SUMMARY PLUGGED IN – HOW MEDIA ATTRACT AND AFFECT YOUTH
Valkenburg & Piotrowski
the order of the chapters is based on the order in which the chapters were discussed during the lectures
chapters NOT included: chapter 8, 9 and 15 (since it was not part of the examination)
WEEK 1 – YOUTH, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY
Chapter 1 – youth and media
The gaps in our knowledge of the effects of media in youth 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). New media and
technologies are developing and replacing one another at a dramatic pace. Youth and adults 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. 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. 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 PlayStation. 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.
Academic interest in youth and media
Although many social trends have contributed to the dramatic growth of this academic interest in youth, three
trends have played particularly impressive roles:
1. The commercialization of the media environment around youth. In the Netherlands there was no
commercial television, and hence no research on its effects, until 1989, when the first commercial
station was launched. 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.
2. The development of media for the very youngest viewers, children between one and two years old.
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
3. 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?
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. 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.
Public debate
Today, stories about youth and media make the news headlines virtually every day. The news stories have four
common characteristics:
they are more often about the negative than the positive effects of media.
news stories often focus on extreme incidents, such as cyberbullying cases and online sexual predators.
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.
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, 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.
Chapter 2 – then and now
The child as miniature adult
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. Children were essentially seen as miniature adults
and were treated as such.
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. 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. 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.
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.
The miniature adult returns
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. 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.
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. 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. Moreover, as parents became more apt to admit their
mistakes and shortcomings, their relationships with their children became more democratized.
The emergence of television played a key role in changing parent-child relationships in the late twentieth
century. 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.
Meyrowitz offered a second explanation. He argued that it was not the broad accessibility of television but
rather the representations of reality in television that influenced this change. The dominant portrayal of
children in television was of outspoken, autonomous, headstrong, and worldly-wise beings who were smarter
than their silly parents and other authority figures. Television thereby created a distorted reality that
undermined the authority and prestige that historically characterized parents.
One of the most cited sociological media effect theories is the cultivation theory of George Gerbner. According
to Gerbner and his colleagues, television and other media cultivate such a powerful shared culture that they are
capable of leveling differences between the elite and the rest of the population. Anyone, regardless of
socioeconomic status, who comes into frequent contact with media sees the same distorted view of reality;
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, “mainstreaming”. Drip-drip theories offer an explanation for how television, through its presentation of a
distorted reality, contributed to the homogenization of parents and children.
Changes in family communication
Drip-drip theories typically acknowledge that the environment in which media effects occur also play a part in
the process. Today’s parents negotiate with their children about what they may and must do, and both parties
have a say in the outcome. Parents are more indulgent, feel guilty more often, and want the best for their
children. Interestingly, although these changes suggest that youth have the autonomy and empowerment that
characterize adulthood at an increasingly early age, these same youth are delaying the responsibilities of adult-
hood, such as joining the labor market, being in a permanent relationship, having children, and more. These
developments constitute the paradox of childhood. Even though children today, with their outspoken- ness and
grown-up looks, may indeed seem like miniature adults, as they did before Rousseau, and even though they
have a strong need for autonomy earlier than they did before, their need for a carefree childhood seems
stronger than ever.
Rapid Technological Changes as Cause
There are 3 types of cultures:
1. post-figurative (such as a traditional society until 1950). Parents, with their wisdom and life experience,
are the most important models. Children are expected to follow in the footsteps of their parents and
grandparents.
2. co-figurative culture (1960). Adults and children orient themselves primarily to their peers. In the
event of rapid technological changes, a post-figurative culture often changes into a co-figurative one.
3. pre-figurative culture. youth are the dominant role model and they determine what happens.
Commercialism as cause
Widespread marketing aimed at the young dates from the 1950s, when advertisers used marketing techniques
to promote comic books and films to teenagers. Yet marketing to kids and teens as we know it today took off
only in the 1980s.
The tendency of children to dress and behave more like adults has been intensified by marketing aimed at
children. In the 1990s, the marketing world came up with a term to describe this phenomenon: KGOY (kids
getting older younger) Tween = between childhood and adolescence. This group is no longer interested in toys
such as Barbie dolls, as they were a generation ago. Instead, tweens prefer products with a social function, such
as music, clothing, makeup, and social media, in which the focus is on the development of social relationships.
With the mega success of Teletubbies, advertisers and TV producers quickly discovered an important new
demographic.
Are children different from what they used to be?
It should now be clear that over the last few decades, childhood has undergone a paradoxical metamorphosis.
On the one hand, children seem to get older younger (the KGOY phenomenon). On the other hand, they defer
all sorts of responsibilities traditionally associated with adulthood, such as having a partner and children, until
later in life: kids getting older later (KGOL).
Today’s children are more intelligent than children of the same age in previous generations. This increase in
intelligence is called the Flynn effect: children’s IQ scores had risen steadily since the beginning of the twentieth
century. These increases could have been caused only by environmental factors. Plausible causes for these
changes include smaller families and the new parenting style, which may be more stimulating to children. And
interestingly, it is often believed that media may play a role in the increase in fluid intelligence.
It is also said to have more self-esteem, more self-awareness, and a higher degree of narcissism. Self-esteem is
the degree to which we value ourselves. Self-awareness—or rather, public self-awareness—is our under-
standing of how others perceive us. People with high self-awareness can predict well how others will respond to
them. If self-esteem and self- awareness are both high, they can turn into narcissism.
Also, depression and behavioral problems such as ADHD and anxiety are occurring more frequently than before.
However, the data indicate that it is not that these problems per se are occurring more frequently—instead,
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