Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Chapter 8 Youth, Technology, and Media Cultures

2006; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3102/0091732x030001279

1935-1038

Julian Sefton‐Green,

Literacy, Media, and Education

n Miranda July's film You, Me and Everyone We Know (2005), a young child, Robby, is initiated into and then takes over from his big brother a with an anonymous respondent who (we later find out) turns out to be an older woman. In unsupervised experiences online, and through cutting and pasting text, the young child effectively teaches himself to and manages to seduce the respondent. This satire of contemporary anxiety about children's online vulnerability plays into current press saturation and television's focus on online pornography and pedophilia. In July's film, the boy's play with the projected identity afforded him in the chat room, the image of him learning to write and communicate, offers a very different image of the modern child. His agency, symbolized in his control of the computer and its communicative possibilities and in his sexual desire (however appropriate), can be contrasted with the child transfixed by the TV in the 1982 film Poltergeist. There the image of the blank flickering white screen beckons a toddler away from the warmth of her family into its evil heart. This is an image of the media intruding into the family and taking over a child's mind. The screen has changed from 1982 to 2005. In 2005 it is now more interactive, more dominant of the visual field (Manovich, 2002), and it is a principal means of communication beyond the living room walls. Although these two film excerpts are clearly fictional representations of child and screen, I want to take them as the organizing themes for this review in an attempt to explore research about young people and the media over the past approximately 20 years. This is not a story of enlightenment as if we have moved from the notion of an evil magic to one of sophisticated play. The scholarship and research in this field does not follow such a simple trajectory. Indeed, we encounter anxiety about the negative effects of the media current in contemporary debate-for example, around the role of the media in childhood obesity. However, the current levels of attention to learning to write, to master the technology, to appropriate a play with identity, and to act in the sexualized adult world are all important in current debates around how young people use the media. They also frame how we now theorize and study children's interactions with the media as pedagogic relationships with significant educational potential.