“One big thing I’ve recently finished is an assessment for the UK Government on ‘the impact of the commercial world on children’s wellbeing’. It’s a very polarised debate. You have a lot of people arguing very strongly that the commercial world – by which they primarily mean advertising and marketing – is a bad influence on children on multiple levels. And then you have the marketers insisting that they are very responsible, and that they’re following the rules. 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. 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.”

Play spaces have also become increasingly commercial spaces…

Another thing we have tried to do is to take a broader view of what we mean by the commercial world. It’s not just advertising and marketing; advertising is a very small part of a much bigger phenomenon which is about children’s lives as consumers. So we’ve tried to shift the agenda a bit, so it’s not just about regulating advertising, but looking at the balance between the public and the private in other areas of children’s lives – looking at public television for example, which is becoming increasingly commercialised, or children’s experience of play – play spaces have also become increasingly commercial spaces, and less public spaces.

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.

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.”

Online risks to children, violence in video games, and the plasticity of young brains

You can’t regulate in a way to stop the risk without also preventing kids getting access to the opportunities.

“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 could make the same argument about video games, where one argument is all about violence. The argument that games cause people to be more violent than they would otherwise be I think is very questionable indeed. Or the risk of people getting ‘addicted’ to video games – a very loaded term, but the idea at least that people are spending more time than is good for them playing computer games, when they should have more balanced lives. And yet, of course, video games are also fun, and people learn things from them, they can be quite sociable experiences, and so on. Again, it doesn’t make much sense to separate the positives from the negatives, or to see this in simple either/or terms.

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.

There is no conclusive evidence that video games are harmful. 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.

Personally I’m not too convinced that some of those notable neuroscientists actually know anything at all about video games

[Some neuroscientists argue 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.”

Media Literacy

“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.
For example, video editing is something teachers are now doing with 14 year olds, and often that would be their first experience of it. But actually much younger children are capable of learning how to put a coherent narrative together in moving images, and are able to use editing tools to do that. They’re also capable of reflecting and having a critical understanding of what they’ve done. So that would suggest then that we need to have a serious look at how progression happens – how learning happens across the age range and over time.

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. ”

Sexualisation of children

“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…. The notorious examples are dolls; people used to get anxious about Barbies, and now they get anxious about Bratz dolls – because they’re seen 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.

Kids will use the word ‘sexy,’ but actually what do they mean by it?

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….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?”
[Adapted from an article that first appeared on the London Knowledge Lab web-site. For full piece see http://www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=349&Itemid=115]

David Buckingham is attending the Screen Futures Summit courtesy of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation.

Further Links:

Buckingham’s Government Report on Commercialisation: http://publications.education.gov.uk/default.aspx?PageFunction=productdetails&PageMode=publications&ProductId=DCSF-00669-2009

The Scottish Parliament report on sexualisation:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/s3/committees/equal/reports-10/eor10-02.htm

Research Centre where Buckingam contributes: www.childrenyouthandmedia.org