-ended
drawing program by attempting to draw a house by both guiding the trackball at the same
time.

recognizable from Gadamer and Huizinga were deployed by EDC users to create
opportunities for ritual communication in which the content and the transmission
of information were not particularly relevant. The production of unusuability is
a widespread tactic used to turn the computer from a device understood instrumentally as something useful for the end of looking things up into a device useful for
creating the means of interaction toward no particular end. Tactics like the production of unusability were particularly worrisome for some adults at the EDCs who
had the transmission model in mind, as will be explained later.
Collaborative Play as a Motive for Use
Children are drawn to use public access computers that have connections to the
Internet regardless of their access to Internet connections in the home. Children
report social motives for Internet use and they enjoy coming to a public space to use
this communication technology. While it might be expected that publicly available
free computers connected to the Internet are a powerful draw for those without
access to these resources elsewhere, in fact children are drawn to the collaborative,
social atmosphere of the public access computer center regardless of their availability
at other locations. Children request to be driven to the Tenderloin (the economically
depressed neighborhood adjacent to the New Mains EDC) from the more affluent
suburbs. Thus, this setting draws patrons with no computer at home, but it also
draws those with other access. It is true that other motives exist as well, including
faster Internet connectivity at the library, more software titles to choose from at the
library, and other activities at the library that are complementary to Internet/software use.
My dad works at the Internet, a 13-year-old boy said. When asked if he has
access to the Internet at home he says yes. When asked if he comes to the EDC
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945

because of the speed of the computers, he replies, no, its the other people and
stuff, (he looks around the room) you can talk to them. Its fun.
Even apparently solitary use of the EDC computers generally occurs with an
audience. In Figure 5, a child playing a game alone with headphones on completes
a level successfully, and moves her hands and body in a playful dance to celebrate,
while others look on.
Further evidence that collaborative play is the mode of use in the EDC can be
found in the amount of effort that children spend bracketing Internet use in the EDC
as different from work, school, or even other situations of Internet use elsewhere. For example, relevance to a childs school curriculum is an important consideration weighed when he or she decides what to do with the EDC computers. In
most, but not all, cases children make a clear distinction between work and leisure
time, and the time spent at the EDC is considered to be leisure. Although there are
school field trips to the EDC, the majority of traffic at the EDC occurs after school,
on weekends, and during the summer, times usually reserved for leisure.
When Ben, a 14-year-old boy, sees that the researcher is interested in what he is
doing on the Web, he confides, Im working on a Web site for my school. The
researcher mistakes his volunteered statement to refer to what he is looking at on the
Web right now, a Web site for Acura enthusiasts, and asks him what part of the Web
site he is working on right now. He is visibly surprised and immediately corrects this
misperception, speaking with exaggerated patience: Nooooo! I found out about
Web sites and stuff in a class, but I come here for . fuuun. When asked if he uses
the computers in the EDC to work on school projects, he realizes that he is not
getting his point across, and speaks very slowly to clarify this distinction: No, that is
school, I come here for fun.

Figure 5 A child successfully completes a level of a learning game and celebrates by dancing with hands and torso while others look on. She experiences this as play and ritual, while
adults tend to define this game as the transmission of important information.
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Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (2006) 932956 2006 International Communication Association

Behaving as anyone would who has been released from work during a given
time period by social convention, the children at the EDC are very careful to separate
the spheres of leisure and work as much as possible and use a variety of tactics to
protect the leisure sphere from encroachment. Chief among these is a comparison of
Web and software activities to the school curriculum they have experienced. If the
activity seems too similar, it is rejected (and frequently tarred with the epithet
learning game as in, hey, thats a learning game! spoken as criticism by observing
children).
As noted above, this is not to say that children do not learn; learning is acceptable
if it can be justified as leisure. In the minority of interactions in which a child
performs an information-seeking task on the EDC computers, it is usually justified
in this way. Over a span of two sessions at the EDC, Eric searched a variety of
educational resources on the Web and used the librarys CD-ROM encyclopedia
to find out about Honduras, from which his family immigrated. This was leisure
because he liked it, it wasnt required, and it was open-ended. Thus the use of the
EDC meets another requirement of play: It is voluntary.
Masking Learning With Ritual
The EDC allows us an opportunity to understand our interaction with the Internet as
a medium by exploring the contrast between adult and child. Because it is frequented
by young children and the adults who accompany them, the EDC represents a liminal
zone in which those who bring a strong predisposition about the purpose, use, and
meaning of the technology (the adults) attempt to negotiate a shared understanding
with those who have had no formal introduction to the technology and may have
little in the way of preexisting schema with which to understand it (the children). It is
from this confrontation that the meaning of public Internet access can be distilled.
Children realize they can leave work (or for them, school) outside the EDC because it
is defined symbolically as a place for fun by previous experience, bright colors,
loud children, and, most important, absence of the structure often associated with
time spent using a computer in a classroom or a school computer lab. Adults have
the opposite reaction to an activitys relevance to school curriculum, and are engaged
at combating the demarcation of the leisure sphere to exclude learning.
Librarians combat this distinction by attempting to label certain time periods as
work. They have set up specific times devoted to homework help and as an
incentive they provide double the amount of time normally allowed. Parents combat
this distinction by using mild deception. Parents encourage their children to visit
Web sites and use software that they recognize as educational in the hopes that the
child will not recognize that it is. One parent describes the computers at the EDC
with the following statement, intended as praise: theyre great! I dont think [my
son] really notices that they are learning games. If children persist in using the
computers in ways that are obviously not educational, some adults become very
distressed. Library staff who learned that the researcher was working on this ethnography frequently tried to break the news gently by saying with pained expressions and
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947

guilty voices, they use it for games, you know. One volunteer told me in an angry
voice, the Internet, it is good for nothing. I dont show them those games, but they
find them somehow.
The tug-of-war between work and play is particularly interesting because a two
year ethnographic study like this one is certainly not required to produce the conclusion that young children play. It is self-evident that young children play, but
something about the EDC creates an environment where the opposite meaning is
the prevalent common sense. Adults are genuinely surprised that children play and
criticize their use of the EDC as an arcade. In this research project, it is tempting to
outline the ideal goals of public policy that centers like the EDC ought to produce,
then express surprise that this does not happen in reality. But the reality of the
EDC in San Francisco is one where the ideal goals for public Internet centers are
present and rehearsed in everyday interaction. Some of these derive from people who
are well acquainted with the idealized narratives of the technology. Commenting
about the childrens use of the EDC, one librarian commented to the researcher,
dont tell the funders! But even adults who likely had no familiarity with public
policies about the digital divide still had strong opinions of what the Internet connections ought to be used for.
In the EDC, children valued communication that they saw as ritual (play), while
adults valued communication that they could justify as transmission (learning). A
learning game succeeds in the EDC to the extent that it deceives the child into
experiencing it as ritual communication while simultaneously presenting enough
clues for the adult to understand it as the transmission of valuable information.
Transmission must be masked as ritual through the introduction of rules and the
freedom to choose some paths within them. The valence of the most common uses of
the network as perceived by both children and adults is summarized in Table 1.
Many items in this table are self-explanatory, but of note are the activities
characterized by adults as negative: overplaying and circular interactivity. As

Table 1 Valence of Internet uses at the EDC, by point of view

Point of view
Child

Adult

948

Valence
Positive

Negative

exploration
novelty
interactivity
unpredictability
collaboration
relevance to school
exploration of knowledge
predictability
solitary work

relevance to school
difficulty

overplaying
exploration of culture
circular interactivity

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (2006) 932956 2006 International Communication Association

Sutton-Smith notes, [p]aradoxically children, who are supposed to be the players

among us, are allowed much less freedom for irrational, wild, dark, or deep play in
Western culture than are adults (p. 151). Overplaying refers to the feeling, expressed
by parents, that it is possible to become too involved or lost in play, as well as to
experience too much play. Overplaying then consists of too much play, or becoming over-involved in play, and it was stigmatized and guarded against at the EDC.
Sometimes adults did not seem concerned that these behaviors were damaging, but
rather objected to their pointlessness, as in lets get you something useful to do.
Any play not tethered to learning might be bad, but ecstatic, wild, or irrational play
was worse. Circular interactivity is the ecstatic experience that is partly what play
theorists have called dark play (Sutton-Smith, 1997, p. 56). Circular interactivity
refers to the regularly observed behavior of repeating a very simple action over and
over, such as alternating in pressing the back and then the forward button on the
Web browser endlessly, or playing an overly simple game (such as a Java-based
version of the paddle game Pong with the paddle set to the same width as the field).
While children accepted these activities as a structured, self-renewing game, adults
found the lack of complexity and irrationality distressing. Any tolerance they might
have for play was in this way reserved for games involving at least a modest complexity of task.
Applying the perspective of adults in Table 1, the uses of the Internet that adults
preferred were activities like storytelling software for younger children and Web sites
that seemed to have direct relevance to school topics for older children (such as the
content for kids at http://www.nasa.gov).
Public Internet as a Playground
One final piece of evidence completes the case that the EDC is best understood using
theories of play. On one visit to the library, the researcher was leaving the library
building and saw a group of three children who appeared to be about 12 standing
outside the library entrance discussing whether or not to go in. It was a sunny day in
San Francisco, and they were debating whether they should go do the computer or
play ball in the lot: two activities that were to them somewhat substitutable. When
considering what place visiting the EDC occupies in the greater framework of the
lives of its users, children were asked, what did you do just before coming here?,
where are you going after you leave here?, what do you usually do at this time
every day?, and if you decided not to come here, what would you do instead?
Overwhelmingly, the EDC serves as a setting equivalent to other sites for unstructured play leisure activities in their lives. The children answered: watching TV,
just stuff around the house, playing with my friends, playing ball, playing
outside, and (most common) nothing. Additionally, after school when it is raining is the busiest time for the EDC; the library staff believes that the EDC is a substitute for playing games outside. Adults, in contrast, frequently bring children to the
EDC and leave them while they perform other tasks; for adults the EDC can be the
functional equivalent of babysitting.9
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949

Conclusion: The Lessons and Implications of Play

This article presented details from an ethnography of a free public Internet center. It
set out to investigate how children use the Internet when it is given to them in public
places, especially near an economically disadvantaged area where few other avenues
to access the Internet were available. Ethnography revealed a number of interesting
features of childrens Internet use. First, the public Internet studied here was fundamentally social and collaborative, in contrast to adult use at paid Internet cafes
studied in other research. Even apparently solitary activities in the EDC had a performative dimension (recall Figure 5). The most common applications used by
children were gaming and chat, but activities that were not labeled as games were
transformed into games.
In other research, a reasonable way to answer the question what do children do
with public Internet connections? has been to examine what Web pages the children
chose to look at, as was done in another study of this center (Sandvig, 2003).
However, this ethnography demonstrated the problems with that approach. Children were often indifferent to the content of communications, and turned the user
interfaces and applications themselves into interactive games by inventing new rules
about how computers ought to be used. While Web page choices by children werent
random, Web pages were not used to retrieve and learn the information they contained. Children transformed serious activities like reading Web pages into play by
free-associating search terms and then not reading the results, playing email to
send Web-based emails without any content in the body of the messages, and producing unusability by sharing user interfaces in ways that make them dramatically
less efficient (recall Figures 3 and 4). While this well-equipped computer center
served children from the poor neighborhood nearby, it also drew affluent children
to visit the neighborhood for the purpose of using the computers, resulting in
a diverse mixing of race, class, and skill demographics that could be seen as a prosocial feature of the program (recall Figure 2).
The Persistence of an Ideal Internet Use in Local Internet Culture
Perhaps the most significant finding of this study is the degree to which the computer
center itself became a discussion area for competing meanings of Internet use, as
evinced by Table 1. Previous scholarship has presented the political and social
rationales for subsidized Internet access as standing apart from and in opposition
to actual Internet use. This is fair to a point, but in this study, the users of the EDC
were well aware of what they should be doing online, and adults rehearsed the
rationales of telecommunications access subsidy every day when trying to control
their children. It is easy to acknowledge that policy statements about topics like the
digital divide present idealized, unrealistic scenarios. In the rhetorical frame of
public policy, this computer center should be full of nine-year-olds using tax-subsidized Internet connections to somehow transform themselves into white collar,
information-age workers. In policy, the route to this transformation is admittedly
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Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (2006) 932956 2006 International Communication Association

unclear. Yet, these idealized narratives of the Internet do not sit apart from actual
use. Instead, the Internet was a loaded object discussed with terms like ought and
should. The transmission narrative was so persuasive that a certain kind of progress-oriented, information-seeking Internet use was thought by adults to be the
correct kind of Internet use. Outside the EDC, it is obvious that children play, but
inside the EDC childs play is cause for surprise and alarm. Childs play was thus
denaturalized when brought into the setting of public Internet use. Any particular
Internet use was seen as a success if it could pass as ritual (and play) to children while
passing as transmission (and learning) for the adults. Which audience was the one
being fooled by this passing is an open question.
The Relevance of Play Theory to the Study of Communication
An explanation for this struggle over the meaning of Internet use was found in
Careys (1989) distinction of the privileging of communication as transmission as
opposed to communication as ritual. Carey called for more studies of communication as culture and ritual. While ritual communication has motivated a wide body of
research in communication (e.g., see Hughes-Freeland, 1998), Careys initial distinction between transmission and ritual only suggested broad avenues toward which
scholars might turn for a further theoretical apparatus. Play theory may be of help
here. Play as an academic concept is now entering a moment of new popularity
among some communication scholars (see Glasser, 2000; Myers, 2006). This study
asserts that play theory adapted from Huizinga (1950) and Gadamer (1989) is a useful theoretic approach to apply to Careys conception of ritual communication, as
the communicative behavior found here in the EDC enacts their characterization of
play as a mode, explaining the motivations of children that would otherwise seem
opaque or absent (as in, children just like to play).
More specifically, play may be a useful way to consider Internet communication, even beyond children. Miller and Slater (2000) have said that the Internet is
embedded in particularistic local cultures and should not be considered independently of local social relations. Wakeford (2003) noted that Internet cafes are local
achievements that produce particularistic spaces, cultures, and norms that surround
and encompass Internet access. With this in mind, the findings of this study
should not imply that all children play the specific games of the EDC or that childrens public Internet use uniformly matches the definitions of play theorists introduced here. Still, it is striking that the features of play theory were so widespread in
the EDC, but that this way of conceptualizing childrens Internet use is usually
unacknowledged in the scholarly literature on Internet communication, with a few
exceptions (including Danet, 2001). In addition, while adult activities are rarely
named using the derogatory term play, it is seems likely that communication
behavior among adults could be just as playful if researchers paused to look. This
understanding of media use has already been explored for older media forms (such as
television) by other scholars (e.g., Stephenson, 1964, 1967; Sutton-Smith, 1997,
pp. 144-147).
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951

Problems with the Internet Playground in Public Policy Discourse

The story of public Internet access told here might be taken to be very discouraging.
If consulted as a taxpayer or policymaker, anyone surveyed might be reluctant to
invest large sums in providing a technology that substitutes for more inexpensive
forms of play (like play ball in the lot). The computer has spread into almost all
parts of modern society, except that of the lowest socioeconomic status. The unpleasant reality hidden behind appeals for electronic literacy that are quickly replacing
the pleas for media literacy of times past is that familiarity and skill with the
personal computer at its present level of development is an individuals insurance
policy against having to resort to the lowest rungs of the occupational ladder. To
what extent public access points could act to restore equity in this situation on a large
scale is unclear. The data presented here show unexpected uses for unexpected
reasons that do not map well with the transmission-oriented goals of policy. One
response is to offer weak functional explanations of the benefits of computer
exposure familiar to scholars of electronic games. These are benefits like
computer literacy and hand-eye coordination that sound suspiciously like
apologies for play.
Considered from another perspective, public policy is itself a game people play.
Streeter (1996) explains communication policymaking as occurring inside an interpretive community subject to strict discursive rules. Certain justifications, like economic efficiency, may be the price of participation in the communication policy of
a given moment. Policymaking is serious talk, while play is often popularly defined as
useless, in opposition to seriousness. We shouldnt be surprised that the EDC
doesnt slavishly perform ideal statements specified in policy discourse about the
digital divide. One would never expect an ethnographic study to yield a description
of behavior identical to a statutes. Instead, the interesting point is that policy and
law provide a kind of moral language of what ought to be done with computers
(Moore, 1978) that seems pervasive, not distant. Rather than the top-down policy
sitting above and in contrast to the users of this center, the economic rationales for
subsidized public Internet use could have been drawn from a survey of the parents
here, despite the difficulty of describing actual Internet use by their children in terms
of efficiency.
It is true that all humans engage in play, and that they will continue to do so
regardless of any cultural privilege given to work, productive activity, and the goals
of policy initiatives. Study of play can lead us to understand behavior as valuable in
new ways, or at least it can portray what actually happens in these settings, regardless
of assessments of value. In Careys words, with other technologies of the past
.large numbers are spoken to but are precluded from vigorous and vital discussion (Carey, 1989, p. 168). Internet use is too varied a phenomenon to describe
accurately with a single broad statement. Yet the tendency observed here at the EDC
was not one of monolithic institutions appropriating knowledge and reducing discussion, but rather a picture in which interpersonal interaction was generally preferred by users.
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Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (2006) 932956 2006 International Communication Association

While communicative play may not be formal or explicit, the data given here
indicate that a large percentage of computer and Internet use by children at public
centers takes the form of play. While this study focused on children playing with new
communication technologies, an interesting question for further research would be
the application of play theory to adults. That children play is no surprise, except to
those convinced by the value of the transmission model of Internet communication.
Public policy and some scholarship will continue to ignore or deride Internet use it if
it is characterized in playful terms. To conclude, in recognizing the primacy of
productivity narratives and in finding resistance to them, in joining theories of play
and Careys distinction of ritual vs. transmission in communication, and in applying
Gadamer and Huizingas theories of play, we embrace a powerful analytic describing
a broad sweep of human activity, as has been seen in the small crucible of the EDC.
Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the staff and patrons of the San Francisco Public
Library System for their assistance in this research project. Additionally, Emily
Murase, Theodore L. Glasser, Franc
xois Bar, Robert E. McGinn, Byron Reeves, and
the anonymous reviewers provided very valuable comments on this article. An earlier
version of this article was presented to the 2000 annual meeting of the International
Communication Association, and a small portion of this material was presented with
Emily Murase and Sybil Boutilier in Strategies for Promoting Access to the Internet
Among Children and Youth: A Case Study of the San Francisco Public Librarys
Electronic Library Project at the 1999 annual summit of the Internet Society. This
material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under
Grant No. REC 9603344.
Notes
1
2
3
4

Lee asserted that public internet use.[can be] an atomized and profoundly uncollective
experience (Lee, 1999, p. 346).
Data were mainly collected from the Fisher Center in the San Francisco Main Library, but
also at the Chinatown Branch (1 session), and at the Mission Branch (1 session).
As school was in session during this period, no sessions were scheduled for weekday
mornings.
When ordering chairs for the center, library planners toured another nearby computer
center at the San Francisco Exploratorium (a hands-on museum of science and art) and
noticed that groups of children tended to cluster around the few available computers.
Anticipating this demand, they placed three chairs in front of every two computers at the
EDC (Boutilier, personal communication).
Although children waiting for a computer are not required to remain in the Center, they
overwhelmingly do so. In addition, the majority do not visit other areas of the Center
while waiting (e.g., to read books), but wait in the EDC itself, interacting with other
computer users.

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953

6
7

8
9

Younger children may not be able to operate the menu system at all, and are often put in
front of a software title chosen by a parent, librarian, or volunteer.
These are often remarkably simple. One favorite is a version of Pong written in Java that
runs within the Web browser and is free. Several other older action games are also
popular, including space Invaders.
MUD may stand for Multi-User Dungeon or Multi-User Domain. MOO stands for MUD,
Object-Oriented.
A similar childcare purpose was found in a study of an expensive, high-status public
Internet access center in Trinidad (Miller & Slater, 2000).

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About the Author

Christian Sandvig is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at the University

of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Associate Fellow of Socio-Legal Studies at
Oxford University. His research investigates the development and use of new communication technologies and their relationship to law and public policy.
Address: Department of Speech Communication, 244 Lincoln Hall, University of
Illinois, 702 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801 USA

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Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (2006) 932956 2006 International Communication Association