ABSTRACT
Department of Media and Communications , London School of Economics and Political Science , London , UK
Children’s lives in the digital age raise new questions about the risks and the opportunities of the changing media and communication environment. In relation to the dominant mass media of the twentieth century, risks and opportunities were primarily examined through the social psychological study of the effects of media exposure on children’s attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. Often too, the focus was on the potential media harms of exposure to aggressive, sexual and commercial media contents. Over time, increasingly complex models have identified multiple pathways of media influence along with key mediating factors (notably, parental mediation and children’s media literacy) and contextual factors that differentiate children’s life chances (Lemish, 2015 ; Valkenburg & Peter, 2013 ). Meanwhile, scientific and political critiques and a range of qualitative alternatives have also developed, coexisting with the effects tradition, not always harmoniously. With the advent of digital, networked and social media in the twenty-first century, research on children and media has embraced more diverse disciplinary perspectives. It has also found itself in the public spotlight as policy-makers call upon the evidence base to justify interventions designed to maximise the benefits and minimise the harms associated with heavily mediated childhoods.
