Abstract :
When critics consider young people’s practices within cyberspace, the
focus is often on negative aspects, namely cyber-bullying, obsessive behaviour, and
the lack of a balanced life. Such analyses, however, may miss the agency and
empowerment young people experience not only to make decisions but to have
some degree of control over their lives through their engagement with and use of
technology, which often includes sharing it with others in cyberspace. This was a
finding of research conducted by Nicola Johnson, which also informs the two novels
considered in this article, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and Brian Falkner’s
Brainjack. The article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of acts of resistance (Acts
of Resistance: Against the New Myths of our Time, 1998) to demonstrate how these
fictional representations of hacker heroes make a direct address to their readers to
use their technological expertise to achieve social justice. Rather than hacking
