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Summary Topic Always Connected:
Key insights in youth, media and technology
Overview literature
Lecture 1: Introduction: youth, media and technology
- Chapter 1 + 2 + 3
- Ashton, J. J., & Beattie, R. M. (2019)
- Krum. R. (2013)
Lecture 2: Developmental psychology meets Media: from infancy to adolescence
- Chapter 4 + 5 + 6
- Crone, E. A., & Konijn, E. A. (2018)
Lecture 3: Always Educated: Educational media, incl. television, games and VR
- Chapter 11 + 12
- Revelle, G. (2013)
- Bailey, J. O., & Bailenson, J. N. (2017)
Lecture 4: Always Connected: Opportunities and risks of social media
- Chapter 13
- Odgers, C. L., & Jensen, M. R. (2020)
- Starkey, L., Eppel, E. A., & Sylvester, A. (2019)
- Kleemans et al. (2018)
Lecture 5: Always Out of Control: Media use and self-regulation
- Chapter 14
- Beyens, I., Valkenburg, P. M., & Piotrowski, J. T. (2018)
- Clifford, S., Doane, L. D., Breitenstein, R., Grimm, K. J., & Lemery-Chalfant, K.
(2020).
- Van Der Schuur, W. A., Baumgartner, S. E., Sumter, S. R., & Valkenburg, P. M.
(2015).
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Lecture 6: Always Accompanied: Media representation and identity development
- Ward, L. M., & Grower, P. (2020).
- Ceglarek, P. J., & Ward, L. M. (2016).
- González-Velázquez, C. A., Shackleford, K. E., Keller, L. N., Vinney, C., & Drake, L.
M. (2020).
Lecture 7: Always In Progress: The future of media and tech and how to successfully
navigate a world that is always connected
- Chapter 15
- Turner, K. H., Jolls, T., Hagerman, M. S., O’Byrne, W., Hicks, T., Eisenstock, B., &
Pytash, K. E. (2017).
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Lecture 1: Introduction: Youth, media and technology
General developmental stages
● Early childhood:
○ Infants (0-2)
○ Toddlers (2-4)
○ Preschoolers (4-5)
● Middle childhood:
○ Early middle childhood (5-8)
○ Tweens (8-12)
● Adolescence:
○ Early (12-14)
○ Middle (14-15)
○ Late (16-19)
Chapter 1: youth and media
Academic Interest in Youth and Media
Two major interdisciplinary fields have been studying youth and media since the 1960s:
● Cultural studies: is concerned with the meaning of popular culture in daily life.
○ For example whether children and teens have the same access as adults to
media and technology or how particular minority groups are portrayed in
popular culture aimed at youth.
○ Qualitative & inductive (empirical): in-depth interviews or focus groups.
● Media psychology: concerns itself with the use, power of attraction, and effects of
media on the individual.
○ Quantitative & deductive: experiments, surveys, and longitudinal research.
Three social trends that have contributed to the dramatic growth of this academic interest in
youth:
1) The commercialization of the media environment around youth;
2) The development of media for the very youngest viewers, children between one and
two years old;
3) The rise of social media.
Public debate
News stories about youth and media have four common characteristics:
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1. Negative effects: news stories are more often about the negative effects than the
positive effects of the media.
2. Extreme incidents: news stories often focus on extreme incidents, such as
cyberbullying and online sexual predators.
3. Clinical experts as source: journalists frequently quote clinical experts (such as
pediatricians and psychiatrists). Yet these clinical experts often speak from their daily
experience with atypical kids, who do not represent the average child or adolescent.
4. Lack of nuance: journalistic coverage of youth and media issues often misses the
nuance of research findings, opting instead for a simplistic and alarming sound bite.
Chapter 2: Then and Now
About childhood and parenting
Society's ideas about childhood throughout the years:
I. The Child as Miniature Adult
Until the second half of the eighteenth century, children were seen as miniature adults
and were treated as such.
● For example, children’s clothing did not differ from that of adults. This can be
seen in art as well.
II. The Vulnerable Child: in the second half of the eighteenth century this idea changed,
partly because of the Enlightenment. Children became a vulnerable audience worthy
and deserving of protection ➔ censorship to protect children.
● Locke: a person is born as a tabula rasa (clean slate), which becomes filled
with experiences and impressions through one’s senses.
● Citizens were increasingly expected to keep their sexual and aggressive urges
under control. Gradually, parents began to be embarrassed about the physical
aspects of life.
III. 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 his book Émile,
ou De l’éducation, he advocated that a period in a child’s life be focused on
upbringing, not confrontation.
● Rousseau believed that children were active researchers who determined how
their identity and development took shape (instead of passive receivers).
● Privilege differences: 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.
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➔ 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.
IV. The Miniature Adult Returns: in the second half of the twentieth century 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.
● This view was fueled 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.
Criticisms of the Miniature Adult
Starting in the 1980s, influential child psychologists and cultural critics observed a number of
significant changes in the social order. One of their main arguments was that children were
being treated too little like children and that childhood itself was threatened with erosion.
● David Elkind: children were being hurried through childhood, becoming adults too
fast and too early. Forcing youth into situations for which they are not emotionally
prepared could lead to stress, insecurity, depression, and aggression.
● Meyrowitz: the boundary between children and adults may have disappeared
altogether.
○ Homogenization of youth and adults: children and adults behaved more
alike in their dress, language, gestures, and preferences for media content.
Television viewing as cause
Scholars argued in some way that 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. Whereas print media created childhood by
segregating reading material appropriate to each phase of life, he argued that
television integrated these phases. Print media are largely inaccessible to children
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under six, given their inability to read, whereas such inaccessibility does not hold for
television.
● Meyrowitz: it was not the broad accessibility of television but rather the
representations of reality in television that influenced this change. According to
Meyrowitz, the dominant portrayal of children in television was of outspoken,
autonomous, head-strong, 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.
○ Drip-drip theory: using the analogy of water hollowing out a stone drop by
drop. The influence of media on the social order is cumulatively, over a longer
period.
○ The cultivation theory by George Gerbner: 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 the
media sees the same distorted view of reality. Gerbner called this
phenomenon, in which media contributes to the wiping out of differences
between social groups, mainstreaming.
Changes in family communication
While the emergence of television likely contributed to changing notions of childhood,
several other sociocultural factors may have strengthened this process. One particularly
relevant factor has been a shifting balance of power in the family. Unlike the traditional
top-down family communication style of the 1950s, today’s parents negotiate with their
children about what they may and must do, and both parties have a say in the outcome.
● The classical moratorium phase, as Erik Erikson called it—in which the young
person is experimenting with his or her identity and is not taking any real
responsibility—has thus become longer.
● Privatization of media use: offers individual family members the opportunity to
withdraw to their own personal spaces for entertainment and communication with
people outside the family.
➔ Together, these developments constitute the paradox of childhood. Even though children
today, with their outspokenness 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
Mead’s three types of cultures:
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1. Post-figurative: parents, with their wisdom and life experience, are the most
important models. In such cultures, children are expected to follow in the footsteps of
their parents and grandparents. Differences between older and younger generations
are seen as temporary, age-related effects.
2. Co-figurative: 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. Since parents did not experience this type of
change during their childhoods, they can no longer function as role models for
the young. A co-figurative culture is temporary, according to Mead, a
transition leading to a pre-figurative culture.
3. Pre-figurative: youth are the dominant role model and they determine what happens.
Commercialism as cause
While the emergence of television and other sociocultural factors have influenced our modern
view of childhood, commercialism— particularly the recognition that youth represent a
major market—also played an important role in establishing this view. Two phenomenons:
1. KGOY (kids getting older younger): the tendency of children to dress and behave
more like adults has been intensified by marketing aimed at children.
2. KGOL (kids getting older later): 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.
Changes among the youth:
● Physical Changes - accelerated puberty: physically, youth today are different from
those in former generations. They are larger, and they reach puberty earlier.
● Cognitive Changes - increased intelligence: today’s children are more intelligent
than children of the same age in previous generations. This increase in intelligence is
called the Flynn effect.
● Psychosocial Changes - self-Awareness and narcissism: the current generation is
assumed to have more self-esteem, more self-awareness, and a higher degree of
narcissism.
● Psychosocial Problems: depression and behavioral problems such as ADHD and
anxiety are occurring more frequently than before.
Chapter 3: Themes and Theoretical Perspectives
How it all began
The 1920s, the prevailing notion was that the mass media had a significant and uniform
influence on the public, regardless of age. The mass media—specifically, radio and
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film—were rapidly gaining in popularity at the time. All sorts of new media brought popular
music into the home, and that led to considerable concerns among parents and educators.
The hypodermic needle perspective
Media effects were viewed as: immediate, direct and uniform. This belief fit in with general
notions of human nature at the time, which were heavily influenced by:
● Darwin’s theory of evolution: Darwin rejected the idea of man as a rational, thinking
creature. He believed that human and animal behavior alike were driven by
unconscious instincts that evolved over time and were uniform within a species and
that much of our behavior is determined (that is, beyond our control).
○ Behaviorists saw human behavior as uniform and involuntary reflexes to cues
and reinforcers in the environment: the stimulus (in the environment) was
followed by the response (the behavior). What happened in between, in the
mind, was a black box, and irrelevant.
● People’s experiences with the film industry: the urban legend goes that a showing
of the 1896 silent film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, in which a
life-size train arrives in a station, caused sheer panic among the adult audience. The
first time this film was shown, viewers supposedly screamed and ran away in panic,
believing that a real train was heading toward them.
Although the hypodermic needle perspective has come to be widely criticized for its lack of
nuance, it received some support in the early twentieth century ➔ propaganda use in World
War I and II. Today it is believed that media literacy might be both a skill that people acquire
throughout their lifetime, and something that is handed down from generation to generation.
The Payne Fund Studies
The popularity of motion pictures reached its peak in the late 1920s. Parents watched their
children imitate the clothing, attitudes, and behavior of cinema idols. This Pied Piper effect
of the movies began to worry them, and as a result there was a widespread demand for
information about the effect of movies on children and adolescents.
The Payne Fund project was one of the largest-ever studies on the influence of motion
pictures on children and adolescents by William Short and Frances Payne Bolton.
● Edgar Dale: analyzed 500 motion pictures. In an attempt to classify these films, he
identified ten major themes: crime, sex, love, comedy, mystery, war, children (about
or for), history, travel, and social propaganda. Most movies could be classified under
three major themes, referred to by Dale as the Big Three:
○ Love (30 percent);
