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Summary Plugged In: How Media Attract and Affect Youth
- Instelling
- Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
- Boek
- Plugged In
Summary of the book Plugged In: How Media Attract and Affect Youth.
[Meer zien]Voorbeeld 4 van de 37 pagina's
Voorbeeld 4 van de 37 pagina's
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Voorbeeld van de inhoud
Media youth and societyChapter 1 Youth and media
The gaps in our knowledge are due to dramatic changes in young people’s media use. As a matter of
fact, today’s children and teens spend more time with media than they do at school. The changes in
the media landscape are due not only to the development of new media but also to the repurposing
of traditional media.
Teens have become ‘’news gazers’’: the clear majority pick up the news from a verity of on- and
offline sources, depending on which is most convenient now.
The commercial environment surrounding youth is experiencing major changes too. Advertisers are
being forced to create and implement other, often more convert forms of advertising, such a product
placement and advergames.
Then there is the world of games, touch screen technology and the internet have profoundly
influenced what gaming looks like. This increased access to gaming on touch-screen platforms,
combined with a reliance on freemiums, has provide formidable competition to traditional console
game manufacturers.
Academic interest in youth and media
Neuroscientist are researching whether media use causes changes in brain areas responsible for
aggressive behavior, spatial awareness, and motor skills.
Sociology is studying the dynamics of youth cultures and teenage behavior in online social networks.
To understand the effects of media on children an adolescent, 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 effect.
Two major interdisciplinary fields have been studying youth and media since the 1960s: cultural
studies and media psychology.
Cultural studies: this field in concerned with the meaning of popular culture in daily life, and it
primarily uses theories and methods from the fields of literature, history, sociology and anthropology.
Media psychology: concerns itself with the use, power of attraction and effects of media on the
individual (experiments, survey and longitudinal research).
Interdisciplinary research on youth and media has had spectacular evolution in the last few decades.
Although many social trends have contributed to the dramatic growth of this academic interest in
youth, three trends have particularly impressive roles:
1. Commercialization of the media environment. This dramatic uptick in advertising to children
was seen across many industrialized countries and les to the beginning of empirical research
on youth and commercialism. ‘’host selling’’: in which famous children’s heroes or hosts
could freely advertise unhealthy children’s products on their own program.
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 resulted from a lack of scientific knowledge about very young children’s media
use. Research so far has not found any evidence that developmentally appropriate media
content is harmful to very young children.
3. Social media. Social media raised concerns about online social interaction. The rise of new
media has brought two additional age groups into the picture: toddlers, because of baby
media and teenagers, because of social media. It is nearly impossible to understand the
, effects of media without also understanding their developmental level and their social
environment.
Researchers have broadened their research. They no longer primarily study the potential risk of
media for youth but also recognize the potential opportunities of media. This broad approach,
reflecting the negative and positive opportunities of media, recognizes that media are an integral part
of youth’s lives. The best contribution researchers can offer is to identify ways to ensure that these
media are healthfully incorporated into their lives.
The academic area of youth and media has become more institutionalized.
Public debate
Today, stories about youth and media make the news headlines virtually every day. The news stories
have four common characteristics:
1. They are more often about the negative than the positive effects of media.
2. News stories often focus on extreme incidents, such as cyberbullying cases and online sexual
predators.
3. Journalists frequently quote clinical experts such as pediatricians and psychiatrists as a means
of lending expert credibility to the topics.
4. Journalistic coverage of youth and media issues often misses the nuance of research findings,
opting instead for clean, simplistic, and often alarming sound bites.
These mechanisms mean that popular science books with negative messages tend to attract
significant public interest.
The negative spin that youth and media research often receive in the news can give most people the
idea that media primarily have negative effects on children and adolescents. 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.
Chapter 2 then and now
This book beings in the second half of the 18 th century, since it was then that the first children’s media
books appeared. In this chapter we describe how society’s ideas about youth and media have been
subject to swings of the pendulum since the 17 th century.
The child as miniature adult
Until the second half of the 18th century, there were hardly any specialized media for children, nor
was there a clear delineation between childhood and adulthood. Children were seen as miniature
adults and were treated as such. Children and adults also read the same text in this period.
The vulnerable child
The view of children as miniature adult’s changes in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Children became a vulnerable audience, worthy and deserving of protection. This censorship was
perfectly in line with the new ideas of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment. Children’s
social environments could have a positive, encouraging effect as well as negative and corrupting
influence. As a result of the enlightenment perspective, citizens were increasingly expected to keep
their sexual and aggressive urges under control.
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. He believed that as childhood became
more joyful and carefree, children would, as adults, be less mistrustful and aggressive. Despite the
idea of a childhood as carefree and joyful phase between infancy and adulthood, such a childhood
long remained the privilege of the aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeoisie. Working-class children
had such a short life expectancy that raising them was primarily aimed at teaching them to cope with
pain and to prepare them for an early death. These conditions began to change in the early 20 th
century. With the introduction of laws banning child labor 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 20th century, the pendulum began to swing back, and the paradigm of the
vulnerable child was increasingly questioned. People began to feel that is was wrong to present
children with an illusory safe world and felt that children should be presented with reality so that
they would be are of the true state of the world around them. This view was fueled by the rise of
youth-driven emancipation movements. It was also fueled by the rising commercialization of youth
culture, which ensured that young people acquired an ever-more prominent place in society.
This trend was well illustrated by children’s literature from the time; the realistic problem book.
Children’s literature had to be relevant to today’s world.
Criticism of the miniature adults
The idea that the child should squarely face the adult’s world was not without consequences. Starting
in the 1980s, influential child psychologists and cultural critics observed a number of significant
changes in the social order.
On of their main arguments was that children were being treated to little like children, childhood
itself was threatened with erosion. David Elkind: ‘’children were being hurried through childhood,
becoming adults too fast and too early.’’ (pseudosophistication).
Just as child psychologist began bucking the trend against taking a miniature adults approach to
children, similar ideas were coming from communication studies. ‘’homogenization’’ of youth and
adults; children and adults behave more alike in their dress, language, gesture and preferences for
media content. As a result, the boundary between children and adults had become obscured.
This homogenization of children and adults, put undue pressure on the parent-child relationship.
Formal roles can be maintained only by deliberately and bilaterally withholding personal information.
When this no longer happens, formal relationships are demystified, and formal behavior disappears,
and along with it, children’s natural belief that their parents always know better.
Television viewing as cause
The emergence of television played a key role in the changing parent-child relationships in the late
20th century. Television reinforced bonds between parents and children. Parents and children were
more 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; television took
childhood away. Early research suggests that children’s exposure to adult programming began with
the dawn of television.
Drip-drip effects of television
Meyrowitz; it was not the broad accessibility of television but the representation of reality in
television influenced this change. Television created a distorted reality that undermined the authority
and prestige that historically characterized parents. Not only adults are often outsmarted by children
in today’s motion pictures, but children are sometimes portrayed as more mature, sensitive and
intelligent. Theories about the effects of media, especially from sociology, have pointed out that
media are indeed capable of influencing the social order. The theories postulated that the influence
, of media on the social order was rarely immediate, and if it occurred, it did so cumulatively over a
long period ‘’drip-drip’’.
One of the most cited sociological media effects theories is the cultivation theory of George Gerbner.
They demonstrated that compared with reality, television was more violent, included more men than
woman, and showed more traditional gender relationships. 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.
Gerbner called this phenomenon, in which media contribute to the wiping out of differences
between social groups ‘’mainstreaming’’.
Drip-drip theories such as Gerbner’s cultivation theory, offer and explanation of 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. Thus, while the emerge of television likely contributed to changing notions of
childhood, several other sociocultural factors may have strengthened this process. One particular
relevant factor has been a shifting balance of power in the family. Parents feel it is important to
involve their children in family decision so that they can learn to make choices and develop their
identities. Although these changes suggest that youth have the autonomy and empowerment that
characterize adulthood at an increasingly early age, this same youth are delaying their responsibilities
of adulthood, such as joining the labor market, being a permanent relationship and more.
‘’bamboccioni’’ big babies to leave the parental home.
This process seems to be reinforced by the privation of media use, which offers individual family
members the opportunity to withdraw to their own personal space for entertainment and
communication with people outside the family. Together, these developments constitute the paradox
of childhood.
Rapid technological changes as cause
Like television and changes in family communication, the rapid technological changes of the past
decades may also have contributed to our notions of childhood. Margaret Mead predicted that young
would eventually have a dominant role in society. We now see that youth culture has become the
dominant culture in society. Mead’s prediction about the changes in youth culture were based on her
observations of three types of cultures, in each culture a different age group functions as a role
model:
1. Post-figurative culture, such a traditional society parents, with their wisdom and life
experience are the most important models. Children are expected to follow in the footsteps
of their parents.
2. Co-figurative culture, adults and children orient themselves primarily to their peers. In the
vent of rapid technological change, 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.
And now, as we sit in the pre-figurative culture, youth may indeed be in a more dominant position
than they used to be. As a result of all these factors, parents are more indulgent with their children,
and will do a great deal to unsure that their children lack nothing.
Commercialism as cause
While the emergence of television and other sociocultural factors have influenced or modern view of
childhood, commercialism, particularly the recognition that youth represent a major market, also
played an important role in establishing this view. In this new world of kinds and teens marketing, the
paradigm of the assertive child prevails: children are kids, and kids speak up, and they are clever,
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