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seventeen - Agents of mediation and sources of safety awareness: a comparative overview
- 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 219-230
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Summary
Defining mediation
The question of mediation raises many issues since it entails a normative view about children's socialisation. How do media enter children's lives and who has responsibility for regulating their potential risks or benefits? Parents, teachers, policy makers and the media – all seem to have an opinion. However, the role of parents is prominent since most media use occurs within the home. Structural changes in family life ( James et al, 1998; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) may explain certain transformations within family dynamics (from less to more ‘democratic’ styles of parenting) and account for changes in parental styles of mediating online activities (Eastin et al, 2006). Parents’ strategies toward media consumption reflect these dynamics and the family tensions and power relations that underlie the rules set and the way they are negotiated in different situations.
New media appear to undermine the effectiveness of some parental strategies through the individualisation and segmentation of media consumption within the home. There has been an emergence of ‘media-rich homes’ and a ‘bedroom culture’ among children and young people (Livingstone, 2002) and a tendency towards ‘living together separately’ (Flichy, 2002). The apparent contradiction that needs to be resolved is related to media uses within the family becoming increasingly segmented and individualised, but family socialisation in relation to media is still regarded as being crucial.
Although most authors agree that mediation involves some sort of effort to manage children's relations with media, they are not in complete agreement about what kinds of practices should be considered and how they should be classified (Livingstone and Helsper, 2008). Most theoretical discussions focus on parents, which harks back to their role in relation to traditional media (such as television; see, for example, Austin, 1990, 1993; Valkenburg et al, 1999; Nathanson, 2001a, 2001b). Mediation strategies regarding new media are still being explored (and adapted from previous research) although evidence on their effectiveness is scarce (Eastin et al, 2006; Livingstone and Helsper, 2008; Livingstone, 2009).
In discussing whether parental mediation of internet use can be analysed in the same terms as television, Livingstone and Helsper (2008) note that the conditions are obviously different.
three - Research with children
- 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 31-40
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter untangles the ways in which young audiences, especially digital media and internet users, have been researched and how they can be approached. The first part is a brief discussion of the policy concept ‘children and young people’, since it has clear implications for how the research agenda is defined. The second part examines different theoretical approaches to the problem of whether children should be directly involved in research projects or not. In other words, should we be doing research with or on children? This distinction is important not only from a practical point of view but also from a theoretical (epistemological) point of view. The last part of this chapter addresses the issue of how one should research children's internet and digital media uses and experiences. More specifically, we consider whether methods conceived for working with children have to be entirely new or simply adapted from existing ones, and we discuss which methods are most appropriate for researching children's media/internet uses and experiences.
Constructing childhood and youth for digital media research
We begin this section with what might be seen as an obvious statement, but which is nonetheless of the utmost importance for our discussion: childhood and youth are social constructions; they are neither mere natural categories, nor universal ones. This assumption may be easily confirmed by the fact that both childhood and youth have changed over time and tend to assume a variety of configurations in different cultural and social contexts (Buckingham, 2000, 2007). From laws and public policies to relationships within families, from media representations to interpersonal communications, children and young people have been acknowledged and addressed in various ways (sometimes contradictorily) by different people and entities who contribute to define what they are or should be.
The media play an essential role in this process. One could say that childhood and youth are being defined to an ever-greater extent by the media. This is not just because media content reflects several aspects of children's and young people's lives, but also because children and young people are increasingly devoting their time to a vast array of media-related commodities that have been targeted at them by media industries for several decades now (Buckingham, 2007). Media-related commodities are ever more important in children's and young people's lives, not only as simple products but more essentially as resources with which particular cultures are built and identities defined.