Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Over the past 100 years, as Ellen Wartella and Michael Robb point out in this volume, scholars and social pundits have reacted to every new set of media with a mixture of panic and optimism about potential influences on children. Radio and film each generated some research and social commentary, but the advent of television in the 1950s ushered in a new level of media pervasiveness in children's lives and the first wave of solid, theoretically-based research on the topic. In the 1960s through the 1980s, psychologists and communication scholars forged a field that spanned disciplines as they examined the effects of both the formal features and content of the media that children were using several hours a day. In the last 15 or 20 years, media forms have proliferated, with new technologies transforming how children and adolescents use media as well as blurring the old distinctions among telephones, computers, television sets, radio, and records. The chapters in this volume represent the state-of-the-art knowledge about young people's media use and the roles that media play in their lives. Despite the dramatic technological changes of the last several years, many of themes are familiar from earlier work. One of the fundamental tensions throughout the years has been form versus content. Some theorists have emphasized the importance of the qualities of the medium itself (e.g., visual ... log in or subscribe to read full text