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How Media Attract and Affect Youth

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How Media Attract and Affect Youth PLUGGED IN This page intentionally left blank plugged in How Media Attract and Affect Youth Patti M. Valkenburg Jessica Taylor Piotrowski New Haven and London Copyright © 2017 by Yale University. All rights reserved. Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. The author has made an online version of this work available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. It can be accessed through the authors’ Web sites at www.ccam-ascor.nl, www.jessicataylorpiotrowski.com, and www.pattivalkenburg.nl. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Galliard Old Style type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953447 ISBN 978-0-300-21887-9 (cloth : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 FOR PAUL AND JOHN This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Preface ix 1 Youth and Media 1 2 Then and Now 10 3 Themes and Theoretical Perspectives 28 4 Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers 44 5 Children 63 6 Adolescents 78 7 Media and Violence 96 8 Media and Emotions 116 9 Advertising and Commercialism 137 10 Media and Sex 158 11 Media and Education 175 12 Digital Games 195 13 Social Media 218 14 Media and Parenting 244 15 The End 267 viii CONTENTS Notes 277 Acknowledgments 313 Index 315 PREFACE In the past decades, a dazzling number of studies have investigated the effects of old and new media on children and teens. These studies have greatly improved our understanding of why youth are so massively attracted to media. And they have also shown how children and teens can be affected by media, in positive and negative ways. Plugged In provides insight into the most important issues and debates regarding media, children, and teens. Plugged In discusses the dark sides of media, such as the effects of media violence and pornography. But it also discusses their sunny sides, such as the countless opportunities of educational media for learning, and the potential of social media for identity development. Each chapter gives an overview of existing theories and research on a particular topic. This general literature review is occasionally illustrated by our own research findings. The book covers research among infants (up to 1 year old), toddlers (1–3 years), preschoolers (4–5 years), children (5–12 years), and teens or adolescents (12–19 years). Within these general age groups, we sometimes refer to subgroups, such as tweens (8–12 years), early adolescents (12–15 years), and late adolescents (15–19 years). We use the term “youth” to refer to both children and adolescents. Plugged In is based, in part, on Responses to the Screen (Erlbaum, 2004), by Patti Valkenburg. Additionally, it draws on her Dutch book published in 2014 by Prometheus. But whereas that book focused primarily on Dutch data, this one internationalizes and updates both the research and the ix x PREFACE examples of media and tools. Incidentally, doing so was less difficult than we anticipated, because the preferences of youth in Western countries are remarkably homogenous. For example, a cartoon or digital game that is popular in the United States is very likely to be popular in most other westernized countries. We see this book, like Valkenburg’s earlier ones, as an informative device for anyone interested in the study of children, adolescents, and the media. We are grateful that Yale University Press gave us the opportunity to publish an open-access book whose online version is free to students and researchers all over the world. We hope you enjoy reading the book as much as we enjoyed writing it. PLUGGED IN This page intentionally left blank 1 YOUTH AND MEDIA My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you want to get somewhere else you must run at least twice as fast as that. —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871) Over the past few decades, there have been several thousand studies about the effects of media on youth. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, we still have much to learn. In part, the gaps in our knowledge are due to dramatic changes in young people’s media use. In the 1990s, children and teens spent on average four hours a day with media; these estimates have now skyrocketed to an average of six (for children) and nine hours a day (for teens).1 As a matter of fact, today’s children and teens spend more time with media than they do at school. And indeed, some of us are less concerned about what youth are learning in school than about what they are picking up from their many hours with all those screens. Along with the significant growth in media use, the gaps in our knowl- edge are caused by the sweeping and rapid changes in the media landscape. New media and technologies are developing and replacing one another at a dramatic pace. Social media tools that we studied not long ago now seem as old as Methuselah. In 2015, virtually all teens had Facebook accounts, yet even a juggernaut like Facebook has to continually do its best to stay ahead of the competition and not lose its users to newer, more attractive interfaces such as Snapchat, Taptalk, and so forth. Indeed, the truth of the epigraph from Through the Looking-Glass is compelling: in the new media landscape, we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. 1 2 YOUTH AND MEDIA The changes in the media landscape are due not only to the development of new media but also to the repurposing of traditional media. Youth, and adults too, are watching television differently from the way they did in previous decades. They are watching more programs online, recording more programs to watch later, and often using a second screen while they are watching so that they can comment on a show, avoid advertising, or stay in contact with other people. No longer are they watching a series like Pretty Little Liars or Gossip Girl when it is scheduled to air. Now they watch the program when they feel like it, and sometimes for hours at a stretch by “binge viewing” with streaming services such as Netflix or Apple TV, on their television, tablet, or smart- phone. And although most teens are still interested in the news, more than adults sometimes think, watching the evening news on TV and buying the (paper) newspaper is a thing of the past. Teens have become “news grazers”: the vast majority (93 percent) pick up the news from a variety of on- and offline sources, depending on which is most convenient at the moment.2 The commercial environment surrounding youth is experiencing major changes, too. Traditional TV advertising has lost its dominant position. The discrete thirty-second commercial is no longer the best way to reach young people. Instead, advertisers are being forced to create and imple- ment other, often more covert forms of advertising, such as product place- ment and advergames. Today’s James Bond will gladly order a Heineken, and Mad Men’s Don Draper a Canadian Club whiskey, which, according to its makers, has boosted the sales of whiskey among teens. And thanks to cross-media marketing, Dora the Explorer has become more than a TV series; there are Dora apps, Dora games, Dora toys, Dora quilt covers, and Dora websites in dozens of languages. Then there is the world of games. In the 1990s, gaming was considered the domain of teenage boys, but it has increasingly become mainstream for young and old, male and female. Ten years ago, a mention of video games brought with it images of a home computer or a console player such as Nintendo or PlayStation. Games such as Street Fighter, Super Mario Bros, and Counter-Strike are probably among the first to come to mind. When we think of games today, our first thoughts are likely to be Pokémon GO or Candy Crush—games that can be played with smartphones YOUTH AND MEDIA 3 or tablets. Touch-screen technology and the Internet have profoundly influenced what gaming looks like. We see now that even very young children are playing games with their parents’ smartphones, and that the gender divide is changing as girls find their own game spaces in virtual worlds such as Club Penguin and Neopets. Virtual gaming worlds, in general, have spiked in popularity: the game Minecraft is among the highest-grossing apps of all time. This increased access to gaming on touch-screen platforms, combined with a reliance on freemiums (that is, apps that are free to download and rely on advertising and “in-app purchasing”), has provided formidable competition to traditional console game manufacturers. Academic Interest in Youth and Media In parallel with these wide-ranging changes in the media landscape, the topic of youth and media has acquired greater significance in academia, drawing interest from more and more scientific disciplines. Within psychi- atry and pediatric medicine, there are countless studies of the effects of media use on aggressive behavior, attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and obesity.
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