ABSTRACT
Children’s media use is embedded in contexts and cannot be fully understood independent of them. Contexts comprise physical spaces, such as bedrooms, and social arrangements, such as families and peer groups. In addition, there are much larger social constructions of communities to be considered; for example, nationality, ethnicity, class, and immigrant status. Authors presented in this part of the handbook explore how various contexts in which children grow up and their media use and meaning are intertwined in complicated ways. Amy I. Nathanson’s chapter opens with a discussion of the most central and common of
children’s contexts – the family. She discusses trends in caregiver-child co-use patterns, media in family life, the effects of media on family interaction, and parental mediation. Special attention is devoted to the prominence of background television in the household and how it affects family dynamics and children’s outcomes. Questions are raised about the possibility for new technologies to alter family hierarchies and a call is issued for continued research in this area. Rivka Ribak’s discussion of media and spaces explores the dynamics of the extended family
context, as it reaches outside of the physical home, given that the control of spatiality is implicated in processes of maturation. Young people are defined by the spaces which they are allowed or not allowed to occupy. The media, in general, and mobile telephones, in particular, play a growing role in constructing these spaces. Ribak explores the ways in which mobile phones are used by parents and children to maintain and expand the distance between them, and how mobile phone use is involved in practices of being outside the home, on the city street, or in school. It suggests that studies vary to the extent that they interpret distance as a threat or as a challenge, and construct the mobile phone as a medium for control or sociality. Siân Lincoln discusses a specific physical space within the family context – the child’s bedroom.
The concept of a “bedroom culture” first appeared in youth cultural discourses as a way to account for girls’ invisibility in street-based youth cultures. Primarily located in the home, specifically in a bedroom, girls engage in bedroom culture through reading magazines and listening to music. This space is easily accessible and relatively unchallenging, so girls could also attend to their household responsibilities. In contemporary contexts of “risk,” in which depictions of the dangerous streets prevail alongside the challenges of rapid development and accessibility of media technologies, the bedroom has taken on new significances for young people. Consequently, more recent studies of bedroom culture reveal a dynamic use whereby the media in particular enable young people to explore, display, and represent aspects of their rapidly changing lives in their bedrooms.
