Media and the American Child
Comstock, George and Scharrer, Erica (2007).
Burlington, MA: Academic Press; 373 pages. $64.95 (hardcover). ISBN 9780123725424.
The rapid growth in recent years of interactive media (e.g., video games and the Internet) is garnering significant attention as a potential source of influence on children’s development. However, this growth has overshadowed what continues to be the dominant media influence in U.S. children’s everyday life experience: television. For example, children ages 8 to 10 are exposed to television on average 3 hours, 17 minutes a day—in contrast to the second-highest exposure time of 1 hour, 5 minutes for video games. In Media and the American Child, Comstock and Scharrer provide a detailed, comprehensive review of research relevant to the role that media of all types, but primarily television, play in the lives of American youth today. Those readers who arrive at this book looking for a focus on the impact of new media on children may be disappointed by the fact that this book focuses primarily on television. In fact, this book is a comprehensive revision of a prior book written solely by Comstock entitled, Television and the American Child. However, the authors recognize the changing landscape of media and thus situate their analyses of television within a broader attention to a breadth of media, including video games, the Internet, books, other printed materials, and music.
Comstock and Scharrer have a long academic history in media studies and the book draws upon their extensive knowledge of the area. Comstock, a professor at Syracuse University, has a long and notable history as a scientist of children and media. He was advisor to the Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior in the early 1970s and has published numerous books and articles on the topic. Scharrer was a student of Comstock’s at Syracuse and is now an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She, too, has published a substantial number of journal articles and chapters on the social effects of media.
The book is separated into eight substantial chapters, each of which provides abundant reviews of the relevant literature on the given topics. The first chapter provides a rich discussion of U.S. children’s media exposure, broken out by demographics such as age, gender, and race, as reported through a review of a significant number of empirical studies. The chapter is broken into sections based upon media type: print (e.g., books, magazines), audio (e.g., music), screen (e.g., television, movies), and interactive media (e.g., video games, web browsing). Though a broad array of media is covered, the authors make a strong case in concluding the chapter that television continues to dominate children’s media experiences.
The second chapter is focused almost entirely on the “extraordinary appeal of screen media” and thus is titled as such. The authors discuss the factors that influence exposure to screen media (e.g., socioeconomic status and cognitive development) as well as the influence that screen media viewing has on children’s other activities. Interestingly, the authors emphasize that the amount of time children engage in activities such as lessons, sports, clubs, hobbies, and play is not correlated with how much time children watch television. However, these activites are negatively associated with a combination of conditions in the household including an absence of rules about television use, televisions that are constantly powered on, and high levels of viewing by parents. Thus, it is not television exposure alone, but rather the central role that television plays in the household that explains children’s activities.
Chapters three through seven each address significant issues related to media’s role in the maturation of U.S. children. Chapter three, for example, discusses the ways in which media commonly portray characters in terms of their demographics and their behaviors. This review includes discussion of television, film, and video games among other media. Chapters four through seven discuss media’s role in children’s educational attainment and intellectual development, children’s exposure to advertising and marketing, the portrayal of violence, and the representation of social norms and rules. Each of these chapters is detailed and comprehensive, and they provide excellent reference material from which to begin a review of the relevant literature.
The book concludes in chapter eight with a brief but important discussion of what can be done with the knowledge presented in the previous seven chapters. This discussion is particularly important given the current climate of science’s role in informing the decision-making of policy makers. The authors identify three parties that have the most influence on children’s media activities, namely federal regulatory bodies, media industries, and parents. The authors also note that television advertising and violence in media are two of the most researched areas of inquiry and are ripe for positive interventions.
The book is very well-written but it does have a few notable weaknesses. First and foremost, the book is written with a disciplined attention to the details of past research but lacks a visionary perspective that might explicitly guide future policy, technology and media development, or research. The authors stay close to the material that they review and tend not to venture too far into articulating implications for future generations of children. Also, as mentioned previously, the text includes discussions of media other than television, but such discussions feel at times like appendages to the main discourse on television. These weaknesses, however, do not detract from the overall strength of the book.
In summary, Media and the American Child provides a rich and detailed account of the current state of research on children’s media experiences. The work is both precise in its composition and comprehensive in its breadth. Readers who are seeking a comprehensive, no-frills literature review of television’s influence on children in the context of a broad array of media exposure will find this book both relevant and useful.
Reviewer Information
Department of Language, Literature, and Communication Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Nathan G. Freier is an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Information Science from the Information School at the University of Washington in 2007. His publications have appeared in such journals as the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Interaction Studies, and Networks and Spatial Economics. His research focuses on children’s social and moral relationships to personified technologies, including graphical avatars and social robots.