Plugged In

by Patti M Valkenburg

  Parents of preteens and teens are faced with the often thankless task of helping their children learn to regulate their media behavior. For regulation to be effective, parents must keep in mind that teenagers want to be treated like adults. The regulation of media use can be a struggle, but it is worth the fight. Helping youth develop healthy media habits, particularly in an era of continually available social media, will pay dividends in their later development. Autonomy-supportive strategies, in which parents and teens together form guidelines for media use, work best. Ideally, a conversation about this issue should happen before the media use begins or, at a minimum, before any extreme media use violation occurs. If that happens, the probability that teens will feel some form of personal commitment to the guidelines is increased. And they will then be more likely to keep the agreement they made and to make the transition to the next step: regulating their own behavior.55

  Conclusion

  Parents matter. This is an undeniable fact. How parents raise their children plays a crucial role in how their children develop into adults. Children raised under an authoritative parenting style that balances warmth and structure grow up to be more well adjusted than their peers who grow up in authoritarian or permissive families. Similarly, how parents manage media use in their family can strongly influence child development.

  For the youngest children, parents must try to identify whether any media are okay for their children. And if they decide to expose their children to screen media, they have to navigate the burgeoning educational media landscape to find content that meets the needs of their kids. As children get older, they are increasingly confronted with the allure of other content, such as violent content, and as a result, parents must find ways to successfully mitigate such content’s potential negative effects. And by the teen years, parents must try to help their teens find a way to regulate their media use—a task that increases in complexity because, in comparison with children, teens less easily tolerate parents’ interference in their media use.

  As this chapter showed, parents can influence access to and the effects of media content through restrictive and active mediation techniques. Doing so means taking seriously the new challenges of media-related parenting. In the twenty-first century, children and teens send as well as receive media content. Media-related parenting can therefore no longer be confined to the mediation of content that comes to children, but also involves proactively monitoring children and teens as senders of media content, especially if it takes the form of sexting or cyberbullying.

  Media have become a main ingredient of teens’ social lives. In practice, this means that traditional offline social issues in adolescence (bullying, falling in love, social isolation, and sexuality) have entered the domain of parental media monitoring. And while people often suggest that parents need a sophisticated understanding of new media and technology in order to effectively parent in the twenty-first century, this is largely a misconception. In practice, “new” media-specific parenting issues are typically offline issues in disguise—issues that were at play long before the Internet existed. It is not so much technical knowledge that matters. What matters most is proactive media monitoring, in which parents take the experiences of their children seriously, and in which they help them form the media guidelines that best fit their unique needs.

  15

  THE END

  “Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

  In the twenty-first century, media and communication technology have penetrated all levels of society, and they appeal to everyone: infants, children, teens, parents, teachers, practitioners, public policy makers, politicians—everyone. Media and communication technology make for bold headlines in newspapers, and they are hot topics in debates, forums, and congresses. Everyone wants to get a grip on the rapid, large-scale changes in the media landscape. Everyone wants to know what impact media and technology are having on all of us, especially on youth. And everyone wants to understand the dynamics of our network society.

  The Network Society

  The twenty-first century is, so far, the age of the network society. A society supported by social media networks, which have removed the spatial barriers that traditionally limited our communication, and have changed the world into a global village.1 In comparison with earlier societies, it is much more difficult to get a grip on the processes at work in a network society. In a network society, values and norms of conduct are less fixed and less shaped by place and social position. For example, in the homogenous societies of the 1950s, relationships were clear and largely predetermined. Father was the breadwinner, Mother was responsible for maintaining the household and raising the children, and children were expected to follow in their parents’ footsteps. In many cases, families were part of a religion-defined subculture that influenced their school selection, sports clubs, and much more. Communication was clear and predetermined, occurring either face-to-face or through mass media, and was characterized by a one-way transfer from a sender (such as radio or television) to a receiver.

  Whereas society in the 1950s was defined by collectivities (family, neighborhood, religious circle), today’s network society revolves around the individual.2 Every individual member is part of different networks driven by communication technologies. We are familiar with the image of a contemporary family sitting in a restaurant, parents and children glued to their own phones, unaware of one another, and communicating via e-mail, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat. In the network society, communication is no longer exclusively face-to-face, but is instead mediated through communication technology. It also no longer exclusively takes place through mass communication, but also through “mass self-communication.”3 Recipients of communication are now also senders of an influential mass of knowledge, entertainment, and opinions.

  In a network society, there are fewer absolute rules of behavior than before, and few things are unquestioningly self-evident. In a network society, it is not the social position of the senders but their persuasiveness that predicts their influence and authority.4 The information flow produced by mass self-communication is infinite. Knowledge is available to everyone; it is produced by everyone; and it is accessible to everyone. The information upon which we base our beliefs comes from everywhere, and the average shelf life of this information is shorter and less predictable than ever before.5

  In a network society, parents are confronted with a variety of conflicting, often short-lived beliefs about family matters, including, for example, messages about the appropriateness of media in children’s lives or about the role that parents “should” play in managing their children’s media use—making today’s parenting ever more complex. In addition, the network society has resulted in unprecedented freedom for today’s youth, and the personalized social media they enjoy requires more intense supervision and comprehensive judgment from parents than any earlier medium. Without the authoritative rules governing behavior that were once present in collective societies, our identity has become a matter of free choice, which, of course, demands more responsibility and self-regulation than ever before.

  This is the context that twenty-first-century families are living in. A context filled with opportunities and challenges. A context in which media and technological innovations are so tightly interwoven that it is hard to see where one stops and the other begins. And this is the context in which twenty-first-century academic research on youth and media is conducted.

  Promises and Perils of Youth and Media Research Today

  The transition to a network society has, by all accounts, turned research on youth and media on its head—leading to new opportunities and new challenges. Perhaps most obvious is the fact that our object of study has become a moving target. Many of the media and communication technologies that we investigate today are continually changing—often while we try to understand the phenome
non in question. Yesterday’s MySpace is today’s Instagram. This is especially problematic for the social sciences, because social scientists often need sufficient time to answer questions with appropriate methodological rigor. To establish causal relationships between media use and longer-term outcomes, youth must be followed over several years, and their media use needs to be measured repeatedly. With the rapid and often short-lived developments in the media landscape, such research is far more complicated than it used to be.

  Added to this complexity is the fact that youth and media research has always been an interdisciplinary field par excellence. Questions about youth and media are not solely the province of communication scholars or developmental psychologists. Quite the contrary. A successful understanding of youth and media requires knowledge of media developments, child development, family communication, education, and the particular media outcome of interest (aggression, loneliness, friendship quality, etc.). This means integrating knowledge across communication studies, developmental psychology, social psychology, sociology, pediatric medicine, and more.

  But interdisciplinary work is challenging. Differing ideas about theories, research designs, and the interpretation of research outcomes must be dealt with. These disciplinary differences complicate the study of youth and media, and it is no surprise that there is not yet a single, all-encompassing theory to connect these disciplines and help explain the relationship between youth and media. Moreover, these different perspectives greatly influence the lens through which the field is viewed. For example, researchers who align themselves with the fields of pediatric medicine or child psychology are confronted more frequently with children struggling with emotional and social problems than are, say, media psychologists or sociologists. It is not surprising then, given their different experiences, that pediatricians and child psychologists are more likely than media psychologists or sociologists to see the dark sides of media and communication technology.6 As the saying goes, “What you see depends on where you stand.”

  While the youth and media field is replete with diverging opinions between disciplines, such divides in views also occur within the discipline. This is especially true when it comes to negative effects of media content, such as those of violent media. More than ever before, there are heated debates between scholars about whether media violence leads to aggression among youth. A well-known example of this debate was published in Psychological Bulletin. In a piece by Brad Bushman and colleagues, “Much Ado about Something,” the authors discussed why findings from meta-analyses on the influence of violent games on aggression were meaningful.7 In “Much Ado about Nothing,” however, Christopher Ferguson and John Kilburn argued that they are not meaningful.8

  The issue in scholarly debates such as these is not so much that researchers find different results, but rather how differently they interpret the same results. As we showed in this book, meta-analyses on the effects of media on beliefs and behavior usually report small to moderate effect sizes, between r = .10 and r = .20, with occasional outliers above and below. Some scholars find these effects to be too small to warrant attention. Others, ourselves among them, are of the opinion that we must take such small to moderate effects seriously, since they may indicate that a small group of children and adolescents are particularly susceptible to the effects of media.

  Thus, different scholars in the same discipline can have diametrically opposite interpretations of the same research findings. Over a century ago, an anonymous artist drew a picture, later made famous by the psychologist Joseph Jastrow, and again later by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: the rabbit-duck illusion (see figure 15.1).9 Some people immediately see a rabbit (or properly, a hare), with its ears on the left. Others immediately see a duck, with its beak on the left. It is impossible to see both the duck and the rabbit at the same time.

  Social scientists find themselves in a situation that is comparable to the rabbit-duck illusion. Using the same body of literature, they can discover differing realities and then contradict one another or, what is more serious, talk over one another’s heads. Diametrically opposite interpretations of the same information have fueled social science for decades. Yet today’s network society, with its proliferation of accessible knowledge, brings this opposition to an entirely new level. For every subject and subarea, no matter how small, an overwhelming amount of research can be found. Whereas fifteen years ago, studies on the cognitive effects of video games could be counted on one’s fingers, today there are hundreds of studies and several meta-analyses on the topic.

  Figure 15.1. The rabbit-duck illusion: like this image, research findings can elicit multiple, seemingly incompatible interpretations. The first version of this drawing appeared in 1892 in the German magazine Fliegende Blätter.

  Indeed, while gathering the research for this book, we were often amazed at how much information was available—and simultaneously somewhat apprehensive that in our search, we missed the forest for the trees. This is both a promise and peril of the network society. On the one hand, the impressive (and still growing!) body of knowledge provides fuel for the oppositions housed within and across disciplines. On the other hand, contradiction and criticism have always been the essence of science. They force us to look ever more critically at our research topic and engage with one another’s criticisms in order to develop stronger research and achieve better answers. It is also what makes our field more dynamic, more responsive, and more fascinating than ever before.

  Plugged In: Learning from the Past, Looking toward the Future

  There is no question that we are all plugged in to some extent. We have televisions in our homes, laptops on our desks, tablets in our bags, and smartphones in our pockets. The twenty-first century has enabled us to be always connected, always available, always on. And with this always-connected lifestyle come many questions about what it means for our health and happiness. These questions often focus on youth, since they are typically viewed as highly vulnerable to media effects and are, in fact, growing up almost literally plugged in.

  In this book, our goal was to address these questions by contextualizing them within the larger field of media effects. By highlighting the nuanced nature of the relationship between youth and media, we aimed to quell some concerns associated with media while simultaneously highlighting those areas that should be treated with caution. We also aimed to shed light on the opportunities for future work in this field and to recognize the ever-increasing importance of youth and media scholarship in today’s network society. To do so, we analyzed a number of key questions that regularly call for the attention of academics and the public at large, such as the effects of violence, sex, advertising, educational media, gaming, and social media.

  Perhaps most clearly, Plugged In demonstrates that, as Dan Anderson and colleagues rightfully noted in 2001, “Marshall McLuhan appears to have been wrong. The medium is not the message, the message is the message.”10 Time and time again, we see that the content of media matters. Content that is violent, horrific, or highly sexualized can lead to increased aggressive behavior, fear, and unhealthy sexual attitudes. But in the same vein, content that features academic or prosocial messages can foster academic and social-emotional learning.

  Along with issues of content, this book shows that there are other important factors that parents, practitioners, and researchers must pay attention to. We have seen that complex games can increase teens’ cognitive skills. And we have seen that social media—when used in a healthy way—can help adolescents build their self-esteem, enhance their peer relationships, and shape their identities. But here too there are risks. For some youth, violent games can lead to aggressive behavior. And for some youth, the use of social media can have important downsides, such as cyberbullying, stranger danger, and sexual risk behavior.

  More generally, the adage “There is such a thing as too much of a good thing” rings true when it comes to children’s and teens’ media use. Indeed, real concerns arise when it comes to excessive me
dia multitasking as well as compulsive gaming or social media use. It is crucial that we bolster the effects of positive media content and mitigate the effects of negative content. We need to help youth learn how to make media a part of their life—but not their entire life. In our always-on, always-plugged-in culture, this will be a key challenge for parents and youth, and for us all.

  In addition to highlighting the sunny and dark sides of youth’s media use, this book makes the point that while content certainly matters, so too does the audience and the context in which the media use occurs. Perhaps most prominently, we see that media preferences and media effects are highly dependent on children’s development. While younger children prefer content that is slow-paced, features fantastical elements, and relies on simple humor, teens prefer fast-paced realistic content that incorporates complex humor and risky elements. Moreover, younger children are more sensitive than older children and adolescents to the effects of media violence, frightening media content, and advertising. Development matters. Development influences not only the media that children consume, but also how are they are affected by this consumption. It is impossible to understand the true relationship between youth and media without considering development.

  Beyond development, the research featured throughout this book shows that dispositional and social factors predispose the size and direction of media effects. Effects of media violence show up predominantly among children with an aggressive temperament and an above-normal interest in media violence. In the same vein, sexualized media seem to have negative consequences particularly for teens who become sexually active at a young age and who are particularly interested in sex. Moreover, it is clear that parents play a critical role in enhancing the positive effects of media and combatting the negative ones. These are important findings. They offer a detailed look at who is susceptible to media effects, and make the crucial point that youth’s dispositions and their environments help shape media effects. Just as it is impossible to understand the relationship between youth and media without considering development, it is similarly impossible to obtain a true understanding of this relationship without considering relevant dispositional and environmental variables.