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This article explores the question of the empirical in the context of its related notion of experience, inasmuch as the latter explicitly brings into play issues about subjectivity. The article focuses directly on the ideas of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben concerning infancy and experience, voice and speech, and bare life and politics. In doing so, an argument is made that questions Agamben's recourse to a particular form of linguistic model and makes evident the limitations that such a model poses for an understanding of significant transformations in modern forms of sovereignty regarding the socio-political articulation of highly domesticated voices. The study aims to provide some sociological and social theoretical ground for a consideration of the voice of infancy in contemporary forms of biopolitical sovereignty. In doing so, it suggests that infancy is more than a figuration of experimentation, inasmuch as its voice (hovering between babble and the comprehensible) may resonate across an empirical domain, which is reconfigured through such a voice (or voices) heard, taken seriously and touching others.

This paper considers the question of how to protect our children in conditions of information and communication technology convergence. It focuses on three traditional centres of action- government, industry and parent - in the context of the European Union. Firstly, it argues how the European Commission, in tackling the issue of internet content regulation and child protection, draws on an 'advanced liberal' form of governance. Drawing on a particular example from the UK, it secondly considers how industry has been constructed as a responsible actor and thus how the internet industry in the UK has aligned itself with the programmatic objectives of the European Commission. However, industry has also come up with regulatory solutions which are more ambivalent with regard to the European Commission objectives and the traditional principles of media and communication content regulation. Thirdly, it argues that the European Commission objective of making parents responsible for children's internet use in the home faces considerable resistance, inasmuch as the agency and geography of domestic supervision are both changing and highly contested.