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Electronic Media And The Family

by Arlene Moscovitch
(1998)

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political. economic, strategic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched or unaffected or unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
Marshall McLuhan

The single biggest selling consumer item in the world is a colour television set.
Seven out of ten households on the planet own a television.<<BR> Robert Lamb, "The Global Audio-Visual Media Landscape"

Children's Television Workshop, the originator of "Sesame Street," has helped educate more than 120 million people worldwide. Eight percent of the American population visits McDonald's on an average day. Two Barbie dolls are sold every second somewhere in the world. By all measures, this is success!
Gene Del Vecchio. Creating Ever-Cool: A Marketer's Guide to a Kid's Heart

Introduction

Even a cursory glance shows that media experiences have become an integral part of the weave of everyday life. In fact, it's difficult to think of any area not included in the media embrace. In both the public and the private sphere, we consume and (some would say) are consumed by a flood of images and sounds which carry insistent and powerful messages. According to McLuhan, the medium is the message, and there's no doubt each medium presents a different type of media experience. Listening to music on a cd player is not the same as watching a television program is not the same as playing a videogame is not the same as surfing the Internet is not the same as leafing through a magazine. And yet, neither can the content each medium carries - produced by someone for some particular purpose - be ignored, when considering how our media environments affect us.

This paper examines media messages and media experiences in the context of the family. There's no doubt that our media encounters are an inescapable part of everyday family life. TVs flicker in kitchens and bedrooms, children's thumbs flash as they careen through the latest video game landscape, families use the computer in a myriad of ways: for budgets and banking and e-mail and surfing the Internet and homework and computer games and chat rooms and even e-commerce. Music pours out of radios and cd players and tape recorders, teens tote cell phones and pagers so their parents can stay in touch with them. The media influence is a given. So, too, are some of the questions.

• What use do families make of different media?
• What do they think of them?
• What effect does media use have on family interactions?
• How does the profusion of images and sounds and words and music and all the value messages and information about the world that they convey shape our children and support or impede our work as parents?
• Do parents need to help their children become savvy media consumers?
• Are there public policy concerns related to media in the home?

To answer questions like these, we'll look, in the following pages, at some of the salient facts, issues, research, and even conundrums related to this topic.

Media in the Family: Some Structural Considerations

Home Hardware: What We Own

• 99% of Canadian households own a radio and a television set.
• 59% of all households have two television sets, and more than a third own at least three TV sets.
• 81% of all TV homes have cable and 84% have VCRs.
• More than 70 percent of households rent at least one video a week. 83% own at least one video; 40% own more than 20.1
• One in three households now use computers for communications or surfing the Internet. Adults with children aged 12-17 are most likely to own a computer.²
• Canada is, per capita, the most "wired" country in the world, followed by the United States and Australia.3
• In late March and early April 1998, 20% of the country's households had Internet access, according to an Environics research poll. In November 1997, the figure had been 13%, according to a Statistics Canada poll.⁴ By the year 2000, Internet-wired homes will have risen to 28%, or 3.4 million people.⁵ The main reason for having home Internet access is education (37%), followed by leisure (27%) and business /work. (24%)
• Almost one in five households owns a cellular phone.⁶ Fourteen per cent of the population uses a pager. ⁷
• In 1996, the average Canadian household spent $1099 on communications services, a 40% increase since 1986. ⁸

A Question of Time

In the stressed-out '90s, time stacks up as one of the scarcer resources. (A recent U.S. study found that parents these days spend 40% less time with their children than they did 40 years ago.) ⁹ So how many hours do Canadians devote daily or weekly to their media encounters?

Newspapers

• Sixty-five per cent of Canadians read a daily newspaper on any given weekday, and 72% read a newspaper on weekends. Canadians spend an average of 45 minutes a day reading their daily newspaper and almost 90 minutes on weekend editions. ¹⁰

Books and Magazines

• Almost 40% of adult Canadians spend about 40 minutes a day reading books and 10 minutes a day reading magazines. ¹¹

Radio

• The average listener tunes in for about 21 hours a week. The youth population segment (12-17 years old) listens only half as much as that.
• Listening patterns are changing. More people now listen to radio during working hours, and prefer to listen to music rather than talk shows while they work. ¹²

Television

• On average, Canadians watch more than 22 hours of television a week or slightly more than 3 hours a day.
• Canadian children between the ages of 2-11 watch approximately 18 hours a week or 2.57 hours daily.
• Adolescents between the ages of 12-17 watch an average of 17.3 hours a week or 2.47 hours daily. ¹³

A U.S. study on TV Viewing Time for Children presents a similar picture:

• Children there watch 2.55 hours of TV viewing per day, compared to an average of one hour for homework.
• Preschoolers watch an average of 2.6 hours a day, elementary school children average about 2.4 hours of TV viewing daily, and teenagers watch about 2.63 hours per day. ¹⁴
• Parents in nearly two-thirds of American households that own a personal computer report that, as a direct result, their children watch less TV. ¹⁵

Time spent watching television is dropping. Canadians spent less time in front of the television in 1996 than they did the year before. Though no definite statistics exist, anecdotal observation seems to suggest that children, especially, are spending less time with television and more time with interactive media.

Video Games

Prof. Stephen Kline, a communications professor at Simon Fraser University in B.C. studied the video gaming habits of 650 young people, aged 11-18. He found that:

• video games have been incorporated into the daily routines of 65% of all U.S. households, and 85% of those with male children.
• 25% or 1 in 4 youngsters reported playing between seven and 30 hours a week. They considered themselves addicted and were troubled by their compulsive behaviour.
• A larger number of males reported playing more than seven hours a week. Thirty percent of males surveyed said they played between seven and 30 hours of video games compared to 12 percent of females.
• Most of the video games were played at home, rather than in arcades or at school. ¹⁶

A U.S. study showed that on average, American children who have home video game machines play with them about one and a half hours a day. ¹⁷

Internet

• Canadian Internet users usually spend between five and nine hours online per week. ¹⁸
• Half the Internet users say they know people who spend so much time using it that their family life suffers. ¹⁹

Movies

• Figures do not exist for the amount of time Canadians spend going to the movies. However, attendance at Canadian movie theatres and drive-ins was at a 14-year-high of 91.8 million people in 1996/97. National attendance is up four per cent from the previous year and 1996/97 marked the fifth straight year attendance has grown. ²⁰

But What Does All This Mean for Family Life?

Television can be many things to many people: a companion for shut-ins; a "window on the world"; an alternative to valium. Certainly, for lots of families these days - coping with economic pressures, crumbling social networks, the over-hurried life - down-time vegging out in front of the tube can be a godsend. Even a decade ago, television was still referred to as the electronic hearth, a focal point around which the family clustered to hear the latest stories. In fact, a 1995 survey showed that four out of five adults in the U.S. consider watching TV with their children to be a family activity. ²¹ These days, however, media users in families are more likely to be hunkered down in front of their own individual blazes.

Increasingly, media use is becoming a more solitary activity. With two and three TV sets in a household, there's less communal watching than there used to be. Though no Canadian statistics are available, studies show that almost 83% of British 13-and 14-year-olds have a television set in their bedrooms²²; while the same is true for more than half of the children in the U.S. About half of all children usually watch TV alone or with friends, but not with their family. ²³ The same can be said for playing video games and even more so for computer use.

If, as Statistics Canada's 1996 figures indicate, the average Canadian spends approximately three hours a day in front of the TV set, the question arises: what are family members not doing while they're parked in front of the screen? While answers vary with the individual family, certain patterns are obvious:

• People are less physically active and obesity rates are rising in both the adult and child populations. In 1991, 24% of Canadian children aged four-to-nine were overweight. In 1981, the figure had been 14%. ²⁴ Twenty-six percent of Canadian adults are obese ²⁵ and 35% of Canadians are not even moderately active on a weekly basis. ²⁶

  Obesity affects 15-25% of children in the U.S. and has increased 50% in the last 30 years. Socio-economic factors, exercise and TV viewing patterns all influence reported obesity. ²⁷

• As more time is spent in solitary watching, there's less time for family conversation, less interaction around other forms of indoor recreation like playing cards or board games or doing puzzles or crafts, and less opportunity for children to learn "doing" skills from their parents, other family members or neighbours, whether it be carpentry or baking or gardening, or even how to fly a kite. For children, especially, there's also less time for unstructured, doing-nothing, just-hanging-around or daydreaming.
• There's less time left for visiting friends and family and other forms of community building.

TV as the Electronic Babysitter

As Prof. Stephen Kline points out in his book Out of the Garden: Toys and Children's Culture in an Age of TV Marketing, parents are very conflicted about their children's use of television. ²⁸ On the one hand, it gives parents "time off," whether it be on Saturday morning or at the harried dinner hour. For latchkey children too, being at home alone in front of the television set is often preferable to being outside on the street, unsupervised. On the other hand, many parents also feel the need and pressure to regulate their children's media encounters. This is truer of television than of video and computer games. According to Kline's 1998 study on video- and computer- game use among 650 youth, aged 11-18, parents tend to pay no attention to what their kids play. ²⁹

Pop Culture Survey

In 1995, The New York Times asked 1,209 adults, 411 of whom have children aged 2-17 living with them, what they thought about pop culture and its influence on children. Television seemed to be the locus of their concern:

Have you ever forbidden your child to see or listen to a particular (television program, movie or musical recording) because you objected to its content?

Media Use is Shaped by "Family Culture"

In their book Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsh highlighted the work of British communications researchers studying how new information technologies were incorporated into the rhythm of life in the home. Their research focused on computers, VCRs, video games, interactive information retrieval and telephone-linked technologies. They discovered that families negotiate and transform the meaning of technologies such as home computers, according to "family culture", i.e., the complex of values and interests characteristic of different kinds of households.

For example, one upper middle class North London family's dominant values - interest in the active development of their children's talents, strong emphasis on family togetherness and cultivation of artistic, "spiritual" activities - transformed the original meaning "built into" technologies brought into the home. They replaced the original competitive video game with a game that promoted family unity, parents and children decided to all learn how to use the PC computer to share a common discourse, they installed an electronic intercom system in order to be in easy contact with each other, and the parents severely restricted the television use so that the children would have more time for the local drama club and family talk.

Other studies in the same book suggested that working class families impose their quite different routines and norms on technology. The authors also point out that there is a split between families which are "self-determined" in the use they make of computers and those which mainly consume professional fantasies created by someone else, a stance dubbed by the authors as "interactivity without power."

Television Use and Literacy:

The people most likely to watch TV for significant periods of time are those at lower literacy levels. Over 10 per cent of those in the lowest stratum watch more than five hours a day; over 20 per cent of those at the highest level watch less than an hour a day. ³⁰ Since literacy levels and socio-economic status are linked, it makes sense that families with higher incomes would, as a rule, have a wider range of recreational activities to choose from. In some urban neighbourhoods, watching violence on the screen is preferable to running the risk of meeting it on the streets.

Screen Addiction: Video Games Change Brain Chemistry

Parents and teachers often comment that "kids become absolutely wired" when absorbed in video games. Now, there's a scientific study which confirms that observation. In a study conducted at the Cyclotron Unit of Hammersmith Hospital in London, Dr. Paul Grasby and his fellow researchers determined that playing video games triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.

• The researchers discovered that dopamine production in the brain doubles during video game play.
• The increase of this psychoactive chemical was roughly the same as when a person is injected with amphetamines or the attention-deficit disorder drug, Ritalin. This is the first hard evidence that video game playing is addictive, "the equivalent of a dose of speed."

These results suggest that our TVs, computers and video games have calculable physical and psychological effects on our nervous systems, regardless of their content. ³¹ They also dovetail neatly with the B.C.-based study by communications professor Stephen Kline which found that one in four youths, aged 11-17, were addicted to video games. ³² In a similar vein, Satachi and Satachi, a leader in the children's marketing field, hired child psychologists and cultural anthropologists to perfect a variety of techniques - including play groups, art and games - to probe children's feelings and behaviour when they use interactive media. Their studies found that children can easily be put into a "flow state," a trance-like, "highly pleasurable experience of total absorption" when they are on-line. ³³ Their findings about children's neurophysiological responses have shaped their on-line marketing campaigns directed at children as young as four years of age.

Computers in Canadian Homes:

Canadian Computer Literacy ³⁴

In a Sept. 1997 survey of Canadians who had used the Internet in the last three months, Ekos Research Associates found that the highest concentration of users was in the under-25 age bracket. The lowest was in the 65+ age bracket.

This suggests that within their plugged-in homes, children and youth seem to be in the digital vanguard. Certainly, parents tend to regulate children's computer use less than their television viewing. Partly, it's due to the computer's educational associations ("It must be good for them, it will help them get ahead") and partly it's because most adults are not nearly as computer-literate or internet-savvy as their offspring. Don Tapscott, author of Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, maintains that, for the first time in human history, children are the "knowledge authorities" in a crucial area, passing on cultural information/technological skills to their parents. A technological optimist, he believes that this alteration in the usual balance of power in the family "creates more of a peer dynamic within families and, if managed well by parents, can create a more open, consensual and effective family unit."³⁵

Tapscott also points out that while television was the medium that shaped the lives of the baby boom generation, their children will increasingly opt for highly interactive media experiences. Parents in nearly two-thirds of American households that own a personal computer report that, as a direct result, their children watch less TV. ³⁶ And, in a recent poll by CNN and USA Today, 28% of teens said they could live without their TV, but only 23% said they could get by without a computer. ³⁷

Gender and Media Use

Who controls the remote? "Common sense" or everyday observation might suggest that males tend to wield the "zapper" or "clicker" more than the females in the family. Studies on this particular phenomenon don't seem to be readily available. However, there is some data about how gender differences in using media play themselves out in the home.

• A Sept. 1997 poll by the Los Angeles Times found that 40% of men change channels when a commercial comes on; only 28% of women do.
• Although Canadian use of the Internet in 1998 is split 55-45% between men and women, women are catching up quickly, according to an AC Nielsen/Nordicity survey. ³⁸ Also, women tend to be more interested in web sites dealing with health, education, family, children and fitness while men gravitate towards sites which focus on banking/investment, sports and news. However, the differences between the two genders are not always as great as one might suppose. The most popular site for both men and women, for instance, is national news. ³⁹

A 1995 U.S. study came up with the surprising fact that among children up to grade six, young girls tend to spend more time on the computer than young boys.

Brothers and sisters interact at the computer in 45% of computer-equipped households. ⁴⁰

The Internet and Home Access:

The Internet is growing faster than all other preceding technologies. Radio existed for 38 years before it had 50 million listeners, and TV took 13 years to reach that mark. The Internet crossed the 50-million-users threshold in only four years. ⁴¹

Though Canadians access the Internet from work, schools, libraries and home, the highest percentage (67%) of Internet access is through the home. ⁴² A 1995 study found that communications and work-related activities are the highest home uses of the Internet, but education and entertainment also rate highly. ⁴³

Low local phone rates and cheap Internet access charges make Canada the cheapest country in the industrialized world for surfing the Internet. It costs, on average, $28.26 for 20 hours a month of Internet time in Canada. In Australia it costs $33.23 and in the U.S., prices hit $39.37. The average price among industrialized countries is $81.54 per month. (All figures in Canadian funds). ⁴⁴

Though phone rates and access charges may be relatively inexpensive, that doesn't necessarily make them affordable for a considerable part of the population. Twenty-six per cent of households with high incomes surfed the Net, while only five per cent of households with low incomes did. (That 5:1 ratio is unchanged from 1996). ⁴⁵

The recent introduction of WebTV, which marries the television set and the Internet, has the potential to make the Internet accessible to larger numbers of people. With the aid of a WebTV Plus terminal that sits on top of the TV set, a remote control and an optional wireless keyboard, subscribers can now surf the net, use e-mail, log onto chat and usenet groups, as well as watch their favourite television offerings. According to Steve Perlman, co-founder and president of WebTV Networks of California, 72% of WebTV subscribers don't own a home computer. ⁴⁶ Though start-up costs are lower than investing in computer hardware (approx. $400 vs. $1500), subscribers will still have to pay monthly service charges on top of what they already pay for cable and their telephone.

As digital media increasingly become an integral part of everyday life, the information gap between the technological haves and have-nots is likely to widen, unless government initiatives are undertaken to ensure greater public access. Not surprisingly, in a 1994 General Social Survey, Statistics Canada found that the lower the household income, the lower the rate of computer literacy.

Kathryn Montgomery, director of the Washington-based Center for Media Education points out, "Those without access to the communications system are likely to fall behind in education and be unable to compete in a highly selective job market. Yet just as access is becoming imperative, the number of children living in poverty, with little or no access to technology, is growing at an alarming rate." ⁴⁷

There are some interesting statistics highlighting the differences between computer ownership at lower income levels in both the U.S. and Canada. In 1996, McGill University economist Paul Dickinson and George Sciadas of Statistics Canada found that "Canadian computer ownership was higher than the U.S. rate at every comparable level of education, but especially among those with very low levels of schooling. A computer was found in about nine percent of Canadian homes where the head has less than a Grade nine education, but only three percent of U.S. homes." ⁴⁸

Working at Home

The growth in home-based technology has made it possible for more family members to work from their homes.

• A third of the people who use a home computer say it's for business purposes. ⁴⁹
• Forty-eight percent of employed Canadians report that they work from their homes at least some of the time.
• Sixty-three percent believe that they will work from their homes more in the future. ⁵⁰

Clearly, this development has an impact on family life. Interestingly, the interactive technology that spurs this change may be new, but the tradition of work and family being based in one location harkens back to days gone by. It was, in fact, the norm in the days prior to industrialization when the whole family was often involved in cottage production. Once the machine gained sway, this unity was broken. Men left each day to work at a job while women stayed at home and looked after child care and domestic chores.

Today, working from the family home is again a possibility which has (as with most things) its positive and negative sides. On the one hand, it means that the parent may be more present for the children in the family. On the other, it may mean that they never truly leave their work behind.

"All Roads Lead to Rome": The Trend to Technological Convergence

Just as "one-stop shopping" in big box stores is beginning to squeeze out the small specialized retailers in a local neighbourhood, so there's a push to create multi-function technological devices that will seemingly do everything for us, short of walking the dog and doing the laundry.

In the not-too-distant future, the television, computer and telephone will converge. On the Net, real-time audio, real-time video, and virtual reality modelling languages (which can be used to create Websites which are three dimensional environments) are already being integrated with graphics and text. In the world of "messaging", the latest development is the convergence of pagers and handheld computers or personal digital assistants. ⁵¹ As today's cybertots grow, they will increasingly be able to carry their own personal and portable electronic universes with then.

Technology and Intimate Relations

According to French author Jacques Attali, the current proliferation of portable devices is creating a high-tech nomadic society. Cell phones, laptop computers, pagers, personal digital assistants, fax machines, credit cards: increasingly, as we're on the move, we can take our goods and communications environments with us. Some people may witheringly refer to such devices as the "electronic ball and chain"; others believe they can't function without them. However, we feel about such devices, there's no doubt that, with the advent of voice mail, fax, e-mail, chat lines and news groups, Canadians are developing different patterns of communication.

It's not unusual these days for parents to give their offspring pagers or cell phones, as a way to stay in touch with them. Marketers have been quick to study changes in family structure and work/life/entertainment patterns to create new products. In his book Creating Ever-Cool: A Marketer's Guide to a Kid's Heart, Gene del Vecchio provides striking examples of the ways in which technology is substituting for family functions and interactions. Del Vecchio maintains that we will soon be able to track our children by satellite the way we now track trucks. He also describes "the KidCalls Telephone Service, designed for the 'latchkey kid.' At a specified time each day when the child should be home, an automated calling system phones home and asks the child to respond by pressing certain phone keys. If any trouble is indicated, the parents and others can be called." ⁵²

What do such advances in technology mean for intimate relationships? What happens when people's experiences (and especially children's) are increasingly virtual rather than tangible?

In a study published in the March 1998 issue of the International Journal of Environmental Conservation, researcher Raymond Chipeniuk found that children who explore nature in a hands-on, direct way develop an instinctive feeling for ecosystems and habitats. Mediated experience through classroom lessons, TV programs and the Internet is disembodied knowledge and likely to kill local knowledge of nature. And yet, adults' familiarity with their own region's flora and fauna is essential for an informed public response to land use proposals, according to Chipeniuk.

In their Research Initiative on Children and New Media, the Center for Media Education poses questions such as the following: How does multimedia experience affect neural wiring during the formative years? What happens when a child reaches for a Photoshop palette rather than a box of Crayola crayons? Is the lack of physicality in the virtual world an aid to a child's self-expression or a hindrance to her individuation?

These are questions to which we do not yet have the answers. And there is no doubt that the digital world is here to stay. But the debate over what increasing technology means and how it will be used -- to augment human interaction or to make us more efficient buying machines -- is far from over.

Social theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues for the paramount importance of interaction and community, even in an on-line world:

We're not in an information age. We're in an interactive one. It's not bits we're exchanging but our very essence in the form of ideas, E-mails, graphics and chat dialogue...I suggest that interaction with machines, however temporarily novel, will reveal itself as a poor substitute for using machines to interact with one another. We will tire of a bit-only Internet and unless we engage in its living communities, we will instinctively reject its lifeless offerings.⁵³

Historically, commercial rather than civic values have driven the telecommunications sector. The marketplace is unlikely to concern itself with human needs, unless it can turn a tidy profit in the process. However, As Silverstone and Hirsh pointed out in Consuming Technologies, family values and routines can alter the meaning and use of 'built-in" technologies. (Forty-one percent of those who use e-mail say it makes them feel closer to their relatives.⁵⁴) One answer to an increasingly mediated life may lie precisely in strengthening families and communities, so they can foster the use of these new tools for civic rather than commercial ends.

Who's Telling the Stories? Changing Role of the Family in a Mediated Culture

The family, traditionally, has been the primary socializer of children, with its role amplified and extended by the school, the church or mosque or synagogue or temple, and the larger community. These days, there's another powerful player on the "socialization scene". Despite developments in new media, television today is still so influential in purveying social values and shaping children's notions of the world that it has been dubbed the "third parent".

According to the UNESCO Global Study on Media Violence, "the world's children spend an average of three hours daily in front of the screen. That is at least 50% more time spent with this medium than with any other out-of-school activity including homework, being with family or friends, or reading. Thus TV has become a major socialization factor and dominates the life of children in urban and rural areas around the globe."⁵⁵

By the time the average North American child graduates from high school, he or she will have:

• spent 11,000 hours in the classroom
• watched 15,000 hours of television
• seen 350,000 commercials
• watched 40,000 violent deaths
• listened to 10,500 hours of pop music
• gone to 400 movies ⁵⁶

Through these media interactions, children are exposed to a staggering amount of entertainment and information about how the world works and what it is that makes life worth living. They learn a lot from this " informal curriculum" - about heroes and villains and victims, about being male and being female, about how to achieve success in life, about who's got power and who doesn't, about violence and intimate relations and what constitutes "the good life".

U.S. author and educator Neil Postman pointed out in The Disappearance of Childhood, that our modern concept of childhood has been tied in large part to print literacy which guaranteed that children were given graduated and "appropriate" access to information about the adult world. Television allows children to circumvent those hurdles. "Television provides children with the satisfaction of being in the know, of going behind the scenes and of learning about the world and about people." ⁵⁷ These days, they are getting access to that knowledge at increasingly younger ages.

• A British youth survey group, ChildWise Monitor, found in its 1998 survey that although British TV has a watershed hour of nine p.m. for material not considered suitable for children, almost all children over 11 watch after that hour. Sixty percent of those over five watch after 9 p.m. during the week, and 80% watch during the weekends.
• One in four children owns a VCR and uses it to tape late-night x-rated programs. Boys aged seven and eight were the most likely to engage in illicit taping. ⁵⁸
• A study on children's viewing commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada found that by the age of four, most children are watching adult programs on TV. ⁵⁹

Media Messages Children Learn

Almost any parent knows that media (and especially television) play a powerful role in shaping children's beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. But what is it that they actually learn about themselves and their society from media portrayals, and how do they feel about what they see? One of the best sources of information to answer those questions comes from the annual studies commissioned by Children Now, a U.S. advocacy organization, for its Children and Media Program.

Gender

"Reflections of Girls in the Media" examines the messages sent to adolescent girls across a range of media, including television, magazines, music videos, magazine advertisements and television commercials. Its findings: the media messages girls receive are mixed. On the one hand,"media often offer girls strong, positive role models who are honest, self-reliant and intelligent"; on the other, they often contain "stereotypical messages about appearance, relationships and careers, as well as more subtle signals about girls' value and importance."

• Women are most often portrayed in all media in the context of relationships, whereas men are most often portrayed in the context of their careers. In films, for instance, 53% of men are motivated by their careers, compared to 31% of women. Magazine articles reinforce the trend by focussing much more on dating (35%) than on "school" or "careers" (12%).
• Of all media, TV has the highest total representation of women: they're shown 45% of the time, compared to 55% for men. Films show 63% men and 37% women. Music videos (which follow the music industry in being largely male-dominated) show 78% men and 22% women.
• Girls and boys are almost equally well-represented on general entertainment television. However, girls are underrepresented on action-adventure programs and in TV shows designated especially for children (particularly cartoons). Only 23% of the characters and even fewer of the major characters are female.
• There are important differences in the way girls and boys are presented. Girls are twice as likely as boys to show affection; boys are 60% more likely to show physical aggression. ⁶⁰
• Video games, aimed mainly at 8-15 year-old males, tend to present a far more stereotypically gendered world than what is seen on television. In 1991, researcher Eugene Provenzo found that out of 124 characters in the video games studied, male characters outnumbered female characters 13 to1. In these games, women were rescued or kidnapped 30% of the time. Although men were in occasional need of rescue, they were never saved by women. ⁶¹ In the years since that study, there have been some attempts to produce video games more appealing to girls but these have, by and large, tended to focus on Barbie-like activities, including shopping and trying on different hair-dos.

A 1995 study "Re-casting TV: Girls' Views" polled 2000 U.S. children in grades 3-12 to discover their opinions about what they watch on TV and to give them a chance to create the types of TV shows they want to see. The results of the study, done for Girls Inc., showed that children who watch less TV create shows with less stereotyped characters:

• The fewer the number of hours of TV watched, the more likely girls and young women are to create TV shows about an 18-year-old female who is athletic, acts like a leader, and is cheerful and sensitive to the feelings of others. Their female character is also more likely to be concerned with friends and religion, and more likely to want to pursue a professional career.
• The more TV girls and young women watch, the more likely they are to create a female main character who is rich and thin, concerned about popularity, clothes, money, and looking attractive, and who wants to be a model or a movie star.
• More females than males are critical of television and dissatisfied with the low frequency of programs about important and serious issues. These findings suggest that the pervasiveness of television in children's lives is by no means an indication that children are satisfied with what they are watching.

Race

It's clear that the television characters children admire and the news stories they watch send both subtle and explicit messages about their personal value, their families and their race. Unfortunately, no Canadian studies exist on this topic, though Canada's population is becoming increasingly diverse. The 1998 Children Now study "A Different World: Children's Perceptions of Race and Class in Media", was based on focus groups and a national poll of 1200 children in the U.S. The children were drawn in equal numbers from the White, African-American, Asian and Latino populations. Findings showed that:

• Children overwhelmingly believe that it is important for all kids to see people of their own race on television. They believe that negative messages are sent to children who do not see their race on television.
• Children across all races associate positive characteristics more with the White characters they see on television and negative characteristics more with the minority characters.
• All children agree that the roles of boss, secretary, police officer and doctor in TV programs are usually played by White people while the roles of criminal and maid/janitor on television are usually played by African-Americans. Never do children see Latino or Asian characters as the dominant person in the listed roles.
• Children agree that the news media tend to portray African-American and Latino people more negatively than White and Asian people.
• Children have great faith in media's ability to send children positive messages about race. Over 80% of children from every race say that media has the power to show kids "that people of their race are important."

Children also see that television "starts conversation" among children of different racial groups.

Music videos, sitcoms and cartoons are the television programs children of all races aged 10-17 most frequently watch. ⁶² However, popular music videos overwhelmingly portray black men as aggressors and white women as victims. That's the conclusion reached by Harvard researcher, psychiatrist and former filmmaker Dr. Michael Rich. His study, reported in the U.S. journal Pediatrics in early 1998, analyzed 518 videos on the four most popular music video networks in the U.S. Almost all of the aggressors (85%) in the violent videos were portrayed as attractive role models, not villains. ⁶³ Rich felt that his study should raise concerns about the influence of videos on how teens approach conflicts and how they view each other.

Class

Class seems to be the hidden issue, in most studies of media offerings. However, a couple of salient points do stand out.

• A 1995 poll "Sending Signals: Kids Speak Out About Values in the Media" found that children from blue-collar homes are more likely to feel that the families on television have different problems than their family has. ⁶⁴
• As an example of the intersection of race, class and economic opportunities, children of colour think families on television have more money than their families, while White children are equally likely to say that families on TV have the same amount of money. ⁶⁵

Health Issues

• Young couch potatoes really are heavier than their more active counterparts. That's the conclusion of a U.S. study reported in the March 1998 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. ⁶⁶ The data showed that boys and girls who watch four or more hours of television daily had greater body fat and a greater body mass index than those who watched less than two hours a day. According to senior editor Dr. Phil B. Fontanarosa, "... the increasing prevalence of overweight among U.S. children and the seemingly ever-increasing popularity of sedentary leisure-time activities (e.g., watching television, playing video games and using computers) may well be more than coincidental."
• And what do children see while they're exercising their eyeballs in front of the TV screen? Dr. Milton Chen, author of The Smart Parents' Guide to Kids; TV, points out that 96% of food ads on children's television programs are for sugared cereals, candy, cookies and junk food. ⁶⁷
• The emphasis on "ideal" body shape and size in the media has strongly influenced girls' and women's attitudes towards food and eating. Across media, between 26-46% of women are portrayed as "thin" or "very thin"(compared to between 4-16% of men). "Girls as young as five are preoccupied with dieting, 31% of nine-year-olds think they're too fat and one study estimates that 11% of high school students have eating disorders." ⁶⁸ Males have not escaped unscathed, either. The emphasis on body building and the increased targeting of men as consumers of personal care products has influenced young men to "bulk up", in some cases by resorting to steroids.

Images of Intimacy and Sexuality

Much of what young people learn about love and sexuality comes from television, films and video, according to York University psychology professor James Check. In a 1985 survey of Canadian attitudes regarding sexual content in the media, he found that:

• Male adolescents, aged 12-17, are the primary consumers of pornography in Canada today.
• Thirty-seven per cent of 12-17-year-old males watched a pornographic videotape at least once a month.
• Thirty-five per cent of 12-17 year-old Canadian males expressed an interest in watching sexually violent scenes (rape, torture, bondage etc.)
• Twelve-to-17-year-olds were the most undecided about whether an erotic film is different from a pornographic film. ⁶⁹

Though there is an explicit linkage between sex and violence in some films, videos and video/computer games, there are some bright spots in television's handling of sexual activity and sexual relationships. A 1996 study by Children Now and the Kaiser Family Foundation looked at sexual messages on television and the impact of those messages on children and families. They specifically focussed on the so-called "family hour", the first hour of prime-time between 8 and 9 p.m.

• Three out of four family hour programs on the networks (75%) contain some sexual content. By comparison, 65% of shows in the same time period in 1986 and 43% of shows from 1976 contained sexual content.
• Most of the sexual behaviour featured during the family hour occurs between characters who have an established relationship with one another.
• Most of the children understood and enjoyed the programs with clear, positive messages, such as "Even condoms aren't 100%."
• Parents expressed concern about some of the sexual messages on television, but also found it to be a good way to broach important issues with their children. Thirty-eight percent of parents of children, aged 8-12, say when they see something "inappropriate on TV, they talk with their children about it. Forty-five percent say their child has at some point asked a question about sex, AIDS, or some other sensitive issue because of something they saw on TV. ⁷⁰

It's probably worth noting that this study was done before the soaring popularity` of such shows as Jerry Springer and South Park. which aren't broadcast during the family hour but are eagerly watched by scads of prepubescents, nonetheless.

Media Violence

Of all the media issues, violence seems to be the one that's received the most concentrated attention. The reasons for such concern are not based on pure whimsy:

• By the time the average Canadian child reaches sixth grade, he or she has seen approximately 100,000 acts of televised violence and been exposed to about 12,000 murders. ⁷¹ This is despite the fact that the violence index was 23.4% lower for Canadian television than for American television in a 1994 study conducted by researchers Guy Paquette and Jacques DeGuise. ⁷²
• Children's programming, particularly cartoons, contain more acts of violence per hour than any other programming on television. Children's programs were 68% more violent than programs for adults, portraying four times as many violent sequences per hour as adult programs. ⁷³
• The culture of media violence is global. A recent UNESCO study found that almost 90% of 12-year-old school children in 23 countries are familiar with violent action characters such as Terminator and Rambo. ⁷⁴
• A survey of 364 fourth and fifth grade students showed that girls were more likely to adopt the aggressive behaviour of boys after playing violent video games. ⁷⁵
• Longitudinal studies which track viewing habits and behaviour patterns of a single individual over time found that eight-year-old boys who viewed the most violent programs growing up were most likely to engage in aggressive and delinquent behaviour by age 18 and serious criminal behaviour by age 30. ⁷⁶

Many parents struggle to exercise some sort of control over their children's media consumption, particularly when they are younger. Seventy-five percent of parents have turned off a television program or left a movie theatre because the show was too violent. And seventy-nine percent have set rules in their home regarding when their children can watch television. ⁷⁷ But television violence has a way of rearing its head at less-than-expected times. The Paquette and De Guise study, for instance, showed that the time slot 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. has the most violence. On weekends, the period prior to 6 p.m. is the most violent.

Effects of Media Violence

To date, more than 3000 studies have been done on the effects of television violence on children. After reviewing hundreds of these studies, the CRTC, the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association have concluded that media violence does have an impact on young people.

In 1995, Dr. Wendy Josephson was asked by the Department of Canadian Heritage to review the major studies, in order to categorize the effects of television violence on children of different ages. The study is an analysis of literature on the television content children watch, the context in which they watch it and the meaning they derive from it. She concluded that children who are exposed to media violence:

• may become desensitized to real-life violence
• may come to see the world as a mean and frightening place
• may come to expect others to resort to physical violence to resolve conflicts

As well:

• Infants experience television primarily as fragmented displays of light and sound, which they are intermittently able to group into meaningful combinations such as recognizable human or animal characters.
• Toddlers are likely to pay more attention to television and to imitate what they see and hear. The viewing patterns children establish as toddlers will influence their viewing habits throughout their lives.
• Since toddlers have a strong preference for cartoons and other programs that have characters who move fast, there is considerable likelihood that they will be exposed to large amounts of violence.
• At the preschool age (three to five years old), children are attracted to vivid production features common to cartoons. They are unlikely to be able to put the violence of cartoons in context, since they are likely to miss any subtleties mitigating information concerning motivation and consequences.
• Preschoolers behave more aggressively than usual in their play after watching any high-action exciting television content, but especially after watching violent television.
• By age eight, children are especially likely to show increased aggression from watching violent television if they believe the violence reflects real life, if they identify with a violent hero (as boys often do), or if they engage in aggressive fantasies.
• During adolescence (age 12-17), young people watch less television than they did when they were younger, and watch less with their families. Youth develop a preference for music videos, horror movies and pornographic videos (boys particularly).
• The tendency of adolescents to challenge conventional authority makes them particularly susceptible to imitating some kinds of television violence, crime and portrayals of suicide. However, these imitative acts affect only a small percentage of adolescents.
• The children who are most vulnerable to the effects of television violence may be the ones whose parents are least likely to be vigilant mediators (for example, abusive parents and parents of families in distress.) ⁷⁸

It can be very tempting to focus on media violence without paying attention to the culture as a whole. (When asked to select measures which would reduce violent crime "a lot", many Americans chose restrictions on TV violence more frequently than gun control.⁷⁹) It takes more than television programs, films, video games and demeaning lyrics to turn children into violent adults. Real-life experience with poverty, violence, abuse or neglect is a very powerful determinant. One thing is certain: media violence has a much greater impact on children who have experienced violence first-hand and see it as "natural".

A Word in Defence of Superheroes and Action Figures

Many children need and use media heroes as role models to help them compensate for and escape from difficult situations. In a recent study on global media violence conducted by UNESCO, 51% of children from high-aggression neighbourhoods wanted to be like Terminator, as opposed to 37% from low-aggression settings. ⁸⁰ As the educators in Responding to Media Violence point out: "Sometimes the appeal of such images lies in the instruction they offer youngsters on how to be strong, how to protect oneself and how to become the aggressor instead of the victim." ⁸¹

Argentinean researcher Tatiana Merlo-Flores has spent twenty years studying children's relation to television. She believes that TV has lifted the lid off repression, giving us a glimpse of the dark side of human nature. "Young people perceive the violence, envy, misery, presented on the high rated program as related to them, to their innermost being, they recognize themselves in it and get to know themselves from formerly forbidden angles." She also points out that children or adolescents with problems of loneliness, abandonment or frustration, will try to compensate for those situations by watching programs, such as cartoons, aimed mainly at children. Lacking adequate role models in real life, children will choose screen heroes who never die and always "get respect". ⁸²

The Truth is No Consequences: The Violence Game

George Gerbner, Dean Emeritus of the Annenberg School of Communications and pioneer in the study of media violence, often draws attention to the preponderance of what he calls "happy violence", ie. no pain, no consequences.

• According to the Unesco Global Study on Media Violence, the impact of media violence is so great primarily because aggressive behaviour is rewarded.
• The National Television Violence Study, funded by the U.S. cable industry analyzed the context in which violence was depicted and found that perpetrators of violent acts on television go unpunished 73% of the time. Bad characters are punished 62% of the time, good characters only 15% of the time. Forty-seven percent of all violent interactions showed no resulting harm to the victims, and 58% depicted no pain. Longer-term consequences, such as financial or emotional harm, were shown only 16% of the time. ⁸³
• Twenty-five percent of all violent acts on television involve the use of a handgun. Only four percent of programs containing violence emphasized non-violent alternatives to solving problems.
• Children's programs posed special concerns because they were least likely to depict the long-term consequences of violence (five percent) and they portray violence in a humorous fashion 67% of the time.

Media Representations of the Outside World

Gerbner undertook a long-range study of the effect of televised violence. Contrary to popular belief, he found that heavy TV viewing actually cultivates a fear of violence:

"Heavy viewers of TV violence suffer from a 'Mean World Syndrome' and that has all kinds of consequences. They are more likely to overestimate their chances of encountering violence, to believe that their neighbourhoods are unsafe and to assume that crime is rising, whether or not it actually is." ⁸⁴

Reasons for the 'Mean World Syndrome' are not hard to find. Violent crime is far more pervasive on television than in real life. "Since 1955, television characters have been murdered at a rate 1000 times higher than real world victims have." ⁸⁵ News is even more influential than entertainment television in creating the sense of a world of heightened dangers.

How Canadians Get Their News About the World

• A large majority (81%) of Canadians watch network or local news programs for information. About two-thirds (67%) prefer to watch specialty news channels such as CBC, NewsWorld or CNN. Sixty-five percent watch TV news magazine programs such as W5 or 60 Minutes.
• Close behind TV news in popularity is the daily newspaper, read by 73% of Canadians.
• About 63% get their news from radio programs - an increase of about 15 % from 1997.
• Less popular are weekly news magazines such as Maclean's or Time, read by just over a quarter of Canadians (27%).
• Least popular so far is the Internet: only one in six people (15 %) surf the Net for news. ⁸⁶

Violence and the News

In many families, the six-o-clock newscast is a daily ritual. And yet, for many children, the images of real-life mayhem and disaster can be overwhelming. In the words of one six-year-old girl, "The scariest thing on TV is the news." Partly, that's because as television news has become profitable and hence dependent on "ratings", the violence quotient has increased markedly. The National Media Archive used its database text search to find the number of stories on murder. The study examined 1,917 CBC and 1,593 CTV news stories between Jan. 19 and June 30, 1995.

• Though the murder rate for 1994 dropped eight percent, murder reports were 33% more frequent than the previous year.
• 75 -98% of news stories focussed on murders committed by strangers. Yet, over the past seven years, the random murder rate has remained between 12-18%. of the total murder rate. ⁸⁷

Children in the News

Dale Kunkel, an American media critic, watched the nightly newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC, for the entire month of November 1993. He also examined the content of five major U.S. newspapers during that same period. He discovered that:

• 48% of all television news stories, and 40% of all reports in the newspapers about children involved reports of crime and violence The overemphasis on random violent crime leads viewers to see their society as more violent than it actually is.
• Children or parents are cited as sources of information in just one-quarter of news stories involving children. ⁸⁸

And what about the kids themselves? How do they feel about news media coverage? To find out, the U.S.-based advocacy organization Children Now surveyed 850 young people, aged 11-16, in 1994. They found that:

• More than half of all kids reported feeling angry, sad or depressed after watching the news.
• 61% of young people say that when they see kids their age in the news, they are involved in crime, drugs or violence.
• Children long for more positive news about themselves.
• When asked what one story they wish the news media would cover about kids their age, 44% said kids "doing good things," "staying away from trouble" or "helping the environment." ⁸⁹

Video Games

Video games blend television's spectatorship with the computer's interactivity. They did so to the tune of $30 billion in 1998 for the corporations that design, produce and distribute them. Stephen Kline, author of the 1998 study "Video Game Culture" argues that to maintain market share, gaming companies continue to indulge tastes for more extreme material. "The introduction of full-motion video sequences, more realistic graphics technology and powerful sound enhancers, such as a forthcoming system known as 3D positional audio have led to what Kline calls 'the increasing graphicalization of violence'." ⁹⁰

Childhood in an Age of Mass-Marketing

Children may, indeed, be a nation's treasure. It's just that, lately, that sentiment has begun to take on a different meaning. Increasingly, our young are no longer seen mainly as an individual and collective resource to be nurtured, but as a burgeoning market to be exploited. It's not too hard to discover the reasons for such a development.

Marketing to children is now a multibillion dollar business. The direct spending power of children, almost all of it discretionary, has risen markedly in recent years. In Canada, four million children, aged two-12, spend $1.5 billion of their own money in one year and influence an additional $15 billion in home purchases. ⁹² In 1995, according to Interactive Marketing News and Youth Markets, American children under 12 spent $14 billion, teenagers another $67 billion, and together they influenced $160 billion of their parents' annual spending. ⁹³

In molding children into consumers, it's clear the media play a critical role :

• During prime time, each of the four American broadcast networks shows over 15 minutes of commercials and promotions during an average hour. For daytime shows, the number rises to 20. This means that a viewer will likely watch eighteen 30-second commercials during a TV hour. ⁹⁴
• Canadian children see, on average, 20,000 TV commercials a year. That adds up to 200,000 commercials between their second and twelfth birthdays, and more than two months of their waking time. So it is not surprising that many of them now chant advertising slogans the way kids once recited nursery rhymes. ⁹⁵
• A U.S. study of children's favourite TV ads found that 9600 children aged 6-17 were able to identify, with no prompting, more than 240 commercials. ⁹⁶
• American advertisers spend about US$700 million annually advertising to kids. TV is by far the favoured medium for advertising to children, accounting for over US$350 million worth of advertising dollars. ⁹⁷
• Of all the 10 provinces, Quebec has the strongest restrictions on advertising to children. In 1980 all advertisements aimed at children under 13 were banned in Quebec under the Consumer Protection Act. ⁹⁸

The targeting of children as consumers has greatly increased the pressure on parents to "buy me that", a demand constantly fuelled by the advertising pitches aimed at small but mighty family members.

Advertising and Child Development

Early Childhood (around ages 2-4). Children this age don't know that there's a difference between programs and commercials and don't know that the purpose of a commercial is to sell something.

Early to Middle Childhood (around ages 4-7). By the end of this stage, children can tell the difference between the commercials and the programs, but enjoy commercials and use them as a source of information about the world - what there is to eat, buy, play with.

Middle to Late Childhood (around ages 7-10). Children this age know that the purpose of commercials is to sell them something but they still like to watch them.

Late Childhood (around ages 10-14). At this stage, children watch commercials critically, looking for the tricks that advertisers use to hook them in. ⁹⁹

The World of Play in the Land of Big Business

A cultural climate which sees children first as consumers is more than likely to produce material that short-changes children's need for wonder. In his book Creating Ever-Cool: A Marketer's Guide to a Kid's Heart, Gene Del Vechhio is very clear about how children's needs and the marketplace intersect: " 'Psyche Gaps' [are] places within a child's psyche that are not being satisfied. That is where opportunities exist for potentially new brands and ideas." ¹⁰⁰

As culture and business interests have converged, the world of children's play -- unstructured, tactile, driven mainly by imagination and curiosity -- has increasingly been replaced by the highly structured world of children's entertainment. One of the most in-depth studies of this convergence is Stephen Kline's Out of the Garden: TV and Children's Culture in an Age of TV Marketing.

The following are a few salient facts and provocative observations from his study:

• The modern parent has little time to devote to traditional family activities. And parent-child interactions have become increasingly mediated, with many children making do without the gift of their parents' time and attention. We give our children musical tapes, instead of singing to or with them. We watch TV fantasies, rather than reading to them or telling them stories. We give them Nintendo but don't teach the games or crafts like knitting, carpentry or gardening that develop finger skills.
• Our children's play culture is being primarily defined and created by marketing strategists.
• The opportunity to reach large audiences of children through television was a pivotal point in developing new approaches to advertising.
• In 1982, the Reagan administration repealed the law prohibiting TV programs for children that were merely disguised advertisements. Character marketing and licensing of products tied in with the children's "culture industries" boomed. And so did stores like Toys 'R' Us.
• Cartoons are cheaper to produce and version into foreign languages than real-life dramas. Besides, they lend themselves better to character marketing which "has all but eliminated images of real children playing in the normal course of their lives."
• Playing with character toys tends to reframe children's imaginative play according to TV scripts. It also encourages more stereotyped/gendered play. (Though some boys might be willing to take the latest He-Man figure inside the playhouse, their numbers probably aren't legion.) ¹⁰¹

In Kid Culture: Children and Adults and Popular Culture, Kathleen McDonnell sounds a more reassuring note than what is usually found in most research papers about the influence of popular culture/ media experiences on children's lives and development. Like other popular culture researchers and writers such as John Fiske in Reading the Popular, she argues that children are not simply passive recipients of popular culture offerings. Instead, they are actively involved in accepting, rejecting or transforming what they are given to create their own versions. ¹⁰²

Marketing to Children on the Internet

In Canada, advertisers have to follow a set of national standards when they pitch products on TV to "persons under the age of 12". The regulations are set forth in The Broadcast Code for Advertising to Children, first developed as a result of pressure from parents and consumer groups.

No such regulations yet exist about advertising elements on Internet sites aimed at children. The need for such regulations has been highlighted by the release of the 1996 report Web of Deception: Threats to Children from Online Marketing. Produced by the Washington-based Center for Media Education, the report flagged such unregulated practices as:

• using prizes, games and surveys to gather personal information from kids
• monitoring children's online activities and compiling detailed personal profiles
• microtargeting, i.e., designing personalized advertising aimed at individual children
• designing advertising environments to keep kids engrossed for long periods of time
• not separating out the content and the ads
• creating product "spokescharacters" to develop interactive relationships with kids (otherwise known as "branding" , which further blurs the lines between entertainment, information and advertising.)

Children's Privacy Online

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) surveyed over 1400 web sites, over 200 of which were children's sites, for their study on online privacy. Upwards of 85% of the sites surveyed collected personal information from consumers and only 14% provided any notice with respect to their information practices. Approximately two per cent provided notice by means of a comprehensive privacy policy.

A great majority (89%) of children's sites surveyed collected personal information from children.  While 54% of these sites provided some form of disclosure of their information practices, only 23% asked children to seek parental permission before submitting information.  The types of information collected from children is shown in the chart below.

Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing to Youth

The Center for Media Education's 1998 research report Alcohol and Tobacco on the Web: New Threats to Youth has found that:

• Major alcohol beverage companies are a growing presence on the Web, with more than 35 brands represented.
• The many websites and home pages dedicated to smoking are helping to foster an online Smoking-is-Cool culture.
• Web sites promoting alcohol and tobacco employ a number of techniques especially appealing to children and youth, including:
• themes and icons of youth popular culture such as interviews with rock stars
• interactive games and contests
• branded merchandise and free give-aways, including clothing, rock music clips and e-mail postcards with company logos
• chat rooms in the form of clubs, graffiti walls and virtual bars
• online magazines and marketing surveys

Future Directions

Given the persuasive and pervasive influence of media in society, what possible strategies are in order? The three suggested in the UNESCO Global Study on Violence are:

• Public debate and "common ground" talks between the five Ps: politicians, producers, pedagogy, parents and future prosumers (active consumers)
• Development of codes of conduct and self-control among media professionals
• The establishment of media education to create competent and critical media users.

Information About On-Going Research

For up-to-date reports on media developments, check the following websites regularly:

Media Awareness Network: http://www.media-awareness.ca

The premier Canadian site for media literacy information

Center for Media Education: http://tap.epn.org/cme/index.html

A U.S. non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of electronic media, especially on the behalf of children and families.

Media Literacy On-Line Project: http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/HomePage
[no longer available see http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/mlr/home/mission.html]

A comprehensive listing of materials

Children Now: http://www.childrennow.org

The Children and Media Program of this U.S.-based children's advocacy organization holds an annual conference and commissions annual studies

Alliance for Children and Television: http://www.act-aet.tv

ACT's mandate - to enrich the home viewing experience of children is carried out through seminars, publications, submissions and presentations to various agencies of government.

Conclusion

Love 'em or hate 'em, it's clear that the media are part of the warp and woof of our everyday lives. In some homes, the TV goes on with the first cup of coffee and for many, the flickering light of the screen is the last thing they see before they turn in for the night. Factor in the computers, video game systems, cd players and tape recorders and it's obvious that our private domains are, increasingly, part of the wired world.

But what happens when electronic technologies are introduced into the home? Do they bolster or impede interaction among family members? Bring them together or drive them apart? Obviously, it depends on the uses to which they are put. Seniors over 55, for instance, are rapidly becoming connected to the Internet, as they realize that e-mail allows them to be in constant contact with children and grandchildren who don't live in the immediate vicinity. On the other hand, there are also tales of families being severely disrupted by the Internet addiction of one of the parents or children.

Many families have rules about when and for how long the television or the computer or the video game system can be used, though some do not. In some cases, TV watching or computer use is an individual activity; in other homes, the television or computer is placed in the living room or some other central spot, so that it becomes part of the general family activities.

One thing is certain: the media are so pervasive and so influential - in terms of how family time is used, in terms of their socializing power - that parents need to help their children become discriminating media users. Children may be very familiar with media content; that doesn't necessarily imply any critical awareness of what the content means. Teaching one's children to be savvy media consumers is as much a part of parenting these days as teaching them other basic skills.

While this may hold true for television, matters become a little trickier when we enter the digital universe. Here, children and youth are more at ease and knowledgeable than the majority of their elders but that still doesn't lessen the need for parents to be aware of what their children are doing on-line. Exploring some of the riches of new media can also be a shared activity between parents and children. Lest we forget, interactive equals interaction implies connection and connection is what keeps a family strong.

End Notes

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