Children, Young People and New Media - Project Overview
Report on SSHRC -funded Research Project: Children, Young People, and New Media in the Home (2002-06)
My objectives for this research project were to examine young people’s use of the internet by focusing on the overall media environment at home. In particular I was keen to give children and youth the opportunity to actively discuss their everyday uses of the internet, without having their voices filtered through adult perspectives. This was a timely project as for many Canadian families the internet was quickly becoming a domestic utility, used alongside (and sometimes more than) television, radio and newspapers. The research questions that guided my research included those focusing on access, lifestyle, uses, social change, content, and commercialization.
As the research developed it took on two distinct trajectories: 1) interviews with children and youth in their home; and 2) research on policy issues related to youth and new media as well as research on the commercial aspects of new media products for kids.
Papers published from this research project (see below) reinforced the findings from the interviews. Papers looked at the creation of internet communities by and for youth (NeoPets, Gurl.com, MySpace, Mary-Kate and Ashley, the Pro-Ana sites) with a focus on critically assessing the commercial implications of these sites and the policy issues they raised, particularly privacy and data mining practices. A focus on gender differences was evident in papers on the Pro-Ana community, efforts to protect young girls from sexual predators on the internet, and the design of mobile phones marketed to young girls. Policy issues played a central role in all of the papers, from an analysis of the federal SchoolNet program and its purported attempts to ‘wire’ up all K-12 schools in Canada, to free speech issues (Pro-Ana), to debates over downloading.
The 35 semi-structured interviews took place in Ottawa, Windsor, Montreal and Toronto and were conducted by the student research assistants. Securing ethics clearances from the universities including both parental assent and children’s consent forms proved to be time-consuming but the processes in both institutions were professional and diligent. Locating children and youth was time-consuming and necessitated creating trust amongst the student interviewers and the parents and children. The Canadian Journal of Communication (Shade, Porter & Sanchez, 2005) article outlines the research analysis from the interviews. Topics included: time spent online, uses of the internet for leisure and schoolwork, perceptions about privacy and attitudes towards online advertising, music downloading practices, and identity play. Our study indicates that while children and youth are active and intrepid internet surfers, they use the internet to extend their local and school-based ties, and that they have very little concern for offensive or illegal content issues. Furthermore, while parents and policymakers raise concerns about violence and pornography, our research indicates that there are more insidious potential areas of concern that raise important ethical and political considerations: a lack of awareness of privacy information and a proliferation of data mining targeting youth; a lack of discussion of questions surrounding copyright, downloading, and online plagiarism; and a tendency of policymakers to address children as consumers of entertainment rather than as potential citizens or active media producers. These findings are of special interest for government policy. Canadian internet policy has tended to ignore how children and young people have become a viable and integral online target market, which is a disquieting omission when considering the overall political economic framework of the internet and the profitable demographic that marketers are seeking to attract. Although PIPEDA (the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) legislation protects personal information collection, used or disclosed by commercial interests, Canada does not yet have the equivalent to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). On the popular practice of peer-to-peer downloading of music, video, and film, continued vilification of these youth practices by industry will not work when trying to solve this complex social and policy issue. Policymakers need to think critically – and creatively – about developing digital literacy skills that consider children and young people as valid and active citizens. Policymakers might want to shift their focus to the proactive development of digital literacy skills, particularly those focusing on the authenticity and prevalence of commercial content, raising awareness of privacy rights, and copyright education.
2008. Empire and Sweatshop Girlhoods: The Two Faces of the Global Culture Industry, pp. 241-256, co-authored with Nikki Porter, in Feminist Interventions in International Communication: Minding the Gap, co-edited with Katharine Sarikakis (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield).
This poignantly stark disjuncture between the lives and livelihoods of women workers in Bangladeshi—who earn between eight and eighteen cents an hour (or between US$189.28 and $436.80 a year)—and the Olsen twins, whose 2004 gross sales were $1.4 billion, with retail revenues at $21 million (Forbes 2004), and who earned the distinction of being ranked number eleven on Forbes magazine’s 2007 list of the 20 richest women in entertainment, with a net work of $10 million, is the focus of this chapter.
It takes up Teresa Ebert’s argument to embrace materialist feminist cultural critiques, understood as “politics as the practice aimed at ‘equal’ access for all to social, cultural, and economic resources and also as an end to the exploitative exercise of power . . . [the achievement] of economic equality through social struggle” (1992–93, 18), and the recognition of gendered divisions of labor in the “global reconfiguration of patriarchal capitalism” (42); and the later challenge from Toby Miller (2004), who urges cultural studies scholars to turn away from a preoccupation with consumption toward a consideration of labor, and how this new international division of labor “links productivity, exploitation and social control” (62). Thus, rather than look just at the consumption practices—the cultural formations of the Mary-Kate and Ashley empire, and the subjectivities engendered by their myriad products on young girls—Miller urges us to look at the life of these commodities and the various subjectivities complicit in the international cultural division of labor.
In the burgeoning girls studies movement in media and cultural studies, feminist analyses have not typically adapted a political-economic perspective in scrutinizing the creation of tween and teen girl content, although there have been some notable exceptions (Record 2001; Kearney 2006). This chapter thus applies a feminist political-economic analysis to the phenomenon of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, arguably one of the most financially successful teen enterprises ever, whose television, film, and video ventures have expanded to include a range of products, including clothing, magazines, books, cosmetics, accessories, and home decorating items, some of which are sold exclusively at the megastore Wal-Mart. This analysis also aims to contribute to childhood studies, where recent scholarship has examined global youth media and consumption (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 2003; Langer 2004; Maira and Soep 2004; Cook 2005; Lemish 2007), and to international communication, which rarely interrogates global youth culture, with the exception of analyses of coproduction and glocalization (Grixti 2006; Moran 2006).
The chapter first describes the rise of the Olsen twins’ stardom and maps out their media holdings, which are managed through their Dualstar Entertainment Group, created in 1993 to manage the Olsen brand and now rapidly expanding transnationally. It then shifts from the first-world fanciful fortunes of the Olsens to focus on the stark realities of the many women and child laborers in developing countries who produce the very material goods that make it possible for the Olsen’s to be feted as fashionista billionaires by fans, the business press, and high-powered fashion magazines.
2007. Contested Spaces: Protecting or Inhibiting Girls Online?, in Growing Up Online: Young People and New Technologies, ed. Sandra Weber and Shanly Dixon. (London: Palgrave).
On July 26, 2006 the U.S. House of Representatives passed The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) of 2006 by a vote of 410 to 15. DOPA requires that all public libraries and schools that receive federal funding block access to all social networking sites, chat sites and potentially (according to one interpretation of the Act) all blogs. Proponents of the Act contend that it is designed to protect children and minors from access to online sexual predators and sexual exploitation, which the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) estimates has increased significantly; one in five youth received a sexual solicitation over the internet in the last year alone, with teen girls the primary target, receiving two-thirds of the solicitations.
Opponents of DOPA argued that threats are more pernicious for children accessing sites in their own homes without adequate parental supervision. Said Democratic Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, “This legislation will actually drive children to go to unsupervised places, unsupervised sites to go online, where they will become more vulnerable to child predators.” Democratic Representative Diane Watson of California argued, “it sends the wrong message to our children, our parents, teachers and librarians. The bill would curb Internet usage as a means to protect children, a counterproductive method to achieving such an important goal. Rather than restricting Internet usage, parents, teachers and librarians need to teach children how to use our ever-changing technology. The information age in which we live offers so much potential to our children, if they know how to use it.” The furor around this latest piece of U.S. legislation purporting to ‘protect’ children online highlights the heated public debates that arise around internet and youth. Opinions abound; not all of them based on research, facts, or rational thought! This chapter examines the way in which the emergence of new media has typically elicited disagreement, polarized responses and panic regarding children and the protection of childhood, particularly in so far as girls are concerned.
Young people are avid users of social networking spaces such as MySpace, finding them to be a robust, innovative, and attractive method of communicating online to their friends and peers. Social networking spaces are web spaces where individuals can create their own online presence for uploading photos and profiles of themselves; within the larger web community users are encouraged to be interactive via posting lists of fellow users on their friends section, writing within the comments section, and letting other users link to their own spaces (Williams, 2006). The most popular spaces for youth include MySpace.com, Xanga.com, LiveJournal.com, and FaceBook.com. Fueled by the affordability and ubiquity of digital cameras and cell-phone cameras, these web spaces have also become lucrative. In July 2005 Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation purchased MySpace.com for $649M USD, which in February 2006 boasted, according to some estimates, 89 million users since its inception in late 2003. 150,000 new accounts are created every day, and its user population is equivalent to the 12th largest country in the world (Rosen 2006). MySpace now outranks Google for page views – ten percent of all advertising impressions across the Internet occur on MySpace, which is double that of Google (MySpace: Design Anarchy That Works, 2006). These figures have attracted diverse groups eager to tap into MySpace’s youth demographic, including retailers, entertainment companies, cell phone companies, and youth-oriented brands. Larry Rosen’s (2006) study of Los Angeles area MySpace users revealed that “the typical MySpacer has about 200 ‘friends’ with approximately 75 labeled as ‘close friends,’ many of whom they have never met” (p.2). MySpace clients use IM, e-mail, and post and read bulletins an average of 2 hours a day, 5 days a week. Combating pervasive negative media coverage of MySpace, Rosen asserts that MySpace offers positive benefits for teens: “more support from friends, more honest communication and less shyness both on and off MySpace”, providing “a forum for teenagers to develop a sense of their personal identity” (ibid, p.5-6).
Critics of DOPA argue that the legislation will create an even more pervasive digital-divide amongst children and youth who have broadband access in their homes and those that can only access the internet through their schools, public libraries, or community centers. If DOPA succeeds in banning children from established networking sites, it is unlikely that this will prevent children from doing what they need and want to do–communicate and interact with their peers in a society (at least in North America) that is increasing reticent about the public mobility of children, especially girls, without adult supervision. As well as censoring constitutionally protected speech, DOPA will also exacerbate the ‘participation gap’ amongst youth using and creating internet content, particularly for civic participation (American Library Association, 2006; Center for Democracy and Technology, 2006; Jenkins, 2006).
What to make of all this controversy? Using a case study of MySpace and DOPA, this chapter examines recent public discourses around childhood and the internet, as it relates to girlhood, exploring the interplay between public discourse and policy objectives. Adopting Alison Adams’ admonition that ethical debates about the social uses of information and communication technology (cyber-ethics) need to more pro-actively consider its gendered dimensions, this chapter also argues that internet policy on issues of sexual exploitation is inappropriately ‘gender-blind.’ For instance, although most victims of cyber-stalking, online child pornography, and pedophilia rings are females and most perpetrators male, Adam writes “almost nothing seems to be made of this fact by the policy makers who write such documents. Additionally, policy documents fail to address the issue that, in finding the cause of the problem and ways to counter it, the question of gender might be highly relevant” (Adam, 2002, 134). Gender is thus an important consideration in this discussion because of the active roles young girls are assuming as consumers and creators of internet content. </em>
June 2007: Feminizing the Mobile: Gender Scripting of Mobiles in North America. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20(3): 179-189.
This paper discusses the gendering of the design and marketing of mobile phones, using the concept of the gender script (Rommes, 2002; van Oost, 2003. It first provides a brief overview of recent international scholarship exploring gendered uses and development of mobiles. The next section explicates the gender script and examines some print ads for mobile phones appearing in North American women’s and teen magazines. How can we go beyond gender scripts that essentialize women and their uses of mobiles? The paper concludes with reflections towards this end.
2005. “You can see anything on the internet, you can do anything on the internet!”: Young Canadians Talk About the Internet, co-authored with Nikki Porter & Wendy Sanchez. Canadian Journal of Communication 30(4):503-526.
This paper presents emerging findings based on 35 semi-structured interviews conducted with children and youth from the research project Children, Young People, and New Media in the Home. The objective of this research is to examine young people’s use of the Internet by focusing on the overall media environment at home. Our study indicates that while children and young people are active and intrepid Internet surfers, they use the Internet to extend their local and school-based social ties, and that they have very little concern for offensive or illegal content issues. We argue that these experiences of children and young people need to be considered an intrinsic facet of Canadian Internet policy development treating children and young people as valid and active citizens.
Cet article présente de nouvelles données basées sur trente-cinq entrevues semi-structurées menées auprès d’enfants et de jeunes dans le cadre du projet de recherche « Les enfants, les jeunes, et les nouveaux médias au foyer ». L’objectif de cette recherche consiste à examiner l’utilisation d’Internet par les jeunes en tenant compte de leur milieu médiatique au foyer. Notre étude indique que les enfants et les jeunes, bien qu’ils soient des cybersurfeurs actifs et intrépides, utilisent principalement Internet pour développer leurs réseaux locaux et scolaires, et qu’ils ne se préoccupent guère de questions de contenu offensif ou illégal. Nous soutenons qu’il faut tenir compte des expériences de ces enfants et jeunes dans l’élaboration d’une politique canadienne pour Internet qui traite ceux-ci comme des citoyens actifs à part entière.
June 2005. Neopian Economics of Play: Children’s Cyberpets and Online Communities as Immersive Advertising in NeoPets.com, co-authored with Sara Grimes. The International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 1(2): 181-198.
This article examines NeoPets, an online community for children where members create or adopt a virtual pet. The NeoPets Corporation is examined, with attention paid to their practice of ‘immersive advertising’ amidst concerns over the increasing commercialization and branding of children’s web-based content and culture. Ethical issues explored include privacy and intellectual property.
2004. Canada’s SchoolNet: Wiring Up Schools?, with Diane Yvonne DeChief, pp. 131-144 in Global Perspectives on E-learning: Rhetoric and Reality,edited Ali Carr-Chellman. (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications).
With the rapid rise in prominence of the Internet during the 1990s, most industrialized nations developed policies and programs promoting public access to the Internet in order to ameliorate the emerging “‘digital divide’” that threatened to undermine social solidarity. In Canada this was pursued most visibly through the federal “Connecting Canadians” agenda, led by Industry Canada. Its goal was to make Canada the most “‘connected nation on Earth,’” notably through its SchoolNet, Community Access (CAP), and Library Net programs.
SchoolNet, established in 1994 to increase “connectivity” to public schools across Canada, was one of the earliest federal government projects in support of access to what was then dubbed the “information highway.” Its mandate–—to work with public and private partners to extend Internet connectivity into K-12 classrooms–—was also touted as an international model. But, despite millions of federal government dollars invested in SchoolNet over the last decade, little to no evaluation on the effectiveness of SchoolNet as a learning resource has ever been conducted. Indeed, the 2004 federal budget has downsized SchoolNet, notably discontinuing its Office of International Partnerships. An examination of SchoolNet raises many salient issues related to the efficacy and claims of “‘wiring’” up K-12 classrooms, an increasing practice bolstered by policy and funding pushes, particularly across North America.
2004. Gender and the Commodification of Community: Women.com and gURL.com, pp. 143-160 in Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice, ed. Darin Barney and Andrew Feenberg. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
This chapter will chronicle the transformation of two online communities designed specifically for women (Women.com) and young girls (gURL.com), whose origin stories in the early to mid-1990s began as earnest attempts to produce feminist-oriented content for a demographic that was not then adequately represented on the Internet. Feminist pioneers created their communities in the heady days of Internet utopianism, when the North American female population of the Internet was paltry, in comparison to its current gender parity. Women.com and gURL.com are interesting case studies because, as we shall see, both communities became part of the wave of dot.com euphoria, merging with other companies and creating commercial ventures, capitalizing on Internet stock speculation, and, in the process, diluting the nature of its feminist content to appeal to a mainstream female audience, thus targeting and commodifying a particular female demographic.
Women.com and gURL.com are cautious tales of how cutting-edge online feminist communities became part of the feminization of the Internet, by which I refer to the process whereby the creation of popular content privileges women’s consumption, rather than encouraging their production or critical analysis. The corporate history of Women.com and gURL.com will be detailed, and the elements that shape their notion of community (such as discussion boards, content forums, user agreements and privacy policies) will be analyzed. As will be shown, the case studies of Women.com and gURL.com illustrate how community has been transformed by the process of commodification, and how users are conceived not as active agents or citizens, but as consumers. What were once burgeoning feminist communities have since been transmogrified into female-oriented spaces where empowerment is often equated with consumer sovereignty.
December 2003. Weborexia: Ethical Issues Surrounding Pro Ana Web Sites. Computers & Society 33(4)
Pro-Ana’s are young women who proclaim themselves to be proudly anorexic, and they have created a vibrant community online. This article will examine the nature of the Pro-Ana sites, analyzing their discursive community, and discuss the ethical issues surrounding the sites, wherein many have been censured or shut down by commercial website hosting sites, which has raised issues of censorship versus freedom of speech.
Protecting the Kids? Debates Over Internet Content, by Leslie Regan Shade, in Civic Discourse and Cultural Politics in Canada: A Cacophony of Voices. Eds. Sherry Fegurson and Leslie Regan Shade, Ablex, 2002.
This chapter will examine debates in Canada about how to protect children from offensive and illegal content on the Internet. The stakeholders in this debate include government, industry, parents, educators, librarians, and public interest groups. After looking at the type of content that has been targeted, I will relate the discussion to earlier and ongoing concerns about ìmoral panicsî surrounding children and media content. I will then look at how diverse stakeholders have addressed the issue of offensive and illegal content, particularly pornography. Tensions highlighted include the need to achieve a balance between freedom of speech versus censorship, self-regulation versus governmental regulation, and technological solutions versus education and awareness.
Autumn 2002: Canadian Kids Online. Transition (Vanier Institute of the Family, Ottawa): 7-11.
As increasing numbers of Canadian young people go online at home and at school, interactive technologies such as the Internet, CD-ROMs, and video games have begun to supplant televisionís dominance. Interactive media are becoming integrated into the daily lives of many Canadian children and youth, who are no longer passive media recipients. Instead, theyíre creating Web sites; participating in chat rooms, e-mail, and instant messaging; and coming up with innovative uses for new media, especially the Internet.
Alongside youth’s increasing Internet use are a host of ethical and policy questions. For instance, the impact of the Internet on social interaction has been widely debated: does it lead to social isolation, or foster new forms of vibrant communities? What about children and families that donít have access to the Internet at home ? will they be left behind? Is the Internet a valuable tool for homework and research, or is it contributing to a plague of plagiarism? How can exposure to pornography and hate material be regulated? Are children aware of online privacy and security issues? And, should we be concerned about the increasing commercialization of children’s online culture?
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