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Summary Topic Always Connected UvA
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Summary Plugged In – Patti M.Valkenburg & Jessica Taylor Piotrowski
, University of Amsterdam
University of Amsterdam
Communication Science
Topic – Always Connected: Key Insights in Youth, Media and Technology
January 2019
Ivo Martens
Ivo Martens Plugged In – How Media Attract and Affect Youth
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, University of Amsterdam
1. Youth and Media
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). 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.
The changes in the media landscape are due not only to the development of new media but also to
the repurposing of traditional media (think about on-demand tv). The commercial environment
surrounding youth is experiencing major changes, too. Traditional TV advertising has lost its
dominant position. Instead, advertisers are being forced to create and implement other, often more
covert forms of advertising, such as product placement and advergames.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. The dramatic uptick in advertising to children was seen across
many industrialized countries and led to the beginning of empirical research on youth and
commercialism.
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. The rise of baby media led to new and heated debates
among the public.
The dawn of the new millennium saw a third trend, one that has irrevocably turned the field of youth
media on its head: social media. The concerns raised by social media were broader than those raised
by television and games.
Although most empirical research in the 1990s was done among pre-schoolers 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.
Public Debate
Today, stories about youth and media make the news headlines virtually every day. The news stories
have four common characteristics.
Ivo Martens Plugged In – How Media Attract and Affect Youth
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, University of Amsterdam
1. More often about negative than positive effects of media
2. Focus on extreme incidents
3. Lending expert credibility to the topics by quoting clinical experts
4. Misses the nuance of research findings
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.
2. Then and Now
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 additions, we compare the current generation
with previous generations.
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. Children and adults also read the same texts in this
period.
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. 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.
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.
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 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.
These conditions began to change in the early twentieth century. With the introduction of social
legislation such as laws banning child labour and requiring school attendance, the phenomenon of a
carefree childhood began to permeate all classes of society.
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.
Television Viewing as Cause
Scholars argued that the emergence of television played a key role in changing parent-child
relationships. 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. This
early research suggests that children’s exposure to adult programming began with the dawn of
Ivo Martens Plugged In – How Media Attract and Affect Youth
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