Troubling the Image-Work of Children in the Age of the Viral Child: Re-Working the Figure of the Child

This article works toward an expanded reading of the viral child by beginning with the "origin" example of the 2007 viral video known as "Charlie Bit My Finger—Again!" In drawing on theatrical as well as sociological histories of the "priceless" child, it thinks through the evolution of the scriptive, performative, and economic dimensions of children and young people's material and digital media cultures. It argues that the kinds of capital produced by the digital circulation of images of children and young people, as well as the kinds of labour—immaterial, affective, temporal—that those images exploit, reproduce, and transgress both hyperbolize and trouble the increasingly economized cultures of subjectivity and temporality that are experienced by children today.