Abstract
To my mother, Chaya Barkai (Mishkov), who once insisted on pulling me away from my desk on the eve of a major exam because ‘there is this great nature documentary on TV. You can learn so much from it too!’ … Thus, it is fair to say that it is from her that I learned first-hand about the role of media in children’s lives – as well as about her abiding faith in my abilities to study and write about it (or anything else) – if I only want to. (p. v)
Professor Dafna Lemish’s opening dedication to her mother is a telling start of an ambitious collection of essays exploring the relationship between children, adolescents and the media. Telling, because it reveals the editor’s views by clearly placing children at the centre of the relationship rather than viewing them as ‘dupes’ and ‘passive victims’. We should acknowledge from the onset that the handbook itself carefully treads through a minefield. Studies on children as audiences are not only a ‘microcosm of media studies’ (p. 1), but they have also given rise to contention and controversy in the field – often ridden by scholarly arguments between researchers investigating media’s (harmful) ‘effects’ on children, including through controversial experiments, and others who believe that children are ‘active audiences’ able to interpret, decipher and be empowered by media content and messages.
This handbook is indeed ‘a huge undertaking’ (p. xiii) featuring 57 contributions from 72 academics from 38 countries with the aim of creating ‘a shared scholarly arena’ (p. 5) by spanning across a variety of disciplines such as developmental psychology, media studies, public health, education, feminist studies and the sociology of childhood. In reality, however, it does not really span that widely because it is dominated by media studies.
The handbook is divided into five main parts – childhoods and constructions, channels and convergence, concerns and consequences, contexts and communities and collaborations and companions. I will summarize below the main focus of each part, and I will discuss in more detail a few chapters that I found particularly useful and insightful.
The first part ‘sets the stage’ (p. 9) by presenting a variety of disciplinary approaches. Some of the leading scholars in the field such as Kirsten Drotner, David Buckingham and the editor Dafna Lemish offer their overviews of the main tenets and assumptions of key theoretical traditions and perspectives. Topics include representations of childhood in the media, trends in consumption and constructing children as consumers and ecological approaches and feminist theory. Marina Krcmar’s chapter tackles four assumptions stemming from a dominating developmental psychology approach: that children and adolescents are qualitatively different from adults, that age is a primary variable and that all differences are related to development and the selective application of developmental phenomena and theory. Krcmar advises against taking differences over time as ‘evidence for development or progress towards adulthood’ and rightly points out that in studies with adults, differences between older and younger people ‘are taken as evidence for social differences, economic differences or differences in the subculture of a cohort’ (p. 41).
Also very interesting is the following chapter by Elizabeth A. Vandewater in which she argues that scholars ‘must eschew the endless procession of correlational or cross-sectional analyses that add little to nothing to deeper and more nuanced understandings of media and children’ and instead ‘think deeply and comprehensively about how best to incorporate and test the ebb and flow of developmental processes’ (p. 51). Vandewater claims that with the advent of new technologies, media use can no longer be treated as ‘an isolated experience’ and ‘understanding and examining the context of media use is now even more critical’ (p. 52). Similarly, Karen Orr Vered is critical of academics looking for ‘harmful effects’ of media use especially in relation to obesity and violence. She argues that critical studies ‘draw attention to what children do with media, not what media do to children’ (p. 64).
Part 2 of the handbook explores the role media technologies play in children’s lives. The first few chapters focus on specific media – starting from print media, film and television and moving to the Internet, digital games, mobile phones and music. Then, in the last three chapters, wider issues are explored, such as consumer culture, learning within convergence culture and the concept of ‘children’s technologized bodies’ (p. 86). Most of the essays provide useful summaries of the history and current state of research but hardly any new insights.
Having said that, however, Sonia Livingstone’s essay about the role of the Internet is very interesting. She tackles the ultimate question of whether the Internet is ‘a player in social change’ (p. 114): Incorporating the internet into the very fabric of society exacerbates processes of globalization, commercialization and individualization in children’s lives. Yet it is salutary to reflect that after half a century of mass television, Katz and Scannell (2009) struggled to identify just what difference even half a century of television made, and so it is unsurprising that social science is not ready to pronounce on the consequences of internet use for children. (Livingstone, p. 114)
Livingstone reminds us that studies investigating the difference the Internet has made to children’s social relations, parenting, civic participation, educational outcomes, personal risks and safety ‘tend to claim contingent and modest effects only’ (p. 114). She also warns that online ‘risks and opportunities are positively correlated, so that seeking to reduce the former may jeopardize the latter’ (p. 116).
Part 3 of the handbook further delves into the risks and opportunities media offer. It explores a contentious issue – concerns for the effects media might have on young people as well as the implications and consequences of media use. Topics include the relationships between media use and early cognitive and social development, including babies’ exposure to screen media; attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; children’s inner fantasy worlds; creativity; body image and disordered eating; obesity; media and substance use; media use and understanding of the social and political world; news consumption and meaning; the role of entertainment media in emotional development; media violence and youth; media effects on sexual development; political socialization; consumer socialization; media and gender identities; and media and peer sociability. The range of topics is very wide, and although this is arguably the most informative part, it lacks coherence. The transition from media effects in relation to violence, sex and obesity to political socialization and then to advertising and consumption is somewhat problematic and rather abrupt at times despite the editor’s efforts.
Nonetheless, despite the differences, some of the issues tackled are common. A key one which many ‘media effects’ researchers have grappled with over the years is the difficulty of establishing clear relationships between the respective variables, let alone claim causality. Thus, Mariëtte Huizinga, Sanne W. C. Nikkelen and Patti M. Valkenburg argue that ‘unlike the media-violence-aggression literature’, the use of cross-sectional designs in studies investigating media effects on attention, hyperactivity and impulsivity ‘does not allow us to decisively single out the causal direction of the relationships’ and it ‘remains unclear whether media use is the cause or the consequence’ (p. 183). On a similar note, Erica Scharrer provides an excellent and well-rounded overview of the literature on media violence. She concludes that it is undeniable that young people are exposed to ‘substantial amounts of aggression and violence in the media’ and this consumption has ‘a number of troubling implications’ (p. 213). However, equally important is to recognize that extreme violence is much more strongly linked with other psychosocial factors rather than with media use. Scharrer advises us to ‘resist an unquestioned “culture of fear”’ (p. 214).
Although not particularly well placed in this part of the handbook, the three chapters discussing children’s relationship with news are also very interesting. In her essay about the fantasy worlds of children, Maya Götz describes the findings of a study conducted in the United States, Israel and Germany in the first 10 days of the Iraq War. Children had been asked to draw a picture of what was happening in Iraq: ‘Dominant national discourses were clearly reflected’ (p. 190). Thus, the US children had fantasies of George Bush killing Saddam Hussein, children in Israel were more concerned about the bomb attacks and their own safety and German children showed sympathy for Iraqi children – ‘their fantasies of US soldiers included executing Iraqi children with a smile’ (as quoted on p. 190).
Likewise, Cynthia Carter’s chapter on ‘Children and the news: rethinking citizenship’ offers interesting insights. Carter first tackles a truism that has led to limited research in the area – that ‘children, no matter where they live in the world, regard the news as “boring”’(p. 255). She then argues that children’s growing participation online shows that they are not ‘inevitably apolitical’ while also recognizing that ‘ICTs do not produce citizens. Instead they provide spaces which may be used to develop new citizenship practices’ (p. 260).
Similarly, in her chapter on political socialization, Erica Weintraub Austin argues that US surveys show that young people rarely follow traditional news but they look for news online and they also watch late-night talk shows. The bone of contention still remains, however, in the degree to which young people learn from such programmes and the extent to which entertainment sources are of value as primary sources of political information.
Part 4 then explores the importance of contexts such as physical spaces and communities. Topics discussed include the role of the family, including the extended family, the child’s bedroom, peer culture, minority children and immigrants, as well as the active role children play in their media environment. There is a very good chapter on media and civic engagement, which would have been better placed together with the two chapters on news and political socialization in the previous part, because the author Tao Papaioannou tackles a similar issue – the role of web 2.0 technologies. Papaioannou’s conclusions are very similar to Carter’s – the Internet is ‘an increasingly useful and empowering platform’ but ‘there is little empirical support for the claim that technology, and particularly the internet, has brought the majority of young people (or old) into active civic life’ (p. 354). The author, however, takes a step further and suggests that in order for this democratic and participatory learning potential to be fully realized, the state must provide institutional support.
The role of various stakeholders is then further explored in the final part of the book. Topics include policymaking, including advertising regulation and Internet protection; the impacts of educational media; ‘new’ media and learning; media literacy; defining quality media for children; the role of United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), international media initiatives, the role of the paediatric community and the relationship between industry and academic experts.
Most of the chapters are very informative, but this is particularly the case in Amy Beth Jordan and Joelle Sano Gilmore’s essay on children and advertising policies, which includes an excellent cross-national comparative table. Michael Rich also offers a very useful summary of the active role the US medical community has played in researching the media’s influence on health and development and shaping policy in relation to ‘media effects’ on children. Rich notes that ‘increasing numbers of media effects papers’ (p. 454) have been published in leading health research journals in the last few decades – starting with only 12 in the 1970s to 34 in the 1980s, 117 in the 1990s and 450 in the 2000s.
The final chapter also addresses an ongoing issue – the relationship (or ‘often the non-relationship’) between the media industry and the research community. Linda Simensky’s verdict is somewhat damning – ‘academia could be judgmental and critical when it should be analytical and focused’ and ‘the industry could in turn be dismissive and defensive’ (p. 460). Collaboration, in her view, is nonetheless possible if researching mutually interesting topics and presenting results in ‘language the industry could easily understand’ (p. 460).
All in all, this is an excellent collection of essays, which I would definitely recommend to lecturers, researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of disciplines, including media studies, the sociology of childhood and development psychology. In spite of some coherence issues and the lack of new insights, it is certainly a most useful reference handbook both for academics and policymakers.