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Printed from The Vanier Institute of the Family's website at www.vifamily.ca. © 2007.
Good Servant, Bad Master?
Table of Contents
In 1998, the first Electronic Media and the Family paper described the terrain to be explored in the following way: 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 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 videogame 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.
That first investigation looked at the kinds of hardware people had in their homes, the stories about themselves and the world which children were absorbing via their media diet, and the impact of mass marketing to kids as “consumption generators” within the family. Questions were also raised about the interface between technology and intimacy. One clear conclusion was that, given the media’s pervasiveness and socializing power, parents needed to help their children become discriminating media users. Almost a decade later, the Vanier Institute of the Family has commissioned another Contemporary Family Trends paper on the same topic. Interestingly enough, many of the questions raised at the end of the 90s are still pertinent, even though certain changes seem quite obvious. Communications technologies have become such an essential element of our everyday lives that some researchers now define homes as “media hubs”.1 Investigation into the impact of this new media landscape is still in the early stages and the findings often show significant differences but an initial scan suggests that:
In the following pages we will not only explore the changes that have occurred in the intervening years but also examine what those changes suggest about the texture of family lives in Canada and the fabric of the larger society which enfolds them. In the last 10 years, there’s been an explosive growth in the number and kinds of media “goodies” which are now considered an indispensable part of what researchers often like to refer to as domestic ecology. According to the Consumers Electronics Association of America, the average U.S. home now boasts 26 different electronic devices for communication and media.2 Comparable marketing statistics don’t exist for Canada but there is no reason to assume that households here are any less well-equipped. Most Canadian children and youth live in homes or apartments with CD or tape players, radios, VCRs/DVD players, video game consoles, computers, portable and cell phones, hand-held video game players and digital cameras. Many also boast digital video recorders, MP3 players, portable DVD players, CD burners and webcams. Eighty percent of youth have cable or satellite service at home. The big picture suggests little change in the number of television sets or cable/satellite connections for TV since these were close-to-saturation markets anyhow. What then, are some of the most notable changes over the past decade?
When it comes to households with children in them, the picture is even more media-saturated. In 2005, the Media Awareness Network surveyed more than 5000 students in Grades 4 to 11 across Canada, They discovered that:
In the first decade of the 21st century, the 19th century figure of Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit forever checking his watch and exclaiming “I’m late! I’m late!” seems unnervingly relevant. For many people juggling increasingly demanding work and household schedules, time (and time together) can be the rarest commodity of all. A 2007 study by Statistics Canada found that the average Canadian worker now spends 45 minutes less per day with his or her family than was the case in 1986. More hours on the job have gobbled up that time, which amounts to five weeks out of a family’s yearly togetherness allotment. Many kids are home alone more while others have increasingly complicated after-school lives which require a lot of time-management finessing on their parents’ part. To keep everything humming (or lurching) along, people now rely on such electronic helpers as family cell phone plans, and portable videogame players or in-car DVD players to keep kids occupied. For some families, multiple TV sets and computers are the norm. With so many electronic information, communication and entertainment devices now firmly ensconced in our homes, the question inevitably rises: how much time do we devote to them on a daily basis and what impact are they having on family routines and behaviour? According to Statistics Canada’s Time Use Survey for 2005, Canadians aged 15 and over spent just over two hours each day watching television. While the amount of time people spend watching TV is dropping (In 1998, the average was slightly more than three hours daily), the way in which they watch is also changing. Tuning in used to be a family activity as everyone hunkered down together in front of the electronic hearth. It still is for some families, but increasingly family members are watching television on their own and eating more meals alone.12 Radio use has remained relatively stable between 1998 and 2003, with people clocking in at about three hours a day.13 People on average are spending 30-45 minutes more per day on the telephone, both landlines and mobiles, than they did a decade ago. Meanwhile, the amount of time people devote to reading for pleasure clocks in at approximately 38 minutes daily on average, a figure which has not changed appreciably since 1991.14 And according to Statistics Canada, reading materials such as books, magazines and newspapers were the most popular online purchases in 2003. In 2000, Canadians spent an average of an hour a day on the Internet at home. For young people, that figure was significantly higher. Though nine out of ten Canadian schools are connected to the Internet, the bulk of Canadian kids’ online activities are carried out under the family roof. When the Media Awareness Network asked more than 5000 youth in 2005 about their Internet use, they found that on an average week day, Canadian students spend:
(The sum of those figures, by the way, is a deceptive total since many of the activities are being carried out simultaneously.) Studies carried out in other countries confirm similar trends. According to British psychologist Aric Sigman, English children aged 11-15 spend seven and a half hours each day in front of a screen, an increase of 40% in the past decade.15 Meanwhile, a 2005 U.S. study of the media habits of youth between eight and eighteen years of age found that they spend an average of nearly six and a half hours daily with media, compared with:
Since many kids are interacting with more than one medium at a time — on the Internet, watching TV and listening to music — they are actually squeezing approximately eight and a half hours of media content into those six and a half hours.16 Patterns of domestic media use seem to be changing. Many people are spending less time with print and television and more time plugged into interactive media like their cell phones, videogame systems and Internet-connected computers which allow them to build websites, create blogs, download films and music and engage in complex immersive games. And increasingly, they seem to be doing that in their own bedrooms, often alone, rather than in communal family spaces. But does Internet use actually change the way in which Canadians spend their time and also affect interactions with family members? There seems to be no simple answer. According to a 2006 study which focused on people over the age of 15, heavy users (those who spent more than an hour a day on the Internet) devoted less time to socializing with their spouse or partner, as well as their children and friends. They also spent less time doing domestic chores. However, being with family and friends was a priority for both Internet and non-Internet users. Heavy Internet users were also eager consumers of other media. In fact, they spent more time watching television and more time reading books than non-users.17 For Statistics Canada researcher Ben Veenhof, author of the report, “This is an interesting time because the patterns of communication are changing. The Internet is almost as diverse as the world around us. We need to try looking at different types of Internet users and uses. And people make different decisions about how they’re going to allocate their time.” Those time allocations vary within households. When the Internet Use Survey began in 1997, the survey unit was the household. Now it’s the individual. That difference marks a significant shift because access to one’s own personal computer directly affects the number of hours family members spend online. Children and youth who have their own Internet-connected computer spend twice as much time online as those who use equipment shared by the whole family. The time members of Canadian families dedicate to electronic devices continues to increase but the number of hours in a day is still pegged at 24. Trying to cram more into a given number of hours (remember Cinderella’s stepsister trying to jam her outsized foot into the recalcitrant glass slipper?) leads to a sense of ever-busyness, truncated interchanges and increasing homage to the god of multi-tasking. Where do our children fit into this picture? Growing Up in a Mediated World It's just hard not to listen to TV: it's spent so much more time raising us than you have. Most children these days are immersed in media experiences practically from the moment of their birth. That’s hardly a surprise since one recent study shows 50% of U.S. infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers live in homes with three or more TVs, 97% have clothes or toys based on media characters and three-quarters share their living space with a computer.18 The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under the age of two years. The Canadian Pediatric Society has alsoweighed in with its own media policy. Nonetheless a 2003 study of the media habits of U.S. children from birth to six years of age found that almost 70% of children under two years spend on average two hours every day watching either television shows or videos.19 Added up, that translates into one month per year that our youngest children spend in front of a screen. According to Vicky Rideout, vice president and director of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Program for Study of Entertainment Media and Health, “Parents have a tough job…and they use media [and especially television] to help them keep their kids occupied, calm them down, avoid family squabbles and teach their kids the things parents are afraid they don’t have time to teach themselves.” For decades television has been dubbed “the third parent” because of its power to shape children’s values, while familiarizing them with different aspects of the world outside their home from within their home. That capacity to introduce children and young people to broader horizons is infinitely expanded through access to the Internet. There’s not much data yet about computer use among the pre-school set but in 2003 pre-schoolers were the fastest growing group of online kids.20 In that same year, 80 per cent of U.S. Kindergarten students reported they used computers and a third (32%) said they went online. 21 Nonetheless, for the youngest children of all, the television screen still reigns supreme. In the Kaiser study, two-thirds of children under the age of six lived in homes where the television was on at least half the time, whether anyone was watching it or not. For one-third of the children, the television functioned as ongoing electronic wallpaper during their waking hours. For many, television is so firmly a part of family routines and culture that 26% of toddlers under the age of two had a TV set in their bedroom. The reasons most commonly advanced for giving infants and toddlers their own TV were to free up other sets in the house so the parent or other family members could watch their own shows, to keep the child occupied while the parent did household chores, to help the child fall asleep and as a reward for good behaviour. In most cases, parents said they were watching with their children. In focus groups, many parents spoke about the importance of educational programming and videos, even for the very young set. Increasingly, the “kidvid” market is being targeted even to infants and toddlers. TV shows with titles like “Brainy Baby” and “I Can Sign” are aimed at kids as young as 12 months, there’s a lively trade in videos and DVDs for infants 1-18 months, and computer games and keyboard toppers are being produced for nine-month-olds. In 2007, Canadian infants will be able to look at offerings on a U.S.-based 24-hour cable channel, BabyFirstTV while Britain’s BabyTV channel has been granted broader access here. Some recent research carried out at the University of Washington with 1000 families found that 40% of three-month-old infants were already looking at TV programs, DVDs and videos on a regular basis. 22(Zimmerman, University of Washington, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, May 2007) Anxious to give their children a head start, many parents in the Kaiser study pronounced themselves very pleased by their tots’ and preschoolers’ progress with letters and numbers and the prosocial behaviours such as sharing and helping which their young children absorbed from their media diet. For Dr. Arlette Lefebvre, psychiatrist at Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, those benefits come with reservations attached. “Toddlers should be exploring the environment. They shouldn’t be plugged to Baby Einstein. I worry about any large amount of viewing [for that age], no matter how enriching, because it’s still passive and it’s still only engaging the eyes and ears.” It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity. She is not alone in wondering whether the over-stimulation of young children’s auditory and visual senses without a corresponding discharge of that energy through gross motor play may lead to increased hyperactivity. Some research findings indicate that “excessive viewing before age three has been shown to be associated with problems of attention control, aggressive behaviour and poor cognitive development.” 23 And a 2007 British study has suggested that the light from television screens and computers affects the production of the hormone melatonin which in turn leads to disturbed sleep patterns among infants and toddlers. 24 When it comes to media’s impact on the intellectual, emotional, social and physical development of young children, there is still so much we do not know. The authors of Zero to Six: Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers have catalogued some of those unknowns:
Some things however we do know. In homes where the television is constantly on, 34% of children aged four to six can read. In homes where television is much less of a constant presence, that figure rises to 56%. As one would expect, children who have media devices in their bedroom spend a lot more time engrossed in them. One of the most obvious questions that arises from looking those stats is whether anyone else is there watching with the children and if so, what difference that might make in their understanding of the varied material they absorb from their screen teachers. Cultural commentators Neil Postman and Joshua Meyrowitz have both written eloquently about the impacts of television on the nature of childhood, as we currently understand it. Pre-radio and television, children’s knowledge of the wider world was mediated, for better or worse, through the adults in their lives — family members, teachers, religious authorities. Learning about the larger sphere often came through books and was done in phased, age-appropriate stages, as adults deemed fit. Families decided what children should be exposed to and when. With television, computers and the Internet ensconced in the home, access to that privileged information is no longer under the sole control of the adults in the household. Kids who once might have perched at the top of staircases during adult parties to try and decode the workings of that mysterious, child-free world, now only have to tune into the latest soap opera or talk show to have every possible adult shenanigan laid bare. “Real-world” events unfold daily on home screens, often to child audiences who do not yet have the cognitive development to realize, for instance, that the clip of the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre was a replay of one event and not a new explosion happening every time they saw those images. As many children are quick to point out, “The scariest thing on TV is the news.” School-aged Children and Teens With that kind of from-day-one immersion, it’s no surprise that most school-aged children and teens hardly notice the media-infused world in which they live. They are neither positive nor negative about its impact; it simply is, a taken-for-granted fact of life. For Canadian kids, the Net has become electronic wallpaper. Questions about how it has changed their lives don’t resonate with them. So what do kids really like? To find out, two important Canadian studies done since 2000 looked at children’s media use from the kids’ point of view. Kids’ Take on Media, commissioned by the Canadian Teachers’ Federation in 2003, surveyed 5700 children from ages eight to fifteen in every province and territory to find out which media they preferred, what satisfactions they got from media and whether the violence in their daily media consumption affected their behaviour and values. This study focused primarily on television, videos and computer games, media which children use mainly in their own homes and in the homes of their friends. Almost three-quarters of all the students surveyed watched TV every day The most important attributes of their favourite TV programs were that they were “funny” and “exciting”. Equally important for girls was that the program not be violent. Interestingly enough, one of the prime reasons that kids gave for watching television was that “it helps me to relax.” An Alberta principal whose students participated in the survey wasn’t surprised by the finding, “ Parents these days are stressed out of their minds and so are the kids. They’re scheduled to within an inch of their lives so they use TV just like the adults do … as a way to veg out.” Gender and age also shaped media use. Video and computer games were most popular with the youngest kids, with 60% of boys in grades three to six playing almost daily, often for up to two hours. A large number of children said that they received no parental guidance on what they could watch, what games they could play and for how long. Though many students described TV watching as a communal activity that they shared with other family members at least some of the time, that wasn’t true for computer and video games which seemed to be much more solitary. Even for kids in grades three and four, the top figure for parental involvement of any kind never rose above 50% and by grade seven, almost 75% of adults never told children what video and computer games they could or could not play. As kids hit adolescence, their media habits shift. This trend is clear in the second groundbreaking piece of research, the Media Awareness Network’s two-phase study Young Canadians in a Wired World. One of the conclusions of Phase Two, released in 2005, is that “a wired kid is a social kid”. TV and music remain dominant media for youth but the Internet and cell phones are an indispensable part of the “being connected imperative” that becomes increasingly important at this age. The Internet is such a crucial part of kids’ social environment because that’s where they connect with friends, explore social roles, learn about their interests and express themselves:
For the majority of kids, the Internet functions as a social tool/facilitator which they use to participate in and strengthen their real-world networks. Most new friends still come from schools, sports and parties but “kids who spend more time online each day feel more confident about their ability to make friends, tell jokes and make people laugh.” Unlike adults, most young people are not interested in e-mail and infinitely prefer the real-time back-and-forth communication afforded by Instant Messenger. Their more private exchanges are now being complemented by a massive youth presence on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Users on these sites are able to create a personal profile and then construct networks linking their information to that of their “friends” who may number in the hundreds. As communications researcher Danah Boyd points out, youth “ are there because their friends are there and they are there to hang out with those friends .” As of late 2006, 55% of all U.S. online teens were using social networks such as MySpace and Facebook and 55% had created online profiles. 25 These sites provide both private and public communications tools. In their 2006 study of teens’ use of these sites, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that the most popular way of communicating on those sites is to post a message to a friend’s profile, page or “wall”. It’s the lure of checking messages and reading comments that brings most users back on a daily basis but it’s also the potential risk of posting personal information in a virtual commons that raises the red flag for some people. Though the drive to create arresting profiles might seem to be at odds with notions of privacy, 66% of the teens with online profiles in the Pew Internet study limit access to their profiles. 26 This is particularly true since adults (and more particularly parents) have started flocking to such sites, impinging on what was before mainly youth space. For boyd, “It is not the technology that encourages youth to spend time online — it's the lack of mobility and access to youth space where they can hang out uninterrupted. After school activities, sports, and jobs are typical across all socio-economic classes and many teens are in controlled spaces from dawn till dusk. They are running ragged without any time to simply chill amongst friends. By going virtual, digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces. Online, youth can build the environments that support youth socialization. ” 27 Online life is like an identity workshop and that’s the job of youth… to experiment with identity. Exploring social and sexual roles is part of the business of growing up. The Internet lets young people do that in what is, for most, a safe environment with relatively few consequences. Almost 60% pretend to be someone else online and 30% do so because they want to see what it would be like to flirt, talk to older people and explore the adult world away from the supervision of parents and teachers. (Only 1% of kids’ favourite sites were specifically created for children/youth and families.) And in spite of the fears of “stranger danger”, 79% of young people say that they have never met an online acquaintance face-to-face. 28 University of British Columbia education professor Jennifer Shapka is currently investigating the relationship between teenagers’ use of the Internet and their intellectual, physical, social and emotional development. Her initial results underscore the paramount role that instant messaging, by phone or on the Net, plays in helping teens construct and manage their social worlds. Only 25% of the young people she interviewed don’t instant message and this lack sometimes leads them to feel isolated. She found that teenagers who don’t instant message visit social networking sites such as Facebook, Live Journal and MySpace more frequently in order to feel connected. The possible concern there is that they are also more likely to be associating with strangers rather than friends or “friends of friends.” As Shapka points out, there is great diversity in the ways teens use media. Some kids used it for eight hours a day, while others hardly used it at all; most kids used computers in fairly adaptive ways and visited appropriate sites but a small sample didn’t. Certainly. conventional wisdom about the impacts of media use on children’s development is sometimes upended by research results, such as the finding that many kids who spend the most time with media are not lonely isolated geeks but young people enjoying lives which are full with family, friends, sports and other interests. So in the midst of this technological upheaval that is shifting the way in which even our most intimate relationships are played out, there is no clear consensus about its effects. Technological optimists point out that devoted Internet users also read, and that the interactive and creative nature of many web 2.0 activities enhances engagement, thought, information retrieval and organization which are all necessary skills in the contemporary workplace and larger society. What does seem true is that young people’s intensified media exposure from very early ages increases the amount of information — and advertising — to which they are exposed. This escalating immersion raises issues that are both cognitive — what’s the impact of multi-tasking and rapid exposure to so much animated information? — and socio-political — how do youth (and their parents) think through the massive assault from highly sophisticated marketers? Counting on the “Nag Factor”: Marketing to Children Many parents express concern about their children’s exposure to the highly sexualized and violent content increasingly available on cable television, in video games and on the Internet. It’s harder to know how alarmed they are by the barrage of consumerism messages which are delivered to children on a daily basis, especially via computer and television screens. In the marketing world they're called “tinys." At just six months of age, babies are already forming mental images of corporate logos. One in four children utters a brand name as their first recognizable word. Marketers are very aware of just how valuable young buy-me-that prodders can be. As James U. McNeal points out in his 1999 book The Kids’ Market: Myths and Realities, households with school-age children outspend childless households by at least one-third. Children, he adds, represent more potential that any other demographic segment because they constitute three markets in one: the current market, the influence market (where the nagfactor is felt most keenly) and best of all, the future market where “they will eventually buy all goods and services.” McNeal’s advice has not been lost on advertisers whose kid-directed budgets have mushroomed from $100 million in 1990 to more than $2 billion in 2000. 29 It has been estimated that kids see more than 40,000 ads per year on television alone, not including what they encounter on the Internet, in magazines, in public spaces and so on. 30 Research over the years has shown that until about the age of eight, most children are unable to differentiate between the commercial and the “show”. Their radar screens don’t register product placements and pitches as deliberate commercial strategies. To fine-tune their messaging, marketers have enlisted the aid of researchers, including psychologists and cultural anthropologists, to develop complete profiles on children’s developmental, emotional and social needs (and vulnerabilities) at different ages and stages. In the face of such blatant disregard for children’s optimum development, it’s hard not to think of Little Riding Hood mesmerized by the wolf’s pearly choppers and his oily response: “The better to eat you with, my dear.” Food, in fact, is one of the prized advertising arenas in the ‘fast food nation’. With annual sales of food and drinks to children topping more than $27 billion in 2002, it’s no surprise that Saturday morning television is now awash in ads for junk food, including sweets, soft drinks and sugared cereals. One study found that 78% of food ads during Saturday evening adult programming were for products high in fat, sodium, cholesterol or sugar. During children’s programming, it was 97%. 31 The food and drink industry is fond of saying that it is the responsibility of parents to ensure that their children have healthy and balanced diets. This is undoubtedly true but various companies know full well that the barrage of enticing images and give-aways has a definite impact on their youngest consumers. They are not spending millions of dollars on advertising because they consider it an ineffective tool. In fact, childhood obesity levels are skyrocketing, fueled in part by the constant food and drink promotions to which kids are exposed. In Canada, the prevalence of obesity among youth doubled between 1981 and 1996 (from 5% among boys and girls to 14% for boys and 12% for girls. 32 In the U.S. 25-30% of kids are considered obese and a 2006 study in Australia revealed big weight gains in children and adolescents despite improvements in physical fitness. Juvenile diabetes is also on the rise. These realities pose problems not just for individual families but for the societies in which those families live. Concerned about the exploitation of children and the public health implications of soaring weight and cholesterol in decades to come, several governments have enacted legislation to protect young viewers. In Sweden and Norway, television advertising specifically aimed at children under the age of 12 is not permitted. Greece bans TV stations from advertising toys to children between the hours of 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. Quebec in 1980 restricted all television advertising directed at children under the age of 13. Though this was done in the interest of “protecting children from deception”, Quebec now boasts some of the lowest obesity and soft drink consumption rates in Canada. Legislation is not the only factor causing advertisers to look for other means to reach their potential customers. As technology in the form of TIVO and digital video recorders allows more people to craft their own television program menus and skip the commercials if they choose to, advertisers are increasingly building kid-friendly advergames on the Internet. Growing Up in a Wired World: Phase Two asked more than 5000 Canadian youth in grades four to eleven about their favourite Internet sites. They found that the top 50 choices are all “commercial sites designed to sell product, reinforce branding or advertise to youth. Under the guise of games, almost all have embedded marketing materials, whether they be Lifesaver products in Candystand games or Disney-themed images or content on Neopets. And yet, 75% of the kids playing those games are unaware of the marketing angle. Only 19% of kids in grade 4 and 31% in grade 11 critically question the presence of branded products in their virtual playgrounds.” 33 The effect on children (and their families) isn’t confined only to the arena of physical health. Children’s goals and values are shaped by the relentless trumpeting of materialism as the route to a “feel-good” state. For Gary Ruskin, director of Commercial Alert, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to protecting children from corporate exploitation, the issues are clear. “The amount of advertising aimed at kids hurts the way they feel about themselves. It's harmful to them, and it inhibits their happiness." Many parents are weary of commercially-induced tussles with their kids; they feel the strain of trying to raise young people who are emotionally responsive both to their own needs and the needs of others in a culture which is, apparently, increasingly content to see children as an economic motherlode just waiting to be mined. One of the best ways to help children and youth navigate the commercial onslaught is to give them opportunities to become critical thinkers and savvy media consumers. To start the process going, they need input from the people, organizations and institutions in their lives that have their best interests at heart. Parenting in the Media Surround As my son’s cell phone beeped with yet another incoming text message, I asked, The age of connectivity is a two-sided coin. And the shiny side of the coin is very shiny indeed. People have never communicated more, whether it be through long distance calling via phone lines or the Internet, e-mail, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, cell phones, webcams or BlackBerrys. Far-flung family members can stay in touch as never before; communities of interest can spring up, freed from the restrictions of place and even time; artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers — anyone — can share their work globally at no cost, if they choose; students can learn, regardless of their time constraints or geographical location. Even though millions of people still do not have access, we who do have taken a quantum leap in the variety of information and entertainment now available to us. Few of us would be willing — or perhaps even able — to go back. Now that wireless technology makes it possible for us to never be out of touch, there’s a growing expectation that this should be a right. (Many parents in Toronto were up in arms at a possible board-wide ban on cell phone use during school hours, on the grounds that they need to be able to reach their children at all times.) But what’s the impact of always being connected to the world via one electronic medium or another? And what’s the “interface” between this connectivity and intimacy, with one’s self or others? As one media researcher has pointed out, we live these days in a state of continuous partial attention. Multi-tasking may indeed allow us all (and particularly youth who are both adept and comfortable with the toggling) to sample widely from a variety of experiences at the same time but it certainly increases the distraction factor. It’s hard to be deeply engaged in an activity or conversation — with yourself or others — without some whole-hearted and uninterrupted focus on the experience at hand. Whether it is parents surreptitiously checking BlackBerrys during their children’s concerts or students barely able to be separated from their cell phones during school hours, it is hard to avoid the feeling that people are often more interested in staring at screens than into someone else’s eyes. For many people, increased connectivity seems to foster a fear of somehow missing something or someone important if they aren’t tethered to a communication device. Education professor Jennifer Shapka’s research suggests that teens are using their latest devices to explore roles and construct identities. “These are important social tasks but,” she adds, “adolescents also need down time to ruminate and ponder ‘Who am I? How do I fit in?’ It’s not easy to figure out those questions if you always have the option to hop online.” Her caveats are echoed by child psychiatrist Arlette Lefebvre who wrote one of the first books about how to take children online and now often treats patients dealing with some form of screen-related addiction: “What concerns me is are we raising a generation of kids who can’t stand to be bored because they have to be entertained constantly?” Where are parents in this picture? Parental response to the growth of a communications culture has been mixed. In many households, they use ICTs to help manage busy personal schedules and meet the demanding routines of everyone in the family. And wireless devices have been a boon in allowing family members to go their separate ways while still remaining co-ordinated and connected. At the same time, many parents are uneasy, not to mention downright anxious, about the media’s impact on their children’s lives. They worry that their child is online for so long and so often. Some speak of children becoming morose, depressed and anxious, and of their lives disappearing as they while their time away on the Internet. Others are unsure because of the perceived and real dangers of the online world. With whom are my children communicating? Are they downloading porn? What about the lyrics of the songs they listen to? Or the role models television and the Internet expose them to? What about the easy access to Internet gambling? This is much like the anxiety parents have when their kids travel internationally for the first time. And the comparison is apt. But now kids are setting out at an extremely young age and to places that parents often have no experience of. According to UBC’s Shapka, “Most parents are scared because they don’t know what their kids are doing on the Internet. And, because their skill level is less than the kids, parents don’t know how to approach them”. MNet’s Acting Director Cathy Wing seconds that perception. “Parents blame a lot of things on the technology. Because their children are doing things they don’t understand, they often feel a loss of control and power. In a way kids are doing what they’ve always done — chilling out, taking time on their own, experimenting, taking risks. It’s just that now rather than hopping on your bike, the risks can be global.” Besides feeling somewhat intimidated (or outfoxed) by their children’s greater technological expertise, parents are also busier than they have ever been and even if they have fears, many feel they don’t have the time to do anything about it. The upshot of this is that many kids are “home alone” when it comes to their media use. In fact, a significant proportion of kids say their parents don’t impose any rules on them about TV, videogame, computer or music use. As an example, only 25% of 11-14-year-olds reported having rules about playing videogames and, at an age when their interest in social networking is starting to grow, 50% of youth in this age group surf the Net with no supervision at all. For child psychiatrist Lefebvre, unrestricted media access can sometimes lead to challenges down the road. “I see a lot of kids who have no rules at home, who can spend four or five hours on Saturday playing video games, who have no rules for TV, who have Internet access in their bedrooms so they’re up until two or three in the morning and you know they’re on their way to something else suffering: it might be their school or sports or their health. By the time they start deteriorating it’s almost too late because they’re hooked and it’s a huge deal to unplug the Internet access or move it back to a family room.” Given the siren allure of our media devices, an allure to which children and adults alike are susceptible, what’s the best way to reap their benefits and avoid their possible pitfalls? The well-worn riddle “What makes a good servant but a bad master?” offers a possible solution. “Fire” is still the traditional answer but there are valid reasons these days for considering “electronic media” as an equally appropriate response. It’s true that computers or the Internet or cell phones or televisions do not in and of themselves make us DO — or not do —anything. Nonetheless it is the uses to which these devices are put, both within individual families and by various market forces and industries, that may present us with challenges. At a time of such rapid technological change, our ways of handling our media extensions and our etiquettes for incorporating them into family and social life need fine-tuning. The following are some suggested approaches to help make it more likely that we can have our media without them having us. Give kids age-appropriate rules and negotiate boundaries around media use Research results from various studies are consistent — parents can have impact if they choose to. Their guidance has a definite effect on their children’s behaviour, particularly at younger ages. Those who set rules have kids who spend less time with media and more time reading. Their expectations also shape young people’s Internet experiences. Kids, for instance, who live in homes with no rules about meeting online acquaintances or visiting sites with offensive content are more likely to be sexually harassed.
Help kids become more media literate Kids may be tech-savvy but they are not necessarily worldly wise. Until about six years of age, children are not really able to distinguish between fantasy and reality and up until about the age of ten, they accept the media content they encounter on television, in DVDs etc. at face value. Talking with their parents about what they see and how they feel about it helps them critically examine the content they are exposed to. As Dr, Arlette Lefebvre points out, “Any TV program, even a bad one, can become educational if parents watch it with their kids and mediate and moderate and interpret.” Parents need to understand that the most precious gift they give their children is their time. Similarly, children need to learn how to use the Internet in a safe, responsible and ethical way. They are doing things in an environment they do not necessarily understand, where what’s online can be tracked, traced, saved and lasts forever. Very few kids are discussing their online activities with their parents but it’s important, particularly at younger ages, to know what they’re doing on the Internet and what tools they are using.
By doing this, parents learn about the Internet from their children’s perspective, begin to understand at least part of what they do on the internet, and also create spaces in which they can begin to discuss basic internet etiquette and safer behaviors. In this space, they can begin to critically explore together the content to which children and teens are exposed. Though rules and supervision are important, parental involvement and education are better than any blocking filter or tracking software. Interestingly, kids who participated in MNet focus groups were quite clear that they feel parents overreact to online pornography, especially given its pervasiveness in mainstream content. Rather than technological fixes or blanket bans, they favour education about content so that they can make informed choices about online sites. Two thirds of all kids surveyed want to learn how to tell if online information is true and how to protect their privacy, with this desire being strongest among students in grades four to six. Open discussion is particularly useful at this age since kids tend to be playing on commercial game sites that collect personal information and by grade six, are exploring edgier sites that appeal to teens. Media literacy is now a mandated part of the curriculum in all parts of Canada from the earliest grades through to the end of high school. Since so much of kids’ media use occurs in the home (including cyberbullying), it’s important that parents and teachers work together around children’s use of and knowledge about the media. Helping kids become discerning users is the best way to ensure that they are able to select a balanced media diet. As education professor Jennifer Shapka points out, empowering kids is the first line of defense because the wireless revolution means that young people will be able to access content far from parental supervision. The best controls are the internal ones we develop ourselves. There is little point in instituting media use rules, or educating children about the media, if parents do not model good media behaviours. Kids are best taught media etiquette by consciously and unconsciously observing their parents. Where parents use media ethically and responsibly, children are more likely to do so. So:
Create parents’ groups devoted to protecting kids. Build communities of people who want to create a better environment for our children. Media do not function in a vacuum and neither do our children. But the framework that supports young people and their parents has become increasingly attenuated. For children to flourish, they need parents who are both present and involved, as well as an extended network of caring, including other family members, collective community input from schools and neighbourhood organizations and institutions/rituals which offer children some access to the spiritual dimensions of their natures. Kids need an opportunity to learn about other values besides those served up in various media products. They also need the chance to enact those values in different real-life situations, whether they be drama, sports, interactions with nature, time spent with people of different ages etc. It is this range of embodied experiences, provided by parents and the larger community, which will give young people a more adequate basis for evaluating the media representations and tools which fill their days and nights. Families and Media: The Larger Picture There’s no doubt that parents make a real difference — all the data is consistent in that regard: But parents can’t do it alone. They need help from the culture in which their children grow. And many parents feel that they are trying to raise kids in an atmosphere which is actively working against the best interests of young people. The environmental metaphor is an apt one when considering the societal impact of media industries on the family’s traditional roles of rearing children with certain commonly agreed-upon values. If the air is so polluted that children cannot play outside, is their health solely their parents’ responsibility or are there some serious socio-economic and political deficits to be corrected? By the same token, media industries, including advertisers, are fond of claiming that parents are ultimately responsible for keeping their children safe by monitoring their children’s media choices. At some level this is true but is it also a downloading of social responsibility onto individual families? While various forms of media do not in themselves “make” people do anything, neither do tobacco nor alcohol. And yet, as a society, we have decided that certain measures should be taken to protect the vulnerable as well as the population at large from the dangers that arise from excessive use (and the marketing which encourages that overconsumption). When enough individuals and families are affected, matters often switch from a personal to a public health perspective. Given the pervasive and persuasive influence of our media surround, what strategies can we, as a society, devise to ensure that civic values also have influence in the continuing development of the information/entertainment age? The UNESCO Global Study on Violence suggested three useful jumping-off points:
Electronic media are an inextricable part of the weave of our everyday lives. They are with us, apparently, in some of our most personal moments. For some people, in fact, they are a prerequisite for connection on any level. How well they fulfill that promise is a matter of debate. Some people see connectivity in terms of a village, with all that word implies about intimacy or closeness. For others, a more appropriate metaphor is that of a highway which facilitates fast and efficient transmission. One thing is certain: we are living through a technological revolution which infuses every level of our lives and there is no going back. It’s not clear where we’re going but the young are leading the charge, driving the media industries and markets that are only too eager to capitalize on all the newest advances. Unlike most of their parents, the media embrace feels entirely natural to them. In fact, when detached in some way from their IPODS or their cell phones or their laptops, they are likely to feel somehow less than complete. Sociologist Barry Wellman has indentified what he describes as the growth of “networked individualism” where far-flung communities of interest tend to augment (and sometimes supplant) more densely-knit networks bound together by a common geography and history. The individual, not the household, is now the unit of connectivity. And yet how we use these devices is also a reflection of the values we hold, as individuals, as families and as communities. What will the future be like when today’s digital babies become parents themselves? Will they be able to introduce and educate their children to uses of the technology which are still unknown to us? And how will they integrate the “powers” of these new devices with the ever-more pressing tasks of becoming connected to the earth and other peoples? There is so much we do not know. About what happens to the body in all this: the force of a glance, the information inherent in touch and taste and smell. Or how kids get grounded in their physical beings when their eyes and ears are privileged over all other senses. Or how we might use the power to connect which these electronic media offer us to enhance the power to commune. Good servant, bad master… Information about Ongoing Research Perhaps the only constancy around electronic media is the rapid rate of change. For up-to-date reports on media developments related to children and the family, check the following websites regularly: Media Awareness Network/Réseau éducation medias: www.media-awareness.ca Kaiser Family Foundation: www.kff.org/entmedia/index.cfm Children Now: www.childrennow.org Teenagers @nd the Internet http://educ.ubc.ca/faculty/shapka/InternetStudy/Main.htm Connected Lives Project:
http://educ.ubc.ca/faculty/shapka/InternetStudy/Main.htm Pew Internet & American Life Project www.pewinternet.org 1 For more information about media hubs, see Barry Wellman’s work at 2 As quoted in Pew Internet and American Life Project Presentation: How the Internet is Changing Consumer Behavior and Expectations, www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/64/presentation_ 3 Statistics Canada: Survey of 2005 Household Expenditures, as quoted in The Daily, 4 ibid. 5 Sciadas, George. Our Lives in Digital Times (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2006) p.14 6 Statistics Canada: Survey of 2005 Household Expenditures, as quoted in The Daily, 7 Statistics Canada Telecommunication Statistics, Fourth Quarter 2006 www.statcan.ca 8 Sciadis, p. 18 9 Davidson, Neil. Yahoo News Canada, Jan. 16, 2007 http://ca.news.yahoo.com/sw/capress/ 10 Statistics Canada: Survey of 2005 Household Expenditures, as quoted in The Daily, 11 Media Awarenesss Network: Young Canadians in a Wired World, Phase II, www.media- 12 As quoted in The Daily, Feb. 13 2007 www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070213/d070213b.htm 13 Sciadis, p.14 14 Heritage Canada. Reading and Buying Books for Pleasure: National Survey 2005, p. 13 15 Sigman, Aric. “Visual Voodoo: The Biological Impact of Watching TV”..Biologist, Vol.54, No. 1, p.12 www.iob.org/downloads/1260.pdf 16 Kaiser Family Foundation: Generation M: Media in the lives of 8-18 year olds, p.6) www.kff.org/entmedia/7250.cfm 17 Veenhof, Ben. The Internet: Is It Changing the Way Canadians Spend Their Time? (Statistics Canada, August 2006) See www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/060802/d060802a.htm-21 18 Kaiser Family Foundation, Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers, (2003), p.6 www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/hcast_index.cfm?display= 19 ibid, p.6 20 Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Connected to the Future: A Report on Children's Internet Use (March 2003) www.cpb.org/stations/reports/connected/connected_report.pdf 21 Kaiser Family Foundation, Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers, (2003), p.6 22 Zimmerman, Frederick et al. “Television and DVD/Video Viewing in Children Younger Than 2 Years” Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 2007;161:473-479. 23 “ Toddlers watching too much TV”, May 8, 2007 http://www.news-medical.net/?id=24787) 24 Sigman, Aric,. As quoted in BBC news, Monday, Oct. 3, 2005. www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ 25 Pew internet and American Life Project. Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/198/report_display.asp 26 Pew Internet, ibid. 27 Boyd, Danah, Identity Culture in a Network Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace, pp. 4-5 www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html 28 For more in-depth information about MNet’s Young Canadians in a Wired World, check out http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/research/ycww/index.cfm for an overview including key findings and trends and recommendations. 29 MNet. “How Marketers Target Kids” www.media-awareness.ca/english/parents/marketing/ 30 Kunkel, Dale. “Children and Television Advertising,” Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001) pp.375-393 31 Kirkey, Sharon. “Feeding an Obesity Epidemic”, The Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 21, 2006 32 Canadian Pediatric Society and Media Awareness Network. MediaPulse: A Guide for Health Practitioners (2003) www.media-awareness.ca/english/special_initiatives/media_pulse/ 33 Media Awareness Network. Young Canadians in a Wired World: Trends and Recommendations, p.16
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