New Media for Children and Young Adults

I have a few pictures and videos that I put in a quick Prezi that I may or may not have time to show during my presentation (I’m guessing most of them will not be seen for reasons of time). Either way, I will at least be able to say that I put a link up on the blog so that people can check some of the stuff out later, at their convenience. Some of it is pretty awesome.

My topic was about imitative gaming peripherals (specifically music ones), but I have a bunch of different photographic examples of interesting peripherals, and some music gaming videos (including trombone and flute hero) at the link….

See them here.

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The late Mitch Hedberg (I was listening to one of his albums this morning on the ferry), has (had?) a joke to the effect of that every book is a children’s book if the kid can read. Which I think is not only a pretty good joke, but a pretty good idea with regards to the way that we think of media, not from the consumption end, but the production end. It doesn’t seem to mean too much to say that a show isn’t a kid’s show, if kids are watching it, or a book isn’t a children’s book if children are reading it. From reading the posts and the article, it seems the important thing isn’t just what is being produced and distributed as media, but how each individual and family negotiates what is acceptable use of the media. The interesting thing to me is that there doesn’t seem to be any overarching consensus on how to consume media; in each instance there are different rules, allowances, broad categories of content that are allowed or restricted.

For my family, I seem to remember (although I am not exactly sure) that we got a half hour a day of tv (no cable) , which we used to watch a cartoon (typically either He-man, or the Transformers). Eventually, at some point the time allowance got put up to an hour, which could be used for gaming or TV.
I can’t even remember when, but at some point my parent’s got basic cable (it may have been my mid teens), and now they have TiVo, which my brother gave them for Xmas, that my dad uses to watch the same amount of TV, only much quicker. For instance, he watches curling, but not the lead and seconds’ shots, and he fast forwards the sweeping parts, watching only when the rock has crossed the hog line.

I’ve forgotten my point.

Was I shaped by my parent’s lack of basic cable? Maybe a little.

I still don’t have cable, but am definitely not one of those people who doesn’t have a tv. I have one. I use it to watch movies and tv shows on DVD, and play games, none of which I do very much anymore, and only late at night, and then very quietly. I have a relationship with television that is similar but different than the one my parents or my siblings have.

When reading the account of the “Eco-conscious” family in Chapter 6 of the International Handbook on Children, Media and Culture, I was struck by how opposite my family’s media experience was. Poor Brenna wasn’t allowed a tv at her mom’s house, which made her feel estranged from media-savvy peers.  While Brenna understood where her mom was coming from, she said that she ultimately expected to have a tv in her own home as an adult.

In my family home, it was hard to get the tv turned off. My parents were impressive media consumers, and not just of tv. Film, books, magazines, newspapers, video games. Almost every spare minute of their non-working lives my parents spent consuming media.Even while sleeping my parents’ and my brother’s tv sets stayed on, probably pumping subliminal consumer messages into their brains.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my family, and I quite enjoy media (mostly books and movies). But as soon as I left home, I got rid of cable, although I have always kept a television set in order to watch an occasional flick. When I visit my parents and brother, the tv is almost always on, and almost always digitally recording shows to be watched later — This Old House for my Dad, American Idol for my Mom, The Daily Show and Colbert Report for my brother. They watch tv while eating (although never when I’m home — I refuse to), they read Entertainment Magazine while watching tv, and they flip through the newspaper while conversing about the latest politics over afternoon coffee. It drives me crazy. Sometimes when I call my mom on Sunday to ask how she is, she replies by relating what movie she saw over the weekend.

My family’s media identity helped shape my own by turning me into a bit of an anti-media advocate. To me, tv-watching, especially, is such a time-sucking, vapid distraction. And I also don’t want to experience life through someone else’s eyes. Instead of consuming media, I would much rather be cooking, having dinner with friends, traveling the world or doing something physical.

Last month, I subscribed to cable for the first time in my adult life because I wanted to host an Oscar party (and because Shaw offered a good $10 a month deal). So far, after the Oscar party, I have only turned on the cable once and it felt so disgusting and invasive of my serene apartment that I unplugged it after an hour and haven’t gone near it since.

I mention all this because I find it interesting that family identity can be shaped by media in seemingly two ways: either the children will adopt their parent’s attitudes about media later on, or they will react to it.  I’ve always been fairly positive that my children will not have access to cable television while growing up (mainly because I selfishly don’t want to have to listen to or watch it myself), but does that mean they will turn into cable-tv-watching addicts?

My television viewing was restricted when I was growing up, but I’d never stopped to consider why, or consider that I might not be alone in my experience. My family didn’t harbour any religious beliefs, like the Ahmed family in the Hoover & Lynn paper; we weren’t trying to distance ourselves from the “mainstream” culture for value reasons or environmental reasons like the Paytons; I wasn’t homeschooled, nor are my parents politically conservative. Maybe it was all those child-rearing and child psychology books of the late 1980s that influenced Mom to make the choices she did in raising me.

Whatever the cause, up until I reached 6^th grade, Mom would put the TV away in the hall closet every summer. I was expected to play outside, or draw, or play Yahtzee with Mom if I was bored. When I grew old enough to become impatient with this rule, I would usually go over to my best friend’s house to watch her TV. She had a television in her room (what luxury!), and was watching R-rated movies at the age of six. A completely different experience from mine – and I thought she was SO lucky.

The removal of the television became a greater and greater bone of contention between Mom and me – finally, I wore her down and she stopped hiding the tube every June. However, she did continue to regulate what I watched. I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV until I was thirteen – I remember my seventeen year old cousin getting in SO much trouble with Mom for letting me watch music videos with her at my grandparents’ place when I was nine. “The Simpsons,” “South Park,” the “Austin Powers” movies, anything starring Anthony Hopkins (why??), “Baywatch,” even “Pete & Pete” and “Ren and Stimpy” on Nickelodeon were “bad” programs, dirty words in my house, and I wasn’t allowed to watch them. So most of the time, when I wasn’t influenced by a friend, I didn’t.

As a result, I knew less than most about the youth culture most of my friends were a part of; I didn’t watch the shows or movies, I didn’t listen to the music that was popular. I was out of the loop and got picked on a little bit because of it.

I didn’t get my taste of the “dark side” (ha ha) of media until we got a computer with Internet. That wasn’t so easy for my mother to regulate, oddly enough. She didn’t think to install a filter or look at my site history. Any knowledge I was lacking in pop culture (or sexual education) at the age of twelve, I more than made up for through the Internet. Would I have encountered the same ideas and images if my mom had just let me watch TV? Perhaps.

As Julia wrote in her comment, in reference to social networking sites, “It is important to remember that these sites aren’t creating new dangers, just new opportunities for children to encounter them.” For me, the “dangers” were the same, but media allowed me much more freedom and leeway. There is already an attitudinal pushback against letting kids use the Internet, like there was against television – what could be the next media that frightens parents?

I have to say that I and my three siblings enjoyed complete unmediated television watching, Internet surfing and game-playing while growing up, but that it was not because my parents had a social or political stance on media that this was so.

Both my parents immigrated to Canada in the early seventies from Korea from poor families. It was here that they bought their first television, first typewriter, first computer and even first refrigerator (there’s a funny story there where my mom buried vats of pickled cabbage in the frozen Winnipeg ground to keep us through the winter). They also worked long hours and, as a result, had little time to sit down and discuss media, school or anything much during the times that we saw them. My grandmother made sure that we were fed, my older brother took care of storytime, my older sister ran child psychology experiments, and teachers taught us about puberty (that one day in class).

My parents did not have the time to learn about television/gaming culture and then educate us on it. Instead, it was usually us, kids, who were expected to explore, learn and then teach back to our parents what we had discovered. My parents also didn’t have the language or cultural knowledge in the beginning to make decisions on what was “age-appropriate” television, so I was left to muddle through Three’s Company innuendo on my own.

I’m not sure how I would approach the issue of television and Internet supervision for any children that I might have. Having only come at this issue fairly recently and always from the perspectives of others, I feel somewhat unsure of it all. I figure that once I’ve formulated a belief system about media for myself, I might be in a better place to inform others.

In retrospect my childhood was very open to different types of media, but this media was oftentimes introduced to me by and shared with my parents. My earliest memories consist of resting against my mother while she read to me “Snow White” for the tenth time, watching my parents install a Sega Genesis, and listening to my Dad introduce us to a brand new, hilarious show, “The Simpsons.” I really liked how the Hoover and Schofield Clark article articulated the different ways families negotiates their relationships with television; the mixed feelings they have towards a device that can be used to articulate their family’s values (113) or, on the other hand, usurping the parental role of guide and authority figure.

Like the Hartmans, my family had certain shows that act as ceremonial family nights, which included shows that were often a bit “adult” for me (“The Simpsons,” “Ally McBeal,” “Biography,” “Sex and the City,” “American Idol,” etc.). Although Dad has dropped the TV habit, I still had an ongoing ritual with my Mom (Martini Night: “Mad Men,” “Gossip Girl,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Brothers and Sisters”) until recently. I do remember different attempts to counter the amount of TV I watched, but I also remember the rules not being entirely successful and, upon the entrance of the internet into our homes, irrelevant.

I also remember television being used to chart my “family in social and cultural terms” (116). Another televised ritual is watching The Ten Commandments every Passover. We also watched other films that reinforced a sense of Jewish history, values or, in the case of “Exodus,” Zionist values. This was important for my family, as we were strongly connected to the Jewish community in Ottawa, a connection that was never really forged with the community in Richmond.

I’m actually quite ambivalent to this; it doesn’t seem right to have a spiritual aspect of my life take the face of Charleton Heston. There’s also the interrogation and metaphysical unspokeness that is lost when you convert anything to film, a text made by humans, starring humans, to be consumed (and thus make people money). And, of course, anything on TV is usually interrupted by commercials. That’s one of my problems with television, as open as I am to different forms of media. What happens when you engage a people’s sense of pride or sorrow and then sell vacuums?

I had no bedtime growing up.  My mom’s motto on media consumption was “Sex is okay, violence isn’t,” which means I got to watch the pottery scene in Ghost at age eight, but not the scene where Swayze gets killed.  I was also the only kid in my primary grade class who was allowed to watch Married With Children.  I don’t think my mom wanted me to watch it as much as she didn’t want to tell me I couldn’t watch it.

I really enjoyed the Hoover and Clark chapter because it essentially tells us why parents have the wacky television rules that they do.  Among other things, Hoover and Clark found that parents mediate the media consumption of their children to help achieve “a larger set of family goals” (118).  These goals include:

1. creating a distinction from mainstream culture
2. accepting some, but not all of cultural norms
3. achieve behaviour that places one within the cultural norm (i.e. – feeling like everyone else)
4. “challenge the very normative way in which most parents think of restricting media use”

Bonnie Ozirny clearly fell into the last category.  I think her strategy was, “Well, I let Shannon watch pretty  much whatever she wants, and she’s not a weirdo” (that’s up for debate, of course).

I guess what I appreciate from this article is that Hoover and Clark do not present a black and white picture of parents: I think it’s easy to assume that there are the parents, like mine, who let their children freely consume mostly anything, and parents who forbid television in favour of chanting naked in the backyard around a wooden sculpture of an unknown deity.  Hoover and Clark’s findings add a bit of depth and complexity to this dichotomy, and I’m very down with that.

NB: I discussed this with my mother and she insists that she does not remember letting me watch the sex scene in Ghost at age 8 – she thinks I was at least 13.  Sure, Bonnie

I have to admit that I enjoyed reading the “Rapid Rise of Social Networking Sites,” not only for it’s brevity but also for it’s poignant paraphrasing of the enigma raised by Children’s Rights.  It’s a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, type of problem (apologies for my non-PG language).  Children are entitled to the “right to freedom of assembly and expression” but they are also entitled to “freedom from harm and privacy from the state, commerce and individuals.”  So which one do you back?  Attempting to ensure both rights is an essential and noble struggle, but how in this day and age of digital media are we supposed to accomplish both?  I’m interested to hear any ideas out there because for me, I can only see New Media Safety and Education as a possible way to balance both ends of the spectrum.  But then, we all know how well received Internet safety classes are at a high-school level.  Sigh.  Who knew children’s librarianship was so exhausting?  I’m going to have to start buying Tylenol by the case.

On a complete side note, I have to say that I love the changing avatars on the blog posts – particularly the Cheshire Cat .  Awesome and amazing.

for anyone interested in exploring the digital divide further, I really encourage you to take the International Issues and Innovations course. I thought it was amazing, a lot of the efforts to overcome the digital divide moved me to tears. But it also made it clear that this is a very complicated topic, and that its hard not to be ethnocentric about what other people need, especially those in developing countries. Linda did an amazing blog site on slums and bridging the digital divide and I think we should all beg her to link it here.

To begin off-tropic, and to hopefully end up somewhere vaguely where this posts along: Reading anything about the internet from 2003 or 2005 always brings to mind how rapidly things change when you’re talking about the internet. Was anyone else feeling a little frustrated when reading “Digital Divide in Canadian Schools”? Parts of the underlying analysis could definitely fit today, but I repeatedly was asking myself, “But does it? And how?” For instance, while they definitely have a point of boys feeling more at home with computers, I wonder how much of that has changed since the explosion of social media?

The key findings from Young Canadians in a Wired World seemed a bit dated as well, but no doubt accurate for its time. I remember I spent far too much time as a teenager in Newgrounds, the locus for new flash games and animation. Don’t get me started on ebaumsworld, though. They sucked.

Ah, memories. Although these two sites exist (Newsgrounds is in the 700s in Alexa, Ebaumsworld 1500), both websites had their heyday in a long ago, pre-Youtube era.

It really makes you want to get into internet historiography.
The rapidly changing landscape of the internet only widens the digital divide. New dialects and cultures are born and trashed in months, and even universal access to the internet does not translate into an entrance to these worlds. For instance, 700s in Alexa? I assume you all understand what I’m referring to not because we have access to the internet, but because we’re in SLAIS and Alexa, the web-ranking engine, has come up several times before.

There is also the question of how the computer is used at home. For instance, it might seem the norm for one family to treat the computer as something to play with. Another family might treat a computer as a tool for work, and there are of course the families that fall in between. How thoroughly a child engages with technology is determined more than anything, I believe, by her immediate familial and social circles.