ABSTRACT
In this section we turn from a discussion of theories of childhoods and children to those focusing on media technologies themselves. While we acknowledge the convergent nature of media in children’s lives, we also try to pull them apart and highlight the unique aspects of each medium and the contributions it has made to children’s culture and leisure. We start chronologically with children’s print culture, an often forgotten medium in collections
of articles on media and children. Carol L. Tilley surveys the history and current state of children’s print culture, focusing on the United States and Great Britain. She touches on the divide between literary and mass-market publishing, the rise of contemporary realism, and the development of digital book applications. Although print culture as a subject encompasses a broad range of social, cultural, historical, and material considerations surrounding the production and consumption of texts, this survey addresses a more narrow question: how have books and related texts for youth developed to their current status? Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Kirsten Seale discuss the importance of film in
children’s imaginative lives, and the role of film in the memories of childhood entertained and promulgated by adults. In doing so, they differentiate between film for children and films that feature childhood, but acknowledge that the difference between these modes of address is not always clear. While they do not support the argument that film is a reflection or accurate representation of children’s experience, they do suggest that certain ways of being are created, made legible, or legitimated through narrative fiction film. They also discuss the notions of “showing” and “seeing” the world through film, according to which adults show and children see, and film making heightens that divide of perception and power. The subject of Jeanette Steemers’ chapter is television. Thus, her analysis deals with the
most central medium in children’s lives for several decades. Furthermore, in terms of media studies, television has received the most research and public attention to date, and in doing so has established the legitimacy of our discipline. Steemers argues that children’s television culture today is shaped by those who work in an increasingly globalized TV industry, dominated by US-based transnationals. Her chapter explores the connections between industry, content, and audiences that define children’s television culture in the US and Western Europe. One key difference between US and European children’s television culture has been the supremacy of commercial broadcasting in the US and the tradition of European public service broadcasting (PSB). While PSBs are an important source of domestic content in Europe, differences between
commercial and PSB approaches are blurring. For example, while television remains an important pastime, children today watch less broadcast TV. Instead, they access it through other platforms (mobiles, computers) and via multi-tasking on computers and mobile phones. Thus, children’s TV is also impacted by changes in consumption. Sonia Livingstone argues that children’s homes, timetables, relationships, education, and
entertainment are being reshaped now that everyday activities are conducted on and through the internet. The rapid pace of change occasions considerable hopes and fear in public discourses of childhood. This chapter critiques popular discourses of “digital natives” and of wholesale transformations introduced by the internet. It then analyzes three key terms – “children,” “internet” and “culture” – by contrasting them with their opposite terms – “adult,” “offline” and “political economy.” Livingstone argues that children’s internet culture is further cross-cut by three key tensions: power (a central theme in analyzing culture), change (central to the internet), and vulnerability (much discussed in relation to children). Embedded in global and commercial processes, children’s internet culture is, on the one hand, subject to a market-logic, distinct from the organic needs of children and childhood. Yet, on the other hand, it is shaped by children’s agency and creativity in enacting their own culture. In a closely related chapter, Pål Aarsand discusses children’s digital gaming culture. Central
to this discussion are the notions of the “child perspective” and how the concept of “gaming cultures” can be understood. Arguing from the perspective of children, Aarsand claims that children’s digital gaming cultures consist of both games produced for children (by adults) and children’s own production of games or game activities. The chapter situates studies of children’s gaming cultures around three central questions: Who are the players? Where do children play digital games? How do children play? In prior studies, gaming practices have often been seen as children’s subcultures. However, this chapter argues that one can also see gaming practices as integrated parts of children’s everyday life. The mobile phone, argue Rich Ling and Troels Bertel, has become an important and
taken-for-granted part of children’s and adolescents’ lives. The vast majority of children and teens in many countries have a mobile phone, and use it to coordinate their activities, as a safety link to significant others, as well as to weave their social networks and interact with their parents. The authors discuss how the mobile phone has also been associated with less positive behaviors such as sexting, bullying, and distracted driving. They argue that perhaps more than any other medium, the mobile phone is an illustration of the proliferation of convergent technology in children’s lives. Music, argues Tyler Bickford, is an important part of the social, emotional, and political
lives of children and adolescents. Teenagers have long been the primary audience for popular music, and musical media for children of all ages have expanded greatly in the last generation. Children’s role as music audiences is a key aspect of their expanding public status as consumers, and music listening is a key practice for working through social relationships with peers and articulating identities around gender, race, class, and sexuality. Children integrate musical media into their longstanding cultural traditions, such as handclapping games and play with toys, and products from music and consumer industries are designed to cultivate these sensibilities. This chapter provides an overview of how these phenomena have been addressed in the US and Europe, while focusing on recent technological and commercial developments that point to important changes for children’s status in public culture. All the media discussed above are part of children’s consumer culture and the reality that
children are growing up in a commercialized world. Kara Chan’s chapter reminds us that there is continuing debate about whether children are victims of marketing or competent participants in consumer culture. Her chapter outlines the historical development of a child consumer
culture and toy market in the US and its influences worldwide. She also discusses the segmentation of children’s and youth markets as well as symbolic meanings of consumption of products and brands associated with them. The chapter concludes by examining how children in different cultures relate to Disney products, as a case study to illustrate how a global brand adjusts its product benefits to cater to the local consumer culture. Meryl Alper’s chapter focuses on youth, new media, and learning within convergence culture,
or the current era of accelerated, complex, and interconnected flows of information across old and new media systems. Within the last decade, there has been a growing body of research on the technological and social contexts supporting or constraining children’s learning, participation, and connections within their everyday media ecologies. However, thus far, the nascent digital media and learning field has been limited in its approach to studying children’s learning in developmentally, socially, culturally, and globally nuanced manners. She argues specifically for greater inclusion of the diverse ways in which young children and youth with disabilities experience technology in various contexts. In order for the field of digital media and learning to advance, scholarship must take into account how the experiences of children both complement and conflict with dominant discourses. Finally, Meenakshi Gigi Durham develops the concept of children’s technologized bodies.
She argues that children’s engagement with technology is embodied: mobile technologies are effectively parts of the child’s anatomy, and technologies play a crucial role in children’s social lives. Because children’s lives are defined by this “mixed reality” and marked by an ongoing reciprocity between the material and the cybernetic, red flags have been raised regarding the potential perils associated with children’s bodies in a technologized landscape. One such discursive flashpoint has been the practice of “sexting.” The chapter analyzes this practice vis-à-vis children’s relationships with virtual selves, or avatars, as well as their invention of sexual practices that seem safe in an “abstinence only” environment. She concludes, however, by noting that although technologies promise libertarian freedoms, it is crucial to recognize that they are part of a system of multinational technological production and capitalist hegemonies. Thus, she argues, a theory and praxis of children’s technologized bodies must address their political, economic, and ideological contexts.
