Spotlight MacArthur Foundation

1: Renee Hobbs from Temple University Media Education Lab at 9:31 pm on Sunday, December 7, 2008

We didn’t find the same kind of “coming together” among family members in our recent work with 5th and 6th grade African-American children in Philadelphia.

There is a very high level of engagement with digital media among all African-American children, including high academic achievers.  Most children spent more than 4 hours daily with media and technology and more than 6 hours on weekend days.

We did find that more active processing of media and technology is associated with higher academic achievement. This association makes it reasonable to think that all students may benefit academically from schools? efforts to help them improve their active processing of digital media through media literacy education.

In our study, we found that parental involvement in children?s media use does not seem to be a factor in active processing or academic achievement. 

There was actually less “co-play” between parents and children among high achieving students.

It is important to consider socio-economic and cultural factors that shape parents’ and children’s attitudes about media and technology.  These attitudes influence how families perceive and use media and technology.

2: Heather_Horst at 12:47 am on Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Thanks for your response and for letting us know about your recent study. As a sociocultural anthropologist by training, I do share your concern about the social and cultural dimensions of new media use. Given this, I think the best way that we can think about some of the contrasts between your study and our work is to provide you with a little more context.

As noted, we found kids and parents coming together through new media across a range of socioeconomic contexts. As we outline in the Media Ecologies chapter, these included working class immigrant families (broadly Latino/a in Los Angeles), African-American, Latino/a and Asian families in the San Francisco Bay as well as white families in rural California.  In the Families chapter that this blog refers to, we also outline the ways that parenting attitudes, shaped in part by socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, influence the type of engagements kids and parents have around media. Certainly in the middle class Silicon Valley households where I carried out my research, parents? experience with new media and technology in the workplace influenced their ability to discuss issues such as intellectual property as well as the economic resources to purchase software and other materials. Yet, we also found parents and kids who were less economically well off and/or technically proficient also came together around new media.  For example, 10-year-old Miguel in the San Francisco Bay area played video games with his dad, uncle and cousins; his parents were separated and games represented an important space for bonding with his father (Dan Perkel?s study). Lisa Tripp talked to a single mother in Los Angeles about spending time on the computer with her son in middle school by helping him finds words and information. They also enjoy doing puzzles together. Many of the youth from immigrant families of Central American descent in Los Angeles discussed how they helped their parents learn to send emails and upload photos from the shared family digital camera. Others kids helped their parents with English. In many cases, such as Latino/a families, older cousins played a key role as mentors.

We found that different types of media (‘old’ and ‘new’) played a part in these intergenerational interactions. Television continued to be a gathering point for families, but in middle class Silicon Valley television shows and movies were often mediated by Netflix queues and Tivos rather than broadcast television, as we saw in many of the Los Angeles families living in studio apartments. These examples of coming together (not necessarily ?playing together?) were certainly not the only interactions around new media ? all families had their share of tensions and conflicts. Nevertheless, parents and kids called these moments out as being significant and meaningful. Given the complexity of the family dynamics, family structures and parenting strategies, many questions remain. I am particularly interested in how these interactions change over time as children age, what their lasting influence may be as well as what we can do from within different social institutions when youth do not have the social and technical support parents, kids and society at large may desire.  We hope to hear more about your (and others) research as we move forward.