ABSTRACT
This scene-setting chapter discusses children’s media-related behaviour, focussing on their use of TV via different technologies and covering their engagement with traditional TV channels and newer audio-visual entertainment and information services. It places the use of TV within the context of their wider technology-related behaviour. It examines how traditional linear viewing, requiring an “appointment to view” programmes in TV schedules, is shared with “non-linear” or “on-demand” patterns of TV consumption. Viewing diets are now shaped significantly by much enhanced home video-recording technologies and streaming and downloading services, all of which create opportunities for viewers to create their own TV schedules. Children have been especially enthusiastic adopters of these opportunities. All of this has changed young viewers’ orientations towards TV and their expectations of it. Such developments pose questions about risks of screen experiences to young viewers and how these can be mitigated by parents and regulators. They also place new theoretical and methodological demands on scholars seeking assiduously to study and understand this behaviour and its psychological outcomes for children.
