The article I read for this week’s class is Gutnick, Robb, Takeuchi and Kotler’s 2011 report Always connected: The new digital media habits of young children published by the Sesame Workshop and Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the same organizations working toward literacy projects in West Africa, as in the attached video. No surprise that there are muppets involved, as Joan G. Cooney was one of the co-creators of Sesame Street back in 1969. Many of us growing up in North America will have fond memories of the alphabet, early numeracy and pop culture references thanks to the long-running television show. The extensive study of children (mostly age 0-11) and their media consumption habits reveals that television is still the predominant electronic media form, which must have come as a relief to Public Broadcasters. It should be noted too that most of the data collected was as current as 2010, and there are several references to iPads and other tablets, yet nothing in the data to reflect the tablet’s role in accessing media. I also have the sense that video-on-demand and Internet-based channels (at the time of this report, Netflix was transitioning from mailing rental DVD to web-streaming video). Another report will soon clear up these subtle changes, and who knows how children will be connected to media at that point in history! It is good to see that paper-bound books are still considered a source of media outside of schools.
One troubling aspect of the report comes in at the middle section, starting with page 22 and the section titled “Finding 3: digital divides still exist, in both access to and usage of media” where a number of the studies reveal the differences between socio-economic status and broadly-defined racial groups, in this case black, white and Hispanic. As much as the United States holds onto the “melting pot” theory of cultural assimilation, certainly there is something a little off with these three categories: how is Hispanic a colour? Where do Asian-American and Indigenous people fit in? If the cultural difference are reduced to black and white, is Hispanic the new black? Or the new white? It was hard to take most of these findings seriously, as they seemed to imply the very limited nature of social change towards historically disadvantaged groups. The status quo remains the same, much in the same way as television continues as the number one media source for American children.
From the outset of the Always connected report, the authors state that they are viewing the results as a neutral party (p.7) it is no doubt in the interest of television producers, PBS and commercial alike, that the TV set stay switched on, even when there is nobody in the room to watch it. Parts of this report do warrent particualr attention from parents and educators alike, but it was hard to grasp who should heed the message about the media. Much of the studies cited in this paper are scholarly, but more come from either JGC or Sesame Workshop publications. Last weekend, I picked up a copy of the slightly more academic Simon and Nemeth’s 2012 Digital decision: Choosing the right technology tools for early education education, and I have yet to decide whether it is for educators or deep-pocketed parents. The old adage says not to judge a book by its cover!
By strange coincidence, today marks the start of the Oreo “crazy flavors” campaign, and it seem to better capture the multicultural blending of society that Sesame Street originally intended.