Plugged In
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In parallel with this rapid growth in the variety of ages and topics studied, the academic area of youth and media has become more institutionalized. In 2007, the successful interdisciplinary Journal of Children and Media was launched, which specializes in both cultural studies and media psychology. A few months later, the International Communication Association (ICA) started a special division called Children, Adolescents, and the Media, which provides an important forum for researchers in cultural studies and media psychology to exchange ideas and research. With several hundred members, this division has grown into one of the largest within the ICA. Last, we have seen the success of several academic research centers around the world. For example, the University of Amsterdam’s Center for Research on Children, Adolescents, and the Media (CcaM), with which we are both affiliated, has experienced enormous growth and is considered the largest research center of its kind. With more than twenty researchers studying topics including media multitasking, game addiction, cyberbullying, and the opportunities of digital media, CcaM and centers like it have become interdisciplinary hubs for empirical research on the complex relationship between youth and media.
Public Debate
Today, stories about youth and media make the news headlines virtually every day. The news stories have four common characteristics. First, they are more often about the negative than the positive effects of media. “If it bleeds it leads” and “good news is no news” seem to be the mantras of journalists writing on youth and the media. Second, news stories often focus on extreme incidents, such as cyberbullying cases and online sexual predators. Third, journalists frequently quote clinical experts such as pediatricians and psychiatrists as a means of lending expert credibility to the topics. Yet these clinical experts often speak from their daily experience with atypical kids, who do not represent the average child or adolescent. Finally, journalistic coverage of youth and media issues often misses the nuance of research findings, opting instead for a clean, simplistic, and often alarming sound bite.
These mechanisms mean that popular science books with negative messages tend to attract significant public interest. Books such as iBrain, by the American psychologist Gary Small, Digital Dementia, by the German psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer, and Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle, appeal to the moral panic that our children are losing their innocence, sense of decency, memory, or ability to maintain social relationships because of their use of new technologies. Worrying about the effects of new technologies has been with us for millennia. Enthusiasm about technological progress goes hand in hand with fear or even aversion of the same progress. This was true in the age of Socrates, who in the year 360 BCE expressed his concern (put into the mouth of the Egyptian king Thamus) in a dialogue with Phaedrus that written language would lead to memory loss in his students. With the aid of the written word, Socrates opined, students would no longer have to do their best to remember something all by themselves, and would appear pseudo-wise rather than truly wise: “[Writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters that are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom” (275a–b).6
The negative spin that youth and media research often receives in the news can give most people the idea that media primarily have negative effects on children and adolescents. But this is not the picture that emerges from empirical research on youth and media. Instead, this research reveals neither a dystopian paradigm, in which all media are problematic for youth, nor a utopian paradigm, in which youth universally benefit from media. To quote danah boyd: “Reality is nuanced and messy, full of pros and cons. Living in a networked world is complicated.”7 Media effects are not simple—not all media are the same, not all children are the same, and not all environmental contexts are the same. Some research has shown that media can affect certain children in certain situations negatively, while other research shows the reverse. In this book, our goal is to present a nuanced picture of the complex relationship between youth and media. Relying on research that has been conducted throughout the Western world, we aim to provide an accurate account on the role of media—both traditional and new—in the lives of youth today.
2
THEN AND NOW
The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked. “Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
This book begins in the second half of the eighteenth century. This is a logical starting point, since it was then that the first children’s media—books—appeared. Previously, children were not considered children in the sense they are today, and if they could read, they read books for adults. This changed gradually after the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential book on child rearing, Émile, ou De l’éducation, in 1762. As society’s ideas about childhood and parenting began to shift, so did our ideas about which media are appropriate for children. In this chapter, we describe how society’s ideas about youth and media have been subject to swings of the pendulum since the seventeenth century. In addition, we compare the current generation with previous generations. Why are children and teens more self-aware and intelligent than ever? Why has youth culture become so dominant in society? Why do children display adult behavior at younger and younger ages? And lastly, what is media’s role in these developments?
The Child as Miniature Adult
Although the subject of youth and media has captured the public’s interest for several decades, children’s media are relatively new phenomena, as is the concept of childhood itself. In fact, until the second half of the eighteenth century, there were hardly any specialized media for children nor was there a clear delineation between childhood and adulthood.1 Children were essentially seen as miniature adults and were treated as such. For example, children’s clothing did not differ from that of adults. Until the age of five, both boys and girls wore a kind of dress that made toilet training easier.2 After that, girls wore bodices and boys wore knee breeches. Contemporary attitudes to childhood can be clearly seen in portraits of children from this time, in which not only their clothing, but even their faces are depicted as those of adults (see figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1. Children as miniature adults: a seven-year-old Mozart painted by Pietro Lorenzoni (1763). (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum)
Children and adults also read the same texts in this period (if they could read): the Bible, chapbooks (inexpensive books containing ballads and popular tales), and sometimes the newspaper. Writers of the time unabashedly covered subjects such as poverty, disease, and death as well as drunkenness, sexuality, and adultery. Newspapers published political and military news as well as terrifying reports of natural disasters, cholera, and witch trials. Children would regularly accompany their parents to the market square to attend public beheadings and physical punishments. For many families, this was an enjoyable family outing, during which people fought for the best view of the proceedings. Rather than being “brought up,” children were simply confronted with current events, no holds barred.3
The Vulnerable Child
The view of children as miniature adults changed in the second half of the eighteenth century. Thanks, in part, to ideas promulgated by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, especially those of Locke and Rousseau, children became a vulnerable audience—worthy and deserving of protection. Newspapers, which until then had essentially served as cheap textbooks, disappeared from the classroom, and the ABC books from which children had learned the alphabet were supplemented by children’s books. The philosophers of the day felt that the content of newspapers was not suitable for children. Other instructional materials, such as the Bible and book
s of fairy tales, were adapted for the experiential world of the child. Indecent passages such as the Bible story of Daniel and Susanna, in which Susanna is spied on by two men while she bathes, were censored so as not to torment children’s souls. Fairy tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Frog Prince,” which originally included nudity and sex, came to be considered harmful to children’s moral development, and were thereafter sanitized.4
This censorship was perfectly in line with the new ideas of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment. Rousseau, for example, reasoned that man is good and unspoiled by nature, and that individual differences are the result of environmental factors. Children’s social environments could have a positive, encouraging effect as well as a negative and corrupting influence. Similarly, according to Locke, a person is born as a tabula rasa (literally, a “clean slate”), which becomes filled with experiences and impressions through one’s senses. Those raising and teaching children have a crucial role to play in the process—it is their responsibility to write wise lessons on this clean slate. As a result of the Enlightenment perspective, citizens were increasingly expected to keep their sexual and aggressive urges under control. Gradually, they began to be embarrassed about the physical aspects of life. For example, parents stopped cuddling each other and fondling their children, because it was thought to expose children to adult temptations and thereby sully their innocence.5
The Emerging Notion of an Innocent Childhood
Rousseau was one of the first to proclaim that children should be raised in freedom and also protected from the distorting influences of the adult world. In Émile, he advocated that a period in a child’s life be focused on upbringing—not confrontation. This upbringing, he believed, should give children the opportunity to discover themselves without being distressed by the cares and fears of the adult world. Rousseau believed that children were not passive receivers of stimuli from their environment, but instead active researchers who determined how their identity and development took shape. He believed that as childhood became more joyful and carefree, children would, as adults, be less mistrustful and aggressive.
Despite the idea of childhood as a carefree and joyful phase between infancy and adulthood, such a childhood long remained the privilege of the aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeoisie. For children of working-class parents, it was normal to work long days on farms, in the textile industry, or in glass or shoe factories. Most children (and their parents) did not benefit from printed media: most were illiterate, and even if they could read, books and newspapers were expensive. Working-class children had such a short life expectancy that raising them was primarily aimed at teaching them to cope with pain and to prepare them for an early death.
These conditions began to change in the early twentieth century. With the introduction of social legislation such as laws banning child labor and requiring school attendance, the phenomenon of a carefree childhood began to permeate all classes of society. Children were protected en masse from the reality of daily life. Subjects such as childbirth, death, sex, and money were not discussed with them. Printed media for them were primarily moral stories cleansed of taboo subjects. Misbehavior in children’s books was innocent mischief. Strict, clear rules prescribed what children of certain ages should and should not know about. Harsh punishments for disobedience softened, since they were seen as contradicting the increasingly popular picture of the sweet and vulnerable child.
The Miniature Adult Returns
In the second half of the twentieth century, the pendulum began to swing back, and the paradigm of the vulnerable child was increasingly questioned. In particular, by the late 1960s, people began to feel that it was wrong to present children with an illusory safe world and, instead, felt that children should be presented with reality so that they would be aware of the true state of the world around them.6 This view was fueled, in part, by the rise of youth-driven emancipation movements such as the hippies, who protested bourgeois propriety and demanded a place of their own in society. It was also fueled by the rising commercialization of youth culture through music, fashion, and media, all of which ensured that young people acquired an ever-more prominent place in society.
In the 1970s, formerly taboo subjects such as sexuality, death, and divorce once more became acceptable in media aimed at youth. This trend was well illustrated by children’s literature from the time, in which a new genre was created: the realistic problem book. Children’s literature, according to the experts of the time, had to be relevant to today’s world. As a result, a profusion of newly published books dealt with social issues such as homosexuality, incest, divorce, racism, drug use, and incurable diseases.7 Children’s books also began to include an antimoralistic aspect, exemplified by the mischievous creatures in the books of American author Dr. Seuss. Comic books featuring unsavory characters drinking in dimly lit bars became popular, as did comic books that featured strong, independent children as main characters (Tintin, for example, the titular hero of the famous Belgian comic book series).
Criticisms of the Miniature Adult
The idea that the child should squarely face the adult world was not without consequences. Starting in the 1980s, influential child psychologists and cultural critics observed (at about the same time) a number of significant changes in the social order (that is, the more or less predictable relationships between individuals and social institutions). One of their main arguments was that children were being treated too little like children and that, as a result, childhood itself was threatened with erosion. The child psychologist David Elkind was one of the first to express this view, in The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon (1981).8 He argued that children were being hurried through childhood, becoming adults too fast and too early. The “pseudo-sophistication” that comes from forcing youth into situations for which they are not emotionally prepared, he argued, could lead to stress, insecurity, depression, and aggression.
Just as child psychologists began bucking the trend against taking a “miniature adult” approach to childhood, similar ideas were coming from communication studies. The cultural critics Joshua Meyrowitz and Neil Postman, for example, each noted that childhood as a phenomenon was disappearing.9 According to the authors, children were being exposed to information that adults had kept secret from them for centuries. Both authors observed a firmly entrenched “homogenization” of youth and adults: children and adults behaved more alike in their dress, language, gestures, and preferences for media content. As a result, the boundary between children and adults had become obscured or, as Meyrowitz argued, may have disappeared altogether:
Today, a walk on any city street or in any park suggests that the era of distinct clothing for different age-groups has passed. Just as children sometimes dress in three-piece suits or designer dresses, so do many adults dress like “big children”: in jeans, Mickey-Mouse or Superman T-shirts, and sneakers . . . Children and adults have also begun to behave more alike. Even casual observation suggests that posture, sitting positions, and gestures have become more homogenized. It is no longer unusual to see adults in public sitting cross-legged on the ground or engaging in “children’s play.”10
This homogenization of children and adults, critics argued, put undue pressure on the parent-child relationship. According to Postman, the structure of the family and the automatic authority of parents were severely weakened because parents lost control over what information reached their children.11 Moreover, as parents became more apt to admit their mistakes and shortcomings, their relationships with their children became more democratized. According to Meyrowitz, formal roles can be maintained only by deliberately and bilaterally withholding personal information. When this no longer happens, formal relationships are demystified and formal behavior disappears—and along with it, children’s “natural” belief that their parents always know better.12
Television Viewing as Cause
These scholars—Elkind, Postman, and Meyrowitz—argued in some way that the eme
rgence of television played a key role in changing parent-child relationships in the late twentieth century. For example, Elkind believed that the emergence of television reinforced bonds between parents and children more than any other previous media. In his view, parents and children were likely to watch the same shows and identify with the same lead characters and role models, thus ultimately homogenizing the experiences of adults and children. Postman pushed this argument further by suggesting that the emergence of television effectively took childhood away. Whereas print media created childhood by segregating reading material appropriate to each phase of life, he argued that television integrated these phases. These arguments were based on the insight that print media are largely inaccessible to children under six, given their inability to read, whereas such inaccessibility does not hold for television.
Indeed, studies from the dawn of the television age demonstrated that children’s use of television was different from their experience of earlier forms of media such as books and radio. In 1951, when television was new, children’s television preferences were already anything but limited to children’s programs.13 According to a study by Wilbur Schramm and his colleagues in 1961, six- and seven-year-olds spent about 40 percent of their viewing time watching adult programs, and twelve-year-olds no less than 80 percent.14 Thus, this early research suggests that children’s exposure to adult programming began with the dawn of television. Watching television turned out to be a different activity from reading or listening to radio, both of which segregated age groups more than television did.