Rethinking "Screen Time" In the Age of Covid-19 (Part Three)

Sangita Shresthova: Yes, screentime is an incredibly blunt, and largely ineffective tool for navigating children engagement with media. As Susan pointed out “screens” are just a piece of hardware. I would add that “time” measures duration and tells us nothing about what is actually taking place. Clearly. we need more nuanced approaches that take into account everything that has been brought up in our exchange.  And, we need them now more than ever.

This summer, I got quite excited about the possibilities of online interest-based learning for young children when my son took several classes though Outschool (outschool.com).

The classes (taught over zoom) were generally small (ranging from 4-6 kids) and short (15-30 minutes, over several days or weeks). The offerings were staggeringly diverse, with classes on almost any topic imaginable (from butterflies to photography, from drawing superheroes to Bollywood dance).  While somewhat uneven because some instructors were more experienced than others, the classes all helped my son connect learning to a subject area that interested him. He learned a lot and enjoyed it. 

Perhaps it was this positive experience that made the first days of distance-learning kindergarten such a shock over the past week. Responding to critiques of how distance learning happened in public schools this spring, California has passed legislation mandating duration of instruction for every grade level. For kindergarten it is 180 minutes. To meet this mandate, my son’s school leaned into “screentime” and implemented a three hour zoom call, which the teacher now has to fill with programming. It is early days yet, so I am working hard to keep an open mind about how this may play out. And yet, seeing my son stare vacantly at the screen as he moved into hour two on day two, I can’t help but think that there are better ways to do this.

I know that many educators and parents are in the thick of it right now. We are all navigating uncharted territory and the desire to hold on to the “old” normal as a measuring stick is overwhelmingly tempting. It is also dangerous as it obscures the fact that we are living through, what might be, a once in a life-time opportunity to re-evaluate our assumptions about media in our children’s lives.

Henry Jenkins: In Susan’s story, her son’s comment, “you should watch it,” was an invitation into his world, sharing his new favorite program with her and thus opening up a channel of communication. My experience has been that those invitations are most apt to occur when the family has created a history of such open conversations through the years and developed a shared understanding of media content as a resource around which the family might come together and work through its differences. This is very different from advice that parents should surveil their children, looking at their internet history behind their backs, say, or otherwise go where they have not been invited. The first is about building trust and respecting your children’s growing agency to make meaningful choices. The second represents a lack of trust and respect and is apt to further unravel communication within the family over time. 

Our children need adults who will watch their backs, not snoop over their shoulders. They need mentorship as they confront some of the challenges of the digital world and as they construct their own identities in relation to the culture around them. But they are only going to accept our advice when they actively seek it out rather than having it imposed upon them. Child development literature suggests that children adventure a bit further from their parents’ orbit each year they grow older but that this stepping out is inconsistent, that they also seek out their parents’ hands when they feel uncomfortable. A wise parent looks for those openings to provide the support they need. They let go of some control over their kids and instead empower them to stand on their own feet. The indirectness of conversations around television make it an effective middle ground for both letting go and providing support.

Sangita’s story shows something else. Restricting or imposing a specific quantity of “screen time” for children is misguided. Our relations to media should be understood in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. Research on fandom shows that the average fan consumes less television than the general population, not more. Fans actively choose what to watch; they pay close attention as they watch; and watching springboards them towards other social and creative experiences. There are times in the life of a fan when their relationship to the medium is more intensive than others: they are absorbing a new program; they are working through some emotional crisis; they are feeling bored or lonely, so a regular time table does not serve us well if the goal is to ensure a more valuable engagement with the media in our lives. So if the changed circumstances surrounding COVID-19 and Zoom-based learning are forcing us to relax our quantitative control, we should be having the kind of conversation amongst parents and educators we are modeling here regarding what we think a valuable relationship to media might look like.

The Civic Imagination Project has been exploring how adults might learn a more playful way of thinking through the future together. Instead of becoming bogged down in frustrations over our current problems we need to stop and ask each other what kind of world we would want to share together if anything were possible. Then we can think from a fresh perspective about how to achieve that.  Adults need permission to play together.  Children are already playing with the contents of their culture, including media content. Play is how children learn. They don’t need to reclaim a sense of imaginative possibilities as adults do, because they haven’t lost them. They need to learn how to direct their imaginations towards fairness and caring in the world around them. They need to learn how to connect what they see on the screen to what they observe about their surroundings. This playful engagement with media content should be as much a part of media literacy as developing a skeptical understanding of who makes media and what interests are served by its production and distribution. 

In a few days, we will be sharing on this blog some new resources that parents can use to foster civic imagination through playful engagement with the media content that their children already care about. We see these exercises as offering parents some concrete models for how they might introduce these kinds of constructive relationships to popular culture into the context of their own family life, respecting each family’s values, but also respecting each family member’s emotional and social needs. And then we will have some more perspectives to share through two more conversations. So don’t touch that dial!

Susan Kresnicka: You are absolutely correct, Henry. My family has a history of tapping entertainment as an expanded vocabulary, and it's proving more helpful than ever in this uncertain and stressful moment. We need every recourse we can find to raise, express, and process the sprawling range of thoughts and feelings this era is provoking.

I agree, Sangita, that when kindergarteners are being asked to participate in 180 minutes of Zoom instruction each day, indeed, there must be a better way. And tired, trivializing, derogatory assumptions about media – and the judgment they can provoke – seem likely only to obscure it. I look forward to learning more about the Civic Imagination toolkit and how it can help parents forge a new, healthier path.

 BIOS

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, CInematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California and the founder and former co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He has been a dedicated advocate for media literacy education, recently receiving the Jesse McKanse award for his life-time contribution to this field, including the publication of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century which helped to launch the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Subsequent work here included Reading in a Participatory Culture and Participatory Culture in a Networked Society. His other work on children and media includes The Children’s Culture Reader and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. He is currently writing a book which examines children’s media of the 1950s and 1960s in light of shifting understandings of childhood in Post-War American culture. His most recent books include Participatory Culture: Interviews, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and Comics and Stuff.

Sangita Shresthova is the Director of Research of the Civic Paths Group based at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on intersections among online learning, popular culture, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. She is also one of the authors of Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Change (2020) and of  By Any Media Necessary: The New Activism of Youth (2016), both published by NYU Press. Her earlier book on Bollywood (Is It All About Hips?) was published in 2011 by Sage. She is one of the creators of the Digital Civics Toolkit (digitalcivicstoolkit.org), a collection of resources for educators, teachers and community leaders to support youth learning. Her own artistic work has been presented in academic and creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin), the Other Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival (Seoul), and the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC). She enjoys engaging with diverse communities through her workshops, lectures and projects. sangitashresthova.com

Susan Kresnicka

Founder and president of research firm KR&I, Susan is a cultural anthropologist with over 18 years of experience in the commercial sector. Specializing in foundational research to establish core human drivers for consumer behavior, Susan has led large-scale, multi-modal research projects for a range of industries. A student of fandom for more than a decade, Susan has conducted fan research for a variety of iconic entertainment IP brands, sports teams, and brands built around passionate hobbyists. Whether she is studying fandom or another topic, Susan specializes in tying consumer behavior to core human needs, allowing clients to establish more enduring and meaningful bonds with the people upon whom their commercial success relies. Susan holds an M.A. in social anthropology from The University of Texas at Austin, sits on the professional advisory board for UCLA’s Master of Social Science program, and regularly speaks publicly on fandom, gender, morality, identity, and the value of anthropology in business. Her work has been covered in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Variety, and more. kresnickaresearch.com