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five - Varieties of access and use
- Edited by Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and Political Science, Leslie Haddon, London School of Economics and Political Science, Anke Görzig, London School of Economics and Political Science
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- Book:
- Children, Risk and Safety on the Internet
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 07 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 18 July 2012, pp 59-72
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
The vast array of risks and opportunities that confront children in their daily media practices cannot be analysed in isolation from the broader context in which these practices emerge and become meaningful. Previous research (Livingstone and Helsper, 2007, 2009) indicates that the patterns and social contexts of general internet use are key factors shaping children's online activities and their exposure to risks.
In the EU Kids Online project, the institutional, social and cultural environment co-determining the quality of online experience has been analysed from the perspective of children's everyday lives (Livingstone et al, 2011). Online experience is defined as a pathway composed of the online activities engaged in by children, the online and offline factors that shape the safety of online environments and their harmful and beneficial outcomes.
This chapter focuses on the first step along this path, and analyses the increasing variety of internet access and use experienced by children in Europe. Locations, platforms, experience and the embeddedness of the internet in everyday life are accounted for in order to provide a full picture of the first and the most immediate sociocultural layer in which children's agency is exercised. Insofar as individuals’ use of technologies is socially shaped within family and peer relations (Haddon, 2004), this chapter investigates the relationship between place of access, online experience and frequency of use of the internet, within the family’s wider technological culture. It examines cross-national variations in patterns of usage and provides a classification of countries.
Emerging trends and cross-national variations
‘Thinking holistically’ (Haddon, 2003) seems to be one of the most noticeable trends in recent research on media practices. Media are no longer investigated in their individual textuality or as clusters of isolated material practices, but rather as the constituents in an ‘ecology’ (Ito et al, 2009), that is, as ‘an overall technical, social, cultural and place-based system, in which the components are not decomposable or separable’ (Ito et al, 2009, p 31).
‘Media ecologies’ are place- and time-based systems that can be studied from the viewpoint of the temporal and spatial coordinates in which they are rooted. This point is developed thoroughly in the domestication approach (Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992), whose theoretical and empirical insights constitute the framework for the analysis in this chapter.
thirteen - Children and the internet in the news: agency, voices and agendas
- Edited by Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and Political Science, Leslie Haddon, London School of Economics and Political Science
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- Book:
- Kids Online
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 July 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2009, pp 159-172
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
From both historical and theoretical perspectives, many have argued that media representations provide significant symbolic resources for the construction of public and political agendas and that dominant media frames are powerful in defining social problems and shaping public discourses (Griswold, 1994; Critcher, 2003; Kitzinger, 2004). When it comes to young people's engagement with the internet and how society is dealing with this, the interconnection and congruence among the public, policy and research agendas are noticeable.
Based on a systematic content analysis of news coverage in European papers, this chapter examines how the press reports children's positive and risky or harmful contacts with online technologies. Drawing on agenda-setting theories and on contemporary theories on the construction of childhood, it discusses patterns of representation of internet-related risks and opportunities, considers which social actors are given voice and investigates which role and level of agency are attributed to young people in these news narratives.
Agenda setting and conflicting discourses on children
In 2008, a survey showed that, after their closest relatives, parents see the mass media as the second most influential source of information on safer internet use (EC, 2008). Policy makers and researchers also seem to be sensitive if not susceptible to the media's discourses on young people and the internet. The case of happy slapping – ‘discovered’ by the British press in 2005, and now perceived as a social problem in most European countries (see Chapter Twelve, this volume) – is paradigmatic here.
The tradition of agenda-setting studies provides a useful framework to understand the effects of the news media coverage on public, policy and research agendas. Focusing mostly on the role of the media in political and public agendas, research has shown that the news media promote public and political awareness of certain issues (McCombs, 2005). Contemporary agenda-setting studies consider the effects of media coverage at two levels. Whereas the ‘first level’ is focused on the relative salience of issues or subjects, the ‘second level’ examines the relative salience of attributes of issues (Weaver, 2007: 142). Hence, the news media are first of all powerful in selecting a set of issues that resonate in the public sphere and tend to become of public concern. But they are also influential in establishing how to depict and discuss these issues. They actively set the frames of reference on the issue, employ a particular perspective and voice certain values.