influence of mass media on youth essay

Influence Of Mass Media On Youth Essay

Show More In this paper I will argue that mass media can play a significant role in shaping youth opinion. The media has been one of the things that has had the greatest influence on people. The radio, television and newspaper as well as electronic media, definitely plays a powerful position in spreading information in our society and throughout the world. This road has a vast impact on people and particularly the upcoming generation. Almost thirty some years ago society had television and news with journalists practically all over the world, and electronic feeds from multiple locations. Although we were basically everywhere, it could take a couple weeks or even months to acquire the information on what was going on half way across the world. Eventually technology grew to what it is today. Mass media has numerous ways to influence society at a much faster frequency. T.V.’s and computers have all these options like parental control but those don’t stand a chance to young individuals nowadays. There is multiple ways to bypass these controls if …show more content… concerning sex and violence . Since the youth is the most age group targeted by the media, it’s very important to have this kind of connection at a very early age. While technology demonstrates to be valuable it’s had a gigantic damaging effect on youth. Families definitely need to be involved in order to advance entree into the minds of the younger generation. Caregivers of all different types should be conscious of the impact the media has on our children and youth. This helps to keep life in view and helps to uphold a healthy family image. Monitoring is only but one area of improvement in terms of contact. Having a healthy sense of balance between excessive exposure, as well as some open-air and imagination, are all supportive tools to directing at a young

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The Influence Of Mass Media On Teenagers

It isn’t a controversial statement to make that mass media is arguably the most influential and impressionable force on the lives of young people all over the globe. Overall, the term is used to describe press, radio, television, internet, and literature, all of the various formats that come together to make up what we as a population consume as ‘media’. As technology has advanced throughout the decades, so has the human race’s dependence on its cumulative output, and as result, much conversation has been centred in recent years on the effect and influence that mass media overload can have on young and teenage minds. Is the influence a positive one or a negative one? Does it depend on the specific media being consumed? Does it depend on the individual? These are just three questions; there are so many more on the table. This essay aims to briefly discuss the influence of mass media on teenagers in greater detail.

The first issue that warrants discussion, one that impacts on everything else in an umbrella type fashion, is the simple fact of accessibility that young people have today to all forms of media. Whereas once upon a time the only exposure teenagers might have had was the selected programmes on a handful of television channels and the menu of news selected by broadcasters, there is now an open gate to an entire world of information. On one hand, this can be argued to be a good thing, allowing teens to seek their own media and cultivate their own world education and experience. On the other hand, however, a problem can arise in terms of the quality, authenticity, and safety of the content that they are accessing in this age of ‘fake news’ and internet trolling. Relating back to the key topic word of ‘influence’, it can therefore be argued that the relative freedom teens have to seek out unlimited and unregulated entertainment and information can become a dangerous situation.

Of course, this argument leads in to another key element of the discussion, which is the element of the individual being responsible rather than the available mass media. When it comes to how much time one spends on social media platforms, how much time one spends playing video games, and how much time one spends watching television, those are all choices that are made by the individual. The media is always there ready to be consumed, but ultimately it is the active choice of the person in question how long they allow themselves to be exposed. Of course, the more vulnerable or susceptible a person is, the more likely they are to be influenced, so the dynamic exists as something of a double edged sword.

The issue of addiction is something that is becoming more and more prevalent amongst young people with regards to their relationship with mass media. The last two generations, one could say, have grown up never knowing a world without the kinds of technology that opens up the world to you, and conversely, opens up you to the world. Whereas an adult of 35 years and older might not be so reliant on an online existence, the lives of teenagers in 2018 are so intertwined with Internet activity that they can almost be seen as a captive market. There is no doubting that companies use this modern predicament to promote and push various products, trends, philosophies, and ideologies, to the point where impressionable young people can certainly be influenced by what they are seeing in day in day out.

On the darker, more sinister side of the argument, there is the notion of formats like video games and aggressive music being responsible for influencing and cultivating an air of violence in teenage consumers. Admittedly, there are high profile cases of incidents that bear unfortunate similarities to graphic gaming and media, but given the overwhelming percentage on the contrary, it is hard not to consider this as just another footnote in the wider scope of individual decision and choice over overt mass media influence.

In conclusion, it would be fair to surmise that the issue of mass media having influence over the teenagers of today is one that is never going to be ‘solved’ or placed comfortably in one bracket or another. The wide reaching grasp of the internet and all that it entails is only going in one direction, and that is forwards and upwards. As a result, it is going to be up to teens themselves to mould their own experiences. The will to influence on mass media’s part is transparent and unapologetic, so it is going to remain the responsibility of the individual to determine how much they expose themselves to and how much they allow it to affect them. Of course, as with any topic involving the state of the human mind, nothing is ever as cleat cut as that.

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Article contents

Youth and media culture.

• Stuart R. Poyntz Stuart R. Poyntz Simon Fraser University
•  and  Jennesia Pedri Jennesia Pedri Simon Fraser University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.75
• Published online: 24 January 2018

Media in the 21st century are changing when, where, what, and how young people learn. Some educators, youth researchers, and parents lament this reality; but youth, media culture, and learning nevertheless remain entangled in a rich set of relationships today. These relationships and the anxieties they produce are not new; they echo worries about the consequences of young people’s media attachments that have been around for decades.

These anxieties first appeared in response to the fear that violence, vulgarity, and sexual desire in early popular culture was thought to pose to culture. Others, however, believed that media could be repurposed to have a broader educational impact. This sentiment crept into educational discourses throughout the 1960s in a way that would shift thinking about youth, media culture, and education. For example, it shaped the development of television shows such as Sesame Street as a kind of learning portal. In addition to the idea that youth can learn from the media, educators and activists have also turned to media education as a more direct intervention. Media education addresses how various media operate in and through particular institutions, technologies, texts, and audiences in an effort to affect how young people learn and engage with media culture. These developments have been enhanced by a growing interest in a broad project of literacy. By the 1990s and 2000s, media production became a common feature in media education practices because it was thought to enable young people to learn by doing , rather than just by analyzing or reading texts. This was enabled by the emergence of new digital media technologies that prioritize user participation.

As we have come to read and write media differently in a digital era, however, a new set of problems have arisen that affect how media cultures are understood in relation to learning. Among these issues is how a participatory turn in media culture allows others, including corporations, governments, and predatory individuals, to monitor, survey, coordinate, and guide our activities as never before. Critical media literacy education addresses this context and continues to provide a framework to address the future of youth, media culture and learning.

• media culture
• media literacy
• consumer culture

Introduction

It would be absurd for teenagers today to forgo the Internet as a resource for schoolwork and learning experiences of all sorts. Whether to research an essay, acquire new skills, find an expert, watch a video clip, or contribute a blog post, the Internet is often the first source that students turn to pick up new information, to access useful networks, or to find resources that they need to accomplish whatever it is they want to learn. And why wouldn’t it be? The Internet is now a digital learning economy populated by YouTube and Vimeo channels, social media sites like Wikipedia, software and learning games, library data archives, learning television shows, documentaries, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and assorted other resources that are changing when, where, what, and how young people learn. Some educators, youth researchers, and parents lament this reality (Bakan, 2011 ; Louv, 2008 ), but today’s youth, media culture, and learning are nevertheless entangled in a rich set of relationships.

These relationships and the anxieties that they produce are not new. Since the earliest decades of the 20th century , learning dynamics have been thought to be integral to the way youth and media cultures weave together. But these relationships are vexed; the connections among youth lives, media, and education are sites of tremendous anxiety and concern around the world. Yet learning is now such a profoundly mediated experience that traditional dichotomies separating education and entertainment, work and leisure, expert and nonexpert, and pedagogy and everyday life are no longer helpful.

In this article, we examine this context and address how relations among youth, media culture, and learning have been understood since the turn of the last century. Our story begins in the Anglo-American world, but it has quickly become global as media and youth cultures expand around the world. We highlight the anxieties and panics common to thinking about media in young people’s lives and indicate where and how the mediation of youth learning has been taken up to support progressive ends through the development of novel resources, institutions, and pedagogies that nurture young people’s agency, identities, and citizenship. Our survey examines how specific media forms, including film, television, and Web design, have been calibrated to support young people’s learning through the media, and the development of media literacy education to promote critical learning about the media. To conclude, we detail three major problematics that continue to shape the relationships among youth, media culture, and learning.

Teen Screens

Teenagers graduating from high school in 2017 across the global North and much of the global South have always known smart mobile devices, social media, and YouTube, near-constant data surveillance, the ability to Google facts as needed, and texting, messaging, and posting as part of the regular rhythms of daily life. While many statistics have been collected over the years about the time that adolescents spend immersed in media, the general impression is that most children and youth are more involved than ever with media technologies and content. A new area of children’s and youth media has emerged in recent years. It is a world where the Internet, mobile devices, and “television,” now consumed across multiple platforms, compete for attention alongside older media (i.e., radio, appointment television, and movies). Various studies conducted in recent years have sought to understand these developments, with particular attention given to investigating the role of the Internet, social media, smartphones, and mobile technologies in young people’s lives. Regular television and radio continue to hold a place among teenagers’ media choices, and along with mobile phones, they are part of a primary youth media ecology in the global North and South (Common Sense Media, 2015 ; Livingstone et al., 2014 ).

Today, however, one can no longer assume that television programming is viewed on a television set via regularly scheduled broadcasting. While watching television continues to make up a significant portion of teens’ overall media usage in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other regions (Common Sense Media, 2015 ; Caron et al., 2012 ; Livingstone et al., 2014 ), smart TVs, on-demand services, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and video-streaming services such as YouTube, Netflix, and Baidu have redefined what it means to “watch television.” Because the options for consuming content now exist simultaneously across many platforms, there is also a significant amount of diversity in young people’s preferences and patterns of use. Music, for example, remains the most preferred medium among teens, but among only about one-third of teens (30%). After music, video games are a favorite among 15%, reading among 10%, social media among 10%, and television among 9%. The fragmenting of tastes and preferences is notable, with no single medium standing out above all. Added to this is the diversity of ways that teens can engage in these activities, as well as differences in relation to class, gender, and race/ethnicity (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). The point to be made is that changes in how young people spend time with the media are taking place as part of longer-term trends in how media is knit into adolescents’ lives.

At the center of this trend is the fact that young people simply have more media options—both in terms of the media technology used and the content available—and these options are tightly wedded to the daily lives of children and youth. For instance, 57% of teens in the United States have a television set in their bedroom, 47% have a laptop computer, 37% have a tablet, and 31% have a portable game player (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). Sonia Livingstone ( 2009 , p. 21) identifies these technologies with “screen-rich ‘bedroom cultures,’” which have become the norm for kids in countries across the global North. Adding to and fostering media use in screen-rich bedroom cultures is the fact that two-thirds of teens (67%) now own their own smartphone, on which they talk and text, access social media (40%), and listen to music in daily patterns and rhythms (Common Sense Media, 2015 ).

With all these media options available, it is not surprising that teens are more likely than in the past to be media multitaskers, able to pack more media into an hour of consumption than was possible in previous generations. Young people in the United States spend approximately nine hours a day consuming media, for example, but they consume more than one medium at a time. In fact, 50% of teens say that they watch television while doing homework, and 51% say that they use social media some of or all the time when they do homework (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). The typical teenage user today is someone doing homework while watching Netflix, listening to music, and responding to the occasional text, Snapchat, or Instagram message. In this way, screens do not go away as much as they have become environmental in youths’ lives.

This story casts a pall over contemporary youth cultures for some. It is as though the media machine is never absent from youths’ time and space. It is attached to and formative of the worlds of young people, and it would appear to allow for no distance or time away from screens and representations in everyday life. Concerns of this sort are not new. They echo panicked worries about the consequences of young people’s media attachments that have existed for decades. To make sense of these worries, it is helpful to begin with the history of youth and youth culture, terms which are not exclusive to, but find an early emergence in, the West.

Youth as a Distinct Life Stage

The concept of youth can feel as though it has been with us for centuries. But while the age of transition between childhood and adulthood exists across societies, the idea that this period is associated with a particular group of people—youth—and the cultures that they partake in is a recent phenomenon. Andy Bennett (Bennett & Kahn-Harris, 2004 ) tells us that historical instances of what we now call “youth culture” can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries to a group of London apprentices whose dress, drinking, and riotous conduct set them apart from others. Early youth cultures can also be linked to stylistically distinct groups of young workers in northern England in the late 19th century , and to what Timothy Gilfoyle ( 2004 , p. 870) calls the “street rats and gutter snipes” of New York City, who developed oppositional subcultures to challenge adult authority from the mid- 19th century onward. But it wasn’t until the turn of the last century that a modern notion of youth took hold. Schooling would be key to this development.

Publicly funded or supported schooling on a mass scale was regularized in the United Kingdom by the late 19th century and had been ongoing in the United States in the post–Civil War period (i.e., after 1860–1865 ). Public schools developed around the same time in French and English Canada, and slightly later ( 1880 ) in Australia. The practice of batching students into groups by age contributed to the emergence of a new subject position linked to the teen years. If schools started this process, worries about delinquency served to consolidate the notion of youth as a stage of development. Juvenile crime in particular, initially considered primarily an affliction of poor and working-class youth, became generalized by the 1890s as juvenile delinquency and applied to all youth (Gillis, 1974 ). The fear of rising crime rates led to legislative action and the expansion of welfare provisions in the United Kingdom and the United States. The resulting system of social services addressed adolescents as a particular age cohort with specific interests and needs (Osgerby, 2004 ).

By the early 20th century , in psychology and pedagogy studies, G. Stanley Hall’s seminal text, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, and Education (Hall, 1904 ) addressed this stage of life as a specific period of development associated with tumult and uncertainty—the sturm and drang of adolescence. Thinking of adolescence in these terms reflected the worries of legislators, educators, and reformers, but it was not until the early 1940s that the notion of youth culture was coined by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons ( 1942 ). Parsons used the phrase youth culture to name a specific generational cohort experiencing distinct processes of socialization that set them apart from others. Fears about young people’s maladjustment to war during the 1940s continued to feed worries about youth delinquency (Gilbert, 1986 ). But more significantly, a series of changes in the social, economic, and cultural lives of adolescents that began prior to World War II and consolidated during the postwar years proved essential to marking out a modern notion of youth culture.

Media and consumer markets were integral to these changes. From the start of the 20th century , mass media were among the key developments shaping youth culture and learning. This was evident in the United Kingdom and the United States, where industrialization and mass consumer markets emerged earlier than in other nations. This reveals something about the characteristics of youth culture; in many ways, youth cultures (dance, music, fashion, sports, etc.) have always been mediated and shaped by the effects of mass production, wage labor relations, and urban experience. In this way, youth and modernity are tightly connected. Modernity is linked to experiences of change driven by urbanization and migration, the expansion of mass, factory-based production, and the proliferation of images and consumerism as normative conditions of everyday life. Since the late 19th and early 20th centuries , youth have been harbingers of these developments and have often been considered the archetypical subject of modernity.

Early Mass Media and Youth Audiences

The tendency to link youth with the changes characterized by modernity has produced a history of anxieties where the relationships among youth, media culture, and education are concerned. These anxieties first appeared in response to the violence, vulgarity, and sexual desire in early popular culture (e.g., penny novels and mass sporting events, like Major League Baseball), which many educators thought posed an imminent threat to culture. The emergence of the cinema at the turn of the 20th century epitomized these fears by forever changing the nature of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. Movies can be understood with little tuition, meaning that they can fix the attention of all age groups on the screen, a development that proved particularly attractive to children. Early cinematographers were able to stage dramas on a scale unheard of in live theater, to command an audience much greater than literature could, and hence to shape the popular imagination as never before. But because movies work through the language of images, they were thought to create highly emotional—and intellectually deceitful—effects. Images were thought to leave audiences (particularly young people) in something like a trance, a state of passivity that left adolescents open to forms of manipulation that were morally suspect and politically dangerous.

These fears were common, and yet for some, the very fact that movies could reach larger and more diverse audiences—including women and the working class—meant that the medium held a promise for learning that couldn’t be ignored. Such responses not only reflected the sentiment of early film boosters, but they also were part of a more nuanced sense of how life—including the experience of learning—was changing in the 20th century . In a remarkable series of essays, Walter Benjamin ( 1969 , 1970 ) argued thus, suggesting that movies could widen audiences’ horizons through the unique technology of the shot, the power of editing, and sound design. These tools allowed people to see and experience distant lands, other times, and new and fantastical experiences in live-action and highly structured narrative formats. Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush ( 1925 ), MGM’s The Great Ziegfeld ( 1936 ), and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz ( 1939 ) exemplified film’s early appeal because they seemed capable of helping people to dream and escape vicariously from everyday experiences to imagine a different (and perhaps better) world.

Not surprisingly, Benjamin’s was a minority view in the mid- 20th century . Far more common were fears that modern media would serve to undermine how young people learn proper culture—meaning good books and the right music and stories thought to foster a vibrant and meaningful cultural life. Benjamin’s colleagues in the Frankfurt School (so-called for the city where their work began), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, were especially influential in this regard. Drawing from their experiences with the role that media (i.e., radio and film) played in the rise of fascism in Germany, as well as their disappointment with the quality of early popular music and Hollywood movies, Adorno and Horkheimer ( 1972 ) argued that the culture industries (the artifacts and experiences produced by the corporations who sold or transmitted film, popular music, magazines, and radio) threatened to undermine rich and autonomous forms of cultural life. They meant that movies, advertisements, and eventually television were signs of the commodification of culture, an indication that culture itself—epitomized by the rich European traditions of classical music, painting, and literature—was being reduced to a sellable thing, a commodity just like any other in capitalist societies.

In this context, Adorno and Horkheimer suggested that culture no longer works to promote critical and autonomous thought; rather, the culture industries promote sameness, a uniformity of experience and a standardization of life that at best serve to distract people from significant issues of the day. Through childish illusion and fantasy, the culture industries produce false consciousness, a form of thinking that misinterprets the real issues that matter in our lives, leaving young people and adults blissfully unaware of key issues of common concern that demand our attention and action. For those suspicious of these observations, they are worth considering in light of Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States in 2016 . Since the election, it has become clear that distraction (by “fake news,” for instance) and illusion (facilitated at least in part by foreign manipulation of social media) played a vital role in the campaign and Trump’s eventual election.

Youth Markets and Media Panics

The concerns of the Frankfurt School found a receptive audience in the second half of the 20th century . The postwar decades mark an especially significant period of expansion in youth markets and youth culture in the West (Osgerby, 2004 ). Increasing birth rates during the postwar baby boom fueled the expansion of youth markets, as did the extension of mass schooling, which “accentuated youth as a generational cohort” (Osgerby, 2004 , p. 16). Complicating this were the emergence of television and an intensely organized effort to shape and calibrate the spending power of young people in the service of conspicuous consumer consumption.

First introduced to the general public at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, in the postwar years, television became a new kind of hearth around which parents and children would gather. In the United States, television was initially thought potentially promising for children’s education. The small screen represented the promise and possibility of modern times. Not surprisingly, this sentiment was short lived (Goldfarb, 2002 ). By the late 1950s and 1960s, it became apparent that “most children’s programming was produced with the size of the audience rather than children’s education in mind. [As a result,] television [became] the source of anxious discourses about mesmerized children entranced by mindless cartoons, punctuated by messages from paying sponsors” (Kline, Stewart, & Murphy, 2006 , p. 132; also see Kline, 1993 ). These worries aligned with increasing concerns about the dangerous and morally compromising influence of rock ‘n’ roll, popular magazines, early celebrities, and movies in youths’ lives, and what resulted was a media panic that harkened back to the earliest days of mass media.

Most often characterized by exaggerated claims about the impact of popular commercial culture on children and youth, media panics are a special kind of moral frenzy over the influence of media on vulnerable populations (Drotner, 1999 ). Stanley Cohen’s groundbreaking study of the mods and rockers, Folk Devils and Moral Panics , suggests that emerging youth cultures became the most recurrent type of moral panic in Britain after World War II (Cohen, 1972 ). He reveals how youth are positioned in postwar industrial societies as a source of fear and often misplaced anxiety. His study has been criticized for simplifying the meaning of the term moral panics and for underestimating how complex media environments can shape them (McRobbie & Thornton, 1995 ); nonetheless, his work draws attention to the ways that overwrought fears of youth and media culture can come to act as stand-ins for larger social anxieties. In the process, youth and youth culture become scapegoats. Media panics don’t offer helpful tools for explaining social change, in other words, as much as they distract parents, educators, and others from making sense of the formative conditions shaping young lives.

Media panics continued to appear throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In the United Kingdom, for instance, media panics arose around “video nasties” and the risks that horror films and sexually explicit material were thought to pose for youth (Oswell, 2002 ). Related concerns arose in the 1990s regarding video games and violence, the presence of dangerous and disturbing messages buried in the lyrics of popular music, and fears about fantasy board games, including Dungeons and Dragons . More recently, anxieties have come to the fore having to do with the role of the Internet and social media in young people’s lives, including fears of “stranger danger,” cyberbullying, and the likelihood that teenagers are sharing explicit images of themselves and others online (i.e., “sexting”).

We note these fears not to dismiss them outright, but to draw attention to the history of anxieties that have characterized worries about youth and media culture. Such concerns are often underpinned by the view that young people are vulnerable and highly impressionable persons unable to manage the impact of media in their lives. Indeed, the wariness of public officials, parents, health practitioners, and educators toward media is still today often underpinned by deeper commitments to a sense that youth is a time of innocence and hope. Whether understood biologically as a period of maturation toward adulthood or as a distinct generational cohort characterized by shared processes of socialization, adolescence has long been a repository for both the greatest hopes and fears of a nation. While youth are often considered a risk to society and the reproduction of social order, they also have long been framed in connection with the future health and well-being of nations. The result is that youth often occupy a contradictory space in relation to media culture (Drotner, 1999 ).

On the one hand, popular media culture has been a vital resource through which youth communities, subcultures, and generations have defined themselves, their desires, and their hopes and dreams for decades. This continues to be reflected in the dynamic ways that youth are using and creating digital media to shape their lives and address matters of common concern in societies around the world. We take up these developments in more detail later in this article.

On the other hand, it is evident that consumerism and commercial media culture remain sources of tremendous anxiety. The media content that teenagers access—beyond the watchful eye of guardians and educators—and the way that they learn about gender, race, sexuality, the environment, and other issues continues to raise alarms. From at least the 1980s onward, the quantity of media culture has expanded around the world, meaning that more advertising, more commercial screens, more branded experiences of play, and more intensive systems of corporate surveillance and tracking have become common features of youths’ lives.

The digitization of media and the emergence of more dynamic, participatory media cultures (Jenkins, 2006 ) are crucial to this development, as we explain in the final section. But changes in media concentration and the development of vast media conglomerates—including Google, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, Baidu, and News Corp—that produce media commodities and experiences for various national markets have been instrumental in shaping the tensions and impact of media culture on youth lives. It is just these sorts of developments that have long raised the concerns of educators and others who remain deeply ambivalent about the relationship between consumer media and young people. The consequence of this ambivalence has led some educators to argue that media, including film, television, and the Internet, can have a broader educational impact, particularly given their ability to reach large audiences. In the following sections, we take up this possibility and address how learning media and media education have been developed to create forms of public pedagogy with the potential to enrich young people’s learning.

The Media as Learning Portal

While the ties between consumer culture and media continue to raise worries, television’s reach and increasingly central role in families have drawn the attention of educators who argue that it can be repurposed to have a broader educational impact. This sentiment crept into educational discourses throughout the 1960s in a way that would shift the thinking about youth, media culture, and education. Educational media programming was not a new idea in the decade so much as it extended and contributed to an older tradition of using stories and folk tales to teach moral lessons to children (Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ). What was different in the 1960s (and today), however, is that this work wasn’t (and isn’t) being undertaken around the local hearth; it was (and is) developing through the conventions, institutions, and practices of a highly complex media system.

Using this media system to create successful learning resources has been a delicate business. The idea of using radio and documentary movies as informational (and often didactic) educational tools to teach kids social studies, geography, and history has a long tradition in national schooling systems. More dynamic forms of educational programming came online in the late 1960s, led by a then-remarkable new program called Sesame Street that came to epitomize these developments.

Created by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in 1969 as part of the so-called American war on poverty (Spring, 2009 ), Sesame Street helped launch the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the United States as a counterweight to the influence of commercial programming in the American mediasphere. Originated by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, Sesame Street drew lessons from early children’s television programming in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom (Coulter, 2016 ) and set out to promote peaceful multicultural societies and to provide inner-city kids with a head start in developing literacy and numeracy skills. To do this, the now well-known strategy was to adapt conventions of commercial media—muppets, music, animation, live-action film, special effects, and visits from celebrities—to deliver mass literacy to home audiences.

By the late 1990s, approximately 40% of all American children aged 2–5 watched Sesame Street weekly. From the 2000s onward, the reach of Sesame Street became global, extending to 120 countries and including many foreign-language adaptations developed with local educators in Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Palestine, Russia, South Africa, and many other places (Spring, 2009 ). With global audiences, the show’s storylines and issues addressed have also changed. Sesame Street is now engaged in raising awareness and understanding about a host of global issues. For instance, in the South African coproduction, a muppet named Kami who is HIV-positive was introduced in response to the large numbers of South African children who are HIV-positive. Through Kami and related stories, the goal of the program is “to create tolerance of HIV-positive children and disseminate information about the disease” across South Africa” (Spring, 2009 , p. 80). Meanwhile in Bangladesh, the local version of Sesame Street has been used to promote “equality between social classes, genders, castes, and religions” (Spring, 2009 , p. 80).

This success led to the development of other CTW educational programs, including The Electric Company , 3-2-1 Contact , and Square One TV . A conviction that electronic and digital media can support progressive educational goals has also fueled the development of a learning media industry over the past two decades. We are in fact witnessing a veritable explosion of educational media, including an array of educational learning software ( Math Blaster , JumpStart , Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego , etc.) designed to improve older students’ competencies (Ito, 2008 ). Some of this media may be useful, but evidence about the learning value of many of these programs remains scant (Barbaro, 2008 ). On the other hand, at least three other forms of educational media have continued to develop, and in ways that can be beneficial to youth learning. They include public service announcements (PSAs), entertainment education, and cultural jamming.

Public Service Announcements

Public service announcements (PSAs) are now ubiquitous. They can be seen in schools, on television, online, and at commercial film screenings. They address issues ranging from the dangers of smoking, alcohol, and drugs, to concerns about youth driving habits, bullying in schools, what children are eating, and a host of other media-related social causes and health crises. At root, the strategy with PSAs isn’t altogether different from that of learning-oriented programs like Sesame Street . While the broad research and learning agenda that informs Sesame Street isn’t often replicated with PSAs, the idea that commercial media language can be repurposed to influence behavior is common to both formats.

PSAs use the language of advertising—quick, emotional, and sometimes funny messages that emphasize hard-hitting lessons—and the practices of branding to alter behavior or encourage youth to get involved with issues shaping their lives. Studies suggest these strategies can be remarkably effective for influencing young people’s behavior (Montgomery, 2007 , 2008 ; Wakefield, Flay, Nichter, & Giovino, 2003 ; Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ; DeJong & Winston, 1990 ). Wakefield et al. ( 2003 ) for instance, review a number of studies that show antismoking PSAs are useful tools for changing kids’ attitudes, especially when combined with school support programs that help youth to quit or avoid smoking.

These successes are important, of course, because they attest to the ways that learning through media can be nurtured in creative, dynamic, and effective ways, even in a time when media saturation is common in youth lives. A cautionary note is nonetheless in order. PSAs have become so common today that companies are using PSA-like formats to promote everything from cars to personal care products. The personal health products company, Unilever Inc., for instance, has been especially successful with their Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty.” Cutting across online platforms as well as television and film, the campaign has foregrounded the way that beauty ads create unrealistic notions about women’s body images. This is an important message, to be sure; however, while this campaign was underway, Unilever launched an equally provocative campaign for AXE body products for men. What stood out in the latter campaign was precisely the opposite message about women’s body images; AXE ads in fact seemed to suggest that women matter only when their appearance corresponds to a rather tired and old set of stereotypes. This doesn’t necessarily undermine the value of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, but it does suggest that the value of PSAs (particularly when developed as singular learning resources) may be waning as this style of communication becomes just one more strategy for channeling commercial messages to youth.

Entertainment Education

Another strategy, often called entertainment education , has a similarly long history in both the global North and South (Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ; Tufte, 2004 ). Distinct from the more explicit focus of learning TV and PSA campaigns, this strategy takes advantage of the fact that it has been clear for some time that youth negotiate their identities and values through popular media representations and celebrity identifications. Because of this, educators and youth activists have turned to network programming (e.g., Dawson’s Creek , MTV’s Real People , and Glee ), as well as teen magazines (e.g., Teen People and Seventeen ) as vehicles for developing storylines and articles that address issues in youth’s lives. Similar practices are evident around the world. In India, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa, for instance, popular television formats like soap operas and youth dramas (e.g., Soul City and Soul Brothers in South Africa) have been used to raise awareness and change unhealthy behaviors related to a host of issues, including child poverty, community health, HIV-AIDS, and gun violence.

In a related vein, the Kaiser Foundation in the United States has been influential in the development of a multinational set of entertainment education programs on HIV-AIDS in partnership with the United Nations. Since 2004 , the Kaiser Foundation has partnered with the United Nations, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Russia’s Gazprom-Media, Rupert Murdoch’s Star Group Ltd. in India, and more than 10 other media companies to develop a Global AIDS initiative. This eventually led to the integration of HIV-AIDS messages into various programs watched by young people, including a reality series in India modeled on American Idol , called Indian Idol (Montgomery, 2007 ). Similarly, series like the Degrassi franchise in Canada and the United States have addressed issues such as family violence, school shootings, mental illness, and questions about sexuality (Byers, 2008 ). Other series, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer , have ventured into similar territory, and while many educators are perhaps wary of the close working partnership between commercial broadcasters and producers in entertainment education, others note that the very success of this kind of programming demonstrates that media culture can be more than entertainment; it can be a form of meaningful pedagogy that helps young people engage in real social, cultural, and political debate.

Culture Jamming

Fomenting social, cultural, and political debate has been the objective of a third strategy used by educators and progressives concerned about youth, media culture, and education. Culture jamming draws on a long tradition of using media techniques with satire and parody “to draw attention to what may otherwise go unnoticed” in society (Meikle, 2007 , p. 168). Antecedents to culture jamming include the anti-Nazi dada posters of John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld) and the détournment tactics of the Situationist Movement of the mid-1950s and 1960s, which sought to dismantle the world of commercial media culture that transforms “[e]verything that [is] directly lived . . . into a representation” (Debord, 1994 , p. 1).

Culture jammers frequently argue that our lives are dominated by a vast electronic and digital field of multimodal texts (images, audio, and now hypertext and hyperlinks), and the only way to respond is to use the design methods (pastiche, bricolage, parody, and montage) and genres (advertising, journalism, and filmmaking) that characterize commercial media to challenge media power and taken-for-granted assumptions within contemporary culture (Kenway & Bullen, 2008 ). Mark Dery ( 1993 , p. 1) calls this a form of “semiological guerrilla warfare,” through which culture jammers fight the status quo by using the principles of media culture to upend the meanings and assumptions operating in this culture.

Perhaps the most common and popular form of culture jamming is the sub-vertisement that groups like Adbusters have made popular. Sub-vertisements use popular references and techniques in branding campaigns to turn the meaning of logos, branded characters, and signs (like the Absolut Vodka bottle) on their heads. (See http://adbusters.org/spoofads/index.php for a gallery of examples that target fast food culture, alcohol and fashion ads, and political communication.) Other groups, including the Yes Men , have developed another culture-jamming strategy based around highly elaborate spoofs of websites, media interviews, and public corporate communications. Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping is yet another example of culture jamming. Reverend Billy and his allies use impromptu, guerrilla theater tactics to raise awareness of the deleterious effects of consumerism (i.e., sweat shop labor, debt, climate degradation, etc.) in society. The idea behind this and similar work is to use fun yet subversive tactics to offer radical commentary about common images, brands, and ideas that circulate in our lives. These learning practices are open to all, of course, but they have been especially relevant among educators eager to address critical issues about youth media culture.

Media Education and Direct Interventions in Youth Learning

Learning media aims to educate people through various media forms, and while this continues to be a popular strategy, for more than 80 years educators and activists have also turned to more direct interventions to affect how young people learn and engage with media culture. Media literacy education addresses how media operates in and through particular institutions, technologies, texts, and audiences. In its early development, media education tended to position schools and teachers as the defenders of traditional culture and impressionable youths. Early relationships among youths, media cultures, and education were framed around a reactionary stance that implored educators to protect youth from the media. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson ( 1933 ) were the first to champion this protectionist phase of media education in their book Culture and Environment , which is credited as the first set of proposals for systematic teaching about mass media in schools. Leavis and Thompson’s work includes a strong prejudice against American popular culture and mass media in general and reflects the aspirations for early media education within schools to inoculate young people against media messages to protect literary (i.e., high) culture from the commoditization lamented by mass culture theorists (Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012 ).

These sentiments remained strong into the early 1960s, but much as learning media took a new and compelling turn in this decade, so too did media education. Fueling this trend was the belief that educators could adapt curricula and teaching practices to the increasing role of commercial television and movies in young people’s lives. In the United Kingdom, this sentiment led educators to develop a screen education movement based around the critical use of movies in classrooms. Drawing from the influential work of Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy ( 1957 ) and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society ( 1958 ), the purpose of screen education was to study the popular media that teenagers were watching so that they would be in a better position to understand their own situation in the world, including the causes of their alienation and marginalization.

A similar desire to help youth see connections between school and everyday life motivated early initiatives in media education in Australia and Canada. Pedagogically, this led to the development of film analysis and film production courses, which drew inspiration from cultural shifts in the way that movies were understood. No longer seen simply as forms of entertainment, film education focused on the way that popular Hollywood movies (e.g., Easy Rider and Medium Cool in 1969 ) reflected social and cultural values and were thus thought deserving of critical attention. This meant teaching students to understand the language of cinema and the ways that movies engage and shape prospects for social and political change.

As an outgrowth of this work, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the first sustained period of institutionalization of media education. Key curricular documents were produced, and media education entered the school curricula in many countries in a formal way for the first time. The Canadian province of Ontario led the way, mandating the teaching of media literacy in the high school English curriculum in 1987 . Eventually K–12 students across Canada would receive some form of media education by the end of the 1990s. Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, the late 1980s witnessed the integration of media education into the curriculum as an examinable subject for students pursuing university entrance. This helped to fuel the popularity of courses in media studies, film studies, and communication studies in schools, and by the 1990s and 2000s, additional intermediate courses in media studies were added to the curriculum.

In Australia, the late 1980s and 1990s marked a period of expansion in school-based production and media education training, in part because such training was seen to be an ideal way to equip young people with the technical skills and competencies needed to compete in a globally competitive, highly mediated world (Edith, 2003 ; McMahon & Edith, 1999 ). Similarly, in various non-English-speaking countries, including Norway, Sweden, and Finland, media literacy developed and expanded throughout the 1990s (Tufte, 1999 ).

Even when not included in the formal curriculum, media education became a pedagogical practice of teachers aware of the impact of the media in the lives of their students. In particular, in those countries in the global South where the broader educational needs of the society were still focused on getting children to school and teaching basic literacy and numeracy, media education may not have emerged in the mandated curriculum, but teachers were drawing on media education strategies to help youth make sense of and affect their worlds.

In the United States, school-based media education initiatives were slower to get off the ground. In 1978 , in response to children’s increasing television consumption, the Parents-Teachers Association (PTA) convinced the U.S. Office of Education to launch a research and development initiative on the effects of commercial television on young people. In short order, this initiative led the Office of Education to recommend a national curriculum to enhance students’ understanding of commercials, their ability to distinguish fact from fiction, the recognition of competing points of view in programs, an understanding of the style and formats in public affairs programming, and the ability to understand the relationship between television and printed materials (Kline et al., 2006 ).

Ultimately, attempts to implement this curriculum were hampered in the early 1980s as President Ronald Reagan’s move to deregulate the communications industry challenged efforts to develop media education in U.S. schools. Nonetheless, these early developments proved crucial in establishing the ground from which more recent media education initiatives have grown. Robert Kubey ( 2003 ) noted that as of 2000 , all 50 states included some education about the media in core curricular areas such as English, social studies, history, civics, health, and consumer education.

Beyond schools, a number of key nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have developed over the past two decades and have promoted dynamic forms of media education. The Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), a national membership organization chartered in 2001 to organize and host the National Media Education Conference every two years and to promote professional development, is of particular note. So too are the Media Education Foundation (MEF), which produces some of the most important media education resources in North America, and the Centre for Media Literacy (CML), which offers a helpful MediaLit Kit to promote teaching and learning in a media age.

Literacy and Production

While often led by educators, parents, and young people, these developments in media education have been enhanced by interest in a broad project of literacy. The role and discussion of literacy discourse in media education go back to at least the early 1970s in the United States (Kline et al., 2006 ). As media education has internationalized, however, there has been a tendency to turn to literacy metaphors to conceptualize the kinds of media learning enabled through media education. As media education has increasingly become part of school curricula, the language of literacies also has been a familiar and useful framework to situate classroom (and out-of-school) practices. The New London Group’s ( 1996 ) “pedagaogy of multiple literacies” has been especially influential, offering a framework to address the diverse modalities of literacy (thus, multiple literacies) in complex media cultures, alongside a focus on the design and development of critical media education curricula.

While the New London Group’s work has helped to support the development of media literacy education in an era of multimodal texts, the arrival of the personal computer and the emergence of the Internet have been accompanied by the proliferation of a whole host of digital media technologies (e.g., cameras, visual and audio editing systems, distribution platforms, etc.), encouraging the integration of youth media production into the work of media education. Media production has an impressive history in the field of media literacy education going back to at least the 1960s, when experiments with 16-mm film production in community groups and schools were part of early film education initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other countries. By the 1990s and 2000s, media production became a common feature in media education practices because it was thought to enable young people to learn by doing , rather than just by analyzing or reading media texts. Newly accessible broadcasting (or narrowcasting) opportunities made available through Web 2.0 platforms (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, wiki spaces, etc.) accelerated these developments, encouraging the growth of information training programs in schools that focus on Web design, software training, and mastering camera skills in ways that emphasize technological mastery as an end in itself.

The turn to information training is perhaps not surprising, but while technical skills training can help young people to learn key competencies that may lead to job prospects, technical training on its own misrepresents the critical and civic concerns that have long animated media literacy education. How the civic and political involvement of youth are emerging inside highly engaging digital media cultures is one of three major issues examined in the next and final section of this article, where we address pressing questions about contemporary relationships among youth, media culture, and learning.

Contemporary Issues in Youth Media Culture and Education

Recent questions about youth and media culture are tangled up with the participatory condition common to network societies (Sterne, Coleman, Ross, Barney, & Tembeck, 2016 ; Castells, 1996 ). The age of mass media was preoccupied with problems of representation, atomization, homogenization, and manipulation, and these problems defined the thinking about youth consumption and commercial culture in much of the 20th century . This is reflected in the anxieties and studies noted earlier in this article. As we have come to read and write media differently in a digital era, however, a new set of problems has arisen (Chun, 2016 ). Among these is the new role of participation and a participatory turn in media culture that has enabled users (or those we used to call audiences ) to become more active and involved with brands, franchises, celebrities, technologies, and social media networks across everyday life (Jenkins, 2006 ). This turn is evidenced by the increasing amount of time that youth spend with screens, but it is also a function of the way that many of us now interact with media culture. Audiences have always been actively involved with still and moving images, celebrities, sports, and popular music, among other artifacts. Fan cultures exemplify this, as do studies of how real-life audiences talk about and use media (Buckingham, 1993 ; Williams, 2003 ; Silverstone, 2001 ; Scannell, 1989 ; Radway, 1984 ).

But today we are called on to participate in digital media culture in new ways. Participation has become a condition that is “both environmental (a state of affairs) and normative (a binding principle of right action)” (p. vii), and our digital technologies and highly concentrated media industries are woven into the fabric of this state of affairs (Sterne et al., 2016 , p. vii). “These media allow a growing number of people to access, modify, store, circulate, and share media content” in ways that have been available only to professionals or a select few in the past (Sterne et al., 2016 , p. viii). As digitalization has changed the nature of media production, we have not only become more involved and active in our media use, but our interaction with digital media has allowed others to interact with us in new and sometimes troubling ways. This is the paradox of the participatory condition, and it shapes how youth media culture and education are connected today.

Issue 1: Surveillance, Branding, and the Production of Youth

To begin with, the pointy end of the participatory paradox has to do with the way that digital media cultures allow others, including corporations, governments, and predatory individuals, to monitor, survey, coordinate, and guide our activities as never before. With our data footprint, states, political parties, media, toy, and technology companies (as well as health, insurance, and a host of other industries) become data aggregation units that map and monitor youth behavior to interact with, brand, and modify this behavior for profitable ends. Big data enables the production of complex algorithms that produce what Wendy Chun ( 2016 , p. 363) calls “a universe of dramas” that dominate our attention economies. These dramas (the stories, celebrities, associations, and products with which we interact) are “co-produced transnationally by corporations and states through intertwining databases of action and unique identifiers.” Databases and identifiers enable algorithms to target, engage, and integrate a diverse range of youth into the global imaginary of consumer celebrity cultures and the archives of surveillance states (Chun, 2016 ). The American former military contractor and dissident Edward Snowden draws our attention to this universe in the documentary CitizenFour , which tells his story, and makes clear that instead of governments and corporations being accountable to us, we are now, regularly and without knowing it, accountable to them (Snowden, 2016 ).

Compounding these concerns, strangers can now access youth in ways that magnify the potential damage done by the pointy end of the participatory paradox. Fears about stranger danger and cyberbullying have been especially acute in recent years, and while these fears are not new (Poyntz, 2013a ), they have been central to panicked reactions among parents, educators, and others wary of youth media culture. These fears are often connected to worries about online content that young people now access, including vast troves of pornography available at the click of a button, as well as worrying online sites that promote hate, terrorism, and the radicalization of youth. The actual merits of concerns about who is accessing youth and what content they are accessing are sometimes difficult to gauge; nonetheless, it remains the case that for the foreseeable future, one of the fundamental issues shaping relationships between youth, media culture, and education is how and through what means youth are produced and made ready to participate in contemporary promotional and surveillance cultures—particularly when this happens for the benefit of people and institutions that exercise immense and often dubious power in young lives.

Issue 2—Creative Media and Youth Producing Politics

On the other end of the participatory paradox is a second issue shaping youth, media culture, and learning. While network societies produce new risk conditions (like those noted previously) for teenagers, digital media undoubtedly have enabled new forms of creative participation and media production that are changing how youth agency and activism operate. Mobile phones, cameras, editing platforms, and distribution networks have become more easily accessible for young people across the global North and South in recent years, and as this has happened, youth have gained opportunities to create, circulate, collaborate, and connect with others to address civic issues and matters of broad personal and public concern in ways that simply have not been available in the past. Since the mid-1990s, online media worlds have emerged as counterenvironments that afford teenagers a rich and inviting sphere of digitally mediated experiences to explore their imaginations, hopes, and desires (Giroux, 2011 ).

The fact that young people’s online worlds are dominated by the plots and affective commodities of commercial corporations means that these worlds can foster a culture of choice and personalized goods that encourage youth to act in highly individualized ways (Livingstone, 2009 ). But the skills and networks that teens nurture online can be publicly relevant (Boyd, 2014 ; Ito et al., 2015 ). The Internet, social media, and other digital resources have in fact become central to new kinds of participatory politics and shared civic spaces that are emerging as an outgrowth and extension of young people’s cultural experiences and activities (Ito et al., 2015 ; Soep, 2014 ; Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2014 ; Poyntz, 2017 ; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012 ; Bakardjieva, 2010 ).

These practices extend a history of youth actions wherein culture and cultural texts have been drawn on to contest politics and power (including issues of gender, class, race, sexuality, and ability) and matters of public concern (including climate change and the rights of indigenous communities). Youth who lack representation and recognition in formal political institutions and practices often turn to culture and cultural texts to contest politics and power (Williams, 1958 ; Dimitriadis, 2009 ; Maira & Soep, 2005 ; McRobbie, 1993 ; Hebdige, 1979 ; Hall & Jefferson, 1976 ). Recently, these tendencies have been evident in the actions of the Black Lives Matter movement , which has produced an array of cultural expressions, including a video story archive and a remarkable photo library that lays bare the experiences and hopes of a movement that aims to be “an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”

Beyond North America, in Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Chile, Spain, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and other places, a range of bottom-up communication for social change practices has been part of epochal political actions and assemblies often led by students and other young people demanding government action on social justice and economic and human rights (Dencik & Leistert, 2015 ; Tufte et al., 2013 ). The contexts for these actions are complex, but in general, they point to instances where political cultures are emerging from young people’s cultural experiences and learning, challenging the meaning, representation, and response of those in power to matters of public concern.

More generally, across a range of youth communities, peer networks, and affinity associations, participatory media cultures are enabling levels of engagement, circulation, and cultural production by young people that are altering relationships between youth creative acts and political life. Kahne et al., 2014 have described these emerging practices as part of a wave of participatory politics that include a cross-section of actions that often extend across global communities. Examples include consumer activism (e.g., product boycotting) and lifestyle politics (e.g., vegetarianism); groups like the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), which use characters and social justice themes from the novels to encourage connections between cultural and civic life; a community gathered around the Nerdfighters , a YouTube channel and movement organized around John and Hank Green and their mission to “decrease world suck”; fascinating examples of participatory storytelling, including the use of video memes by and about undocumented immigrant youth to draw attention to lives that have largely disappeared from mainstream media culture; and youth-driven campaigns and petitions organized in conjunction with groups like Change.org and Openmedia.ca to challenge public policy and focus attention on major injustices by institutions and officials using memes, videos, and mobile phone recordings of violence, inequity, and exploitation (Ito et al., 2015 ).

In addition to politically mobilized youth and youth drawn into mediated politics through cultural pastimes, there is evidence that youth connections to politics are being nurtured further by a diverse range of community youth media initiatives and groups that have emerged in cities across the global North and South over the past 20 years (Poyntz, 2013b , 2017 ; Asthana, 2015 ; Tufte et al., 2013 ; Tyner, 2009 ). Such community groups are part of a response to the risk conditions that shape contemporary life. They are crucial to negotiating citizenship in highly mediated cultures and for addressing digital divides to equip young people with the resources and networks necessary to manage and respond to experiences of change, injustice, violence, and possibility.

Community youth media production groups are part of an informal cultural learning sector that is an increasingly significant part of the work of provision for socially excluded youth. These groups are of many types, but they are symptomatic of a participatory media culture in which new possibilities and new opportunities have arisen to nurture youth creativity and political action. How to foster these developments through media education and the challenges confronting these efforts represents the third major issue shaping connections between youth, media culture, and learning today.

Issue 3—Youth, Media Learning, and Media Education

Media literacy education refers to learning “a set of competencies that enable one to interpret media texts and institutions, to make media of [one’s] own, and to recognize and engage with the social and political influence of media in everyday life” (Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012 , p. 1). We might debate this definition, but the larger point is that since at least the mid-1990s, media literacy education has made many gains in school curricula and among community groups and social movements, as noted previously (Skinner, Hackett, & Poyntz, 2015 ). At the same time, the challenges facing media literacy education are significant. For instance, the massive and relentless turn to instrumental forms of technical and creative learning in the service of job markets and competitive global positioning in formal schooling has mitigated the impact of critical media education.

Over the past two decades, a broad set of changes in schooling environments around the world have increasingly put a premium on preparing teenagers to be globally competitive, employable subjects (McDougal, 2014 ). In this context, the lure of media training in the service of work initiatives and labor market preparation is strong; thus, there has been a tendency in school and community-based media projects and organizations to focus on questions of culture and industry know-how (i.e., knowing and making media for the culture industries), as opposed to the work of public engagement and media reform. This orientation has been further encouraged by a return to basics and standardized testing across educational policy and practice, which has encouraged a move away from citizen-learning curricula (Westheimer, 2011 ; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004 ). These developments have led to efforts to redefine media education in the English curriculum in the United Kingdom, in ways that discourage critical media analysis and production (Buckingham, 2014 ).

In like fashion, the pressure to return to more traditional forms of learning has led to education policies in the United States, Australia, and parts of Canada that are intended to dissuade critical and/or citizen-oriented learning practices in schools (Poyntz, 2015 ; Hoechsmann & DeWaard, 2015 ). Poyntz ( 2013 ) has indicated elsewhere how this orientation shapes the projects of some community media groups working with young people, but the upshot is that instrumental media learning has come to complicate and sometimes frustrate how media literacy education is used to intervene in relationships among youth, media culture, and learning (Livingstone, 2009 ; Sefton-Screen, 2006 ).

This situation has been complicated further as the field of media literacy education has evolved to become a global discourse composed of a range of sometimes contradictory practices, modalities, objectives, and traditions (McDougall, 2014 ). The globalization of media literacy education has been a welcome development and is no doubt a consequence of the globalization of communication systems and the intensification of consumerism among young people around the world. But if the result of this development has been an outpouring of policy discussions, policy papers, and pilot studies across Europe, North America, Asia, and other regions (Frau-Meigs & Torrent, 2009 ), this has at the same time also produced a complex field of media literacy practices and models that have led to a generalization (and even one suspects a depoliticization) of the field. This has happened as efforts have emerged to weave media literacy education into disparate education systems and media institutions (Poyntz, 2015 ).

As the proliferation of media literacies has been underway, a raft of new media forms and practices—including cross-media, transmedia, and spreadable media (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013 ) have also encouraged the production of a myriad of discourses about “ digital literacy, new media literacy [and] transmedia literacy” (McDougall, 2014 , p. 6). These and similar developments have ensured that media literacy education remains a contested field of objectives and meanings. While this can be interesting for academics, it may be less than encouraging for young people, educators, and others eager to draw on media education to affect contemporary relationships between youth, media culture, and learning. And let it be noted that the impact of these developments is not only relevant to the ways that youth negotiate media culture, but also to the future of democracy itself.

Concluding Thoughts

Media cultures have come to play a significant role in the way that young people go about making meaning in the world; this is especially true of how knowledge is shared and acquired. As a result, media are part of the continual shaping and reshaping of what learning resources look like. Both inside and outside the classroom, young people are increasingly able, even expected, to utilize the vast number of resources now available to them. Yet, many of these resources now foster worry rather than learning. The fact that “Google it,” for instance is now a common phrase referring to the act of information seeking is in itself telling; a distinct culture of learning has emerged from the development of the Internet and other media technologies. In fact, many young people today have never experienced learning without the ability to “Google it.” Yet this very culture of learning is indistinguishable from an American multinational technology company that is not beholden to the idea of a “public good.” If the project of education is not just to be for the benefit of a select few, but for society and a healthy democracy as a whole, however, then these contradictions must be engaged. So while media cultures are a significant feature of young people’s lives, it is becoming clear that media cultures have augured complicated relationships between youth and education in ways that are not easily reconciled.

The project of media education is not without its own set of challenges and contradictions, including those highlighted in this article. But it remains indispensable if educators, parents, and researchers are to support young people in navigating learning environments and imagining democratic futures.

Acknowledgments

Parts of this article have been adapted from Hoechsmann et al. ( 2012 ).

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Studying Media Effects on Children and Youth: Improving Methods and Measures: Workshop Summary (2006)

Chapter: 1 introduction, chapter 1 introduction.

The presence and intensity of media influences—television, radio, music, computers, films, videos, and the Internet—are increasingly recognized as an important part of the social ecology of children and youth, and these influences have become more visible and volatile in recent decades. Research that explores the level and effects of media influences calls for measurements of the quantity and character of exposure to a variety of potentially overlapping media sources, an analysis of the content of the media output, and examination of the social context and relationships that are associated with the media experience.

Additional effort is needed to develop theories that can identify underlying processes and mechanisms that link media influences to outcomes. Outcomes in turn call for tools that can measure, evaluate, and help explain how certain media experiences influence, and are influenced by, health and behavioral factors as well as cognitive and developmental processes. Methodologies from a variety of disciplines— communications, economics, neuroscience, pediatrics, and psychology, to name a few— have been applied to these questions, and a strong body of research and valuable findings has emerged. Nevertheless, the field is relatively young and many methodological and theoretical questions remain, even as new digital technologies continue to pose unique challenges to researchers.

While current media studies focus on the social environment of the millennium generation, there is nothing new in adults being worried about corrupting influences on young people. Early Greek philosophers argued about the relative merits of a focus on rhetoric in the education of their youth at the expense of reason and understanding. When novels were first published during the eighteenth century, many people were concerned that readers, especially the young, would be corrupted by the licentious and immoral behavior described, as well as by the indolent lifestyle they perceived novel readers to follow. By the twentieth century, the potential causes for concern had proliferated dramatically. Today, media experiences seem to expand by the month, and while much of the concern about their influence on young people may represent older worries in new forms, the media ecology of today’s children and youth also presents a new frontier that offers unique challenges for research studies.

A child born in the 1930s might have spent as much as several hours a week listening to the radio; reading comic books, newspapers, or magazines; or watching a film at a local theatre. Since television was first introduced in the 1950s, the number of hours young people spend interacting in some way with media, as well as the range and capabilities of the many devices and activities that could be considered media experiences, have increased to an extent far beyond the imagining of today’s grandparents when they were young. Children today use electronic media from two to five hours daily, and infants—even in utero—are regularly exposed to a variety of media

stimuli. This pervasive experience has raised many questions about how media exposure, content, and context influence young people’s health, development, and behavior.

Researchers are increasingly concerned not only with how much time children spend with the media in general, but also with how they apportion their exposure over different sources and types of media. Furthermore, interest is growing in examining how the experience with media exposure, content, and context has changed over the decades in response to new media features and technologies as well as reflecting other social and economic trends. As an increasingly pervasive and vibrant part of the social ecology of children and youth, media influences have drawn the attention of parents, practitioners, and policy makers who seek to curb risky exposures as well as to identify ways to promote positive media practices that can foster healthy development.

These questions are extremely complicated to investigate. Recognizing the importance of this research, the Board on Children, Youth, and Families, under the auspices of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, and with the sponsorship of the Henry J.Kaiser Family Foundation, held a workshop in March 2006. Its purpose was twofold: to examine the quality of the measures used in studies of the effects of media on children’s health and development and to identify gaps in both research and practice. The goal was for a variety of experts to consider steps and strategies that could move this research forward and improve its utility for helping parents, practitioners, and policy makers guide young people in navigating a media-rich environment.

The specific charge to the Program Committee for a Workshop on Improving Research on Interactive Media and Children’s Health, which planned the workshop, was to consider:

The nature of key research literatures that examine different types of media exposure among children and youth; as well as the types of behaviors and interactions associated with media use (including television, video games, computers, cell phones, and the Internet);

The strengths and limitations of different types of measures used in studies of media, children, and youth; and

Opportunities and strategies for developing one or more studies in this field that can inform the development of research, policy, and practice guidelines regarding media use, content, controls, and guidance for children and youth.

The committee met once by phone and collaborated via electronic mail to develop strategies for describing how media research is conducted and the methodological issues it poses. This planning effort prompted the development of two background papers and a subsequent day-long discussion that included sessions on the state of the art in current measures of media exposure; the research designs, tools, and frameworks used in social epidemiological and prevention research; and the role of theory in explaining relationships among media exposure and outcomes. In this way the committee was able to represent a variety of perspectives, even though the available time would not allow for comprehensive coverage of any of the issues.

This report provides a summary of that discussion, supplemented with information from two papers prepared for the workshop, which are available at

< http://www.bocyf.org/030206.html >. It begins with an examination of the potential impact of media exposure, followed by a description of the basic research questions and the methods currently used to study them. Methodological questions and challenges and theoretical approaches are described; they are discussed from the perspective of other kinds of epidemiological research. The report closes with a discussion of future directions for the field.

The presence and intensity of media influences television, radio, music, computers, films, videos, and the Internet are increasingly recognized as an important part of the social ecology of children and youth, and these influences have become more visible and volatile in recent decades. Research that explores the level and effects of media influences calls for measurements of the quantity and character of exposure to a variety of potentially overlapping media sources, an analysis of the content of the media output, and examination of the social context and relationships that are associated with the media experience.

Recognizing the importance of this research, the Board on Children, Youth, and Families, under the auspices of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, and with the sponsorship of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, held a workshop in March 2006. Its purpose was twofold: to examine the quality of the measures used in studies of the effects of media on children's health and development and to identify gaps in both research and practice. The goal was for a variety of experts to consider steps and strategies that could move this research forward and improve its utility for helping parents, practitioners, and policy makers guide young people in navigating a media-rich environment.

Studying Media Effects on Children and Youth provides a summary of that discussion, supplemented with information from two papers prepared for the workshop. It begins with an examination of the potential impact of media exposure, followed by a description of the basic research questions and the methods currently used to study them. Methodological questions and challenges and theoretical approaches are described; they are discussed from the perspective of other kinds of epidemiological research. This report closes with a discussion of future directions for the field.

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Social Inequality, Childhood and the Media pp 45–75 Cite as

The Role of Media Within Young People’s Socialisation: A Theoretical Approach

• Ingrid Paus-Hasebrink 6 ,
• Jasmin Kulterer 7 &
• Philip Sinner 8  
• Open Access
• First Online: 17 January 2019

37k Accesses

Part of the book series: Transforming Communications – Studies in Cross-Media Research ((TCSCMR))

The study is based on a praxeological research perspective on the processes involved in the media socialisation of children and adolescents. It treats the socialisation as a dynamic and interlinked process acting on both the individual child and the relevant social contexts. Our approach is, therefore, focused on the lifeworld of a child in the family, where everyday life happens and where, most importantly, media activity is already being endowed with meaning in early childhood. This approach to media socialisation allows researchers to understand the subjective nature of a child’s media practices (providing a link to his/her family), as well as his/her options for action , outlines for action , and competences for action . Using these three central analytical concepts, the role of the media, against the backdrop of socio-structural conditions, becomes understandable, in as far as it relates to the interlinkage of subjective perceptions, orientations motivating action and everyday life practices.

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3.1 Introduction

Contemporary societies are characterised by rapid social change, which is furthered by developments in media and technology. Mediatization, as a societal meta-process (Krotz & Hepp, 2013 ; Livingstone & Lunt, 2014 ), is regarded as a highly “transformative process” (Silverstone, 2002 , p. 761); it refers to “how changes occur when communication patterns are transformed due to the communication tools and technologies” (Lundby, 2014 , p. 3). Mediatization has not only changed the everyday lives of adults but accompanies far-reaching changes in the lives of children and adolescents. In Western societies at least, media are omnipresent companions in the everyday lives of young people, at home and at school, during training and in leisure time. From the earliest years of childhood, today’s young people are confronted with media devices and media content in a vast diversity that would have been nearly inconceivable in previous generations. Rideout refers to the growth in media activities among children as “phenomenal” ( 2016 , p. 138). As with adult life, contemporary childhood and youth are, in their essence, deeply mediatised (Hasebrink & Paus-Hasebrink, 2013 ; Livingstone, 2014 ). Such increasing mediatization means that we need to understand how it is transforming the interplay of structural and individual aspects in everyday life for young people (see Hoffmann, Krotz, & Reißmann, 2017 , p. 7). What does this mean for research that sets out to understand young people’s socialisation ?

Due to the increasing relevance of mediatization in society as a whole, and for young people in particular, scholars have to pay attention to the ways in which adolescents relate to media in the course of their everyday socialisation: “It seems rather obvious to state that children’s use of media and exposure to media content does not happen in a vacuum, it occurs in the wider contexts in which they live their lives” (Vandewater, 2013 , p. 51). Therefore, researching the role of media in socialisation requires an integrative approach that conceptualises socialisation as a contextual, interwoven process, in which children and adolescents construct their approach to life against the background of the specific social place, in which they grow up, and of their psycho-social development as individuals. On this basis, we will argue that we need to conceptualise and operationalise socialisation in terms of the interaction between the individual child, or, respectively, adolescent, and the relevant contexts of its growing up. This seems necessary because of the two parent disciplines underpinning previous research on socialisation: psychology, which discusses the individual side of socialisation processes, and sociology, which sheds light on the socio-structural side. Both have long been characterised by their isolated and specific disciplinary perspectives (for a deeper insight, see Prout, 2008 ). They do, however, have two things in common: firstly, viewing several socialisation agents as “next to” others (for examples of this, see Prout et al., 2015 ), particularly parents and peers, educational institutions and extracurricular socialisation agents, and such as youth centres, secondly, by and large they do not attend to media at all. This is unsatisfactory because children grow up in interwoven contexts, all of which are saturated by media.

Before we look at socialisation processes as they relate to media and communications, we will discuss the relevant perspectives of psychology and sociology, in order to bolster our argument on the need for an interactive perspective on the process of socialisation in general.

3.2 Socialisation from Different Disciplinary Perspectives

Psychology and/or sociology have developed theories on socialisation from an individual and/or societal perspective, and further research on socialisation processes derives from them.

Many contemporary theories and models dealing with the psychology of personality have substantial biological components (Krueger & Johnson, 2010 ). And a field recently become popular, neuroscience and genetics, also offers insights, which play an important role in understanding human behaviour (Grusec & Hastings, 2015 , p. xii). Here, the focus is on the interdependence between biological conditions and experiences, an issue also relevant in socialisation research. While we acknowledge the relevance of biological conditions, we will not discuss them in more detail, because our main objective in this chapter is to conceptualise the way children are situated in their relevant contexts.

3.2.1 Socialisation from a Psychological Perspective

From the psychological perspective, socialisation has been described using such examples as the maturationist theory (for example, Gesell, 1933 ), constructivist theories (for example, Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 1962 ; Piaget, 1980 ; Wygotski, 1977 ), psychodynamic theories (for example, Freud, see Mayer, 2017 ; Erikson, 1959 , 1968 ; Adler, see Hoffman, 1994 ) and ecological theory (for example, Bronfenbrenner, 1977 , 1979 ).

The history of psychology suggests that psychoanalysis has tended to neglect how people perform as active agents. The perspective of agency has not been considered relevant in the psychology of perception and in cognitive psychology until the cognitive turn of the last forty years. These theories then proceeded to reject biological models of personality development and instead examined social and societal influences, returning to the active subject as premise. Agency has also been considered relevant in the developmental psychology pioneered by Piaget, which focuses on the “physical, cognitive, and social-emotional changes that occur during the life span” (Piotrowski & Valkenburg, 2016 , p. 1). Bronfenbrenner developed Piaget’s thoughts into an “ecological model” to place the ecology of human development in the context “of the progressive, mutual accommodation, throughout the life span, between a growing human organism and the changing immediate environments in which it lives, as this process is affected by relations obtaining within and between these immediate settings, as well as the larger social contexts, both formal and informal, in which the settings are embedded” ( 1977 , p. 514). This viewpoint sees human development taking place within “a set of social contexts, including local ones such as family, household and neighbourhood, and more distant ones such as social structure and policy” (Prout, 2008 , p. 28). The revised Ecological Systems Theory (EST) (Neal & Neal, 2013 ) describes children’s development in the context of several environmental systems, which can be seen as an overlapping arrangement of structures. This model constructs social contexts as “environments”, in which individuals develop their identities on the basis of social patterns. According to these theories, socialisation is a “bidirectional process” (Smetana, Robinson, & Rote, 2015 , p. 60): “The shift is part of the more general change from the top-down perspective of early behaviourists and psychoanalytic theories to interactive viewpoints which place increasing emphasis on the agency of the child as well as the parent in socialization” (Maccoby, 2015 , p. 25). However, EST does not cover the process of transforming social contexts into personal characteristics.

3.2.2 Socialisation from a Sociological Perspective

Sociology’s initial theories on socialisation considered how an individual may internalise successfully social values and norms (Abels, 2015 ). Abels emphasised that the verb “to socialise” had first arisen in 1846 and meant “to make fit for living in society” (Abels, 2015 , p. 51). Sociology looked for aspects of social order (for example, Cooley, 1902 ); Simmel ( 1908 ) and researched different forms of sociality and social control. For many years, sociology focused on individuals as objects (or even victims) of external, societally determined influences on their socialisation. According to a functionalist point of view (Durkheim, 1972 ), individuals were believed to simply adopt the roles given to them. Parsons focused on the relevance of the roles and norms dominating society; in this sense socialisation means integration into a social order as default setting (Parsons, 1951 ).

However, the concept of socialisation has changed since the end of the 1960s, initiated by the idea of an “active subject” (see for overview Hurrelmann, Bauer, Grundmann, & Walper, 2015 ). Theories of action were developed by Berger and Luckmann ( 1966 ), who based their work on Weber (see Schöllgen, 1998 ), and Mead ( 1934 ). Berger and Luckmann outlined the reality of everyday life as “an intersubjective world, a world that I share with others” ( 1966 , p. 37). They showed how social reality is constituted through social actions and can be understood as the practice of everyday life, which, in turn, influences the development of individual actors.

During the 1980s, the socialisation researcher Klaus Hurrelmann ( 2009 ) developed these insights into a model of “productive processing of reality” that connects sociological and psychological elements. Hurrelmann states that “personality does not form independently from society any of its functions or dimensions but is continuously being shaped, in a concrete, historically conveyed life world, throughout the entire space of the life span” (Hurrelmann, 2009 , p. 42). This model puts the human subject into a social and ecological context, which is subjectively perceived and processed. While the social and ecological contexts influence individuals, the latter also always influence, change and co-create the former (Hurrelmann & Bauer, 2015 ). Thus, this approach is characterised by a multi-dimensional perspective, taking into account both subjective and objective factors of personality development. The objective factors are the circumstances of the social and physical environment (exterior reality), whereas the subjective factors encompass a subject’s bodily and mental qualities and traits (interior reality). From this perspective, children are neither “becomings” nor “full beings” (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998 ) but “active constructers of social knowledge” (Laible, Thomson, & Froimson, 2015 , p. 47).

Whether emphasis is placed on individual or social perspectives, socialisation is always an “interactive process” (Hurrelmann & Bauer, 2015 , p. 146) and is contextualised in a dynamic process of interwoven macro and microstructural factors within the framework of social interaction between individuals and the specific social context of their everyday lives. Specific practices of socialisation are mainly developed in social contexts (for example, family, peers or friendships), in institutional contexts (for example, kindergarten, schools, job training), or in non-institutional, recreational contexts. Communicative practices, including media-based practices, are developed as integral parts of these social practices.

3.2.3 Perspectives on the Process of Socialisation in Media and Communications Research

Media and communications research provides rich empirical evidence on young people’s use of media devices and products (for example, Lauricella, Cingel, Blackwell, Wartella, & Conway, 2014 ; Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010 ). Particularly in recent years, many researchers have fundamentally questioned how children use media within their process of identity construction (Buckingham, 2008 ; see Hoffmann et al., 2017 , p. 6).

Studies show that children and adolescents use media to acquire a view of the world, to build contacts with peers and friends, and to deal with the self (Paus-Hasebrink, 2010 ; Subrahmanyam & Šmahel, 2011 ). As agencies of symbols and meanings, media offer children orientation and the potential for identification (Lemish, 2007 ; Livingstone & Bovill, 2001 ; Paus-Hasebrink & Kulterer, 2014 ), and the internet offers a particularly wide range of opportunities for self-presentation. When using “the Internet the self is presented without bodily presence [(…]), the presentation of the self requires resources to mediate not only the setting and appearance but also the manners, the dramatic realization” (Skaar, 2009 , p. 252).

Media can have a supporting function in young people’s socialisation and further the development of social understanding (Livingstone, d’Haenens, & Hasebrink, 2001 , p. 5; Paus-Hasebrink & Kulterer, 2014 ). This “means they can offer children stimuli and suggestions for an active engagement with themselves and their surroundings” (Charlton & Neumann, 1986 , p. 32). In formal education, inserting “popular culture, media and/or new technologies into the communications, language and literacy curriculum have a positive effect on the motivation and engagement of children in learning” (Marsh et al., 2005 , p. 6).

In addition, many researchers have, particularly in recent years, questioned how, given the background of different social contexts they are involved in, children and adolescents make sense of media within their everyday life. So, such research fundamentally investigates how children use media within their process of identity construction (Buckingham, 2008 ; see Hofmann et al., 2017 , p. 6). Here, Drotner, and Livingstone ( 2008 ) and Lemish ( 2013 ), for example, have made a positive advance by demonstrating how research is needed to “strengthen the depth of contextualisation within studies of media and of childhood both in theoretical and empirical terms” (Drotner & Livingstone, 2008 , p. 4). With reference to increasing mediatization, we have to take transformation processes within the interplay of structural and individual aspects of young people’s everyday life into account and show how they interact (see Hofmann et al., 2017 , p. 7). Therefore, it is not sufficient to do cross-sectional research only, because this cannot trace how socialisation processes occur over a number of years and indicate which roles different media play within this process. In order to understand young people holistically as they engage in a range of specific social contexts (see Furlong & Davies, 2012 ), we need, on the one hand, a theoretical approach, taking into account immediate and broader social contexts and providing deeper insights into the interplay between relevant contexts within the process of socialisation (James, 2013 ). These questions correspond to Ien Ang’s understanding of contextualism ( 2006 ). As she emphasises, the key challenge for such an approach is to identify the relevant contexts, which shape the structure of the child’s everyday life (Ang, 2006 , p. 69). On the other hand, we need a methodology which is able to empirically show how the process of transfer between social contexts and personal characteristics—and vice versa—takes place within young people’s socialisation processes as they grow up, in order to illustrate these interactions in relation to the role of media within socialisation. Against this background, we intend to deal more broadly with socialisation within children’s and adolescents’ relevant socio-cultural contexts (see Wartella et al., 2016 ) and to shed light on the role of media in today’s mediatised socialisation. This approach takes account of the fact that media infiltrate all contexts of socialisation, considered here as a contextual, interlinked process. In it, children and adolescents construct their approach to life against the background of the specific social situation in which they are growing up and of their individual biological and psycho-social development.

In order to examine these processes, we will firstly discuss the concept of developmental tasks. Secondly, we will focus on the family as the most relevant social context for most children and adolescents, which at the same time also reflects the other social contexts, such as peers and friendships, institutional contexts like kindergarten, school, job training and non-institutional, recreational contexts. Thirdly, we propose, therefore, a praxeological approach built on three analytical concepts developed by Paus-Hasebrink (see, for example, Paus-Hasebrink, 2017 , 2018 ), which help to analyse the interaction between the individual child and its social contexts and are based on Bourdieu’s “Theory of Practice” ( 1977 ; see also Weiß, 2000 ).

3.3 On the Role of Developmental Tasks in the Framework of Socialisation Processes

At the centre of an adolescent’s socialisation is the process of identity formation, in which it develops its personal as well as its social identity (Erikson, 1968 ; Krappmann, 2016 ). According to Erikson, identity construction is a basis for growing up: “In the social jungle of human existence there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity” (1970). Against the theoretical framework of developmental tasks, as presented by Havighurst ( 1972 ), children grow up and learn to deal with the age-specific challenges they encounter in their everyday lives. Development is conceived of as a learning or working process. In order to cope with the relevant developmental tasks related to the different stages of growing up and with various daily life experiences, young people seek to acquire expertise. Hence the process of growing up is built on dealing un/successfully with developmental tasks, for example building stable social relationships with peers and dealing with the self. “Erving Goffman describes ‘the presentation of self in everyday life’ ( 1959 ) as a perpetual process of social performance” (Skaar, 2009 , p. 251). Developmental tasks—closely linked to children’s and adolescents’ age, gender and social background—shape their perception and action when dealing with their environment. This process takes place within the framework of developmental tasks shaped by a person’s biography and guiding an individual’s perception, cognition and action (Havighurst, 1972 ), while not wholly determining it. “A developmental task is a task which arises at or about a certain period in the life of the individual, successful achievement of which leads to his happiness and to success with later tasks, while failure leads to unhappiness in the individual, disapproval by the society, and difficulty with later tasks” (Havighurst, 1972 , p. 2). This concept was developed within developmental psychology and has since been frequently applied to societal changes and adapted to explain them (see Hurrelmann, 2009 ). For our purposes, it serves as a relevant insight into how children build their identity in the context of their everyday lives. Heckhausen and Schulz ( 1999 ) have stressed that Havighurst’s concept does not only apply to children but to adults as well. In order to distinguish between children’s and adults’ tasks, we use the term developmental tasks with reference to children and the term life tasks with reference to adults.

3.3.1 Childhood and Adolescence—More Than Age-Based Phases

The concept of developmental tasks recognises children’s active role in co-constructing the symbolic and material world in which they live and grow up (James et al., 1998 ). At the same time, it reflects James’ ( 2013 , p. 15) recent argument that children’s individual agency has, in fact, been somewhat overemphasised, as children’s agency cannot fully override socio-structural conditions. Following this perspective, identity formation can be regarded as a dynamic process of construction, in which children form their beliefs and their attitudes towards themselves, including cognitive, emotional and motivational components. In this process, a child is confronted with basic challenges that arise from his or her particular situation and biographical context: the “developmental tasks” (Havighurst, 1972 ). These tasks include finding one’s place in life, learning about oneself by relating to others, and interacting with and positioning oneself within the family, the peer group, and other social contexts (Hurrelmann, 2009 , p. 42).

When children grow older, they have to cope with the special challenges of adolescence; socialisation research calls this phase a “distinct developmental period” (Smetana et al., 2015 , p. 60).

Historically, the phase of adolescence is a fairly recent concept. A transitional phase between childhood and adulthood has been identified since antiquity, but in its current form this phase is the result of massive changes in productive and social structures caused by the industrial revolution in Western societies. In this sense, adolescence has developed into a phase not marked by gainful work, but by education and preparation for adulthood (see Kimmel & Weiner, 1995 , p. 7; Oerter & Dreher, 2008 , p. 271). During the post-war years especially, adolescence continued to be differentiated and has expanded at the expense of adulthood, until it has today become a central phase in an individual’s life cycle (see Hurrelmann, 2010 , pp. 17, 36).

In terms of its duration, the phase of adolescence is very ambiguous and hard to define. Simple age in years is often used to set its boundaries, especially in legal contexts, but a look at the extensive literature on it shows that definitions vary greatly with regard to any framing by age (see Göppel, 2005 , pp. 3–5). On the social level, many societies maintain certain rites of passage (often linked to religious rituals like, for example, the bar mitzvah or the Christian confirmation) that mark the beginning of adolescence. Other definitions concentrate on biological factors to mark at least the beginning of adolescence with the beginning of the biological and physical changes associated with puberty, which do not always correspond with definitions based on age, since such development varies among individuals (see Kimmel & Weiner, 1995 , pp. 2–3).

Each and every age-based definition is, thus, first and foremost an artificial and pragmatic limitation and does not necessarily correspond with an individual’s reality. It is, therefore, much more feasible to focus on a definition that concentrates on shared patterns of experiences or crises, in the sense of developmental tasks as characteristic for adolescence in today’s society. In this sense, dealing with the same developmental challenges can be used as a marker to subsume individuals in the same developmental phase. At the same time, it must be pointed out that youth or adolescents do not exist as a homogenous mass; even with shared developmental tasks, these collective terms cover a heterogeneous group of individuals.

3.3.2 Adolescence—A Phase of Transition

What most definitions of adolescence do, however, have in common, is the notion of transition, the transition between childhood and adulthood (Kimmel & Weiner, 1995 , p. 15). Where young people have to cope with “with unstable forms of community integration, identity is seen as much more dynamic, multiplistic, relativistic, fluid, context-specific, and fragmented” (Mayseless & Keren, 2014 , p. 64). Arnett ( 2007 , p. 69) describes the end of this phase of transition as a time “between”: “no longer adolescent but only partly adult, emerging into adulthood but not there yet” (Arnett, 2007 , p. 70). This phase is characterised by “unsettledness, exploration, and instability” (Arnett, 2006 , p. 7). Issues such as the context in which this transition takes place, what is expected from adolescents and what is deemed “successful” or “unsuccessful” coping with developmental tasks are subject to cultural and historic differences (see Kimmel & Weiner, 1995 , p. 4).

In 1972, Havighurst first formulated developmental tasks that are specific to various periods in life. His work serves as the basis for later adaptations that account for social changes in the years since the tasks were first formulated. Despite social changes in the past decades, literature shows that the core topics remain fairly stable, but recently we have observed that dealing with certain tasks is being pushed backwards by dint of, for example, longer periods in education and a later entry into work, women becoming mothers at a later age and so on, all coupled with changing priorities (see Fend, 2005 , p. 152; Noller & Atkin, 2014 , pp. 5–10; Oerter & Dreher, 2008 , p. 283). Mayseless and Keren ( 2014 ) point out coping with love and work as the central developmental task: “(…) love and work, are described as the focus of identity exploration in emerging adulthood. (…) Current postmodern processes in Western industrialized countries set the stage for the saliency of a new developmental task in emerging adulthood: finding the meaningful life” (Mayseless & Keren, 2014 , p. 63). With regard to Havighurst’s conception, and to further differentiations from other authors, we can subsume the relevant developmental tasks for adolescents in today’s Western societies as follows: coming to terms with one’s body, establishing and negotiating relationships with peers, forming an idea of one’s role in society, developing first romantic relationships, dealing with one’s sexual identity, detachment/independence from parents, gathering resources to build a personal economic basis, developing an idea of one’s self, obtaining values, thinking about forming a family and making plans for the future (see Havighurst, 1972 , p. 45; Kimmel & Weiner, 1995 , pp. 15f.; Noller & Atkin, 2014 , pp. 2–10; Oerter & Dreher, 2008 , p. 279).

3.3.3 “Meta-Developmental Tasks”

Above all this stands one large “meta-developmental task” (Friedemann & Hoffmann, 2013 , p. 375; translated by the authors) that basically influences all other areas and tasks: the construction of a unique identity to set oneself apart from others (see Friedemann & Hoffmann, 2013 , p. 375). It can be argued that this task is one that continues throughout life, and one’s identity is, in this context, never ultimately fixed. Nevertheless, the phase of adolescence is where this task becomes especially prominent.

Young people often live under particular pressure (see Quenzel, 2015 , p. 23); they have to cope with many changes, both on an individual and a social level. When we look at the employment market and the insecure employment situations today, it is evident that young people have to face numerous demanding situations, such as the need for flexibility and more and more higher qualifications. Hence, the task of acquiring qualifications for a career has gained importance in recent years. This is highly relevant for less educated adolescents especially and frequently leads to pressure on them to perform (see Albert, Hurrelmann, & Quenzel, 2015 , p. 40). So, socially disadvantaged young people often have to deal with frustration and disappointment (see Quenzel, 2015 , p. 23). Confronting situations like these leads to strain and emotional pressure and quite often to capacity overload. In this context, Quenzel talks about another relevant developmental task for young people: they have to know how to recuperate and to relax and, in this context, to manage leisure time competently and deal with consumer culture (see Quenzel, 2015 , p. 34).

3.3.4 Developmental Tasks and Media Contexts

By coping with developmental tasks, young people develop and stabilise their capacity for action. Where they are confronted with specific developmental tasks during the socialisation process, they attribute specific meanings to media and communicative practices. The context for coping with developmental tasks is an individual’s everyday life. In this sense, young people are always moving in fields of tension and are challenged by crises, which can also be understood as possible turning points. They must cope with these challenges to make daily life liveable. To do so, they require information and orientation, as well as support, and counsel. The process often includes an increased desire for experience, while such desires and needs also typify an individual adolescent’s situation in the world. Against this backdrop, and the range of available media options, young people select media products and services based on their individual preferences and aversions and with regard to their usefulness in coping with everyday lifechallenges.

So far, we have discussed socialisation as the process of interaction between individual adolescents and their relevant social contexts. We have referred to the concept of developmental tasks to specify how children form identity by coping with these tasks, in part by using media. We will now proceed to examine the most relevant social context, the family, and its role in children’s and young peoples’ socialisation. As mentioned above, there are several relevant contexts, such as the family, peer-groups or friends (and later, romantic partners), institutional contexts, such as kindergarten, school or job training, alongside the overall societal context (Hurrelmann, 2009 ) and the media system (Lange, 2015 ). These contexts will be discussed later on by considering children’s and parents’ perspective on them against the background of our empirical data. As our study progressed, we focused on the family, because our empirical research indicated how the families of the children in our panel crystallised as the main socialisation context, and, with this, the fundamental basis for children in developing their view on the world. Against this background, the interaction between the individual children and their family contexts will be discussed more explicitly, before we present our empirical conceptualisation of our study.

3.4 The Family Context in Socialisation

The family is the most relevant context of (most) young people’s everyday lives because their lives are deeply embedded in it (see Noller & Atkin, 2014 ). Keeping in mind that the concept of “family” cannot be understood as referring only to a stable, nuclear group of mother and father and children, we use this term in the wide sense of the core group, in which a child grows up. Particularly in early childhood, the family, and especially the parents, remain the most important actor in most children’s socialisation (Grusec & Hastings, 2015 , p. xiii; Huston & Wright, 1997 ). This also continues as they grow older and enter the often turbulent and challenging phase of adolescence (see Noller & Atkin, 2014 ). Accordingly, we will now proceed to discuss children’s and young people’s socialisation in greater depth.

3.4.1 On the Relevance of the Parent–Child Relationship

We recognise the relevance of the interaction between family members (Goldberg, Grusec, & Jenkins, 1999 ), given how the degree of proximity, trust and reciprocity that parents and children show towards each other shapes the styles of parenting and family communication. Parenting styles and practices are observable in the specific way parents interact with and manage their children and indicate how highly relevant they are to children’s socialisation (Schofield Clark, 2013 ; Smetana et al., 2015 , p. 66). Given the correlation between parents’ socio-structural background and their specific ways of interacting with their children and managing them, it can be assumed that the cognitive, social and cultural resources that parents acquire from their education, professional lives, and social networks influence their ability to support their children in their socialisation: the socio-cultural capital of parents shapes the acquisition of that capital by their children (Paus-Hasebrink, Bauwens, Dürager, & Ponte, 2013 ). In this regard, we emphasise how families differ in their abilities to cope with and to support children in growing up and tackling their own developmental tasks, especially when they begin to seek independence and strive for individuality during adolescence (Noller & Atkin, 2014 , p. 2).

3.4.2 On the Relevance of Doing Family

The ways family members interact with each other—Jordan calls this the “family system” ( 2003 )—are connected to “family ‘climate’, family paradigms, family coordinated practices, and family myths and rituals” (Maccoby, 2015 , p. 24). Analogously to what Livingstone and Sefton-Green ( 2016 , p. 169) show for the area of education, this process may also have longer roots reaching back to earlier generations. This dynamic and affective process takes place every day, is continually renegotiated and reconstituted by the family members, and includes specific communication practices and media-based practices of sense-making. Taken together, these practices characterize the specific way of “doing family” (Morgan, 2011 ).

However, the process of doing family is influenced not only by children coping with biographically determined developmental tasks but also by the way their parents and other family members cope. In this process, the parents and/or other reference persons participate against the background of their own life tasks: for instance, they have to deal with the role distribution between mothers and fathers, to cope with the particular challenges of being a single parent or of unemployment, to manage potential new relationships, to find a balance between work life and family life, to fulfil their personal ambitions, or to maintain, or even improve, their position within the broader societal context. In this respect, the family also reflects other social contexts of children’s socialisation, such as the neighbourhood, the parents’ professional environment, and the family’s position within the wider societal structure. In this way, the family sets the framework for a child’s growing up and learning to deal with everyday challenges and to realise his or her own interests.

Furthermore, research also shows that there is a correlation between the relationships among family members, the ways in which they interact with each other, and the children’s own ability to form their own relationships with peers, as well as in a romantic sense later in life. As Noller and Atkin ( 2014 , p. 2) point out: “It appears that adolescents may model their dating relationships on what they have seen in relationship between their parents (Steinberg, 2005 ). Thus, adolescents whose families have poor relationships and relationships that are highly conflicted are less likely than those from harmonious families to learn the skills necessary for successful relationships outside the family. In addition, the quality of their adolescents’ relationships with both parents and peers influences the quality of their romantic relationships (Brown, 2004 )”.

As regards media usage, a rich body of research on family communication and media has shown that a child’s actions in general, and media related actions in particular, cannot be understood adequately without reflecting on families’ specific modes of “doing family” (see, for example, Jennings & Wartella, 2013 ; Lull, 1980 ; Wilson & Drogos, 2013 ), which is, in turn, influenced by their socio-economic backgrounds. As Nathanson ( 2013 , p. 304) emphasises, “family dynamics can shape children’s vulnerability to the media and, likewise, media use can influence family dynamics”.

Having said that, social contexts—the family as well as others–shape children’s and adolescents’ socialisation (Kimmel & Weiner, 1995 ; Lamb, Ketterlinus, & Fracasso, 1992 , p. 465; Noller & Atkin, 2014 ; see also Packer, 2017 ). Our study will demonstrate conclusively that we need to specify how these contexts, and the underlying social structures, are transformed into an individual child’s personal orientation and identity. In the following section, we will propose a praxeological approach that allows us to understand how the socio-structural conditions influencing the everyday life of all members of a family are transformed into the specific ways children see and experience the world, how they orient themselves in this world, how they develop individual goals and plans, and, in doing so, how they make sense of media within their everyday life.

3.5 A Praxeological Approach to Researching Children’s Socialisation

The following questions are central to the praxeological approach of researching the role of media within socialisation: How do children make sense of their media usage? How is this sense-making process connected to the children’s interaction with their immediate reference persons in the context of the family? A fruitful starting point for our research lies in the perspective of Cultural Studies on society, individuals and the media: “The central emphasis here is not on the effects of the media on behaviour and attitudes, but on the ways in which meanings are established, negotiated and circulated (…) this research regards children’s uses and interpretations of the media as inherently social processes to be characterized by forms of power and difference” (Buckingham, 2008 , pp. 221–222).

However, as Ralph Weiß ( 2000 ) argues, research conducted in the sphere of Cultural Studies has not successfully demonstrated the link between the “maps of meanings”, which show how subjects appropriate and interpret mediated points of view, and the practical rules that individuals use to organise their everyday lives in their specific social places (Weiß, 2000 , p. 44). As early as 1992, David Morley, one of the proponents of Cultural Studies, stressed this point: “What is needed here is an approach that links differential interpretation back to the socio-economic structure of society, showing how members of different groups and classes, sharing different ‘cultural codes’, will interpret a given message differently not just at the personal, idiosyncratic level, but in a way systematically related to their socio-economic position” (Morley, 1992 , p. 54). Nevertheless, the question of how social structures transform an individual’s “subjective sense” remains a challenge for Cultural Studies because researchers lack a theory that systematically explains how to translate the objective structure of the relationship between power and social inequality into the subjective structure of points of view, habits of feeling and need to experience (Weiß, 2001 , p. 12). The praxeological approach serves to answer this question.

Our focus is on young people and their reference persons in their everyday lives and thus in the particular social places that are materially and symbolically at their disposal. It is in these social places that individuals invest their “capital” and gain their competences for the action, through which they then make sense of everyday life, including, as one aspect of it, their use of media. In the following, we will set out the theoretical components of our approach systematically.

3.5.1 The Lifeworld and Related Contexts

As stated above, socialisation processes are shaped by social contexts, ranging from the inner circle of family and the most significant reference persons to the societal level characterised by the medially permeated political, economic and cultural contexts of a region or a country, such as the labour market, family-related laws and support programmes, educational institutions, and the availability of recreational facilities. Everyday life derives its specific character from the social situation of the family and the factors that characterise it: income, job, formal education and the living situation of the parents (Hradil, 1987 ). The social space in which the child learns to act is marked by the family’s social situation, while that space’s specific structure arises from the different fields of everyday life.

Socio-phenomenological or social-constructivist conceptions of everyday life provide an opportunity to avoid both a one-dimensional objectivist perspective on social phenomena and a purely subjectivist one. In his concept of the Lebenswelt , the “lifeworld”, Alfred Schütz laid the foundation for a phenomenological sociology which strives to uncover the universal structures in the everyday. Following Schütz and Luckmann, the Lebenswelt may be conceived of as what individuals consider to be the given sphere in which they act ( 2003 , p. 30). The lifeworld is realised in the “conduct of everyday life” (Jurczyk et al., 2015 ). This term goes back to Max Weber, and it is defined “primarily as practice (it means the structure of activities that are part of life on an everyday basis)” (Jurczyk et al., 2015 , p. 45). The “conduct of everyday life” is understood as both the individually constructed and the institutionalised ordering of everyday life over time. Both endow daily actions with direction, efficiency and meaning and lend stability, coherence and continuity to life as a whole (Kudera, 2001 , p. 51). As discussed earlier, the way children conduct their everyday lives is influenced by how they cope with impending developmental tasks; the same holds good for the children’s adult reference persons and their respective life tasks.

The individual’s activities, with their connections and consequential effects, are at the centre; however, based on patterns of interpretation and biographical schemata, how individuals classify these activities meaningfully cannot be ignored (Hörning, 2001 , p. 158). So, beyond subjective representation, the conduct of everyday life is shaped by “classifying practices”, which are a symbolic order presenting significant distinctions (Bourdieu, 1996 , p. 175). These practices are connected to the social space where children and their parents gain their experiences (both medial and non-medial), build their identities, gain competences for action , and judge, value and classify themselves and their social space. Bourdieu’s work on social fields provides a theoretical framework for understanding the interaction between structure and action. Each field values particular sorts of resources (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992 ), which Bourdieu metaphorically calls “capital”. He distinguishes three different types of resources: economic, cultural and social capital. Furthermore, he introduces symbolic capital, which is related to honour and recognition and is earned on an individual basis (Bourdieu, 1989 ). “Thus, on a social field, economic, social and cultural capital is converted to symbolic capital” (Walther, 2014 , p. 10).

The composition of the different forms of capital is always unevenly distributed, leading to the formation of specific social milieus. These are shaped by fundamental points of view, which are shared by members of a milieu and through which they distinguish themselves from other social milieus (Weiß, 1997 , p. 259). In this way, social milieus demonstrate the social arrangement and structure of a society (Weiß, 1997 , p. 246).

The different types of capital are gained through education and socialisation (Bourdieu, 1986 ). With respect to the social milieu in which social action takes place, Bourdieu explains how certain aims are followed, how certain patterns of orientation and perspectives can be formed, and how particular patterns of action are socially accepted (Weiß, 2000 , p. 47). In the framework of socialisation, the patterns of action and orientation that are developed during childhood are culturally rooted, refer to individuals’ particular societal status and their social milieu, and shape their specific habitus, which is developed through common social contexts and formed by similar existential backgrounds. As Benson ( 2016 , p. 3) maintains, it is via their habitus that individual agents internalise their experiences of social structure; “habitus-endowed agents constitute and reconstitute the fields of which they are a part” (Benson, 2016 , p, 3). In Bourdieu’s own words: “The habitus (…) enables an intelligible and necessary relation to be established between practices and a situation, the meaning of which is produced by the habitus through categories of perception and appreciation that are themselves produced by an observable social condition” (Bourdieu, 1996 , p. 110). As the habitus operates “at the unconscious level of taken-for-granted assumptions, tastes, and bodily hexis (embodied practice or way of using one’s body)” (Benson, 2016 , p. 4), it can be understood as an incorporated social structure (Weiß, 1997 , p. 246), or as “socialized subjectivity”, which can be seen as “a system of dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1996 , p. 6). These dispositions are shaped by conditions for the conduct of everyday life that are socially unequal and structurally distributed (Weiß, 1997 , p. 246).

Patterns of action are culturally rooted and refer to people’s social status. Transformed into everyday opportunities and competences, they influence individual actions and the processes of social and personal identity development and interact with people’s subjective ways of making sense of societal conditions (Weiß, 2000 ; Willis, 1977 ). To conclude, the habitus as a concept following Bourdieu`s ideas and provisions has a dual nature: It covers the individual predisposition of a single person on the one hand, but also it incorporates the conditions of the social environment of living and the social surroundings during the process of growing up and socialisation within a social milieu (see also Paus-Hasebrink, 2013 , p. 80).

Within this general praxeological perspective on socialisation, we are focusing especially on young people’s relation to the media, because these provide a way to deal subjectively with topics arising from developmental and family-related challenges.

When considering the ensemble of practices that are used to conduct everyday life and to cope with everyday challenges, our focus shifts to the individual context. At the same time, we go beyond subjective representations and take into account the social milieus which are—actually or symbolically—at an individual’s disposal. In their practical actions, meaning their specific conduct of everyday life, individuals use their capital to seize opportunities in their social spheres (Habermas, 1988 , p. 473), such as their working life (employment, income, capital), in politics and law (social order, law, morality), and the private sphere (love, personal relationships, happiness), as efficiently as possible (Weiß, 2000 , p. 47). Individuals, including children, attempt to employ their own capital to realise the opportunities of their specific social places (Weiß, 2000 , p. 48). The objective structure of socially unequal conditions for action is transformed into the subjective structure of diverging outlines for action . This transformation takes place as a psycho-social process within the identity formation outlined above. It is co-determined by factors such as formal education, gender and the bodily experience of growing up in the framework of an individual biography. In this respect, the media fulfil several functions in the process of a child’s socialisation, and these are connected to its specific developmental tasks against the backdrop of its own and its parents’ conduct of everyday life within the process of doing family .

3.5.2 Three Analytic Concepts: Options, Outlines and Competences for Action

The conduct of everyday life is manifested in social milieus where individuals attempt to realise their specific goals in life, including their own particular plans and wishes. An individual’s subjective perception of the options for action available, based on his/her social milieu, is crucial here, as is the way an individual forms his/her outlines for action within the framework of the identified options for action and thereby acquires competences for action , which make it possible for him/her to apply his/her resources to the task of realising the outlines for action .

Thus, the following three concepts must be integrated (for an overview see Table 3.1 ):

Options for action are, on the one hand, related to the individual’s specific socio-structural conditions and, on the other, to the socio-structural aspects of society as a whole and its political, economic, cultural and media contexts. Options for action describe the objective characteristics of an individual’s social conditions, which are shaped by the rules of the social field(s) in which he/she operates. Options for action represent an ordered arrangement of possible (and impossible) actions.

Outlines for action are related to subjective perceptions of social conditions and represent the ways in which the subject transforms the objective characteristics of his/her situation into a subjective guide for action. These outlines reflect what makes sense to the subject and indicate the viewpoints from which he/she structures his/her perceptions and interpretations of the world. Thus, all of the family’s or the individual’s goals and plans are closely tied to a subjective perception of the social milieu.

Competences for action are related to the resources at the individual’s disposal to accomplish the above outlines for action . As Bourdieu maintains, these competences characterise the material, cultural and social resources available to an individual and serve as cognitive or motivational prerequisites for his/her actions, including the use of media. These competences are reflected in the realisation of the individual’s outlines for action .

Based on the options for action , outlines for action and competences for action , it is theoretically and empirically possible to understand the connection between a social milieu, and the subjective structure of making sense of one’s life. Our approach to young people’s socialisation, as presented here, provides answers through a combined analysis of both the subjective and structural components of practice. It is focused on the lifeworld of a child in the family, where he/she conducts his/her everyday life and where, starting in early childhood, media activity is given its meaning. This approach helps in examining the everyday structures of a child’s life, which are shaped by the family’s social situation, in order to describe the “arrangements” for conducting everyday life and the process of doing family . It is through these arrangements that practices, including media practices, are formed and media actions gain structure and meaning. So it is possible to reconstruct the transmission process, namely, how socio-structural conditions transform into an individual’s subjective perception and (media-related) actions and how this perception leads to an independent orientation towards the world.

3.6 Conclusion

This chapter contends that, in order to understand the role of media within young people’s socialisation, we need to conceptualise and operationalise socialisation as the interaction between an individual child and the relevant contexts of growing up. Referring to the concept of developmental tasks, we have specified the way children, by coping with these tasks, partly by making use of media, form identity. In order to conceptualise the interaction between the individual child and social contexts, we have focused on the family as the most relevant context for young people’s growing up. In order to specify how the underlying social structures in families and other contexts are transformed into a child’s personal orientation and identity, we have proposed a praxeological approach that distinguishes three analytical concepts: options for action , outlines for action , and competences for action . Based on these concepts, it is theoretically and empirically possible to understand the connection between a social milieu and the subjective structure of making sense of one’s life. In specifying the “arrangements” of the conduct of everyday life and the process of doing family , this approach enables us to examine the everyday structures of an adolescent’s life. It is through these arrangements that practices, including media practices, are formed and media actions gain structure and meaning. So it is possible to reconstruct the transmission process, namely how socio-structural conditions transform into an individual’s subjective perception and (media-related) actions and how this perception leads to an independent orientation towards the world.

As presented in this chapter, our theoretical approach provides a fruitful basis for research on the role of media within young people’s socialisation. The role of other contexts we empirically investigated in our longitudinal study, such as peers, romantic partners, kindergarten or schools, professional training, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6 .

The next chapter (Chapter 4 ) illustrates both the methods we applied in our longitudinal study on children’s, or respectively adolescents’, socialisation in socially disadvantaged families and how this approach can be operationalised.

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Paus-Hasebrink, I., Kulterer, J., Sinner, P. (2019). The Role of Media Within Young People’s Socialisation: A Theoretical Approach. In: Social Inequality, Childhood and the Media. Transforming Communications – Studies in Cross-Media Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02653-0_3

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Influence Insider

How mass media affects youth.

As we know, mass media has vast influence on our daily lives – it shapes what people believe about society, politics, and life in general. It also influences how people behave, socially and economically.

Mass media includes TV shows, movies, magazines, online sites, and apps. These products and services are marketed to us, so they can appeal to us or scare/influence us. They may even promote specific brands or industries.

Youth are most susceptible to media influence because of two things. First, you must remember that commercials tell stories! Stories use pictures, settings, emotions, and characters to get you involved and connect with the product.

Second, kids at an early age expect media to be entertaining and educational. When these experiences aren’t, they are likely to ask questions like “Why is this important?” and “What lessons can I learn from it?”

That’s why it’s crucial for adults to be aware of the effects media has on youth. This goes beyond just watching your favorite show or reading your favorite book; it involves looking out for signs of potential problems.

If you see your kid spending hours every day watching television , using social media, and staying up late, chances are he or she is not spending time on other activities. Make sure such activities include doing hobbies, playing sports, going to classes, and talking to friends outside of the house.

Too much media

Recent studies show that today’s children are exposed to an overwhelming amount of media content. More than one-quarter hour of every day is spent in some form watching TV, listening to music, using smartphones, or engaging in other forms of interactive media.

There have been many reports about how quickly kids these days expect constant engagement with screens. A growing number of parents complain about their teens spending too much time sitting in front of screens.

Research shows that this overstimulation can have negative effects on youth development. It may lead to poor relationships, risk taking behaviors like smoking , drinking, or drug use, mental health issues such as depression or anxiety, and obesity.

Because technology moves so fast, we are also exposing young people to increasingly graphic and violent content. This has a lasting effect by shaping attitudes and behavior patterns.

Furthermore, research suggests that the more exposure you have to certain messages, the less resistant you will be to those messages.

So while there is no doubt that digital technologies offer vast opportunities for communication, education, and entertainment, they also pose challenges related to screen time.

They need to be used responsibly to ensure that they do not contribute to social problems.

Too little media

Recent studies show that today’s youth are experiencing an epidemic of “media deprivation.” Nearly one-third of all children under age eight in America are not exposed to any form of printed, broadcast, or online content for more than two hours per day.

And among children ages nine to twelve, only twenty percent can say they spend at least six hours per day watching TV, listening to music, using social media, or engaging with other forms of technology.

This is problematic because it exposes young people to too few sources of media content that promote negative stereotypes, offer limited messages and opportunities, and lack intrinsic values like education , literacy, and knowledge.

Furthermore, as we know, excessive screen time has been linked to higher rates of obesity, sleep disorders, depression, anxiety, and stress. These conditions negatively affect overall health and wellness.

What media youth look at

As we know, mass media is very accessible to most people these days. It does not require special equipment or locations to view it. You can either use your phone or computer as a device to access it.

Mass media comes in many forms including television shows , movies, songs, advertisements, etc. These materials influence our society by creating trends and influencing how people behave.

Youth are especially vulnerable to media effects because they spend a lot of time using media services such as Netflix, YouTube, and Snapchat. When children and teens grow up experiencing a constant stream of media content that promotes violence, sex, and materialism, it has long-term impacts on their self-image and perception of the world.

These experiences also may make them more likely to accept similar negative behaviors in real life, whereas teenagers who have limited exposure to such content might be able to separate entertainment from reality.

What media youth listen to

With all of these tools at our disposal, it is easy to get overwhelmed. It can feel like there’s never enough time to do everything! As powerful as technology has become, we must be careful about how much power we give up control of for it.

As you read this article, think about what types of technologies your parents probably didn’t have back when they were young. For that matter, what kinds of technologies their own parents didn’t have.

It’s important to remember that most people are very influenced by the media that surrounds them. From advertisements to entertainment, the media teaches people lots of things. Sometimes those lessons are good, but sometimes they aren’t.

Technology gives us more ways to learn, which is great, but it also makes it easier to be exposed to negative messages or behaviors than before. This influence isn’t limited to children, either; adults are susceptible too.

There are many opportunities in your school district to teach students about the effects of mass media. You should definitely take advantage of these classes if they're offered.

However, another way to help prevent the media from having an undue influence on kids is to limit their exposure to media. Make sure your child is not watching too much TV, keeping mobile phones away from teens, and avoiding computer games with violence.

This will only strengthen your bond as parent and kid.

What media youth watch

Recent studies show that children ages 6 to 12 are increasingly exposed to high amounts of media content, particularly via television. More than one-third of 8–12 year olds report watching at least two hours per day of TV, which is more time than most adults spend in front of a screen!

Another alarming finding is how much of this media content features negative messages about self-image and body image. Over half of all young people surveyed reported seeing advertisements or videos with images that use thin models as examples for what you should look like.

These ads often feature comments telling viewers not to accept their current weight because they do not look good in their clothes. Or, they may suggest buying products to try to lose weight – something that clearly does not work long term.

Furthermore, research indicates that exposure to such advertising can contribute to eating disorders and other weight related problems. It also raises concerns about the influence these advertisements might have on teens’ attitudes towards beauty and weight.

This article will talk more about some ways that mass media has an effect on kids and adolescents, why it happens, and strategies parents can use to help mitigate those effects.

How to be an effective media watchdog

As we have seen, mass media can influence how you feel about yourself, other people, and the world around you. It can also influence what decisions you make by subconsciously influencing your beliefs and behaviors.

As parents, it is important to be aware of this so that you can help develop your children’s understanding of the media they are exposed to. We as adults need to remember that the content our kids see is not just for them, but for their development too!

Making sure your child is learning appropriate skills such as counting, reading, and writing takes away some of the responsibility from us as parents at least initially. Once these basic skills are in place, then it becomes more of a challenge to prevent your child from being influenced by the media.

However, if you take time to discuss the effects of the media with your children, they will learn how to use common sense when it comes to deciding whether or not to read material that is targeted toward their age group.

Take breaks

A lot of professionals in the media field work long hours without much break . This is very common these days as there are always new gadgets, technologies, and ways to market yourself or your product.

But research shows that this approach can have negative effects on you as a person. It may contribute to stress, anxiety, and depression.

Too many people with too busy of schedules develop relationships with less than honorable characters or individuals.

This influence can be longer lasting than just one exposure. These types of experiences can shape how someone views life and the world around them.

It also gives others permission to act similarly by promoting behavior that is not healthy. You will help keep this from happening if you take time for yourself and avoid letting the pressure of being productive make you unhappy.

Be consistent

As we have seen, media comes in many forms. This means that how much you use media as an influence for or against social justice depends on what type of media you consume. Some types of media promote social injustice while other media can help dismantle these systems! It all really comes down to what you are looking to get out of consuming media.

If you want to see some great action films that involve mass violence, then watch them with an understanding that they will probably make you feel bad about yourself and your life. Or if you enjoy stories where powerful men run things , check out books and movies which feature this theme so that you can recognize it when you see it in real life.

On the contrary, if you want to learn more about non-violent ways to solve social problems, choose to read and view content related to this topic. You could also look into different strategies and approaches to solving environmental issues such as saving energy or reducing waste.

We believe that most teens today become involved in bullying behaviors due to exposure to negative messages produced by media. These include scenes of cruelty towards others who do not fit society’s stereotypes of what people should be like, characterizations of strong men as being aggressive and wealthy individuals getting even richer .

It is important to remember that just because something seems normal does not mean it is okay __________________.

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Mass Media Influence On Youth

George Gerbner’s cultivation theory suggests that mass media influence audiences by the cultivation and acculturation of repeated exposures (Roxanne Hovland, Joyce M. Wolburg). Young viewers are cultivated by the mass media in the long run and will start to believe things that are portrayed in the media as a norm and reenact them in real life. Mass media influences youth without a hitch, hence youth culture is easily shaped, and is affecting youths’ moral, their principle of right and wrong. Mass media contributes largely to youth culture in recent years, and is causing moral decay in youths due to its portrayal of violence and sexual content. However, parents also contribute to moral decay in youths. Media violence leads to youths losing …show more content…

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Argumentative Essay On Media Violence

There are those who argue that it has long and short-term adverse impacts on the social lives on young children and adolescents while others declare that not all effects are detrimental. Therefore, the debate continues as more research is done on the issue. In spite of the many debates, there is sound evidence documenting the damaging effects of media violence on the society. It has been argued that, children who are exposed to violent media become aggressive and violent at some point in their life (Markey, Charlotte, and Juliana 293) Therefore, media violence has a severe effect on the lives of

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Teenage pregnancy is becoming a societal problem that branches out to other problems that it is caused for the growth of poverty rate in different baranggays. One of the reasons why teenagers are already aware with this topic is because of media. They get a higher knowledge to sex from the magazines, TV shows, internet, movies and other

Media Influence On Youth Essay

“One may remember or forget these messages but briefly one takes them in, and for a moment they stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or expectation.” (Berger, 1977) as a result, teenagers are often depicted as lazy, rude, antisocial, violent, naïve, wild, irresponsible and mischief conductors by the society in real life because these particular images of youth have been constructed in their minds by the media. Films and TV shows that involves youths as the main characters, regularly promotes conformity. There are media effects that affect youths and the society based on the message and ideology sent in films and TV shows, this will be elaborated later on in my essay.

Sex Education Dbq

Since the 1960’s, premarital sex has increased in popularity and the average marriage age increased as well. People started having sex earlier and getting married later, and that gap continues to grow as time goes on (Source A). Source G confirms that about 47% of American high schoolers are already having sex. This statistic, no matter how much it rises or falls, proves that there will always be sexually active students that require information on how to do so safely. Conservative sources will emphasize the fact that the majority of high schoolers are still virgins, but this majority is made up by a thin margin, and in reality this fact means nearly half of the US student population is sexually active.

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Impact of media use on children and youth

The influence of the media on the psychosocial development of children is profound. Thus, it is important for physicians to discuss with parents their child’s exposure to media and to provide guidance on age-appropriate use of all media, including television, radio, music, video games and the Internet.

The objectives of this statement are to explore the beneficial and harmful effects of media on children’s mental and physical health, and to identify how physicians can counsel patients and their families and promote the healthy use of the media in their communities.

Television has the potential to generate both positive and negative effects, and many studies have looked at the impact of television on society, particularly on children and adolescents ( 1 , 2 ). An individual child’s developmental level is a critical factor in determining whether the medium will have positive or negative effects. Not all television programs are bad, but data showing the negative effects of exposure to violence, inappropriate sexuality and offensive language are convincing ( 3 ). Still, physicians need to advocate continued research into the negative and positive effects of media on children and adolescents.

Current literature suggests the following:

• Physicians can change and improve children’s television viewing habits ( 4 ).
• Canadian children watch excessive amounts of television ( 5 , 6 ).
• There is a relationship between watching violent television programming and an increase in violent behaviour by children ( 2 , 7 ).
• Excessive television watching contributes to the increased incidence of childhood obesity ( 8 , 9 ).
• Excessive television watching may have a deleterious effect on learning and academic performance ( 10 ).
• Watching certain programs may encourage irresponsible sexual behaviour ( 11 ).
• Television is an effective way of advertising products to children of various ages ( 12 ).

The average Canadian child watches nearly 14 h of television each week ( 13 ). By his/her high school graduation, the average teen will have spent more time watching television than in the classroom ( 2 ). Studies show how time spent watching television varies between different age groups and cultures ( 1 , 13 ). This is especially relevant when studying the effects of excessive television exposure on disadvantaged populations.

The amount of time that younger North American children currently spend watching television has not decreased significantly ( 14 ). A substantial number of children begin watching television at an earlier age and in greater amounts than what experts recommend ( 15 ). Evidence suggests that television’s influence on children and adolescents is related to how much time they spend watching television ( 1 , 2 , 16 ). As a result, with prolonged viewing, the world shown on television becomes the real world ( 1 , 2 ).

Television viewing frequently limits children’s time for vital activities such as playing, reading, learning to talk, spending time with peers and family, storytelling, participating in regular exercise, and developing other necessary physical, mental and social skills ( 9 ). In addition to the amount of time spent in front of the television, other factors that influence the medium’s effect on children include the child’s developmental level, individual susceptibility and whether children watch television alone or with their parents.

Television can be a powerful teacher ( 17 ). Watching Sesame Street is an example of how toddlers can learn valuable lessons about racial harmony, cooperation, kindness, simple arithmetic and the alphabet through an educational television format. Some public television programs stimulate visits to the zoo, libraries, bookstores, museums and other active recreational settings, and educational videos can certainly serve as powerful prosocial teaching devices. The educational value of Sesame Street , has been shown to improve the reading and learning skills of its viewers ( 18 ). In some disadvantaged settings, healthy television habits may actually be a beneficial teaching tool ( 17 ).

Still, watching television takes time away from reading and schoolwork. More recent and well-controlled studies show that even 1 h to 2 h of daily unsupervised television viewing by school-aged children has a significant deleterious effect on academic performance, especially reading ( 10 , 19 ).

The amount of violence on television is on the rise ( 20 ). The average child sees 12,000 violent acts on television annually, including many depictions of murder and rape. More than 1000 studies confirm that exposure to heavy doses of television violence increases aggressive behaviour, particularly in boys ( 2 , 21 – 23 ). Other studies link television or newspaper publicity of suicides to an increased suicide risk ( 24 – 28 ).

The following groups of children may be more vulnerable to violence on television:

• children from minority and immigrant groups;
• emotionally disturbed children;
• children with learning disabilities;
• children who are abused by their parents; and
• children in families in distress ( 2 , 7 ).

Physicians who see a child with a history of aggressive behaviour should inquire about the child’s exposure to violence portrayed on television.

Because television takes time away from play and exercise activities, children who watch a lot of television are less physically fit and more likely to eat high fat and high energy snack foods ( 9 ). Television viewing makes a substantial contribution to obesity because prime time commercials promote unhealthy dietary practices ( 15 , 29 ). The fat content of advertised products exceeds the current average Canadian diet and nutritional recommendations, and most food advertising is for high calorie foods such as fast foods, candy and presweetened cereals ( 14 , 29 ). Commercials for healthy food make up only 4% of the food advertisements shown during children’s viewing time ( 8 ). The number of hours of television viewing also corresponds with an increased relative risk of higher cholesterol levels in children ( 8 ). Television can also contribute to eating disorders in teenage girls, who may emulate the thin role models seen on television ( 8 ). Eating meals while watching television should be discouraged because it may lead to less meaningful communication and, arguably, poorer eating habits ( 29 , 30 ).

Today, television has become a leading sex educator in Canada. Between 1976 and 1996, there has been a 270% increase in sexual interactions during the family hour of 2000 hours to 2100 hours( 31 ). Television exposes children to adult sexual behaviours in ways that portray these actions as normal and risk-free, sending the message that because these behaviours are frequent, ‘everybody does it’. Sex between unmarried partners is shown 24 times more often than sex between spouses ( 32 – 35 ), while sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy are rarely mentioned.

Teens rank the media as the leading source of information about sex, second only to school sex education programs. Numerous studies document adolescents’ susceptibility to the media’s influence on their sexual attitudes, values and beliefs ( 34 , 35 ).

A detailed guide to responsible sexual content on television, and in films and music can be found in other peer-reviewed publications ( 35 ).

Some people believe that the media can influence sexual responsibility by promoting birth control, such as condom use. No current empirical evidence supports this concept; it is expected that the debate will continue.

Alcohol and smoking

Canada’s two largest breweries spend $200 million on advertising each year ( 36 ). On an annual basis, teenagers see between 1000 and 2000 beer commercials carrying the message that ‘real’ men drink beer. Convincing data suggest that advertising increases beer consumption ( 34 , 37 ), and in countries such as Sweden, a ban on alcohol advertising has led to a decline in alcohol consumption ( 38 ).

Tobacco products are not advertised directly on television in Canada. However, passive promotion occurs when, for example, a soap opera star lights a cigarette in a ‘macho’ act, a Formula One race car has cigarette advertising on it or sporting events carry the names of tobacco companies. There is evidence that passive advertising, which glamorizes smoking ( 28 ), has increased over the past few years.

Television is not the only way that children learn about tobacco and alcohol use; the concern is that the consequences of these behaviours are not accurately depicted on television. One-half of the G-rated animated feature films available on videocassette, as well as many music videos, show alcohol and tobacco use as normative behaviour without conveying the long term consequences of this use ( 39 ).

Advertising

Advertising can have positive effects on children’s behaviour. For example, some alcohol manufacturers spend 10% of their budget on advertisements warning about the dangers of drinking and driving. In addition, although some health care professionals disagree about the health benefits of appropriate milk use, milk consumption has increased as a result of print and broadcast advertisements.

The developmental stage of a child plays a role in the effect of commercials. Young children do not understand the concept of a sales pitch. They tend to believe what they are told and may even assume that they are deprived if they do not have advertised products. Most preschool children do not understand the difference between a program designed to entertain and a commercial designed to sell. A number of studies have documented that children under the age of eight years are developmentally unable to understand the difference between advertising and regular programming ( 12 , 40 , 41 ).

The average child sees more than 20,000 commercials each year ( 12 ). More than 60% of commercials promote sugared cereals, candy, fatty foods and toys ( 12 ). Cartoon programs based on toy products are especially attractive. Advertisements targeting adolescents are profoundly influential, particularly on cigarette use ( 4 ).

The question of whether children are more resilient to the influence of television is debated frequently. Most studies show that the more time children spend watching television, the more they are influenced by it ( 4 ). Earlier studies have shown that boys may be more susceptible than girls to television violence ( 25 ).

Education and parental involvement

High school programs promoting media awareness have been shown to be beneficial ( 4 ). They give students more understanding of how the media may affect them socially. In Canada, the Media Awareness Network has a number of resources that can be used by both professionals and the public to promote media literacy. Their resources are comprehensive, current and specifically applicable to Canadian culture ( 42 ).

Parents may use ratings but they must be used with caution. Currently, there is no consensus as to which rating system works best ( 43 ). Parental involvement in determining desirable programming is the best choice. Parents have to monitor and control their children’s viewing habits.

Studies show that parents play an important role in their children’s social learning ( 44 ), but if a parent’s views are not discussed explicitly with children, the medium may teach and influence by default. Other media, such as magazines, radio, video games and the Internet, also have the potential to influence children’s eating habits, exercise habits, buying habits and mental health. If children are allowed to be exposed to these media without adult supervision, they may have the same deleterious effects as television.

MUSIC VIDEOS

Music videos may have a significant behavioural impact by desensitizing viewers to violence and making teenagers more likely to approve of premarital sex ( 45 ). Up to 75% of videos contain sexually explicit material ( 45 ), and more than half contain violence that is often committed against women. Women are portrayed frequently in a condescending manner that affects children’s attitudes about sex roles.

Attractive role models are the aggressors in more than 80% of music video violence. Males are more than three times as likely to be the aggressors; blacks were overrepresented and whites underrepresented. Music videos may reinforce false stereotypes. A detailed analysis of music videos raised concerns about its effects on adolescents’ normative expectations about conflict resolution, race and male-female relationships ( 46 ).

Music lyrics have become increasingly explicit, particularly with references to sex, drugs and violence. Research linking a cause-and-effect relationship between explicit lyrics and adverse behavioural effects is still in progress at this time. Meanwhile, the potential negative impact of explicit music lyrics should put parents and paediatricians on guard – paediatricians should bring this up in anticipatory guidance discussions with teenagers and their parents. At the very least, parents should take an active role in monitoring the music their children are exposed to ( 45 ).

VIDEO GAMES

Some video games may help the development of fine motor skills and coordination, but many of the concerns about the negative effects of television (eg, inactivity, asocial behaviour and violence) also apply to excessive exposure to video games. Violent video games should be discouraged because they have harmful effects on children’s mental development ( 7 , 47 ). Parents should be advised to familiarize themselves with various rating systems for video games and use this knowledge to make their decisions.

The effect of violent video games on children has been a public health concern for many years. No quantitative analysis of video game contents for games rated as suitable for all audiences was made until 2001 ( 47 ). The study concluded that many video games rated as suitable for all audiences contained significant amounts of violence (64% contained intentional violence and 60% rewarded players for injuring a character). Therefore, current ratings of video games leave much room for improvement ( 43 ).

Parents may feel outsmarted or overwhelmed by their children’s computer and Internet abilities, or they may not appreciate that the ‘new medium’ is an essential component of the new literacy, something in which their children need to be fluent. These feelings of inadequacy or confusion should not prevent them from discovering the Internet’s benefits. The dangers inherent in this relatively uncontrolled ‘wired’ world are many and varied, but often hidden. These dangers must be unmasked and a wise parent will learn how to protect their children by immersing themselves in the medium and taking advice from the many resources aimed at protecting children while allowing them to reap the rich benefits in a safe environment. The physician is in a good position to encourage parents and children to discover the Internet and to use it wisely.

The Internet has a significant potential for providing children and youth with access to educational information, and can be compared with a huge home library. However, the lack of editorial standards limits the Internet’s credibility as a source of information. There are other concerns as well.

The amount of time spent watching television and sitting in front of computers can affect a child’s postural development ( 48 ). Excessive amounts of time at a computer can contribute to obesity, undeveloped social skills and a form of addictive behaviour ( 9 ). Although rare, some children with seizure disorders are more prone to attacks brought on by a flickering television or computer screen. No data suggest that television viewing causes weakness of the eyes. It may be different when a child is closely exposed to a computer screen for long periods, although there are no definitive references to support this.

Other concerns include pedophiles who use the Internet to lure young people into relationships. There is also the potential for children to be exposed to pornographic material. Parents can use technology that blocks access to pornography and sex talk on the Internet, but must be aware that this technology does not replace their supervision or guidance.

There is a wealth of information on coping with the vast resources of the Web, both good and bad. Above all, parents should be encouraged to appreciate that there is potential for more good than bad, as long as one has the knowledge to tell the difference. Canadian youth claim the Internet as a defining part of their culture and an integral part of their daily lives ( 6 ). Physicians and parents alike must be armed and ready to face that challenge and ensure that they reap the potential benefits as safely as possible ( Table 1 ).

Benefits and risks of Internet use by children and youth

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Physicians should regularly inquire about media habits when taking a psychosocial history, using the Media History Form developed by the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) and the Media Awareness Network ( 51 ). They should also ask about video watching, use of video games, radio programs and time spent in front of the computer, especially when dealing with aggressive and particularly vulnerable children and families ( 7 ).
• Physicians should become more familiar with the kinds of media to which their patients may be exposed, such as programs that portray irresponsible sex and violence, and questionable Internet sites.
• Physicians should make parents aware of the significance of television early in a child’s life. By the end of the first year of a child’s life, there should be ground rules for television viewing and healthy viewing habits should be established in the second year of life. Patient education tools developed by the CPS and the Media Awareness Network can be used to supplement teaching. Visit www.caringforkids.cps.ca for more information.
• Physicians should continue to increase their own level of awareness about the most recent data on the influence of media on the development of their patients’ psychosocial health ( www.media-awareness.ca is one of the most comprehensive Canadian resources for further education).
• Physicians are encouraged to learn about the scope of Internet-related issues to adequately advise parents during their visits for anticipatory guidance. The Media History Tool ( 51 ) can be used to identify areas of concern and to facilitate discussion with parents and children. They can be encouraged to develop a family agreement for on-line use at home. The Media Awareness Network Web site ( www.media-awareness.ca ) has suggestions on how to do this.

Physicians should encourage families to do the following:

• Families should be encouraged to explore media together and discuss their educational value. Children should be encouraged to criticize and analyze what they see in the media. Parents can help children differentiate between fantasy and reality, particularly when it comes to sex, violence and advertising.
• No child should be allowed to have a television, computer or video game equipment in his or her bedroom. A central location is strongly advised with common access and common passwords.
• Television watching should be limited to less than 1 h to 2 h per day. Families may want to consider more active and creative ways to spend time together.
• Older children should be offered an opportunity to make choices by planning the week’s viewing schedule in advance. Ideally, parents should supervise these choices and be good role models by making their own wise choices. Parents should explain why some programs are not suitable and praise children for making good and appropriate choices.
• Families should limit the use of television, computers or video games as a diversion, substitute teacher or electronic nanny. Parents should also ask alternative caregivers to maintain the same rules for media use in their absence. The rules in divorced parents’ households should be consistent.

Physicians who want to get involved in their communities can consider the following:

• Provide parents with resources and information to promote media awareness programs in their communities and schools. The Media Awareness Network ( www.media-awareness.ca ) has resources and research reports for parents, teachers, teenagers and others.
• Promote the implementation of high school programs in media awareness, which have proven to be beneficial ( 4 ).
• Express support for good media. In addition to writing to stations that broadcast responsible and good television programs, physicians and parents can support legislation that encourages more responsible media use.
• Support efforts to eliminate alcohol advertising on television with the same enthusiasm that led to the elimination of tobacco advertising.
• Consider accepting invitations to talk to parent groups, school boards and other organizations about the impact of media on children and youth. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Media Awareness Network have kits that include a fully scripted text, colourful slides, a fact sheet and audience handouts. Visit www.cps.ca or www.media-awareness.ca for more information.
• Support further research on the impact of media on the mental and physical well-being of children and adolescents.

PSYCHOSOCIAL PAEDIATRICS COMMITTEE

Members: Drs Anne C Bernard-Bonnin, Hôpital Sainte-Justine, Montréal, Quebec; Kim Joyce Burrows, Kelowna, British Columbia; Anthony Ford-Jones, Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital, Burlington, Ontario; Sally Longstaffe, Children’s Hospital, Winnipeg, Manitoba (chair); Theodore A. Prince, Calgary, Alberta; Sarah Emerson Shea, IWK Health Centre, Halifax, Nova Scotia (director responsible)

Consultants: Drs Rose Geist, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario; William J Mahoney, Children’s Hospital-Hamilton HSC, Hamilton, Ontario; Peter Nieman, Alberta Children’s Hospital, Calgary, Alberta

Liaisons: Drs Joseph F. Hagan, University of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington, Vermont (American Academy of Pediatrics); Anton Miller, Sunnyhill Health Centre for Children, Vancouver, British Columbia (Developmental Paediatrics Section, Canadian Paediatric Society)

Principal author: Drs Anthony Ford-Jones, Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital, Burlington, Ontario; Peter Nieman, Alberta Children’s Hospital, Calgary, Alberta

The recommendations in this statement do not indicate an exclusive course of treatment or procedure to be followed. Variations, taking into account individual circumstances, may be appropriate.

Essay On Mass Media

500 words essay on mass media.

All kinds of different tools which come in use to help in distributing and circulating information and entertainment to the public come under the term of mass media. In other words, everything including radio, newspapers , cable, television and theatre are parts of mass media. These tools include exchanging opinions and public involvement. Through essay on mass media, we will go through it in detail.

Introduction to Mass Media

In today’s world, mass media embraces internet , cell phones, electronic mail, computers, pagers and satellites. All these new additions function as transmitting information from a single source to multiple receivers.

In other words, they are interactive and work on the person to person formula. Thus, it revolves around the masses i.e. the people. It is true that radio, television, press and cinema are in the spotlight when we talk about mass media.

Nonetheless, the role of pamphlets, books, magazines, posters, billboards, and more also have equal importance if not less. Moreover, the reach of these tools extends to a huge amount of masses living all over the country.

Television, cinema, radio and press are comparatively expensive forms of media which private financial institutions or the Government runs. These tools centre on the idea of mass production and mass distribution.

Therefore, newspapers, television and radio cater to the needs of the mass audience and accommodates their taste. As a result, it will not always be refined or sophisticated. In other words, it displays popular culture.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

The Function of Mass Media

The main function of mass media is to reach out to the masses and provide them with information. In addition to that, it also operates to analyze and observe our surroundings and provide information in the form of news accordingly.

As a result, the masses get constantly updated about not just their own surroundings but also around the world. This way mass media spreads and interprets information. For instance, weather forecasts equip people and farmers to plan ahead.

Similarly, fishermen get updates about the tidal activities from the news. In addition to this, mass media also strives to keep the fabric of our social heritage intact which showcasing our customs, myths and civilization.

Another major product of mass media is advertising. This way people learn about the goods and services in the market. It also spreads social awareness. For instance, anti-smoking campaign, women empowerment, green earth clean earth and more.

Most importantly, with the numerous mediums available in multiple languages, the masses get entertainment in their own language easily. Millions of people get to access a cheap source of relaxation and pass their time. In fact, it also helps to transport momentarily from our ordinary lives to a dream world. Thus, it remains the undisputed leader in reaching out to the masses.

Conclusion of Essay on Mass Media

All in all, while it is an effective tool, we must also keep a check on its consumption. In other words, it has the power to create and destroy. Nonetheless, it is a medium which can bring about a change in the masses. Thus, everyone must utilize and consume it properly.

FAQ on Essay on Mass Media

Question 1: Why is mass media important?

Answer 1: Mass media is essential as it informs, educates and entertains the public. Moreover, it also influences the way we look at the world. In other words, it helps in organizing public opinion.

Question 2: How does mass media affect our lives?

Answer 2: Mass media affects many aspects of human life, which range from the way we vote to our individual views and beliefs. Most importantly, it also helps in debunking false information.

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Influence of Mass Media in Youth

2018, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention

Nowadays social media has become a new set of cool tools for involving young peoples. Many young people's day to day life are woven by the social media Youngsters are in conversation and communication with their friends and groups by using different media and devices every day. In past years it was seen that youngsters are in touch with only friends and their groups in schools and colleges. But nowadays youngsters are in contact not only with known friends but also with unknown people through social networking sites, instant messaging etc. According to BBC news research of 2013 they discuss that 67% Facebook users are very common and well-known social media portal consist of the youth and students, so these praise the fact that the youth and student have more focus and relation. Throughout the country teenagers frequently use the web, mobile phones, online games to communicate and gather information with each other.Usage of information technology in social media, increase its popularity in the youth. For analyzing the effects of social media and mass media on students, the questionnaire study was designed and an online survey was done among students of an engineering college based of Tamil Nadu India.

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Shubhada Kulkarni

Today social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Whatsapp, Instagram etc. become an integral part of youth's life. Youth cannot imagine themselves without using social media network. They are active on social media from early in the morning to late night. Students use social media networks in the examination periods also. These new social communication channels have been adopted by all the age groups in India. Social media have a significant impact on the society especially on the youth. Social media networks have negative as well as positive impact on our society. It is important to know the positive and negative impact of social networking sites and applications on today's young generation. It is also important to know the benefits of social networking for youth. This paper is an attempt to study the impact of social networking sites and applications on young generation. It is a result of a survey conducted on youth of Jalgaon and Dhule Districts. The sample size of 100 respondents was obtained by distributing well structured questionnaires. Convenience sampling method was used. The scope of the study was limited to the youth of Jalgaon and Dhule district. The result shows that there is a significant impact of social media sites and applications on today's youth. It is also seen that there are benefits of social networks for youth. This study also describes that there were some drawbacks of social networking.

Euro Asia International Journals

IJAR Indexing

Information technology makes the world a global village and connect the people from all over the world.Usage of information technology in social media, increase its popularity in the youth especially in students of universities. For analyzing the effects of social media on students, the questionnaire study was designed and by using simple random sampling, sample of 380 students was selected from University of Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan. By using bivariate analysis, result of this study depicts that social media plays vital role in providing learning and job opportunities to the students.

Dr. Ghulam Safdar

Social Networking sites provide a platform for discussion on burning issues that has been overlooked in today's scenario. This research is conducted to check the impact of social networking sites in the changing mind-set of the youth. It is survey type research and data was collected through the questionnaire. 300 sampled youth fill the questionnaire, while non-random sampling techniques was applied to select sample units. Rate of return was remaining 97 percent after fill up the questionnaire. The main objectives were as (1) To analyze the influence of social media on youth social life (2) To assess the beneficial and preferred form of social media for youth (3) To evaluate the attitude of youth towards social media and measure the spending time on social media (4) To recommend some measure for proper use of social media in right direction to inform and educate the people. Collected data was analyzed in term of frequency, percentage, and mean score of statements. Findings show that the Majority of the respondents show the agreements with these influences of social media. Respondents opine Face book as their favorite social media form, and then the like Skype as second popular form of social media, the primary place for them, 46 percent responded connect social media in educational institution computer labs, mainstream responded as informative links share, respondents Face main problem during use of social media are unwanted messages, social media is beneficial for youth in the field of education, social media deteriorating social norms, social media is affecting negatively on study of youth. Social media promotes unethical pictures, video clips and images among youth, anti-religious post and links create hatred among peoples of different communities, Negative use of social media is deteriorating the relationship among the countries, social media is playing a key role to create political awareness among youth.

Creative Education

Mahwish Rabia

isara solutions

International Res Jour Managt Socio Human

Social media can be concluded as any action, a platform or software tool, not to mention the way that all media have a social component. In the ongoing years, propels in Information and communications technology have foreshowed a significant change in human correspondence. Several waves of digital media, social media have introduced new communication patterns. A wide participation by the individual across the globe has widened the scope of knowledge sharing. The fruitful usage of different sorts of Social media for the advancement of social change requires a steady change of procedures to political and public setting as explicit prerequisites. The targets of this paper are to address these inquiries and investigate their suggestions for teenagers. The examination depends on primary and secondary data and taken into consideration the students studying in private and govt. colleges of Bhagalpur district. This investigation comprised of 100 samples. The subjects of meetings and quantitative outcomes have been collected from both urban and rural teenagers. The prime purpose of the current investigation is to asses by and large the effect of Social media on teenagers.

IOSR Journals

Over the past few years, technology has advanced at a very fast pace and internet has become an inseparable part of our lives.Along with internet came social media, which is used by everyone, especially youth. Social media has created both significant new challenges and exciting opportunities. However, frequent usage of social media often has behavioral and psychological effects on the youth which may be beneficial or harmful for them. In addition to providing information and being a source of entertainment for many people, social media has some disadvantages as well. Addiction to social media is a major cause of concern along with cyber crime and various health problems.The present study was conducted to test the impact of social networking sites on the youth and various problems associated with it.

Madiha Zainab , Hamna Baqai , AAtiqa Ejaz , Areej Arshad

Social Networking Media: Boon or Bane?

Darshan B M

One of the best inventions of mankind is technology and more so, it is the information technology that has brought this world closer, calling it as a “Global Village”. While growth, development and speed of progress have increased due to this, a special bonding is happening between human beings. This is through the social networking. Internet has got many social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc. The exposure to internet in general and social media in particular is increasing enormously. Hence this is a proper justification for probing the influence of such social media on teenagers. But here is the big question- is social networking really a boon or bane? The rapid adoption of social network sites by teenagers in India and in many other countries around the world raises some important questions. Why do teenagers’ flock to these sites? What are they expressing on them? How do these sites fit into their lives? What are they learning from their participation? Are these on-line activities like face-to-face friendships or are they different, or complementary? The objectives of this paper are to address these questions and explore their implications for teen identities. The study is based on survey method and students of Pre - University in both government and private colleges were chosen for the study as respondents. Age and sex were the demographic factors that here taken for the study. This study consisted of 100 students studying in different colleges based on systematic sampling. The subjects of interviews and quantitative results are primarily urban teenagers of Mangalore. The primary objectives of the present study is to asses overall impact of social media on teenagers. Keywords: Social media, teenagers, impact

Journal ijmr.net.in(UGC Approved)

Social media's impact on youth is creating additional challenges and opportunities. Social Networking sites provide a platform for discussion on burning issues that has been overlooked in today's scenario. The impact of social networking sites in the changing mind-set of the youth. It was survey type research and data was collected through the questionnaire. 300 sampled youth fill the questionnaire; non-random sampling technique was applied to select sample units. The main objectives were as (1) To analyze the influence of social media on youth social life (2) To assess the beneficial and preferred form of social media for youth (3) To evaluate the attitude of youth towards social media and measure the spending time on social media (4) To recommend some measure for proper use of social media in right direction to inform and educate the people. Collected data was analyzed in term of frequency, percentage, and mean score of statements. Following were main findings Majority of the respondents shows the agreements with these influences of social media. Respondents opine Facebook as their favorite social media form, and then the like Skype as second popular form of social media, the primary place for them, 46 percent responded connect social media in educational institution computer labs, mainstream responded as informative links share, respondents Face main problem during use of social are unwanted messages, social media is beneficial for youth in the field of education, social media deteriorating social norms, social media is affecting negatively on study of youth. Social media promotes unethical pictures, video clips and images among youth, anti-religious post and links create hatred among peoples of different communities, Negative use of social media is deteriorating the relationship among the countries, social media is playing a key role to create political awareness among youth. Introduction Social media is most recent form of media and having many features and characteristics. It have many facilities on same channel like as communicating ,texting, images sharing , audio and video sharing , fast publishing, linking with all over world, direct connecting. it is also cheapest fast access to the world so it is very important for all age of peoples. Its use is increasing day by day with high rate in all over the

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Influence of Mass Media on Youth

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More than 1,000 studies on the effects of television and film violence have been done over the past 40 years and the majority of these studies have the same conclusion: television and film violence leads to real-world violence (United States 2). The average 7th grader watches about 4 hours of television per day, and 60% of those shows containg some violence (United States 4). A prime source of these violent images is TV news, which happens to be America 's number one sourse of news and information (Steyer 73). Most local television newscasts are dominated by killings, assaults, kidnappings, terrorist attacks, and other stories designed to provoke a strong emotional reaction from viewers (Steyer 73). In the recent years, Hollywood 's growing taste for grotesque, graphic fare has upped the stakes, from Friday the 13th to Creepshaw and Scream (Steyer 73). Even though these movies are not meant for small kids, it is a fact that young children are often regularly exposed to them in the company of unthinking par-…

Tv Violence Sociology

The “cool” factor of these shows is actually kids becoming more and more desensitized to violence. Although these shows have not been proven to turn a normal child into a deviant. “Hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence on children and teenagers have found that children may become "immune" or numb to the horror of violence. They may gradually accept violence as a way to solve problems, or imitate the violence they observe on television; and identify with certain characters, victims and/or victimizers…

How Mass Media Affects Adolescents

We’ve all heard the expression, “Well if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?” from our parents, or other adult figure-type person. In today’s society, adolescents seem to be taking this phrase to a new level. As the media continues to abuse the popularity of the too-thin actors and actresses, exploit famous persons’ suicides, and portray ‘problems’ in general as being ‘cool’ with TV shows focused on rehab circles featuring those popular people our culture knows and loves, more and more young people are finding reasons to copycat these problematic ‘role models’, resulting in a crisis within the youth. The depression, low self esteem, eating disorder, and suicide rate disaster within the youth can all be traced back to the media, which tends to glamorize such problems, so that they appeal to adolescents as being the next ‘in’ thing.…

Youth Violence Research Paper

Some researchers have demonstrated that very young children will imitate aggressive acts on TV in their play with peers. Before age 4, children are unable to distinguish between fact and fantasy and may view violence as an ordinary occurrence. In general, violence on television and in movies often conveys a model of conflict resolution. It is efficient, frequent, and inconsequential. Heroes are violent, and, as such, are rewarded for their behavior. They become role models for youth. It is "cool" to carry an automatic weapon and use it to knock off the "bad guys." The typical scenario of using violence for a righteous cause may translate in daily life into a justification for using violence to retaliate against perceived victimizers. Hence, vulnerable youth who have been victimized may be tempted to use violent means to solve problems. Unfortunately, there are few, if any, models of nonviolent conflict resolution in the media. Additionally, children who watch televised violence are desensitized to it. They may come to see violence as a fact of life and, over time, lose their ability to empathize with both the victim and the…

Argumentative Analysis

Experts even suggest that the evidence linking media violence to aggressive behavior is stronger than the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer (Gentile). In the United States an average of 20-25 violent acts are shown in children's television programs each hour (Media Wise). Violence (homicide, suicide, and trauma) is the leading cause of death for children, adolescents and young adults, more prevalent than disease, cancer or congenital disorders (Youth Violence Facts at a Glance 2). In fact, six prominent medical groups (American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, American Psychological Association, American Medical Association, American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association) warn of these effects of media violence on children: Children will increase anti-social and aggressive behavior, become less sensitive to violence and those who suffer from violence, children may view the world as violent and mean, become more fearful of being a victim of violence, children may desire to see more violence in entertainment and real life, and children will view violence as an acceptable way to settle conflicts (National Institute on Media and the Family). While most adults realize that media violence is fabricated, children are more vulnerable. Preschoolers cannot distinguish the difference between reality and fantasy. Children who identify with aggressive heroes are more likely to be more aggressive. They learn that violence is effective, courageous, socially acceptable and rewarded, and they get caught in the aggression cycle. Aggressive children prefer aggressive programming (Medscape). These…

The Impact of Violent Media on Children

Children would likely develop their violent characters from watching violent medias such as televisions, radios, video games, and magazines. According to the article “The Psychological Effects of Violent Media on Children” by Aimee Tompkins, there are three main impacts of bad medias. First, they become less aware to the hurt and sorrows of other people. Second, they would be more afraid of their environment. And lastly, they would be more argumentative. Although surveys say that harmful video games can make children become more quarrelsome to others, a few parents and psychologists believe that some kids gain some good things from it.…

impact of media on youth

There is a relationship between watching violent television programming and an increase in violent behaviour by children (2,7).…

Effects of Media on Adolescents

The good thing about the media and its advanced sexual content is that it helps to educate the youths about what is out there in these streets, such as sexually transmitted diseases, sexual predators, and how to deal with people such as homosexuals; who might be considered different. With the exposure to this type of media, the adolescents will be more aware and better equipped to deal with the situations that the might face while growing up. On the other hand, others may disagree with sexuality being so prevalent in the media. On the down side, too much sexual exposure may influence the youths to be more eager, and ready to participate in such acts. Even a young boy may think that the men they see dominating and assaulting women are cool, because of the level of control and power the men assume when the commit rape. It is very difficult to determine what may happen from viewing or listening to sexual media, so its best that some material be limited to the a specific age group; hence the rating on certain films.…

Media Violence Not Good for Children

The effects of media violence on children have been studied for over thirty years, with researchers repeatedly finding correlations between aggressive/violent behavior and the viewing of media violence. These education and psychology researchers began asserting years ago that a cause-and-effect relationship existed, i.e., viewing media violence was one of the causative factors in aggressive behavior in children. We often use the phrase that "children are impressionable." We mean that children do not see the world through the same filter of experience that adults do. Children see things more literally. They do not yet possess the sophisticated sensibilities to distinguish fiction from reality. It matters a great deal, therefore, how much TV children watch and what they view. Young children often mimic what they see. Parents and caretakers observe this regularly. If children see people punching and kicking, they may act out that same behavior. Older children develop, through years of watching, sub-conscious mental plans of how they will react in conflict situations. For years they have seen conflicts resolved by violence, and they sub-consciously develop the same reaction plan. When confronted with a conflict, the tendency is to react the way they have seen countless others react—in a combative, aggressive or violent manner. Researchers call this developing a "cognitive script." Through television, video games, and movies, children and teens view countless acts of violence, brutality, and terror as part of entertainment. They become conditioned to associating violence with entertainment. This is the classical conditioning. First-person shooter video games develop our children’s skills in operating weapons. The games reward marksmanship, and further reinforce the association of killing with entertainment. In the past, the heroes of movie and television shows were usually people who strictly…

Effects media has on teenagers

The media is a vast forum of communication that permeates nearly every aspect of culture (Mokeyane). It consists of a broad spectrum of communication such as: television, films, web sites, the radio, commercials, and newspapers. These varieties of communication offers the youth entertainment, news, culture, and education, “They are [the media] an important part of our lives and have much to teach” (Understanding the Impact). Teenagers excess amount of access to the media has grown incredibly. Over the past five years, there has been a myriad increase in media use. An average of teenagers use the media from nearly six and a half hours to over seven and a half hours (Perle).…

The Effects of Violent Media on Children, Adolescence, and Adults

Boxer, P., Huesmann, R., Bushmann, B., O 'Brien, M., & Moceri, D. (2009). The Role of Violent…

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