Young People and New Media

Childhood and the Changing Media Environment

Sonia Livingstone

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781446231517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Combining a comprehensive literature review with original empirical research on young people?s use of new media, this book provides a fresh and in-depth discussion of the increasingly complex relationship between the media and childhood, the family and the home.

We can no longer imagine our daily lives without media and communication technologies. At the start of the 21st century, the home is being transformed into the site of a multimedia culture. This book looks at the discussions around the potential benefits of this new media and asks: What impact are the new media having on childhood and adolescence? Are these technologies changing the nature of young people?s leisure and sociability? and has the participation of children in private and public life changed?

1

CHILDHOOD, YOUTH AND THE CHANGING MEDIA ENVIRONMENT

FROM SPECULATION TO RESEARCH

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A group of boys go to play with the friend who has a new computer game. A teenage girl checks out the web site of her favourite band. In the playground kids discuss the latest episode of an Australian soap opera. Parents buy a computer to support their children’s education but are then unsure how to use it. Meanwhile teachers are faced with considerable inequalities in pupils’ domestic experience of computers and the Internet. When kids ask their parents for a mobile phone for Christmas, telephones become more individual than household appliances. So too with television and, more recently, computers, as electronic screens of one kind or another multiply in bedrooms, living rooms and even hallways. Saturday morning means television time; music, cartoons and news are already available round the clock, and digital television further expands the options available.

We can no longer imagine living our daily lives – at leisure or at work, with family or friends – without media and communication technologies. Nor would we want to. As we enter the twenty-first century, the home is being transformed into the site of a multimedia culture, integrating audiovisual, information and telecommunications services. There is much discussion of the potential benefits of the ever-more significant, ever-more multifunctional electronic screen. Media headlines regularly focus on the possible consequences – e-commerce, the virtual classroom, global consumer culture, cyber-democracy, and so forth. And public anxieties keep pace, reflecting a widespread concern with the kind of society that today’s children will grow up to live in as adults. Hence, there is speculation about ‘the digital generation’, children in the ‘information age’, ‘computer nerds’, ‘innocents on the Net’, the ‘digital divide’ and ‘addicted surfers’.

In both public and academic domains, grand claims abound. Optimists foresee new opportunities for democratic and community participation, for creativity, self-expression and play, for the huge expansion of available knowledge, thereby also supporting diversity, difference and debate. Pessimists lament the end of childhood, innocence, traditional values and authority. Interactive media are seen to herald the rise of individualised and privatised lifestyles increasingly dependent on the economics of global consumerism, often iniquitous in their effects, tending to undermine national culture and national media regulation. Indeed, the potential impact of new forms of information and communication technologies (ICT) has been speculatively related to almost every aspect of society, from home to work, from education to leisure, from citizenship to consumerism, from the local to the global; perhaps their most radical impact appears to be the blurring of these traditionally important distinctions. The result is a flurry of hype and anxiety, a pressure on public and commercial bodies as well as on individuals to be seen to be responding, a fear of not ‘keeping up’.

Behind the speculation lies a dearth of knowledge about the social meanings, uses and consequences of new information and communication technologies. How are children and young people using these rapidly developing new technologies? What do they think of them? And how important are they for their leisure and, as leisure provides the space for young people to experiment with identity and relationships, how important are they for their development and social relations? Will some be excluded from these opportunities while others live in an increasingly information-rich environment? How do the new forms of media affect uses of older, more familiar media, and vice versa? Will the greater variety of media contribute to the withdrawal from traditional leisure activities and even social and political participation? Will the media operate to strengthen local identities with locally-produced programming or will they support the emergence of transnational or global identities? And so forth.

We know from historical studies of past ‘new’ media that the outcome of ICT diffusion and appropriation is sometimes at odds with popular expectations, is often shaped by those expectations, and may be amenable to intervention if opportunities are recognised in time. Empirical research is essential if we are to understand the balance between the potential and the dangers of today’s new media. Yet an exclusive focus on the latest media would be inappropriate. Not only do new media add to and, in the process, transform existing leisure options, but also existing practices mediate the appropriation of new media into daily life. Consequently, this book examines the state of current research on the diffusion, use and significance of new media and information technologies among children and young people by considering ‘new’ media in the context of older media, media use in the context of leisure, and leisure in the context of the rest of children and young people’s lives.

Two trends make an academic volume on children and young people’s media environments valuable at the present time. First, and as the empirical research to be discussed clearly shows, the media are playing an ever-greater role in children’s daily lives, whether measured in terms of family income, use of time and space, or importance within the conduct of social relations. Secondly, and here too the evidence is convincing, the media are extending their influence throughout children’s lives so that children’s leisure can no longer be clearly separated from their education, their employment prospects, their participation in public activities, or their participation within the private realm of the family. Yet the key terms and frameworks for conducting such research – children and young people; audiences, users and contexts of use; the ‘new’ media; and social change – are widely contested. Before considering the empirical research base, we must therefore examine the nature of each of these concepts in order to understand what questions can be, and have been, pursued effectively. That is the task of this chapter.

YOUNG PEOPLE’S MEDIA CULTURE

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I will begin by asking, why focus on children and young people? Curiously, there is a notable discrepancy between the high levels of public concern over children and young people’s use of new media and the paucity of empirical research conducted thus far.¹ Although children are often left out of ‘population’ surveys, in Europe approximately half of all households contain parents and children, and some two-thirds of the population live in these households (Kelly, 1998). Beyond considerations of population size, their activities and interactions make children and young people distinctive in several ways.

First, children and young people are a distinctive and significant cultural grouping in their own right – a sizeable market segment, a subculture even, and one which often ‘leads the way’ in the use of new media.² Households with children generally own more ICT, and many media goods, especially those that are relatively cheap and portable, are targeted at and adopted by the youth market. Moreover, children and young people are at the point in their lives where they are most motivated to construct identities, to forge new social groupings, and to negotiate alternatives to given cultural meanings; in all of these the media play a central part.

Within the household, media of one form or another are often implicated in the sometimes fraught negotiations between children and adults. Crucially, one cannot be certain of children’s ICT access and use, given only information at the level of the household, because traditionally, though perhaps decreasingly, they lacked the power to determine activities in the home. As explored in Chapter 2, for a variety of reasons children may not use media located in the home, and they may use media elsewhere which they lack at home. Moreover, children may diverge from adults in their perceptions of everyday practices precisely because their actions represent tactics to resist or reinvent the adult-created contexts in which they live (Graue and Walsh, 1998).

In Kids’ Media Culture, Kinder (1999: 19) identifies significant differences between children and adults in their use of, and response to, diverse media products, seeking to rectify the way in which the meaningmaking activities of children are often rendered invisible or inconsequential. Indeed, as she points out, not only are ‘adult anxieties and fantasies about their own social realities, political agendas, and personal memories … sometimes projected onto these texts’, but also, as part of the everyday contexts of media reception and use, the conflict between adult and child responses to media texts ‘can itself become a means of socialisation for children or a potential object of commodification for media producers with transgenerational marketing goals’. By linking production and consumption in this way, Kinder shows how, while adults struggle to resolve, or undermine, children’s sometimes transgressive readings of media contents, producers structure media contents so as to appeal to both adults and children, thus exploiting generational differences in media culture.

In order to recognise how gender and generation subdivide the household, research must encompass both individual and household levels of analysis. In achieving this, it is no more acceptable to ask adults alone to speak for children than it is to ask husbands to speak for wives. Children’s voices are indeed increasingly being heard in public, policy and commercial fora. Children and young people have long been the subject of specific policy intervention, premised on the assumption that they constitute a ‘special audience’ (Dorr, 1986), drawing on a well-established tradition of policy designed to protect children from potential harms. This tradition is now being rethought, as part of the move to recognise children’s rights. For example, the internationally-endorsed Children’s Television Charter³ not only specifies that children’s programmes should be non-exploitative and free from gratuitous sex and violence, but also that children should have high-quality programmes made specifically for them, so as to support the development of their potential, and through which they can hear, see and express their experiences and their culture so as to affirm their sense of community and place.

It is also the case that children – as audiences for and users of new media – are distinctive because of the perennial social anxieties concerning children, childhood and youth. Indeed, the combination of children, new media and social change commonly arouses particularly strong views. However, as each new medium is introduced, similar hopes and fears – with the fears generally dominating the agenda – have arisen on each occasion.⁴ Currently, these so-called ‘moral panics’ centre on the Internet, with questions typically being asked about violent, stereotyped, commercially exploitative or pornographic content and about the reinforcement of individualistic, lazy, prejudiced, uncritical or aggressive activities. Yet similar questions were asked about the introduction of video games before the Internet, about the VCR a couple of decades earlier, about the introduction of television before that, about radio, cinema, comics, and so on. As Drotner (1992) points out, it seems that as each new medium is introduced, through a kind of ‘historical amnesia’ about previous panics, we come to accept, or incorporate, the medium that preceded it. Predictably, she argues, each panic tends to move from ‘pessimistic elitism’ to a ‘more optimistic pluralism’; in other words, initial calls for technocratic and legalistic measures such as censorship and direct social control give way to a tacit paternalism and the advocacy of moral education or media literacy.

This account is not meant to imply that these and related concerns are in principle improper or misguided. It may well be the case that the media do encourage a tolerance of aggression, stereotyping or prejudice, for example. Moreover, it is clear that these questions are of considerable concern to many parents. Why do adults keep harking back to their childhood? Not simply nostalgia, but a need to mark change and to understand it, an acknowledgement of the importance of thinking through the implications of change. As we shall see later, today’s parents – like those of every generation – recognise that these are differences which are informative about the world they now live in, and which require a response from them. Indeed, asking yet again the old questions of new media can be seen as productive, inviting us as a society to rethink widespread assumptions or challenge long-held beliefs or give recognition to submerged problems.⁵ Thus ICT provides a new opportunity to rethink familiar issues and to raise, once more, important questions about the place of communication and information – as mediated by technologies – in our everyday lives, as well as broader but still pertinent questions about the nature of childhood, family life, education, community, identity, and so forth. In short, both researchers and funding bodies appropriately derive some research questions from public imagination concerning ICT, asking, for example, whether cyber-friendships are ‘real’, whether children are becoming video games ‘addicts’, who are the ‘information poor’, will e-commerce alter the domestic gendered division of labour, how truly participatory are democratic fora on the Internet? However, it is crucial to examine such questions critically, being aware of who asks them, why, and in whose interest.

As Cohen (1972) argued, public anxieties or moral panics may present themselves as positive and wholesome, as ‘respectable fears’ (Pearson, 1983), establishing an image of children as vulnerable, innocent and in need of protection from the faults or poisons of society. Yet examined closely, these often transpire to represent middle-class concerns about the ‘polluting’ effect of working-class practices, and so rest on social division and conflicts of interest. The common claim that one worries less about one’s own children and their media use but more about those of others is perhaps better read as a middle-class anxiety about the supposed failure of working-class parents to control their children. In short, behind the rhetoric of a moral panic lies the middle-class assertion of the right to define, and the struggle for the authority to legislate for, standards and values – to define good against bad, decent against criminal, culture against populism, quality against cheap pleasures, morality against depravity. For Cohen, the creation of ‘youth’ as a deviant and stigmatised image in 1950s Britain represented one such tactic. As children and young people have their own interests, desires and values, these panics may also be read as a struggle between current and upcoming generations, a struggle in which the definition of children as vulnerable further legitimates adult authority to regulate their interests and pleasures. Buckingham (1993) has noted more recently that focusing these debates on the latest new media offers the further benefit of displacing attention from other more complex social ills: the media, treated as scapegoat, can be blamed for social unrest, crime, breakdown of the family, political apathy, thereby simplifying and trivialising the underlying social problems (e.g. Putnam, 2000).

Moreover, or perhaps as a consequence, moral panic questions have generally not been productive of good research, tending to generate narrow and unimaginative hypotheses that even then are often not supported empirically. For instance, far from finding that teenagers are turned by computer games into lonely, isolated addicts unable to communicate with each other, it seems that teenagers are incorporating new media into their peer networks, using both face-to-face and online communication, visiting each others’ houses to talk about and play computer games just as they visited and swapped comics a generation before, using new media to supplement rather than displace existing activities.⁶ To take another example, when Schoenbach and Becker (1989) surveyed the impact on households of media introduced in the 1980s (VCR and cable/satellite television) across a variety of Western countries, they found little evidence of a reduction in time spent on non-media leisure and little evidence of reduction in time or money spent on print and auditory media. Rather, their claims were more modest, suggesting consistent evidence for increasing diversification and specialisation in uses of all media.

For a variety of reasons, it seems that to research children and young people – particularly in relation to the media – is to enter a domain that, for the adult population, arouses deep ambivalence. In arguing for a new, child-centred approach to the sociology of childhood, Qvortrup (1995: 9) identifies nine fundamental paradoxes in our culture’s orientation to children and young people.⁷

• ‘Adults want and like children, but are producing fewer and fewer of them, while society is providing less time and space for them;
• ‘Adults believe it is good for children and parents to be together, bu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the text
• 1 Childhood, youth and the changing media environment
• 2 The diffusion and appropriation of new media
• 3 Media, leisure and lifestyle
• 4 The media-rich home: balancing public and private lives
• 5 Living together separately: the family context of media use
• 6 Changing media, changing literacies
• Appendix: The Young People New Media Project
• Bibliography
• Index