18.3: Media

Media is another agent of socialization that influences our political views; our tastes in popular culture; our views of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community; and many other beliefs and practices. In an ongoing controversy, the media is often blamed for youth violence and many other of society’s ills. The average child sees thousands of acts of violence on television and in the movies before reaching young adulthood. Rap lyrics often seemingly extol ugly violence, including violence against women. Commercials can greatly influence our choice of soda, shoes, and countless other products. The mass media may also reinforce racial and gender stereotypes, including the belief that women are sex objects and suitable targets of male violence. In the General Social Survey (GSS), about 28% of respondents said that they watch four or more hours of television every day, while another 46% watch 2-3 hours daily (see "Average Number of Hours of Television Watched Daily"). The media certainly are an important source of socialization that was unimaginable a half-century ago.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Daily television viewing time - in 2008 almost half of the participants watched 2-3 hours of TV daily while more than a quarter watched over four hours, and just over a quarter watched between 0 and 1 hour each day.[1]

As the media socializes children, adolescents, and even adults, a key question is the extent to which media violence causes violence in our society. Studies consistently uncover a strong correlation between watching violent television shows and movies and committing violence. However, this does not necessarily mean that watching the violence actually causes violent behavior: perhaps people watch violence because they are already interested in it and perhaps even committing it. Scholars continue to debate the effect of media violence on youth violence. In a free society, this question is especially important, as the belief in this effect has prompted calls for monitoring the media and the banning of certain acts of violence. Civil libertarians argue that such calls smack of censorship that violates the First Amendment to the Constitution, while others argue that they fall within the First Amendment and would make for a safer society. Certainly, the concern and debate over mass media violence will continue for years to come.[2]

Of course when we talk about technology, digital media and social media, we might be referring to slightly different things. Before 2007 phones were used for calls and texts. Today social media can broadly be divided into social networking sites, microblogs and photo/videosharing. But as the commonsense media research shows, children engage in all kinds of passive and active activities online (including for their school work).

Social Media Use

Social media has become ubiquitous in our contemporary world. Common Sense Media reported that there was a 17% increase in entertainment screen use of both tweens and teens from 2019 to 2021. Teen screen use increased from 7:22 hours to 8:39 hours, and tweens from 4:44 to 5:33 hours. In both age groups boys used screens for entertainment more than girls, Latinx children used it most, followed by Black children and White children used it least number of hours. Middle and lower income teens spent most number of hours on screens for entertainment. Viewing online videos was reported to be the favorite activity (as opposed to playing video games, social media, and other activities like browsing websites, content creation or video chatting) of both teens and tweens. Tween percent who used social media sites increased a lot between 2019 and 2021. They also found that in lower income households only 67% reported having a computer (laptop or desktop) in the home, while 89% of middle income and 94% of higher income 8-18 year olds had computers in the home.

It used to be that we would talk about media as the "idiot box" or TV in the family living room. But now media is available in every pocket - even every pocket on a playground slide! To show how many children this data might apply to, Kamenetz (Oct 2019) reports that 53% of those under 11, and 84% of teenagers own a smart phone.

Effects of digital media

What is the effect of this ubiquity? I know that in my lifetime I have seen huge changes. Since I was born in 1969 in India (in a big city middle class household), I knew a time before TV in my family home, and remember walking to extended family about 15 minutes away to watch biweekly programming for entertainment! There was no 24 hour programming and certainly no choices of channels to pick from. As I came to the US and witnessed (and was an unwitting participant in) the computer revolution, my cohort and I have wondered (and researched) the effects of this pervasiveness on my own children, my students and society at large. I wanted to point out this divide because much of at least the initial research comes from the studies that people of my generation (if not necessarily my SES or national background) have conducted. I have heard us referred to as "digital immigrants" as we certainly are! As a parent I struggled to monitor my children's exposure to first television, then video games, computers, and finally phones, social media and smart devices.

Jean Twenge at SDSU represents a group of my generation who claimed that there are several dangers of child media use and that children (particularly teens) have disappeared into their online lives, not engaging with their families, becoming more narcissistic, depressed and having greater suicidal ideation. Twenge's book "iGen" epitomizes and fuels this concern about how social media is bad for children. However, in Kamenetz's (Aug 2019) article, it is pointed out that not all psychologists agree. When radio first came out, psychologists were worried about radio addiction! The same went for TV and now for computerized media. Kamenetz discussed with Amy Orben at Cambridge University that the datasets used by Twenge showed only about 1% of the variance in teen depression is attributable to social media. In discussion with Keyes at Columbia University, Kamenetz was told that much of Twenge's data might be methodologically misinterpreted. Similarly Steele, Hall and Christofferson (2019) reviewed the literature about the effects of social media. Their scholarly article reported that adolescents themselves report ambivalence over their own and their peers' use of social media and digital technology.

In line with Twenge's work, Steele et al do suggest that adolescent psychosocial outcomes are affected by digital use. However, the latter conclude that there are several personal factors like age and gender, social factors like parental monitoring, preexisting social conditions like social isolation, preexisting mental health conditions like loneliness and depression, and situational variables like type of platforms used - that all moderate and mediate those effects. Simply speaking, some parts of this debate are similar to the age old question about TV viewing and aggression. I was certainly concerned about whether my children (and their cohort) were being exposed to too much violence on TV and that that was leading to more acts of violence in real life. But the argument many suggested then was that it was the children with aggressive tendencies who watch more violent TV and therefore it ends up looking like violence on TV leads to greater aggression. Similarly, it has been found that many children who are lonely and predisposed to depression engage in greater digital media pursuits, making it look like digital media leads to depression. Wang et al's review (2023) of 36 studies found that overall preschoolers spend more screen time than is recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics (in 2001 they recommended no screen time before 18 months, and no more than an hour a day till age 5), and the WHO (in 2019 they recommended no screen time before 24 months and no more than an hour a day till age 5). In Wang et al's review they also found that a majority of studies found that there were negative effects on children's health, cognition and psychosocial functioning as a result of screen time and problematic digital use. But there were at least a few insignificant findings as well as many mediating individual (child sex, temperament, possible predispositions) and parent factors (parental digital time, addiction, parenting and education) that these studies uncovered as playing a role.

Steele et al also point out that the quality, frequency and type of media use affects these outcomes. For example, passive users of platforms like Facebook show more negative outcomes than more active users. They also suggest that there are many components of digital stress including availability stress (perceiving the need to be available to friends 24/7), approval anxiety (over belongingness and how the self is perceived - this is also greatly influenced by the use of platforms that are more permanent, public and picture based), fear of missing out, and connection overload.

All these issues are further confounded by the fact that children and adolescents' brains are not fully developed. With a prefrontal cortex that is still getting wired, and where peer relationships are replacing family ones in importance, adolescents' executive functioning in the form of attention control, delayed gratification and perspective taking comes under huge stress. This is particularly true when the media in question are synchronous, available and quantifiable.

Recommendations for digital media use

So digital stress is not simply a monolithic issue. There are, and can be, no universal instructions for parents or clinicians. Technology has undoubtedly increased the quality of life for us all. The potential for learning, creativity, productivity and even social contact has increased manifold. It is unproductive in so many ways for parents to simply decry the use of technology by children. Keyes (in conversation with Kamenetz) points out that when parents' daily confrontations with their children are about reducing or removing their digital media, it leaves no room for communication about relationships, media and even ironically the stress that that media might be causing. In fact Jordan Shapiro at Temple University says it is better we lean into technology while parenting and spend more screen time with our kids.

References:

Commonsense media (2022). Infographic. The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021

Kamenetz, A. (Oct. 2019).It's a smartphone life: More than half of US children now have one. NPR.org. Retrieved April 24, 2023

Kamenetz, A. (Oct. 2019). The scientific debate over teens, screens and mental health. NPR.org. Retrieved April 24, 2023

Steele, R. G., Hall, J. A., & Christofferson, J. L. (2020). Conceptualizing Digital Stress in Adolescents and Young Adults: Toward the Development of an Empirically Based Model. Clinical Child & Family Psychology Review, 23(1), 15–26. https://doi-org.ezp.pasadena.edu/10.1007/s10567-019-00300-5

Wang, C., Qian H., Li, H. & Wu,.. D (2023) The status quo, contributors, consequences and models of digital overuse/problematic use in preschoolers: A scoping review. Front. Psychol. 14:1049102. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1049102. Licensed CC-BY

Attributions:

[1] Data from General Social Survey, 2008. Image by Ian Joslin is licensed under CC BY 4.0

[2] Sociology: Brief Edition – Agents of Socialization by Steven E. Barkan is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0