New article on how parents mediate the media

“Parental mediation theory for the digital age” is an article in this month’s journal Communication Theory. It’s meant to update communication theories about how parents are mediating the media, now that digital and mobile media have become firmly entrenched in family life. Specifically it argues that with digital media, young people can contribute to family life in ways that weren’t possible before, and we need to take account of how children aren’t just vulnerable to media effects but are also co-contributors to our lives together with and through digital and mobile media. Here is the more academic version of the article’s abstract:

This article describes the theory of parental mediation, which has evolved to consider how parents utilize interpersonal communication to mitigate the negative effects that they believe communication media have on their children. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this theory as employed in the sociopsychologically rooted media effects literature as well as sociocultural ethnographic research on family media uses. To account for the emotional work that digital media have introduced into contemporary family life, I review interpersonal communication scholarship based on sociologist A. R. Hochschild’s (1977, 1989) work on emotions, and suggest L. Vygotsky’s (1978) social development theory as a means of rethinking the role of children’s agency in the interactions between parents and children that new media affords. The article concludes by suggesting that in addition to the strategies of active, restrictive, and co-viewing as parental mediation strategies, future research needs to consider the emergent strategy of participatory learning that involves parents and children interacting together with and through digital media.

Full citation and where it’s available online:
Clark, L.S. Parental mediation theory for the digital age. Communication Theory 21(4): 323-343.

Making Your Kid Super and Using Education to Hedge Your Bets

Okay, admittedly, this is going to be a more cynical reflection than the title of the post suggests.

Two recent op-ed columns are worth reading back to back: Bill Keller’s The University of Wherever,” about the unsustainability of today’s expensive university educations, and James Atlas’“Super People,”on young adults with over-the-top lists of achievements for college and graduate school applications.

Atlas marvels at the resumes of young adults who have worked in orphanages around the world and founded farmer’s markets in lower-income neighborhoods, all while learning several languages and playing multiple instruments. He wonders, “has our hysterically competitive, education-obsessed society finally outdone itself in its tireless efforts to produce winners whose abilities are literally off the charts?”

Atlas’ column links the over-achievement of today’s young adults with “helicopter parents,” particularly mothers who give up careers to manage their children’s prospects for future economic success. But actually, he does more than blame the mothers, a familiar theme in many articles about what’s wrong with today’s children. The article subtly raises the deeper moral dilemma that this new “species” of “super people” represents. Even as wealthy young people have been striving to become hyper-competent to compete for fewer and fewer desirable positions at the top, those young people from the lowest socioeconomic levels suffer greater declines in verbal and math skills compared to earlier generations. So those with privilege focus on making sure that they’re able to access the best, while those without are less competitive even for the positions their parents might once have held.

Even the hopes we once held out about the “leveling” potential of the Internet are now fading. Maybe once we would have celebrated the ways that university professors could make their content accessible to those who otherwise would have little means to gain the insights of higher education. Access to outstanding university-level education could be accessible for more than just the “Super People” that Atlas discussed in his column. But NYT columnist Bill Keller seems a little more skeptical.

Keller talks about a Stanford faculty member who’s made his lectures available worldwide and for free. Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun offers a course titled, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” Keller notes that after the New York Times ran a piece about this offering, online enrollments in the course grew to 130,000. Certainly, this indexes a desire for outstanding education about a significant topic, and demonstrates that the Internet can make it available to those who couldn’t go to Stanford. But does it solve the fundamental problem of shrinking access to “the top”?

In Keller’s article, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun is quoted as criticizing the traditional university as “insanely uneconomical.” After all, he says, he can provide “free” education to whoever wants it at a fraction of the cost (never mind the fact that Stanford is paying him to create this “free” content for those who are actually paying $50,000 a year to receive it in a classroom).

What’s interesting in Keller’s article is that this description of “free” university education gets examined in relation to the question of whether or not its offerings will undermine traditional brick-and-mortar schools. After all, he cautions, higher education remains one of the last of the desirable U.S. “exports,” a point on which he cites both Thrun as well as Stanford’s president. Sure, the Internet makes it free, these experts as well as the article’s author seem to suggest. Just as long as it enhances, rather than undermines, the pedigree of a Stanford degree. “We” in the U.S. need to maintain our space at “the top,” after all. Wow, are we collectively nervous about that. And rightly so.

It’s kind of funny how much Thrun, the Stanford professor, sounds like a grown-up version of the earnest Super People young adults Atlas reviewed. Can you imagine having 130,000 sign up for your college course? When he talks about wanting to make his course available “for free,” he sounds as if he is being generous and populist – until you consider the fact that the added value he brings to the university (even through “free” students auditing his class) actually, and maybe ironically, guarantees his own “spot at the top.”

We in the U.S. sure do love — and loathe — these stories of individual greatness. Sure, we all want fairness. But when it comes down to it, parents want whatever will give their kids an edge over others. We are profoundly competitive. Our current economic strife didn’t cause this competitiveness, but it certainly has brought it to the fore.

But as we focus our energies on competing, what might we be losing? If there are “winners” and “losers,” are we ok with the fact that we can no longer ignore the huge discrepancies between “winners” and “losers” that have a lot more to do with luck of birth than with giftedness, drive, or education? Or perhaps I should ask, how long will we be ok with this? Isn’t this fundamentally the opposite of the U.S. dream of a society of equal opportunity?

I feel like we as parents are so nervous about the future of our own kids that sometimes, we fail to see the ways in which that future is inextricably bound up with the future of *all* kids. Maybe not thinking about that inevitable connection, actually, has become a central strategy in how we’re hedging our bets. Because if we thought about it, we might have to change what we’re doing as parents. We might have to think less about “us” and “them” and more about shared futures and win-win (rather than win/lose) scenarios. And we just might have to examine our assumptions about what makes a kid “super” to begin with.

Families change, raising new questions about technologies

I just returned from a the recent conference of the Council of Contemporary Families, an organization that’s dedicated to providing better and more rigorous sociological data to inform public opinion and public policy.  It was exhilarating to learn of the new directions in sociological research and U.S. families, and I’m using this blog entry to reflect on some of the questions the sessions raised for me as I think about how those in media studies might respond in a similarly forward-thinking way about changing families and the roles that various media play in them.

Several people in the conference’s first panel reported that close to 1 in 7 U.S. families are now part of a multiracial family. Yet although interracial marriage has become more common, economic disparities remain important in relation to how people from differing ethnic groups come to meet one another and develop relationships.  Much of our ethnic divisions in the U.S. are strongly rooted in geographies, as Nick Jones of the U.S. census said; several urban areas already include a majority of Latinos or African Americans.  This made me wonder about Craig Watkins’ research into digital and mobile media use among urban communities, and the implications as to how social networks may participate in either redrawing networked geographies — or reinforcing geographic divisions.  Watkins often cites the Pew research finding that Blacks and Latinos are more likely than Whites to use their mobiles to download music or play games, demonstrating that urban populations are among the leaders in mobile adoption and use.  Yet we still don’t know much about how diverse populations communicate with one another modally.   I suspect that urban populations are also leaders in this area of identity negotiation.  I was reminded of this yesterday when one of my students observed with some humor that although she probably has an ipod full of a range of music that’s similar to her urban professional friends, she’d be horrified if some of her other professional acquaintances were to hear what’s on it.  She only puts professional info on her Facebook page; she considers her ipod strictly private.  Does this mean that some devices are becoming more private and personal than others, or that we are becoming more selective in how we participate in various online-related activities?  Or perhaps it signifies that some communities have long had the experience of revealing certain parts of themselves selectively, and so the dilemmas of identity and new technologies aren’t all that new for everyone.

This also made me wonder whether or not families communicate about this kind of online negotiating directly, or if it happens through observation.  One thing I learned from this conference is that it does seem that families that communicate openly about feelings concerning racial ethnic identity tend to do better than those that do not.  This was an especially poignant observation made by one of the people who spoke about interracial adoptions and the tendency for white couples to want to be “color blind” – much to the detriment of young people who may interpret their approach instead as “my mom and dad don’t look like me and/or they don’t have friends who look like me.”

Interracial adoptions were a particularly interesting part of the discussion at this conference.  USA Today reporter Sharon Jayson published a summary of Adam Pertman’s research of adoption conducted with the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.  They have found that about 40% of all U.S. adoptions now involve multiracial families, and biracial and multiracial children are four times more likely to be put up for adoption than monorace children.

Pertman offered an instructive quiz to the conference’s attendees, asking us which did we believe was the most popular method of adoption: infants adopted domestically, international adoptions, or adoptions from the foster care system.  Whereas the audience was split about evenly, we – like most in the U.S. – were way off.  Fully 68% of adoptions occur through the foster care system.  International adoption has been dropping and now accounts for 15% of all adoptions, and domestic infant adoption accounts for another 17%.  It certainly demonstrated the discrepancies between public opinion and reality when it comes to adoptive families, making me wonder: why are these stories of foster families told in such limited (and often negative) ways?  Probably because the other two kinds of adoptions are most noticeable in the middle class ‘burbs, aka the people who read newspapers and the people television advertisers favor in relation to programming.

When those of us studying family media uses think about how technology plays a role in the lives of these growing families, it seems that there are all kinds of new questions we could be asking with regard to representation, as well as negotiation of identity in online as well as offline spaces.  There are also questions about usage: I met one research group that’s exploring how divorced parents use the mobile to avoid interacting with one another and instead communicate directly with their child. That reminded me of Danny Miller’s studies on how mothers who work transnationally utilize mobiles to keep in touch with their children, with varying degrees of success according to those children.

This conference was all very helpful, as my research team and I are heading into Denver’s most diverse high school tomorrow to continue our experiences in teaching digital media literacy there. In addition to teaching, we’re learning from the students themselves about what they would teach others about their own experiences in negotiating identities among diverse populations both online and off.  I was glad to be reminded of the CCF’s commitment to think deeply about structural factors that influence family forms and technological uses, and was also challenged to consider how I might frame my own research so that it challenges rather than echoes a simple “deficit model” in relation to diversity.  I am sure that this research will raise many more questions than it will answer, and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

What Young People Teach Us

It’s nearing finals week here at the University of Denver, so this will be quick. Just had to share this story from one of my students because it so neatly illustrates the positive experience young people can have when they lend their digital media expertise to people of their parents’ generation.

“So, do I need a Facebook account to promote my book,?” Emily’s supervisor at her internship asked her. She told him she didn’t think he needed one for that purpose, but she suggested that he should find out whether or not Facebook would be useful for him by establishing a personal Facebook account. He agreed, and so she helped him set up the account.

As luck would have it, one of his daughters was in Chile during last Saturday’s devastating earthquake. “The phones were down, and so he had no way of finding out if she was okay,” Emily said. Fortunately, the young woman in Chile was able to get wireless access – and so she put a note on her Facebook page indicating that she was all right. Her father was able to get the news and to let others in her family know – and he was able to be in touch with his daughter to provide emotional support at a crucial time. Emily said that now he’s asked her to show him how to make phone calls using Skype so that dad and daughter can be in touch and can see and hear one another.

For Emily, the experience turned out to be a very positive one. She’d often been asked by coworkers and supervisors for help setting up Facebook, Twitter, or blog accounts; that’s what happens for lots of young people who are asked to share their social media expertise with those who have been in the workforce for a while. But this time, Emily was able to see how this small instance of helpfulness had given her an opportunity to make a difference. “It made me feel really good, because I had played some small role in helping him to use new media in a way that enabled him to be in contact with his daughter – and that made a huge difference for him,” Emily said.

Coworkers and supervisors have seen the value of getting involved with social media for some time now. Business leaders talk about social media marketing, the new wave of online and contact-based business, etc. – and sometimes, young interns like Emily are called upon to offer their expertise in the work situation. But parents, too, can appreciate the ability that social networking affords for long-term relationships with our kids, and I’m finding that they’re increasingly asking for their help in getting set up for social networking. Once emerging adults are away at college or the military, many parents ask to “friend” their kids, and while some kids choose to use the “limited profile” option, many find social networking can be a helpful way to remain in contact with parents.

What’s more, being in touch via social media can help emerging adults to navigate the changing relationships they have with their parents. They can control what they put up, what they provide access to, and how often they share what they do about their lives. And Emily’s story is a great reminder not only of how a dad and daughter were able to maintain connection through a devastating time, but how a young person was able to provide assistance in making that connection possible.

We often focus on the negatives of the digital generation gap, and with good reason. But because of the digital generation gap, this is a wonderful time for us to be able to learn from our children. Let’s hope we can find meaningful ways to establish and build upon those connections with our kids and with the other young people who are eager to contribute their expertise for the rest of us.

New study on social & mobile media use

Today the Pew Internet & American Life project released “Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults,” its latest report on media experiences of teens and young adults. For this study, Amanda Lenhart and her team conducted interviews with 800 adolescents and more than 2,250 adults over the age of 18. Data were collected between June and September of 2009. Amanda Lenhart, danah boyd, Eszter Hargittai, and I are each cited in this article about the study in the Washington Post. The article highlights the fact that teens don’t use Twitter as much as we might expect – which I comment on below.

75% of teens have a cell phone; 66% text

First, here’s what they’ve found:
TEENS:

* Three quarters of teens now have a cell phone. 12 seems to be the age at which many get a cell phone; 58% of 12-year-olds have one. This is a dramatic increase over 2004, when just 18% of 12-year-olds had a cell phone.

* 66% of teens say that they send and receive text messages.

* 93% of teens say they go online.   Two thirds of all teen Internet users go online every day (63%).  14 seems to be the age when they’re most likely to start going online regularly, as 95% of 14-17 year olds go online compared with 88% of teens 12-13.  White teens go online more regularly than Hispanic teens.
* 73% of wired U.S. teens now use social networking sites, with Facebook leading the way. This is also an increase from previous years. In 2006, just over half of online teens (55%) used social networking sites. But their usage of these sites is shifting…

* Between February 2008 and the current study, some uses of social networking sites have become less frequent among teens – at least, fewer reported sending daily messages to their friends, sending bulletins, sending group messages, or sending private messages. (**why? Here are my guesses)

* Teens aren’t using Twitter much. About 8% of Internet users use Twitter, with older teens and high school girls more likely than other teens to use Twitter.

* But they are getting their news online – much to the chagrin of the news industries that haven’t figured out a workable financial model for this practice yet.  62% of online teens say they get news online.

*  They’re also doing more buying online: now, 48% of teens buy things like books, clothing, or music online, compared to 31% who bought online in 2000.

* And they’re getting personal information online, such as health, dieting, and fitness info (31%) as well as info on hard to discuss topics like drug use and sexual health (17%).

YOUNG ADULTS:
*93% of 18-29 year olds own a cell phone.

*93% of 18-29 year olds go online.

* 72% of young adults ages 18-29 now use social networking sites – just about the same percentage as teens.

93% of 18-29 year olds have a cell phone

* They remain the most significant Twitter users. One third of those 18-29 who are online post or read status updates.

* Half of 18-29 year olds have accessed the Internet wirelessly on a laptop or cell phone. About a quarter have accessed the Internet with another device such as a gaming device or an e-book reader.

* Two thirds of 18-29 year olds own a laptop; they’re the only cohort more likely to own a laptop than a desktop.

ADULTS:
* The number of adults using social networking sites has increased dramatically over the past year. Now, 47% of online adults use social networking sites, compared to 37% a year ago. Fully 73% of adults who use social networking sites are on Facebook. 48% have a MySpace profile and 14% have a LinkedIn profile.

*About half of those adults who are on social networking sites (52%) say that they have two or more different profiles (meaning they may have one on Facebook and one on LinkedIn or another social networking site)

COMPARING GROUPS:
* 81% of 18-29 year olds are wireless Internet users. But among those 30-49, only 63% use wireless, and the numbers go down further for those ages 50 and up: only 34% of them access the Internet wirelessly.

* Whereas 93% of both teens and young adults say they go online, only one quarter of adults over 18 go online.
* Compared to November 2006, fewer teens and young adults, and more older adults, are blogging.

FOR PARENTS:

* Three quarters of families with children between the ages of 12 and 17 have broadband Internet access at home. In 2004, only half of households with teens had broadband access.  This means that Internet access is faster and easier than it was just 6 years ago.

* Of the 25% of families that don’t have speedy Internet access, 10% use a dial up model, 8% have no computer, and 4% have a computer with no Internet access.  Some families and teens may be opting for a cell phone in lieu of a more expensive computer.

WHY??

Why does cell phone, social networking, and Internet use continue to rise among all ages?  It’s a function of critical mass, or what Malcolm Gladwell called the tipping point.  The more your friends use these things, the more these things become something you see as a necessity rather than an option.  These technologies are becoming a taken for granted part of everyday life for people across ages, incomes, and ethnicities.  They’re being used in different ways by differing groups – and how they’re used has a lot to do with the needs of the particular groups.  Teens need more constant contact with their peers; relationships are what’s of central importance to them during those years when they’re trying to figure out who they are in relation to others.  For adults, concerns about relationships remain important, but we start to see ourselves playing different roles in different parts of our lives: hence the need for multiple social networking profiles in places like Facebook, LinkedIn, or somewhere else.

**But if Facebook and relationships remain important for young people, then why does it seem that teen uses of certain social networking sites are going down? Teens see Facebook as a “social resume,” to use the words of one young person I’ve spoken with. It’s necessary to have an online social networking profile in order to be seen in today’s social world. But it’s not the most convenient way to communicate with your closest friends. Text messaging is preferred for continuing conversations and for coordinating activities. If a particular message gets too complicated to type out, a phone call is next in line of importance.

So Facebook is seen as something that’s important, but less convenient, since you and your friends have to check in to the site and you may want to convey a message to a particular friend immediately. Facebook’s good for keeping up with friends you may not see every day or every hour.

And Twitter might be fun if you’d like to be a celebrity, but I think teens are not finding Twitter to be useful because they worry that they’ll find that their peers think of them as self-promoters who give TMI – too much information.  Figuring out how much to share and with whom is part of a delicate cost and benefit analysis for teens.  Twitter’s broadcast-like function doesn’t allow for the kind of nuance that teens seek in this area. This is why I think texting is on the way up: it allows for much more personalized decision-making about who to reach with which messages.

One thing I’ve noticed that this survey didn’t really discuss is teens’ increased level of familiarity with privacy settings on Facebook. My guess is that teens started to have greater incentive to figure out the privacy settings as the number of adults on Facebook and other social networking sites started increasing over the past year. After all, when you’re getting a ‘friend’ request from your aunt, you may not want to deny or ignore it — so you’re motivated to figure out how to limit her access to all of your photos and other information. It’s not increased awareness of online dangers, then, that has motivated the attention to privacy – it’s concern over keeping control over the information that’s available to a wider circle of adults in your social circles.

WHAT DO TO?

What are parents supposed to do about this increasingly mediated world in which our young people live?  Here are a few suggestions:

1. Don’t try to friend your teens or preteens on Facebook. It’s the equivalent of trying to barge into your teen’s room without knocking.  Respect their privacy.  But do talk with them about your expectations: you expect them to be the same person both offline and online (kind and respectful of others and not a bully, for starters).

2. When you talk with your kids about the technologies in their lives, look for ways to find common ground.  Find things to like in their choices of music, fashion, or other popular culture choices.  They see these choices as expressions of themselves, so criticizing these things is heard as if it’s a criticism of them.

3. Many parents are concerned that they need to help their preteens and teens figure out how and when to “unplug.” If you want to establish household rules about when it’s appropriate to use cell phones or laptops, ask them if they have suggestions about how and when they think you should use these things, too.  Some teens mention the fact that they wish that their parents would watch them play soccer rather than texting or chatting on the phone throughout their game.  Make sure you’re ready to listen to their suggestions about unplugging if you want them to listen to yours.

4. Use digital and mobile media as an excuse for you to demonstrate your willingness to learn from your teens and preteens. Ask them advice and suggestions on how to make better use of these technologies in your life.  Ask them to give you a tour of Club Penguin, Webkinz, or even World of Warcraft.  Many preteens and teens like to have opportunities to be in a leadership position within their family.  If you find yourself needing to comment, see #2.

5. Consider using digital media in ways that will bring your family together. Start a Wii sports tournament, or create a family video about an event that you can share with extended family members.  If you share the workload, you’ll all benefit from the collaboration – and you’ll be amazed by the creativity you can have when you work together!