on sex, violence, obesity...and teaching
Q: What are you working on? A: One big thing I've just finished working on is an independent assessment I was asked to lead for the government, about the impact of the commercial world on children's well being. It was commissioned by two departments - DCSF and DCMS. I was chairing a panel of a dozen or so academics who reviewed the research. We have produced a substantial report which should be published in the next couple of months.
There are a lot of claims about, for example advertising causing obesity, but not a lot of hard evidence to support them |
The report we've produced basically reviews all the evidence. The brief was not to recommend policy, although inevitably the report will point in the direction of potential policy outcomes - which might be to do with regulation of marketing, education, and other aspects of public policy.
We found that there are a lot of claims about, for example advertising/marketing causing obesity or 'materialistic' attitudes, but not a lot of hard evidence to support them. Of course, that's not to say that advertising has no effect on anybody, but there are often other, more substantial factors that are at stake. Very often with these kinds of debates you get into a 'let's blame the media' argument. We start with undesirable things - childhood obesity, the sexualisation of children, materialism - and look for a single cause. And in these kinds of debate blaming the media becomes a kind of ritual response. It's easy to blame the media, but it's actually very hard to address some the more complex causes of these kinds of phenomena.
If you look at obesity for example, one clear thing is that poor people are much more likely to be obese than wealthy people. So poverty has something to do with it, and that has to do with people's opportunities to exercise, the kind of food choices they have - the availability of fresh food, and so on. Addressing those issues at a public policy level is much harder than saying 'let's ban junk food advertising.' In this case, I think the government is realising that this is a multifaceted issue. But there's a danger with all of these arguments that you end up looking for a simple explanation of what you think is wrong with the world, and then opting for symbolic responses that don't really make any difference to the problem.
The bigger question is about how children's - and all our - lives have become more commercialised |
And the most problematic one from the government's point of view is education itself. Commercial companies are now involved in education at all sorts of levels, in ways that are not necessarily visible to many people. They're involved in the management of schools, they're marketing to schools, and so on. Now there are positives and negatives about that, and the evidence that for example companies running schools has a good or a bad impact on children's well being is quite hard to establish. But the bigger question here is about how children's - and all our - lives have become more commercialised, and what the consequences of that might be.
Do you often get called on a lot to defend the media?
Certainly - although I would say that this whole debate is all too often seen in either/or terms. Are the media good or bad for children? That's a natural enough question to ask, I suppose, but the problem is that people always seem to be looking for a simple answer.
Before I did this assessment on commercialisation I did a big review of the literature for the Byron Review - about children and new technology, particularly video games and the internet. Byron started out from the premise of looking at the harmful impact of these things; but Tanya Byron, who chaired it, quite rightly said that we need to look at the positive aspects as well, because the positives are inevitably tied up with the negatives.
So, for example, there may be risks when children go online - even if a lot of those risks are overstated. But the key point is that the risks are tied up with the opportunities these things offer. So you can't regulate in a way to stop the risk without also preventing kids getting access to the opportunities.
You can learn from video games, but it's not so much the game itself as the context in which it's used |
So for me that means you need some kind of educational response to this, rather than saying something is bad or risky, so let's just ban it. My argument would be that young people - or indeed people in general - often seek out risky experiences, because they can be pleasurable. And also necessary - we learn from risky experiences. So the argument would be that people need to be informed about what they're letting themselves in for, they need to understand how to deal with risk, rather than simply trying to keep them away from it.
So with video games in particular, there's no conclusive evidence one way or the other that they're harmful or not.
No. But equally I would say that neither am I convinced by the argument that they have enormous benefits for learning. Again the evidence is very, very limited. What we have to say is that, like any other medium, you can learn from video games, but it's not so much the game itself as the context in which it's used - the pedagogic relationships that surround it.
Something in the news lately is notable neuroscientists saying that video games, computers, the internet are changing the way our brain works, for the worse.
Yes, and they make arguments about the plasticity of the brain which seem to depend on a view that development in infancy has a massively determining effect on the kind of people we become. Frankly, I think there's a lot of mystification about neuroscience - that it's seen as 'real science,' and claims coming from other disciplines are somehow not seen to carry authority. Personally I'm not too convinced that some of those notable neuroscientists actually know anything at all about video games.
CivicWeb
Over the last few years I've been quite involved in working as a researcher in a public policy context; but I have been involved in other more straight-ahead research projects. A couple of projects I've been finishing recently are CivicWeb , a pan-European project which focuses on young people, the internet and civic participation [link to Liesbeth's profile]; and a slightly older one, Camcorder Cultures, which looked at people's everyday amateur video-making.
Media Literacy
Another project we've just started is Developing Media Literacy, which is ESRC-funded. This comes out of a very longstanding interest for me - I used to be a Media Studies teacher, and trained Media Studies teachers for a long time. Although I've done a lot of classroom-based research, this is the first opportunity I've had to do something big and systematic in this area. We're looking at what and how kids might learn about media, across the age range. When I've done research in this area before it's mainly been with older kids - secondary schools. And one of the things that people have found doing work with younger kids is that actually they're capable of a lot more than we like to imagine - a lot of things we might see as more suited to 14 to 16 year olds.
Much younger children are capable of learning how to put a coherent narrative together in moving images |
So we're operating here with a sort of spiral curriculum model - taking a concept and looking at how you would teach that to 7 year olds, 10 year olds, 14 year olds, and so on. We're working with a couple of secondary schools that we know quite well which are specialist media schools, but quite contrasting - one is in Cambridge and the other is in Croydon. Also with the feeder primary schools for those two schools.
What we've done so far is to just survey what goes on - a big questionnaire survey, both with the teachers and with the kids. We've done a whole series of in-depth interviews with the teachers. And we're going to be doing some focus groups with the kids. What happens as we move into the second year is that we're developing curriculum - ten units of classroom work that will happen in the schools across the next two years.
The first one is probably going to be around narrative. For younger kids that translates as storytelling - how do stories work, how a story is put together, and how can we use media to tell stories. All good media education involves both critical analysis and practical production - and a dynamic between those two. So they're looking at how stories are structured, but also making their own. Then thinking about how an audience makes sense of that story, what did they find difficult about it. You make, you step back, you reflect, and in the process you develop a more systematic conceptual understanding of what's been going on, and then that feeds back into production, into the making of further stories.
Hopefully what we've got at the end of this three-year project is comparisons between the schools, but also between the age groups as well. There's not been a lot of classroom research in the area, and most of it has been quite small scale.
Sexualisation of children
Another new project is a much smaller scale project on marketing and 'the 'sexualisation' of children, which we're doing for the Scottish Parliament. This brings together the interest in marketing and commercialism with another long-standing interest in young people and sexual content in the media. I did a project a few years ago for some media regulators, the Broadcasting Standards Commission and others, about young people and sexual content in the media. This is one of those things that's often talked about in shock horror terms - as a matter of young people being depraved and corrupted by what they see.
You get a lot of concerned adults talking about it, but not very much attempt to look at how children interpret it |
This latest project is more about products - clothing, toys, products that are seen to have sexualised connotations. The notorious examples are dolls; people used to get anxious about Barbies, and now they get anxious about Bratz dolls - because they're see to be inappropriately sexy. Then there are stories about how Tesco marketed a pole-dancing kit for kids; and you get the sexy slogan t-shirts - 'porn star' and so on. It's actually debatable how far these things really are being marketed at children. And we need to look at how seriously anybody is taking this - including children themselves. One of the problems that you get is a lot of concerned adults talking about it, but not very much attempt to look at how children interpret it.
This is funded by the Scottish Parliament, so our colleague in Scotland, Rachel Russell at Glasgow Caledonian University, is doing some observation in high street shops there; while other people on the team will be doing focus groups with parents, and some classroom activities with children. One of the problems, of course, is that what one person thinks is sexy, another does not. It's a socially and culturally constructed thing - not something that's just given and that we can all agree what it is and what its meaning is. It's quite debatable what adults perceive to be sexy, and it's the same with kids. Kids will use the word 'sexy,' but actually what do they mean by it?
So I guess you could say this is another example of me doing something in a very controversial area, an area where there's often a lot of intense and passionate debate, and trying to find some way through where you can actually talk sensibly and have some serious empirical research - particularly research that tries to access kids' perspectives.
Teaching
We've had an MA course which has been in operation now for almost 30 years. And we're constantly rethinking, bringing it into the new media age; it used to be called Film and Television Studies for Education. It's now called Media, Culture and Communication - those words came in in the 90s. And increasingly now we're teaching courses about computer games, there's a module on the internet, and there are modules generally about new media, broadly defined. Some are quite practically oriented - there's a digital video production module for example, which involves students editing digital video as well as writing about it. There's a research module in which students do small-scale research projects.
We've got a lot of practicing teachers, because this is giving them things they're going to be doing with their classes. But we also have quite a big group of international students, who come from all over - the States, Latin America, Asia, Africa. Some of them have a strong interest in education or young people specifically, but others are looking for a more generic media course.
Q: Anything coming up, or any dream projects you'd like to do?
One thing is that I'm going to be working on more is this children and consumer culture issue. I will be working on a book coming out of the assessment I did for the government, which will be an overview of the area, but also a book that tries to move the debate on.
Another area I"m working on is around youth culture. We're running an ESRC-funded seminar series about youth culture, media and globalisation. We've had a couple of seminars, with another one coming up in November at the Knowledge Lab. It's a two-year programme. I also teach an MA module in that area. I feel there's a need to do some more work on the area - one of the problems is that you've got a body of work about youth culture that has yet to come into the digital age. And I think there's a real need to rethink approaches to youth culture in light of digital media - computer games, social networking, mobile media. All of those things have interesting implications in terms of how young people construct identity, and in terms of the meaning of peer-group relationships among young people. So one of my current interests is around rethinking the established approaches to youth culture - not chucking them out, but rethinking them in the context of new media. I can see a big project in that area happening at some point, but I've probably got enough on my plate at the moment!