| Liesbeth De Block |
| Monday, 05 January 2009 | ||||||
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talks about soap operas, social change and The Simpsons
I'm a lecturer on the MA in Media, Culture and Communications and a research officer in the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media based in the LKL. CIVICWEBCIVICWEB is a European-funded, seven-partner project funded under Framework 6. The full title is Young People, the Internet, and Civic Participation. It's a three-year project and it's in its third year now. It was set up to address concerns about young people's - between 15 and 25 - perceived lack of political voting and civic engagement and the potential role of the internet in promoting participation.
The partners are in Turkey, Spain, Sweden, Netherlands, Hungary, Solvenia, and us. The countries were selected because they represent very different political histories, and also very different political systems. In the UK it's very much a two-party state; in Sweden and the Netherlands it's a different formation. In Catalonia, it's got the hangover of Franco's dictatorship. Istanbul is potentially joining the EU, and Hungary and Slovenia are post-communist states. So it was set up to look at what role in these different political economies web sites can play. And that's partly because the EU itself is using web sites to try to involve young people in volunteering and voting, in youth councils - all those things trying to promote a European identity. And basically it's not been very successful. We're looking at the issue from three angles. We're looking at web sites that exist, a kind of broad range of what's available to people in different countries. That includes web sites from political parties, from charities, from grassroots organisations, on particular actions or themes. We're analysing those - looking at what the affordances are, how they're designed, how they're trying to address youth in terms of the design and the language, the welcome or the non-welcome. For that aspect of the research we've taken various types of sites, and different partners have looked and compared the different types of sites cross nationally. The second angle is talking to some of the producers of those sites, both in terms of design - why they chose certain designs and what they're hoping to achieve by that, how they see their audiences. Also looking at the kind of economy - who's paying for what. So a designer may want to do something, but actually they're being told by the funders that they have to do something very different.
Obviously it applies more to some kinds of sites than others. But there is this kind of belief that if a site is incredibly complicated then it's going to engage people more. But that doesn't necessarily follow. It's the motivation for using the site that’s important. The third aspect of the research is talking to users, and discussing the relationship between their offline and online civic participation. What uses they make of the internet in that relationship. And asking them how they find their way through it - what their route is, what aspects turn them off, what aspects engage them. Some groups use it more than others. For instance we did a focus group interview with young farmers here in the UK who were very active in the Young Farmers Union, but they don't use web sites at all, because basically they don't have time, they don't have broadband, they're not interested in it. That's a kind of extreme case of just saying, well it's irrelevant to them in some senses, other than just basic information - when is the next activity, like a billboard. And they're not interested in more than that. But there is a strong relationship we're finding: If people are active offline then they're more likely to be active online, and it doesn't necessarily work the other way. So the perception that web sites and all the other internet possibilities will engage people - it's not necessarily the case. So the priority should be to engage people offline, and then from that you might be able to spread it more through online engagement. Often web sites for international charities, it's the usual suspects who are using them. You're not reaching hard-to-reach youth and you're not going to do that through online activities. The other thing, which is always interesting with European projects, is the history and the language. Every country is coming at it differently. For instance in Slovenia and Hungary, everybody will say they're not political, they're not interested in politics - even the political parties - because of the history and how politics and the state are perceived. There's great distrust. We're looking at different aspects of participation and themes. For instance there's a cycling group in Budapest, but actually a lot of their activity is political in a broad sense - political with a small p. So we look at how they perceive that activity in terms of broader civic participation, and how then they see their connections on the internet. Like a lot of the work we do in the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media (CSCYM), we're looking at it more from the kind of lived experience of people and bringing that to the technology, not the other way around. The project ends at the end of August. There is a web site, which is www.civicweb.eu Mediae
In the soap opera tradition, it's to do with social education. The storylines all address particular issues like corruption, human rights, children’s rights, the role of education. It has large viewership - in Kenya it's about 5 million, in Uganda higher than that. Despite the fact that not everyone in Kenya owns a TV, where there isn't one, people get together to watch where possible. The reason this company is expanding its production is because television ownership is growing rapidly, though obviously in parts of the country there are issues of power and reception. What they're now doing is developing a programme called the Know Zone, which is aimed more directly at education - they've got basic education programmes in literacy, numeracy, programmes about Kenyan wildlife, economic projects. There is also a spinoff programme from Makutano Junction called Junction Juniors - a soap for children, with a lot of the same characters.
The company approached us to do the audience evaluations. So last year I organised a research programme for the people in Kenya who carried it out, and I did the design and the training. And we did a series of focus group interviews with parents, teachers and children, looking at the pilot programmes, in four different regions of the country. This was funded by DFID. The programmes have now been adapted on the basis of that research, in terms of the length and some of the content, some of the presentation. It's going out on broadcast on January 12th 2009, and over the year they're doing more research on how it's actually used in homes and schools. They're doing larger scale surveys with a company based in Kenya, and they're asking us to organise the focus group work. And we'll also be doing case studies, following some families right through the year, to see how and if The Know Zone is becoming embedded in family life. I'll be going in February and November, possibly in May. But fundamentally it's in order to train people there. I will be doing some of the focus group interviews, but it's better if people there, who speak the local languages and have a better understanding of the contexts, can do it. I'm from South Africa. I've been to Mozambique and Zimbabwe, but not to Kenya. That's why I'm very, very strictly keeping a back seat and taking a lot of guidance from them. But I have traveled widely; I worked as a journalist for seven years doing social reporting from different countries in Latin America, Central America, the States. It was an independent documentary film organisation. I did the research and went with the teams. And a lot of that was post-dictatorship, post-conflict, or pre-conflict work, quite a lot with refugees.
Then I went back into education here when my daughter was born. And I worked as a language support teacher in primary schools in London, supporting refugee and migrant children. That took me to my Ph.D., which looked at the ways migrant and refugee children use media to make contact in their social relationships - the ways in which particular TV programmes play particular roles in children's social interactions. Obviously all children use TV in that way, but there are particular ways in which migrant and refugee children use them that are quite significant. Also the intergenerational relationships that tally with their use of media - global relationships, cultural maintenance, how transnational and diasporic media operate in people's everyday lives. US programmes still dominate worldwide, but now there are Japanese products, a large Turkish industry, things like Al Jazeera. But programmes like Sesame Street have always been designed for a global market, in that they are developed in slots, so that local sections can be put in - the bits where you go out on the street are localised. So it's a kind of global/local product. Teletubbies is made the same way. Programmes like The Simpsons - that's a kind of classic that children carry with them. I mean, it's a global product and obviously very, very American. But it does have some kind of emotional resonance in terms of the kinds of family dynamics that are international and cross-cultural. What's interesting again is that you start from people's everyday lives, and then go to the technology, you get a completely different view of what the possibilities are and what's being offered. CHICAMThat came out of my Ph.D. and work that David Buckingham had been doing in the Centre on global media products for children. And also a project called Video Culture.CHICAM was another European project, under Framework 5. We had six countries involved, and we set up media production clubs. That's now at www.chicam.org. CIVICWEB builds on that in terms of the way media play in a public space.
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