ABSTRACT

Within the framework of this volume this chapter deals with children’s media consumption and how it changes over time. A reconstruction of long-term trends in children’s media use meets two challenges. First, it cannot rely on long-term data, which cover several decades or even centuries and provide comparable data over a longer period of time. Second, as a rule the existing data, which cover at least several years, reflect the situation only in a specific country and do not enable general conclusions on a global level. Thus, our approach has to build on a synopsis of a large body of research from different historical and cultural backgrounds. In order to identify relevant trends which can serve as meaningful interpretations of the history of children’s media use, this synopsis has to be highly selective. Our approach combines two steps: first we take the historical development of media

technologies as a key condition for children’s media use, starting with the earliest media; we will follow the historical development. For each relevant media technology we will sketch how it entered children’s everyday lives and how it is used today. This way of telling the story of children’s media use as distinct stories of individual media technologies is linked with the risk of a deterministic view of technology. Therefore, against today’s backdrop of an increasingly converging media environment, our second step sets out to develop a more holistic view of children’s media use. We will focus on function rather than on technology. This means that we try to identify comprehensive media repertoires of children, for example the composition of different media that children select for themselves. This perspective helps to better understand the particular role of the different media and the interrelations between “old” and “new” media, as well as the changing functions that media fulfill in children’s everyday lives.