PLUGGED IN
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FOR PAUL AND JOHN
CONTENTS
Preface
1Youth and Media
2Then and Now
3Themes and Theoretical Perspectives
4Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers
5Children
6Adolescents
7Media and Violence
8Media and Emotions
9Advertising and Commercialism
10Media and Sex
11Media and Education
12Digital Games
13Social Media
14Media and Parenting
15The End
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
PREFACE
In the past decades, a dazzling number of studies have investigated the effects of old and new media on children and teens. These studies have greatly improved our understanding of why youth are so massively attracted to media. And they have also shown how children and teens can be affected by media, in positive and negative ways. Plugged In provides insight into the most important issues and debates regarding media, children, and teens.
Plugged In discusses the dark sides of media, such as the effects of media violence and pornography. But it also discusses their sunny sides, such as the countless opportunities of educational media for learning, and the potential of social media for identity development. Each chapter gives an overview of existing theories and research on a particular topic. This general literature review is occasionally illustrated by our own research findings. The book covers research among infants (up to 1 year old), toddlers (1–3 years), preschoolers (4–5 years), children (5–12 years), and teens or adolescents (12–19 years). Within these general age groups, we sometimes refer to subgroups, such as tweens (8–12 years), early adolescents (12–15 years), and late adolescents (15–19 years). We use the term “youth” to refer to both children and adolescents.
Plugged In is based, in part, on Responses to the Screen (Erlbaum, 2004), by Patti Valkenburg. Additionally, it draws on her Dutch book published in 2014 by Prometheus. But whereas that book focused primarily on Dutch data, this one internationalizes and updates both the research and the examples of media and tools. Incidentally, doing so was less difficult than we anticipated, because the preferences of youth in Western countries are remarkably homogenous. For example, a cartoon or digital game that is popular in the United States is very likely to be popular in most other westernized countries.
We see this book, like Valkenburg’s earlier ones, as an informative device for anyone interested in the study of children, adolescents, and the media. We are grateful that Yale University Press gave us the opportunity to publish an open-access book whose online version is free to students and researchers all over the world. We hope you enjoy reading the book as much as we enjoyed writing it.
PLUGGED IN
1
YOUTH AND MEDIA
My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you want to get somewhere else you must run at least twice as fast as that.
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)
Over the past few decades, there have been several thousand studies about the effects of media on youth. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, we still have much to learn. In part, the gaps in our knowledge are due to dramatic changes in young people’s media use. In the 1990s, children and teens spent on average four hours a day with media; these estimates have now skyrocketed to an average of six (for children) and nine hours a day (for teens).1 As a matter of fact, today’s children and teens spend more time with media than they do at school. And indeed, some of us are less concerned about what youth are learning in school than about what they are picking up from their many hours with all those screens.
Along with the significant growth in media use, the gaps in our knowledge are caused by the sweeping and rapid changes in the media landscape. New media and technologies are developing and replacing one another at a dramatic pace. Social media tools that we studied not long ago now seem as old as Methuselah. In 2015, virtually all teens had Facebook accounts, yet even a juggernaut like Facebook has to continually do its best to stay ahead of the competition and not lose its users to newer, more attractive interfaces such as Snapchat, Taptalk, and so forth. Indeed, the truth of the epigraph from Through the Looking-Glass is compelling: in the new media landscape, we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place.
The changes in the media landscape are due not only to the development of new media but also to the repurposing of traditional media. Youth, and adults too, are watching television differently from the way they did in previous decades. They are watching more programs online, recording more programs to watch later, and often using a second screen while they are watching so that they can comment on a show, avoid advertising, or stay in contact with other people. No longer are they watching a series like Pretty Little Liars or Gossip Girl when it is scheduled to air. Now they watch the program when they feel like it, and sometimes for hours at a stretch by “binge viewing” with streaming services such as Netflix or Apple TV, on their television, tablet, or smartphone. And although most teens are still interested in the news, more than adults sometimes think, watching the evening news on TV and buying the (paper) newspaper is a thing of the past. Teens have become “news grazers”: the vast majority (93 percent) pick up the news from a variety of on- and offline sources, depending on which is most convenient at the moment.2
The commercial environment surrounding youth is experiencing major changes, too. Traditional TV advertising has lost its dominant position. The discrete thirty-second commercial is no longer the best way to reach young people. Instead, advertisers are being forced to create and implement other, often more covert forms of advertising, such as product placement and advergames. Today’s James Bond will gladly order a Heineken, and Mad Men’s Don Draper a Canadian Club whiskey, which, according to its makers, has boosted the sales of whiskey among teens. And thanks to cross-media marketing, Dora the Explorer has become more than a TV series; there are Dora apps, Dora games, Dora toys, Dora quilt covers, and Dora websites in dozens of languages.
Then there is the world of games. In the 1990s, gaming was considered the domain of teenage boys, but it has increasingly become mainstream for young and old, male and female. Ten years ago, a mention of video games brought with it images of a home computer or a console player such as Nintendo or PlayStati
on. Games such as Street Fighter, Super Mario Bros, and Counter-Strike are probably among the first to come to mind. When we think of games today, our first thoughts are likely to be Pokémon GO or Candy Crush—games that can be played with smartphones or tablets. Touch-screen technology and the Internet have profoundly influenced what gaming looks like.
We see now that even very young children are playing games with their parents’ smartphones, and that the gender divide is changing as girls find their own game spaces in virtual worlds such as Club Penguin and Neopets. Virtual gaming worlds, in general, have spiked in popularity: the game Minecraft is among the highest-grossing apps of all time. This increased access to gaming on touch-screen platforms, combined with a reliance on freemiums (that is, apps that are free to download and rely on advertising and “in-app purchasing”), has provided formidable competition to traditional console game manufacturers.
Academic Interest in Youth and Media
In parallel with these wide-ranging changes in the media landscape, the topic of youth and media has acquired greater significance in academia, drawing interest from more and more scientific disciplines. Within psychiatry and pediatric medicine, there are countless studies of the effects of media use on aggressive behavior, attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and obesity. Neuroscientists are researching whether media use causes changes in brain areas responsible for aggressive behavior, spatial awareness, and motor skills. Sociology is studying the dynamics of youth cultures and teenage behavior in online social networks.
Research on youth and media requires an interdisciplinary approach integrating knowledge and theories from several disciplines. After all, to understand the effects of media on children and adolescents, we need to know theories about media in general as well as about cognitive and social-emotional development in youth, since it is this development that largely shapes their media use and its effects. We need to be familiar with theories about a child’s social environment, such as family, friends, and the youth culture, since factors in these environments predict the nature of media effects to some or a great extent.
Two major interdisciplinary fields have been studying youth and media since the 1960s: cultural studies and media psychology. Both fields are part of communication studies. Cultural studies, which falls within the critical tradition of communication studies, originated with the Frankfurt School in the 1940s. This field is concerned with the meaning of popular culture in daily life, and it primarily uses theories and methods from the fields of literature, history, sociology, and anthropology. Empirical methodology is typically qualitative and inductive in nature (for example, in-depth interviews or focus groups). Cultural studies researchers focus on questions that fit within the critical tradition, for example, whether children and teens have the same access as adults to media and technology, or how particular minority groups, such as homosexuals or ethnic groups, are portrayed in popular culture aimed at youth.
The second interdisciplinary field, and the one to which our research belongs, is media psychology. Research in this field gained momentum in the 1960s with Albert Bandura’s famous studies on the effects of television violence.3 Media psychology concerns itself with the use, power of attraction, and effects of media on the individual. It typically relies on quantitative, deductive research methods, such as experiments, surveys, and longitudinal research. Media psychologists, like researchers in cultural studies, make use of theories from different disciplines. They work mainly in communication studies, but also in psychology and education.
Interdisciplinary research on youth and media has had a spectacular evolution in the last few decades. In the early 1990s, only a handful of quantitatively oriented empirical scientists were interested in youth and media. Most of these scientists focused on television’s negative effects on, for example, aggression, reading, doing homework, and creativity. Some were interested in the positive effects of educational programs such as Sesame Street, but this research was less common. Today, hundreds of academics all over the world work on a variety of topics in the area of youth and media. They are looking at an increasing number of new questions. Are teenagers becoming narcissistic from self-presentation on the Internet? Does gaming lead to gaming addiction? How widespread is cyberbullying? What does Internet pornography do to children and teenagers? How does one cope with the thousands of educational apps for toddlers and preschoolers in the Apple Education Store? How can we teach youth to handle the temptations they are bombarded with in ads, games, and social media?
Although many social trends have contributed to the dramatic growth of this academic interest in youth, three trends have played particularly impressive roles. The first is the commercialization of the media environment around youth. In the United States, where television has been commercial since its inception, research on children and commercialism began in the 1970s. By contrast, in the Netherlands there was no commercial television, and hence no research on its effects, until 1989, when the first commercial station was launched. Children’s channels then sprouted like mushrooms, and before long no fewer than 113 commercials were aired during a popular Saturday-morning television show. This dramatic uptick in advertising to children was seen across many industrialized countries and led to the beginning of empirical research on youth and commercialism. For example, researchers began to ask about “host selling,” in which famous children’s heroes or hosts could freely advertise unhealthy children’s products on their own programs. Though this type of advertising was initially permissible, empirical research soon demonstrated the ethical concerns associated with this approach and ultimately played a key role in the banning of this practice in countries throughout the world.
The end of the 1990s witnessed a second important change in the media landscape that required an empirically based scientific standpoint: the development of media for the very youngest viewers, children between one and two years old. Launched in 1997, the BBC blockbuster Teletubbies opened the eyes of commercial conglomerates like Disney and Fox International, which soon realized that this “diaper demographic” was potentially lucrative. As a consequence, they set their sights on an even younger audience—babies as young as three months—with Baby Einstein and Baby TV. The rise of baby media led to new and heated debates among the public, especially in the United States. Was it really a good idea to plop such young children in front of the boob tube?
To respond to these concerns, in 2001 the American Academy of Pediatrics published a policy statement calling on parents to keep children under age two away from TV screens. This somewhat conservative recommendation largely resulted from a lack of scientific knowledge about very young children’s media use. But it was often interpreted as suggesting that media use for children under two is harmful—a sentiment that continues to pervade much of the discourse about toddlers’ media use. This controversy between pediatricians and commercial interests spurred new youth and media research on this topic. As we discuss later in this book, research so far has not found any evidence that developmentally appropriate media content is harmful to very young children. But inappropriate media, and background media not aimed at very young children, have been shown to negatively influence children’s concentration and their ability to play imaginatively.4 Today, researchers remain interested in the effects of television on this youngest demographic, although their interest has expanded to include games and, since 2010, apps.
The dawn of the new millennium saw a third trend, one that has irrevocably turned the field of youth and media on its head: social media. The concerns raised by social media were broader than those raised by television and games. In addition to fears about exposing children to violence, sex, or frightening content, social media raised concerns about online social interaction. Would social media cause children to grow up lonely, socially inept, and sexually out of control? Would social media stimulate online bullying? The first research on the social effects of the Internet was published in the United States in 1998. The study did not actual
ly investigate the effects of the Internet, because at the time of data collection hardly any participating families had access to it. At that time, the Internet was primarily the domain of early adopters, and only a small percentage of children were online.5 Public debate about the Internet heated up only around 2002, when access rates rose dramatically and the majority of American and European youth were online. Shortly thereafter, researchers began to seriously investigate youth’s access to the Internet. The results of these studies revealed a more nuanced picture than many expected, which led researchers to ask more questions about social media, including their influence on self-esteem, social skills, online sexual risk behavior, and cyberbullying.
In the last few years, the subject of youth and media has branched out more than ever. Although most empirical research in the 1990s was done among preschoolers and children, the rise of new media has brought two additional age groups into the picture: toddlers, as a result of baby media, and teenagers, as a result of social media. This broadened age range has helped the field become more interdisciplinary. This is because, particularly for the last two age groups, it is nearly impossible to understand the effects of media without also understanding their developmental level and their social environment, both of which can have a sizable influence on the size and nature of media effects.
Along with studying children and youth from a wider age range, researchers have broadened their research foci. They no longer primarily study the potential risks of media for youth but, more than ever, also recognize the potential opportunities of media. For example, in addition to asking whether early media use may be detrimental to brain development, contemporary researchers try to determine whether early use of educational apps may bolster learning. In the same vein, researchers studying online peer interaction are interested in not just cyberbullying, but also whether social media may provide a place for teens to practice and develop their social skills. This broader approach, reflecting the negative and positive opportunities of media, recognizes that media are an integral part of youth’s lives. And thus, the best contribution researchers can offer is to identify ways to ensure that these media are healthfully incorporated into their lives.
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