Young People, New Media

Sonia Livingstone and Moira Bovill Young people, new media Research report Original citation: Livingstone, Sonia and Bovill, Moira (1999) Young people, new media: report of the research project Children Young People and the Changing Media Environment. Research report, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK. This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/21177/ Originally available from Media@LSE Available in LSE Research Online: August 2008 © 1999 Sonia Livingstone and Moira Bovill LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. YOUNG PEOPLE NEW MEDIA Sonia Livingstone Moira Bovill London School of Economics and Political Science Report of the Research Project Children Young People and the Changing Media Environment 1999 FOREWORD The Nuffield Foundation Study on Television and Children, the Himmelweit Report as it came to be known, was launched in 1954. The BBC was then running Britain’s only television channel, which remained out-of-reach for significant numbers of people. There were about three-and- a-quarter million licences in operation. It is not easy, even for those who were then working in broadcasting, to recapture the atmosphere of that year. Opposition to the principle of commercial broadcasting was ensuring a rough ride through Parliament for the Bill to create Independent Television. Compared apocalyptically by Lord Reith to the scourge of the Black Death, the first commercial television stations were still a year away. In the era of ‘The Toddlers’ Truce’, hours of broadcasting were heavily restricted. Under the truce, no programmes could be transmitted between 6.00 pm and 7.00 pm on weekdays, allowing the nation to put its smaller children to bed without the distractions of television. By today’s standards, it was a time of relative innocence. Parental responsibility within the setting of family life was much less a subject for constant exhortations than an accepted part of the national culture. The ITC has preserved a letter written in 1957 about television and children to a regional newspaper which the writer felt able to sign with the uncontroversial pseudonym of ‘Bachelor child-lover’.1 Despite the limited amount of television available, anxieties about the medium were widely voiced. Many of the concerns were focussed upon the child-audience, as they had been in the case of the cinema a generation earlier. The child-viewer, it was alleged, was suffering a range of harmful consequences including the loss of sleep, neglect of reading, and incitement to violence. (Anyone inclined to be sceptical, however, should remember that, in 1980, objections were seriously raised to the introduction of breakfast television on the grounds that children would delay their departure for school, heightening their vulnerability to road accidents). The recognition of television’s power to inform and stimulate was inevitably overshadowed. In such a climate, the time was ripe for a positive response from the Nuffield Foundation when the BBC invited it to sponsor an enquiry into television’s impact on children and, coincidentally, on family life. The research team led by Dr. Hilde Himmelweit, then a Reader in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics, acknowledged that much changed in television during the four years the Report took to compile. At the outset, it was still possible to find sizeable numbers of children with no access to television, making comparisons between the two groups still a possibility. The BBC Archives contain a report from a woman invited by the BBC in 1952 to criticise six weeks of children’s programmes. She wrote that she had watched without children, ‘unwilling to take the responsibility of creating an appetite for television which some of the neighbours might have resented’.2 By the time the Report appeared in the middle of 1958, much of the population could watch ITV. Both adults and children were turning to the new network in numbers which deeply embarrassed the BBC, provoking at the end of the decade a strong counter-attack from a much- changed Corporation. The Himmelweit Report caused a considerable stir among the public and among broadcasters. Apart from the details of its research, which in general disproved the more extreme fears about the effects of the medium, it included a number of suggestions for action by parents, teachers, and youth- club leaders on how they might make the best use of television to benefit the children in their care. It was, not surprisingly, the chapter of suggestions for producers which gave pause to the BBC and the ITA, the forebear of the ITC. One suggestion was for an agreement that the BBC and ITV should transmit educational programmes at the same time so that, in a world with only two channels, children might not be tempted to switch to an alternative programme of a different kind. Another was for the certification of programmes as suitable for children. While it was important, for political reasons, that the suggestions were seen to be taken with great seriousness, the broadcasters 1Evening Sentinel, Staffordshire. 2BBC WAC ref.T 16/46. had legitimate interests to protect. While not the least of them was the struggle for profitability by the new and still-incomplete ITV network, there was the shared conviction that television had wider obligations than those it did not deny owing to children. Within a short period, the BBC had established an internal committee, chaired by Cecil McGivern, then the Deputy Director of Television, to review the recommendations. Similar enquiries were conducted by the Independent Television Authority and its franchise-holders. These separate responses to the Report were, however, felt by the BBC and the ITA to be insufficient to convince public opinion of the seriousness with which broadcasters took their responsibilities to the child-audience. They therefore established an independent committee, each contributing four members drawn from their advisory bodies. I had been Secretary to the BBC’s internal enquiry and went on to act in the same capacity for the joint committee, under the chairmanship of May O’Conor, Chairman of the Isle of Wight Education Committee. The Committee was asked, in the light of the conclusions reached within the BBC and ITV, to consider the recommendations for action made in ‘Television and the Child’. Having drafted the Committee’s report, I was subsequently asked to draft a preface for the published version. While polite and complimentary, the preface amounted to a brush-off by the two sponsoring bodies for those proposals, including one for a body of specialist advisers on children’s programmes, which they felt would unduly subordinate the interests of the adult audience to those of child-viewers. Although the place the broadcasters prescribed among the television audience for children was not quite that suggested by Himmelweit and endorsed by the O’Conor Committee, the result of all this activity was to give a new prominence to the production of programmes for children which was to survive, not always without difficulty, for many years. A subsequent Television Act required the ITA to establish a Children’s Advisory Committee and the BBC in 1960 produced a code of practice for children’s programmes. Although the pioneering role of the Himmelweit Report was widely praised in Britain and elsewhere in the world, it never received the ultimate flattery of imitation. It was not until the end of the eighties that I and David Docherty, then my colleague at the Broadcasting Standards Council,3 agreed that we should try to set on foot a new enquiry. Television had, of course, altered profoundly in forty years, so that a replication of the earlier design would have made no sense at all. Docherty and I believed that a change of particular importance had taken place in the way children were coming to regard the television screen. The receiver no longer simply brought them programmes to be watched passively. They were making regular use of the screen for a whole variety of different purposes, with the prospect of many more in the future. It was a phenomenon affecting not only the British. It could be observed in many other parts of the world, including the rest of Europe. However, in one respect the situation could be compared with that in which Hilde Himmelweit and her colleagues began their work in the nineteen-fifties. Many children are still without regular access to the new technologies, but just as television became increasingly pervasive in the years immediately following the launch of the Himmelweit study, so we must expect these technologies, in school and at home, to become everyday realities for more and more children in the next decade. The need to know more about the ways in which children are already using the new technologies and about their impact was all the more urgent. At the start of the 1990's, the broadcasting industry was in turmoil. The ITV companies were coming to terms with the consequences of the latest franchise round and the presence of powerful commercial competition while the BBC, with its finances increasingly straitened, continued to be under political attack. Sociological research, however significant, was not high on the agenda and funding support was lacking.

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