5 Chapter 5- Media and Technology

Since the dawn of humanity, every community across the world has devised forms of enjoyment dedicated to times when people were not working or learning.  In traditional societies, childhood games served as the medium to learn adult skills and to pass on the historical memories of the community.  In the Neolithic period when agricultural communities flourished in West Asia and the Middle East, people at the top of the social hierarchy could afford to spend considerable time on leisure (Veblen, 1953).  The ancient Greeks and Romans had believed that play and education were intimately linked, and the purpose of play was to develop one’s fullness as a human (Pauli & Mandell, 2004).  During the renaissance in Europe, this idea was once again developed by writers like John Locke who said that leisure did not mean being idle but cultivating one’s character (Papastephanou & Gregoriou, 2014).  The protestant reformation brought an ideal of extreme work ethic and anti-play attitudes across Europe.  The English puritans viewed games as a waste and as destructive to one’s life but grudgingly allowed a limited number of sports to thrive.  In the late 17th century, walled cities expanded outward creating opportunities for parks and public gardens where sports thrived (Luskey, 2014).

In the USA, the Puritans voiced great concern over leisure activities.  The importance of work over leisure was stressed.  Records indicate that young people were fined and punished for leisure activities such as dancing, drunkenness and gambling.  Laws were passed banning non-religious music, drama and even walks on Sundays (Daniels, 2008; Marsden, 2009).  The industrial revolution brought increased migration of farming families to cities and there was an unprecedented growth in crowded tenements at unprecedented rates.  At the same time, there were a few families that had enough wealth to allow their children to have a carefree childhood with toys and leisure.  There was pressure from labor groups to reduce the number of working hours for industrial workers.   Initially, there was great reluctance on the part of social elites to allow for sporting and other recreational activities for the working class.  The efforts to prohibit them proved futile and reformers argued that allowing socially sanctioned activities might help stem more destructive habits.  In large cities, commercial sports and recreational parks gained in popularity (Juniu, 2000; Parker, 1983).

In large cities, working class youth who were less under adult supervision than ever before, escaped their tenements for organized entertainment in dance halls and clubs. This was resisted by churches and law enforcement agencies that attempted to promote more activities that were considered prosocial at that time (Nayak, 2006).  When work hours were reduced to eight, leaders and factory owners worried about the misuse of leisure by young people and there was, in general, a fear of youth among powerful people in society, a phenomenon known as Ephebiphobia (Astroth, 1994).

As more youth began attending high schools, institutions arranged for after school activities and constructive recreation.  In 1910, the Boy Scouts organization was started by Lieutenant-General Baden-Powell who wanted to instill in boys the importance of patriotism and cultivate their masculine skills (Jordan, 2009).  It was a reaction to the perceived problems of masculinity among youth at that time.  Many social commentators blamed the social arrangements of the Industrial Revolution for leading to the feminization of boys. The founders of the Boy Scouts organization aimed to rekindle traditional values of masculinity and national pride in young boys (Mechling, 2002).  In the early 1900s, work hours were significantly reduced for more workers, but overproduction was still considered to be a problem.  The gospel of consumption was considered one way to stimulate growth (Haine, 1992).  Thus, there was a huge increase in entertainment products for workers.  After the Great Depression, leisure time was perceived as such a great problem for the American people that national expert leadership was established to oversee the use of leisure by Americans (Parker, 1983).  After World War II, organized recreation was a fact of national life for young people (Mclean & Hurd, 2015).

The American teen today has more free time than at any time in the last century.  In the early decades of the 20th century, adolescents worked and contributed financially to their families.   The drive to compulsory schooling and prosperity after the Second World War, changed life for adolescents. Figure 1 is an ad from the 1950s; it very effectively connects teen leisure to consuming a product.  From about the middle of the 20th century, Hollywood understood the consumer value of the American teen.  Movies were made to reflect the unique issues in adolescent lives at that time. Being a teen meant being white, upper-class, rebellious, attending proms and sports events (Sprechlen, 2013).

The wide reach of Hollywood movies made this spread of an imagined lifestyle globally possible. In some sense, Hollywood helped socially construct the concept of adolescence today, and spread it globally.  Adolescents in Germany and Japan have adopted the leisure habits of youth portrayed in Hollywood movies.  There is evidence that adolescents in cultural contexts that have assimilated western popular culture are more likely to suffer from the range of mental illnesses that youth in the US suffer from, i.e., loneliness, alienation, depression and anxiety (Eckersley, 2005).   From the 1960s onwards, the movement to start clubs and afterschool activities were a direct result of adult fears that youth had too much free time and are likely to misuse it.  Today adolescents spend more time on leisure activities than in school or work (WCCO- CBS Minnesota, 2015), almost half of their waking hours.  There is wide variation between adolescents in how they spend their free time ranging from paid work to extra-curricular activities to entertainment and hanging out with their friends.

American teens have higher amounts of free time compared to youth in most other countries.  They spend their leisure time with friends, playing, engaging in hobbies, organized sports and in solitude (Spracklen, 2013).  Most adolescents find school boring and being with friends interesting.  In this context, extracurricular activities provide enjoyment and lead to higher levels of concentration.  In several studies, it has been demonstrated that participation in extracurricular activities were related to higher levels of participation in academic activities, increased communal engagement, and a tendency to continue these engagements into adulthood.  Youth participation in school-sponsored activities resulted in identifying ways to control stress and anger and facilitated young people’s development of positive relationships with adults (Johnson, 2009; Kaczynski, Manske, Mannell & Grewal, 2008). Organized sports participation has been found to have a mixed impact on adolescents, especially boys.  While it offers boys a space to engage in relationships across racial and ethnic groups, it is also related to higher levels of delinquency and lower academic engagement in school (Gardner, Roth, & Brooks-Gunn, 2009; Messner, 1990).

A related issue is the impact of unsupervised time on youth after school.  Studies show that lack of supervision and time spent socially with friends may lead to earlier engagement with sex and drugs and sometimes criminal behavior (Rani & Sathiyasekaran, 2013).  Yet, some studies show that being alone at home after school may lead to more responsible behavior and facilitate self-care (Jacobson & Crockett, 2000; Harker, 2001). Related to this issue, community efforts to provide safe spaces for adolescents is crucial.  Research studies show that providing safe community spaces for young people after school provides opportunities for rich peer relationships, connections with adults and a sense of accomplishment through incorporating skill building activities.  As a Wallace Foundation report (Wallace Foundation, 2015) emphasizes, effective programs for youth during their out of school hours would include coordination of services from the local government to the public schools and the families living in the community.  In high quality after-school programs there is an effort to make activities youth centered and decisions are made with appropriate data and consequent reflection.  While there might not be one program that works well in all settings according to the report, there needs to be a sharing of processes that work and what quality means in each context (Wallace Foundation 2013).  Finally, the comprehensive report by the foundation cautions that if any after school or safe space community program must survive, planners have to be fiscally prudent and plan for the sustainability of the program even after the leaders who may have originally applied and received funding have departed.

Popular media has had a tremendous impact on the way we live our lives today.  It provides us with metaphors and meanings to make sense of our experiences and in turn borrows from our experiences to create marketable entertainment products.  Since the advent of the first moving images, films have been used to define who we are as citizens and members of our community.  Viewers assume that mainstream news, for instance, reports all that is of significance to the viewer, but the audience does not question who makes the decisions about what news to pick and announce and why those choices are made.  As far back as 1917, J. P. Morgan, the financial and banking corporate entity, hired news managers to explore ways to influence Americans by influencing news stories in major newspapers.  Today, propaganda and marketing have taken on a whole new level of sophistication since the early years of marketing research.  A variety of professionals associated with children’s lives are being paid handsomely to explore children’s vulnerability to marketing messages and ways of exploiting them. Marketers are trained to ensnare parents by getting their children to nag for material objects.  In fact, almost 25 – 40% of all purchases made by parents are because of the persistent nagging of their children (Linn, 2004).  Child product manufacturers are the top advertisers on TV, spending almost 17 billion dollars per year (Šramová, 2014).  Media companies hope to turn children and teens into adult loyal customers of the brands they advertise and the earlier children are exposed and buy certain brands, the longer their loyalty to the brand and to the company that manufactures the products (Quart, 2004).

A new paradigm for looking at the impact of media on adolescents is exploring how media not only sells certain messages, but it creates the world that people live in (O’Shaughnessy & Stadler, 2014).  As discussed in chapter one, the form that adolescence takes today is a social construction and media has been and continues to be a big part of that creation.  One of the pioneers of early marketing to people of all ages was Edward Bernays who was a nephew of the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud.  Bernays was assigned to devise a campaign for the cigarette company Lucky Strikes.  He conceived of an ingenious strategy where he exploited many women’s need to appear trendy to popularize cigarette use among women.  He even used the women’s liberation movement at that time to associate freedom with smoking.  Prior to Bernays, companies mostly aimed their marketing at essential goods, but Bernays convinced producers that almost anything can be sold if they appealed to people’s emotional needs and deep inner wants (Amos & Haglund, 2000).

In Herman and Chomsky’s well known book Manufacturing Consent (1988), they assert that media operates through several filters that actually manufactures our consent even in countries with a free press.  The first filter is through ownership.  Since mass media is typically owned by a few corporations, the bottom line is always profit for the shareholders. Since the cost of producing mass media is high, owners recruit advertisers to cut down their costs and in return they sell the audience to the advertisers.  Those in power find ways to influence the stories that are told and they determine how they are told.  As a result, profits and self-serving goals form barriers to people’s capacity to get information that is unbiased.  While the platforms for disseminating information has mushroomed, the underlying profit-motivated frameworks have changed little (McChesney, 1989; 2008).  Teens today have more conversations centered on brands as compared to teens in past years (Quart, 2004).  Regular children and teen programming have a parade of brand name products displayed prominently and these are promoted additionally through peer to peer marketing (Story & French, 2004; Lee & Ulgado, 1997).

In the 1970s, the American Pediatric Association argued persuasively for a ban or at least a regulation on advertising in children’s programs on TV.  Marketing lobbyists vigorously fought against the proposed legislation and managed to thwart the movement towards regulating children’s advertising (Schlosser, 2001).  The commercial value of teen free time and their engagement with popular media has been well documented both in academic literature and among marketing circles.  Fox (1995) described the many ways that adolescents are manipulated by commercial interests because youth do not recognize the real purpose of advertising and often mistake the actors in the ads as representing real people.  The students in his sample could not distinguish between a public service announcement and an ad for a sugar beverage in terms of their purpose and intent.  Other research has conclusively demonstrated that marketing of fast food products has led to a rise in obesity as well as disordered eating nationwide (Cummins & Macintyre, 2006).  As a result, in recent years there has been a movement by parents, caregivers and other advocates for children to push the Federal Trade Commission to impose regulations on advertising aimed at children (TEDX, 2013).  The advocates argue that cigarette advertising aimed at children was regulated because of its dire public health impact; fast food and other children’s products have a similar public health impact and therefore their marketing should be regulated (Allen, 2008; Adam, Tyrrell, Adamson & White, 2012).

Popular media creates ideas and narratives for people to make sense of their society – the political ethos of a society.  In modern times, mainstream media has had an unprecedented role in shaping public perceptions of youth.  For instance, much of the popular narrative about the media impact on youth has been negative – studies are cited by writers to substantiate how media makes young people more violent and more prone to sexual behavior.  This reflects researcher’s perceptions of youth as being particularly impressionable and vulnerable.  The media in turn provides symbols and stories that young people use to live their lives.  Media narratives both define youth and is defined by youth in particular ways.  Youth in turn borrow the metaphors that media provides to communicate their own social location (Ruddock, 2013).  Anyone who works with adolescents and youth cannot understand youth reality without coming to terms with the media that adolescents interact with.  American teens spend more than 10 hours a day immersed in popular media including television, feature films, music, video games and going online (Buckingham, Bragg & Kehily, 2014).  The sheer amount of time that they engage with popular commercial and digital media underlines the importance of the media messages on their lives.

Media representations are not neutral but reflect the views of those who have power.  There has been some excellent exploration of mainstream media representation based on gender, race, class and religious categories in contemporary society by researchers from a variety of disciplines. One of the principal ways in which media portrays groups in the margins are in the form of symbolic annihilation and through misrepresentation of groups.  Symbolic annihilation occurs when some groups are invisible in public spheres including the mass media.

Gramsci introduced the notion of hegemony to explain how it is that the powerful continue to maintain their hold over society.  One of the ways that they do is through ideological manipulation and misdirecting the attention of the audience and one of their most forceful instruments is popular and commercial media.  For example, instead of concentrating on the corporate welfare that rich families receive through tax loopholes and breaks, and through sheer non-payment of taxes, it is the poor and other marginalized groups that are labeled welfare cheats.  Instead of pointing to a central fact that most adolescent girls are impregnated by adult men, the media focuses on the teen mothers who are supposedly lost and have no moral virtues. Focusing on vaguely understood notions about what qualifies as welfare or what factors lead to early pregnancy, through popular medium, the masses are encouraged to focus their anger and hatred towards the most vulnerable groups in a society.

Popular, commercial and digital media tell us how the world ought to be structured, what our values should be and most important of all, what is ‘normal’.  When youth from marginalized communities are constantly exposed to popular commercial media that communicates that they have no value, are evil or just objects of fun and vicious humor and are responsible for their own terrible situation, youth react by internalizing these messages (Carmangian, 2013; Emerson, 2002; Gross, 1991; Petras, 1993).  Thus, many of the modern ‘ills’ exhibited by adolescents be a response to the hegemonic messages about youth in the margins put out by those in power.  In 2019, during Black History Month in March, Esquire Magazine’s cover feature was called The Life of An American Boy.  It profiled a 17-year-old middle class, white, heterosexual boy normalizing the lives of a small slice of the American population – it received criticism from a wide range of readership and other magazines for its choice of representation of boyhood in 21st century America. There is a lesson here in that mainstream social science takes as its norm white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, Christian, and middle- and upper-class youth as its norm for representing adolescence. Popular media reinforce the stereotypes about youth in the margins. It creates a feedback loop for youth that does not capture all of the potential authentic ways of being for young people.

The principal developmental tasks for adolescents in the last half a century involve exerting their independence, exploring new ways of expression and looking for peer validation.  However, the digital revolution has transformed their spaces and methods of exploration.  Most teens today have computers or laptops, smart phones, video game consoles and tablets (Roberts & Foehr, 2008).  While there has been a sea change in teen media use, there are disparities in usage based on income, race and ethnicity (ana Rojas, Straubhaar, Roychowdhury & Okur, 2003).  Black and Latinx youth have much lower levels of digital engagement than white and Asian youth though in recent years the gap is considerably narrowed (Fairlie, 2004; 2017).  Language barriers along with income and other factors contribute to the large digital divide between groups from different ethnicities (Servon, 2008).  Of those who do have access to digital devices, 90% of youth of all ethnicities go online every day and about a quarter claim to be online almost constantly (Weber & Dixon, 2007).  When online, youth spend more time on social media than on other activities.  They use Facebook the most followed by Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Vine (Anderson & Jiang, 2018).  Teens report that texting is their principal manner of communicating digitally with friends.  Talking on the phone is rarely preferred by youth (and increasingly, adults as well); boys report video games as a significant mode of communication with friends (Pew Research Center Teen Relationships Survey, 2015).  While many teens report engaging in digital technology use deliberately, they are equally likely to be exposed to popular media in an ambient fashion.  In many homes, the television is on during meal times or music is playing in the background. There might be billboards on the way to school and digital signage in the school hallway.  There is little research about the impact of ambient exposure to popular media on children and teens, though there is some evidence that teens do absorb the advertising information in all of these different modes (Stice, Spangler & Agras, 2011; Harris, Bargh, & Brownell, 2009; Veerman, Van Beeck, Barendregt & Mackenbach, 2009).

One question raised by such ubiquitous media use among adolescents is whether digital media and the accompanying multitasking, affects the way they process information.  In one survey conducted by Scholastic, 92% of teens report they concentrate the best using printed material and 89% report that if costs were the same, print was preferable to digital reading materials (Subrahmanyam & Smahel, 2010).  The major challenge with digital reading (and writing) is often distraction (CBS News This Morning, 2015).  Some researchers claim that excessive texting and engaging with digital media could become a neurological addiction (Conley, 2011).  In both high school and college classrooms across the country, instructors are having to manage this distraction through using enactment of codified rules and strategic redirection (Cheong, Shuter & Suwinyattichaiporn, 2016).  Another major challenge for instructors of youth increasingly is to transform in a dynamic fashion the platforms where new information is presented to students.  Instructors have written about using tweets (euronews, 2014) to find out more about students’ understandings of a topic and engaging students through social media platforms while at the same time offering guidance to critically deconstruct messages in the platform (Alverman, 2017; Akom, Cammarota & Ginwright, 2008).  Since technology is constantly changing and the kinds of platforms young people are using and feel most comfortable in is undergoing rapid transformations, it is a challenge for instructors to use them in a relevant and useful fashion.

For most of its history, research on the impact of media on young people tended to focus on them as passive consumers of adult driven messages.  In more recent years, the move to study the audience of these messages have uncovered the surprising agency that many youths demonstrate to media messages and the efforts of advocates to facilitate new ways of responding to commercialism in the media (Jackson & Goddard, 2015).  In some ways, the ‘girl-power’ movement of the 1990s and other such empowering forces allowed teens to talk back to big media (Hains, 2009).   Bloustien (2003) wrote about how the opportunity for young women to present themselves in new ways online allowed for both self-making and self-representation.  The girls in her study carefully chose the images that they wanted to carve out for themselves while also experimenting with novel depictions of their desired selves.  The girls in Bloustien’s study used images and narratives from popular culture to communicate their own sense of who they were.  Seiter (2005) similarly points to Latinx boys in her study who adopted cultural symbols from wrestlers in their own representation in film of who they were.  Most spontaneous youth media productions however ignored difference and inequality in popular media and the images they chose reflected their assumptions that they and their inner circle were the norm; thus, teen media even if self-produced erases or minimizes difference (Osgerby, 2004).  Youth and their problems were more likely to be explored using the framework from mainstream communities that have predominant access to digital media production tools- these typically tend to be white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, middle and upper class, and Judeo-Christian (Akom, Cammarota & Ginwright, 2008).

Today social media and other forms of digital media are ubiquitous and the technology that is essential to media production are more easily available to youth in the margins (Horst, 2011).  Phones are more media tools than phones in the way in which they are used by people.  They can consume and produce media for dissemination.  As a result, children and youth are participating in information and entertainment culture in an unprecedented manner.  The challenge is to connect formal critical media pedagogy (Media Literacy Now, 2017) with their informal knowledge allowing them to be flexible in their responses to the dramatically changing world.  As advocates of children’s expanding use of digital media, it is impossible to not be fearful of the many negative impacts of media while recognizing the opportunities and affordances it provides for growth.  All literacies are a capacity to share meaning through symbols.  Today, there is an expanding arena of work and life in which that facility for dissecting information and producing meaning is important.

Experts today agree that there are many kinds of literacies that go towards shaping an educated individual.  Traditional reading and writing are no longer enough to be fully informed.  Aufderheide (1993) writes that media literacy is the ability of the citizen to access, analyze (evaluate) and produce information for specific outcomes.  Robinson (1996) defines media literacy as the ability to decode the carefully constructed codes and conventions of the media industry and understand how it affects our perspective of the world.  Thoman (1999) adds that it is the ability of the consumer of media to make personal meaning from all the information.  Thus, it is the ability to choose, challenge and question. It is the ability to be conscious of current events and the larger structural forces that influence the trajectory of individual lives.  Some of the essential skills of a media literate person is the capacity to analyze media messages, identify who created the message and for what purpose, recognize the tools of persuasion used to sell ideas and objects, identify lies and biases, and most importantly, forge ways to be agents of change (Schwartz, 2001).

Today, teacher education programs routinely include technology but have little on media literacy (Considine, Horton, & Moorman, 2009).  Critical media literacy pedagogy requires that teachers of children and teens critically analyze the impact of media on their students, the entities that big media benefits and the groups it disenfranchises, how violence in television affects children and the commercial implications of growing up in a media saturated environment.  An effective media literacy curriculum would have to explore the anti-democratic sentiments that are part of the media landscape for youth – reducing their needs and aspirations to fashion statements, exploiting them for commercial purposes, and demonizing and stereotyping them as immature and self-obsessed (Hobbs, 2010; Lewis & Jhally, 1998).

A crucial part of media literacy is to fully comprehend that media and power are intimately related and the many ways in which they are related.  Some groups have less space in popular media than others and in an effective media literacy curriculum, students would explore the complex ways in which some groups are kept out of power within mainstream media (Lewis & Jhally, 1998; McChesney, 2015).  A second important goal for media literacy programs is to explore the commercial interests that govern most media.  As McChesney (2008; 2015) asserts, for most of the major players in the marketplace, the concern is in profit and less, if any in the health and welfare of the population.  Thus, an important element of a critical media literacy program would include democratizing the nature and the access of popular media. Understanding how it works allows students to do exactly that.  Some questions that parents and advocates for youth can encourage is regarding the entities putting out influential media messages.  It is important to question their motive, helping to facilitate an exploration of the winners and losers of the current media environment.  Teachers and parents can encourage analyses of the tools of persuasion and the parts of the story that are being left out when a story is told.

In addition, it is important to facilitate students’ exploration of the ethical dimensions of communication.  Students must be taught to apply social responsibility to digital situations (Fleming, Giroux & Grossberg, 2000).  Studies conducted with high school students substantiate that media literacy leads to increased levels of perspective taking, civic engagement, confidence and motivation in the learners (Bennett, 2008; Cohen & Kahne, 2011; Scharrer, 2002).  Kubey (1998) cautions US educators against ignoring the vital need to educate youth about how media functions.  They encourage us to examine the issue from a cultural studies framework which involves deconstructing how the media imparts cultural values to our society.  Since media is a crucial space for imparting cultural messages, it is also a space for those who are powerful and those who want to assert their own dreams and desires.  For Kubey, the central purpose of media education is to make this struggle for power in media representation explicit and teach students to denaturalize these images – to not take them as natural.  When students begin to comprehend the many ways that media represents the real world, they can start to challenge the basic assumptions around us that we take for granted.  A good media education class would allow students to leverage the media environment and not ignore it.

While young people have unprecedented means to communicate with others, they experience little control over that communication.  In fact, youth report that they feel surveilled and controlled (Ruck, Harris, Fine & Freudenberg, 2008).  Advocates of youth must prepare students to be leaders in creating the new media environment, move it from a closed to an open system, from a predetermined structure to a platform for free expression and from simply absorbing information to participating in its creation (Merrin, 2009).  Watch Ernest Morrell, professor at Teachers College at Columbia talk about media literacy and empowerment among youth – there is no video link here yet.

Clark (2013) asserts that in an environment where there are more youth of color than white youth under the age of 18 in the country, we must foster agency and voice for our students with digital media.  In one study she conducted, high schools’ students decided to use digital media to explore their relationship with local law enforcement.  They videotaped their conversations with cops, analyzed the data and came up with suggestions to improve the frayed communication between the two.  As a result of the study, training in implicit bias was introduced to the local law enforcement training.  Clark emphasizes that along with teaching youth how to use their voice, advocates need to help teens gather their audience and use digital technology for evidence gathering and reflection.

Media literacy need not be a standalone course in educational projects.  It can be integrated into other areas of study.  In one South African school, students were taught to dissect history books to explore gender bias in the depiction of men and women (Schoeman, 2009).  Exposure to critical media can be used to teach immigrant youth a new language (Vargas, 2006).  The differences between a popular article on a scientific subject and its primary source can be used to discuss how audience and intent has an influence on the writer’s language and tone (Yarden, Brill & Falk, 2001).  One group of teachers facilitated an exploration of popular scientific claims using primary resources by their high school students (Brickman, Gormally, Francom, Jardeleza, Schutte, Jordan & Kanizay, 2012).  Another group of teachers explored children’s films for inaccuracies in scientific understandings (Worsham & Diepenbrock, 2013).  In fields like the social sciences, there is evidence that having knowledge of media production also increases student’s civic engagement (Hobbs, Donnelly, Friesem & Moen, 2013; Kim & Yan, 2016).

Leisure takes varied forms in different cultures and historical periods.  In modern industrial capital societies, it has been co-opted by corporations for profit and to sell people products, images and ideas.  In the last two years, it has become evident that political actors use digital and social media to manipulate the emotions and perceptions of the masses and fake news has been employed to create moral panics and violence among people.  Critical media literacy is an important tool for teachers and other advocates of young people to help them talk back to corporations in the face of disenfranchisement and lack of inclusivity.