Researching Everyday Childhoods

Front matter

Researching Everyday Childhoods

Time, Technology and Documentation ina Digital Age

Rachel Thomson, Liam Berriman & Sara Bragg

Contents

List of Figures vii Foreword viii David Buckingham

Acknowledgements xii

1 Everyday Childhoods: Time, Technology and Documentation 1 Rachel Thomson, Liam Berriman and Sara Bragg

Foreword

David Buckingham po: debates about children and media are often infused with sweeping claims about social change. Of course, childhood is always a focus for hopes and fears about the future; and when we combine this with ideas about the power of media and technology, we have the makings of a powerful popular mythology. Childhood, it seems, has been comprehensively transformed by media, if not (as many suggest) utterly destroyed.

Those of us who have studied this area for many years might be forgiven a certain sense of déjà vu here. Claims about the powerful influence of the media — for good or ill — have been around for many decades, if not centuries. There's a kind of endless recurrence about this: as each new medium appears on the scene, similar claims are rehearsed about its magical powers, whether to liberate and empower children or to corrupt and harm them.

The problem with these claims is not simply that they are so often over stated, or unduly polarized. Perhaps more significantly, they rest on a separation between children, on one side, and media, on the other. Media are seen as somehow external to childhood and to children’s everyday lives. They come along, uninvited and as if from nowhere, yet they instantly exercise an almost mesmeric power. Children, meanwhile, are typically seen as innocent and vulnerable, easy prey for manipulation and exploitation. The relationship is understood as one of cause and effect: the media are seen to impact on children's consciousness and behaviour, and that influence is seen to flow only in one direction. In this account, children have very little agency: they are seen merely as victims or passive recipients.

Of course, this is not to imply that media have no effects, or that they are somehow insignificant. It is merely to suggest that such notions of cause-andeffect are a simplistic and inadequate way of understanding children’s experiences of media. This approach leads us to ignore the diverse ways in which children interpret media, and the diverse roles they play in their lives. Media may do things to children, but children also do things with media. Media are not outside children’s lives, impacting upon them, but deeply embedded within them.

FOREWORD ix

This is even more apparent in an age where media have effectively become ubiquitous. With the proliferation of digital platforms and the advent of mobile media, media have become ever more deeply entangled with our social and personal lives. Through media, we can be connected at any time, and in any location. Easy distinctions between the online and offline have become increasingly difficult to maintain. For most of us, media are an inextricable part of the texture of our everyday lived experience: we live with and through them, moment by moment. They are fundamental to how we communicate, how we represent ourselves to others, and how we understand the wider world. To separate out the media, and to ask simplistic questions about their influence or effects, is thus to misinterpret the nature of contemporary social life.

These observations are particularly pertinent to children. Yet there is also a risk of romanticism here. Today's children, we are often told, are a ‘digital generation’; today's childhoods are mediated childhoods. Adults, meanwhile, are struggling to catch up. While children are ‘digital natives’, born into a world of digital media, adults are apparently ‘digital immigrants’, who must struggle to learn a new language and a new culture. Such assertions represent children as exotic and alien beings. While waxing sentimental about their apparently spontaneous competence with media, they ignore the increasingly complex demands that children have to negotiate, and the learning that this requires. They also underestimate the continuities across generations, and the oppor tunities for communication between them that media can afford.

This book was originally to be entitled Digital Childhoods, and when | was invited to write the foreword, | recalled the fact that | had written a contribution for a book of exactly the same name (albeit published in Norwegian, as Digital Barndom) no less than twenty years ago. It would be good to imagine that this might be the /ast ever book about ‘digital childhoods’, although publications with similar titles are continuing to appear today.

Part of the problem here is with the technological term ‘digital’ — at a point when the distinction between digital and analogue (or non-digital) no longer has very much significance. Pretty much everything is now ‘digital’, or involves digital technology in some way. The fact that things are digital seems so banal that it is hardly worth saying. Yet such expressions also invoke vestiges of technological determinism, as though technology is an alien force that is now somehow colonizing or defining contemporary childhood. If we talk about technology in this way, we not only exaggerate its power, but also marginalize more important and complex questions about representation, communication and culture.

Recent discussions of ‘participatory culture’ have begun to take us beyond this deterministic approach, although they have raised further problems. It is undoubtedly true that new social media do provide greater opportunities for participation. This book provides many instances where children have x FOREWORD effectively become media producers rather than mere consumers: they are using media to communicate their own perspectives, and to represent their own lives, in ways that were much more difficult to achieve before.

However, we need to beware of romanticism here too. The distinction between media ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ is always a little tenuous, especially once we acknowledge that children are actively making meaning from media of all kinds, and are rarely a passive audience, even for ‘old’ media like television or books. Furthermore, we should not forget that social media platforms are almost invariably commercial: they may appear to be free, but they make enormous profits by gathering data about their users, which is then used to target them with personalized advertising and other commercial appeals. Each medium, and each platform, inevitably exerts constraints on how it can be used. Children may be actively participating and communicating in new ways, but that activity does not necessarily mean that they have greater agency or social power.

This book brings a range of new empirical and theoretical perspectives to bear on these questions. The research that is reported here comes close to the rich detail of lived experience in ways that only in-depth, long-term ethnographic studies can do. The authors look across different settings — the family home, the school, and the peer group — and explore the different functions that media serve in each of them. They consider the role of media not just in private ‘memory work’ and in communication among friends and family, but also how they are used as means of surveillance in the public context of schooling. As these examples show, ‘new’ social media are often inextricably connected with ‘older’ media; and they are very much embedded within the wider dynamics of relationships among the family and the peer group. In this world of constant connectivity, it makes even less sense to consider media as an alien, external influence.

In analysing these different uses of media, the book also draws on broader theoretical debates. It considers how media use is implicated in children’s sense of time and place, in their establishment of identity and their perfor mance of childhood itself. The book resists the temptations of a media-centred or technology-centred approach, and refuses easy distinctions between mediated and non-mediated communication. It draws on ‘post-digital’ approaches, and notions such as ‘polymedia’ and ‘intensive materialities’, to capture the contemporary proliferation of media and the comprehensive mediation of everyday life. It also explores the diverse opportunities children have to create, curate and circulate media content, and what this tells us about the changing nature of ‘communicative capitalism’.

Rather than conceiving of these developments in terms of cause-andeffect, the book also seeks to explain how children themselves understand and experience the various media cultures in which they are immersed. Amid

FOREWORD xi the continuing public debate about children and media, there has been little attempt to access children’s voices and perspectives. The research presented here seeks to address this absence, but it does so in a careful and nuanced way. Children’s voices and perspectives are not simply out there in the world, awaiting the observation of researchers. On the contrary, research also actively constructs ‘the child’ in specific ways; and good research is explicit and reflexive about how it does this.

What is especially innovative about this book, however, is that it addresses the constitutive role of media in this process. The studies reported here use a range of media as means of generating and gathering data; and, more importantly, they enable children to make creative use of these media themselves — in effect, to play a greater role in determining how they are to be represented, and in how ‘their’ data is to be produced, circulated and interpreted. Using such creative, media-based methods has become somewhat fashionable in social research in recent years; but there is often a degree of naivety in how such methods are applied, and the claims that are made about them. As this book makes clear, such methods are by no means straightforward, and they should not be seen simply as a matter of ‘empowering’ or ‘giving voice’ to children. On the contrary, as several of the chapters here suggest, these methods raise complex methodological and ethical questions that are probably incapable of easy resolution. Yet in this respect, the book goes beyond simply problematizing, to provide concrete and helpful suggestions for future researchers.

The ways in which academic research plays into public debate are often indirect and mysterious. Yet, if this book can contribute to the demise of simplistic claims about ‘digital childhoods’, and to the development of a more thoughtful, empirically grounded account of the role of media in children’s lives, it will have achieved a very important and necessary aim.

Professor David Buckingham London, July 2017

Acknowledgements his book has been an ensemble performance, involving many people working in collaboration over time. We would first like to acknowledge the vital and generous contribution of the young people and families that made the research possible. We would also like to acknowledge both the Economic and Social Research Council (grant reference 512589109) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (H/M002160/1) for funding our work. The Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth and the Sussex Humanities Lab at University of Sussex and the Education Research Centre at the University of Brighton provided a supportive and creative environment for this work. We are also grateful for joint project funding from the Communities and Cultures Network + in support of our Hackathon. An Open Access version of this publication was made possible by the generous support of a Research Councils UK Open Access block grant provided to the University of Sussex. The project was enriched by our advisory group which includes David Buckingham, Janet Boddy, Ann Phoenix, Jette Kofoed, Susie Weller and Carey Jewitt, as well as our collaborators: Fiona Courage at the Mass Observation Archive and Susi Arnott of Walking Films and photographer Crispin Hughes. We also extend thanks to our hackathon collaborators — Chris Kiefer, Suzanne Rose, Kirsty Pattrick, Anthony McCoubrey, Thanos Liontiris, Ben Jackson, Sarah Leaney and Cathy Grundy. The research team have all been involved in the book in different ways, but we would like to thank Kate Howland, Sue Sharpe, Lucy Hadfield, Ester McGeeney and Mary Jane Kehily for the rich data that they co-produced for the archive and the book. Finally, we acknowledge the contribution of our ‘in house’ children who have in different ways inspired, critiqued and encouraged our interest in this research area: Milica, Lyra and Isaac. Nothing would be possible without the endless patience and support of Mark Erickson, Louise Berriman and Sean Arnold.

Chapter 4 is based on a journal article originally published as Berriman, L. and Thomson, R. (2015) ‘Spectacles of intimacy? Mapping the moral landscape of teenage social media’ Journal of Youth Studies, 18(5): 583-597. Rachel Thomson, Liam Berriman and Sara Bragg

Everyday Childhoods: Time, Technology and Documentation

FIGURE 1.1 Lucien’s Lego camper van

| ask Lucien to show me something that is more about his past and he takes me upstairs to the room that he and his sister share. Bright colours, fabric, stuff. A beautiful space. He puts onto the spotted bed a camper van made out of Lego. He still plays with Lego, but less than in the past. It used to be his big thing. He made things with his dad. He evaluates the camper van as a car (good quality but slow) rather than as a piece of construction kit. Lucien plays with the van, shows how the interior works, the faults in the design. While in his room, we talk about play. If his friends come over, they tend to play in his room. He explains that he is not the kind of boy that plays online. He is ‘calm and quiet: His mum doesn't like him spending time on his PlayStation and he doesn’t understand why. His mum thinks that his dad becomes a kid when he plays on it. Lucien wants to stay a child, he is in no hurry to grow up. He likes to play. But adults also have freedom. They are allowed to go fast. He maps his life so far in terms of speed: starting with buses, moving on to trains and now cars. He expects that next time | see him, he will be into jet fighters. | check whether this is all linked to future careers? No, it's about now. He wants to stay a kid. [Researcher field note, RT]

W: begin this book with an extract from a research field note written after a visit with 7-year-old Lucien. The researcher has known Lucien since before he was born, having collaborated with his mother Monica in a study of new motherhood in 2005. Over 12 months, our research followed Lucien between home and school, and shared in his excitement in discovering online search and the computer game Minecraft. Like many parents, Monica expressed concerns about Lucien’s ‘screen time’ and the complicated tangle of educational, social and hedonistic dimensions of digital culture. At the same time, Lucien observed and questioned the boundaries his parents made. Through our research, we observed how Lucien's experiences at home and school shaped his discovery and engagement with technology in his everyday life.

Researching Everyday Childhoods: Time, Technology and Documentation in a Digital Age is a book that explores the role of research in understanding children’s lives in a digital age, and the opportunities and challenges this raises. Everyday Childhoods is also the title of a collection of material held in digital form at the Mass Observation Archive. It was made possible by two publicly funded research initiatives that combine methodological and substantive aims (see Appendix 1 for the story of the study). The book explores the dataset, reflects on the methods used to generate it and the insights that arise from thinking with and through it. As a group of researchers, our experience spans the analogue and digital transition, and we are attuned to how recalibrations can be felt in the settings and practices of children’s lives. Our endeavour expresses something of the spirit of the age, where researching and curating have become popular practices and where we are challenged to find ways of speaking across the many and ephemeral publics enabled by digital methods. We have attempted to work with the affordances of digital data and methods in order to create a text that is scholarly and analytical, yet which allows the reader to navigate the material on their own terms in conjunction with the archive to which it is so closely connected. For example, if you want to see Lucien’s bedroom and hear his own words, you can look at the multimedia animations that are part of this project.' The images and the audio provide access to the texture of Lucien’s everyday life with an immediacy that text alone does not; however, making meaning of and from such documents is a longer, slower and often painstaking task. In this opening chapter, we outline some of the key ideas guiding the interpretations we present in this book, including the idea of the ‘everyday’ in a digital age, and themes of time, technology and documentation, which provide a focus for our analysis.

Childhood and digital culture

A decade ago our first multiple-signatory ‘toxic childhood’ press letter described how children’s health and wellbeing were being undermined by the decline of outdoor play, increasingly screen-based lifestyles, a hypercompetitive schooling system and the unremitting commercialisation of childhood. Despite widespread public concern, subsequent policymaking has been half-hearted, short-termist and disjointedly ineffective.

[extract from multiple signed letter to the Guardian newspaper 25 Dec. 2015]

'See http://modernmothers.org/favs/L/Lucien.html.

We call for research to capture the nuance and detail of engagement with technology and understand HOW rather than HOW MUCH new technologies should be used. We call for technology developers in the commercial sector to work with academics, educators and families to create digital worlds where children can play and learn in a way which meets their needs and expands their experiences. We call for anyone making pronouncements on child development to support their arguments with quality evidence. We call for parents not to switch off, but instead to switch on to technology, and engage with their child's digital

learning and play. [A response to “Screen based lifestyle harms children’s health”’, FletcherWatson & FletcherWatson, 2016: http://www.dart.ed.ac.uk/ guardian_letter/]

These two extracts come from a letter to The Guardian newspaper and a blogged response to that letter. The first is signed by leading UK child psychologists and educationalists and captures how technology has become a focus of concern in relation to child wellbeing, suggesting a causal connection with a range of trends, including rising obesity and declining mental health. Concerned for the future, the commentators look back to past, ‘healthier’ and outdoor childhoods. The second extract is a critical response to this letter, produced by researchers working in the field of autism, who observe how children’s lives can be positively transformed by technology. Challenging the blanket notion of technology's ‘toxicity’ for childhood, they call for greater ‘nuance’ and ‘detail’ in accounts of how children engage and live with digital technologies. These extracts each provide important insights into contempor ary debates about children’s lives in a digital age within the UK: first, that discussions about children and digital technology have become highly politicized and are routinely contested within the public sphere; second, that these discussions are experienced and responded to by parents and children; and finally, that research can play a vital mediating role in documenting children’s everyday experiences in and of a digital world.

Children are the focus of much of the public debate on the impact of digital culture, with anxiety clustering around physical passivity, brain development, sociality, privacy and risk (see Buckingham 2011 for an overview). The speed of technological innovation results in uncomfortable lags and snags between adult claims to authority and the uneven expertise of the young — who are the most intensive users of new media and who can be understood to power much of its content and circulation (Livingstone & Haddon 2009). Moral panics about digital childhoods, grounded or not, become part of a fabric of everyday parenting, schooling and play. Public anxieties about children’s digital culture are international in scope — even though children’s digital media practices vary across cultural settings (Miller et al. 2016), as do the concerns to which they give rise (Livingstone and Third, 2017). Our study seeks to develop a methodological perspective that is attentive to, and grounded within, the everyday contexts of children’s lives and digital practices. Through a focus on ‘the everyday’ in a UK context we propose a methodological and theoretical framework that can provide a nuanced perspective on children’s lives across a range of local-global contexts. Our approach to thinking about the everyday is inspired by a range of intellectual resources that includes both material worlds and the stories we tell about them. The rediscovery of the ‘everyday’ appears to mark a new interest in the empirical world as a starting point for the generation of theory (Neal & Murji 2015), characterized by a focus on ‘moments’ (Gabb & Fink 2015), objects (Rinkinen et al. 2015) and specificity (Back 2015). Our approach is particularly indebted to anthropological (Pink 2012) and interactionist (Scott 2009) traditions that focus on the material and phenomenal as the ‘stuff’ through which sociality and structure are enacted. A focus on the everyday also draws attention to temporality and processes of continuity and rupture though which certain practices travel and others disappear. Duration is one of the main ways that we classify the everyday, tracing the micro-temporalities of the ‘craze’, through the meso-temporalities of the ‘experience’, through to the macro-temporalities that underpin habits, routines, demeanours and collective formations such as curricula and traditions.”

Documentation also plays a vital mediating role in our experience of time and is a key component of contemporary governance, be it self-administered or institutionally driven. Within childhood studies, it has been argued that there has been an explosion in ‘documentalization’ of childhood, with growth charts, progression logs and various kinds of portfolios entering streams of inter action, shaping personal and professional practice (Alasuutari & Kelle 2015). Documents give rise to predictive logics that shape as well as reflect behaviour; in Lindsay Prior's terms, documents do things as well as contain things.° In this project, we are interested in the documentation of childhood in its widest sense: the formal reporting documents created by teachers and social workers, the informal documents created by children and parents (e.g. family albums), the documents and objects that span the home-school-leisure divide. We also recognize ourselves as part of a post-empirical moment within the social sciences, where the documents created with and by researchers (such as field notes) must also be understood as a part of a wider culture of documentation demanding the same kinds of interrogation (Lury & Adkins 2009).

?See Shove et al. (2009); Gergen (1984). 3See Prior (2008); Alatuusari & Kelle (2015); Williamson (2016).

Documentation has also been digitalized. Writing, photography and film each in its time constituted a revolution in documentation, and their democratization over the twentieth century (accelerated by digital methods) shapes how memory is externalized and organized. As the means to document become available to more of us, the structures of feeling that shape our expectations adapt. Roland Barthes’s (1981) analysis of ‘punctum’ — the emotional arrow that connects him and his mother through a single treasured photograph — speaks of a particular moment in the history of the media. Its present-day equivalent might be one of the many ‘time-lapse’ films now on YouTube that animate a child’s maturation from birth to adulthood or condense years’ worth of thousands of ‘a photo a day’ images into a matter of minutes.

From the earliest days of social media, commentators have noted how new opportunities for documentation are associated with unfamiliar temporalities that give rise to new kinds of awkwardness, embarrassment and exposure. A series of moral panics around ‘happy slapping’ (using the mobile phone to record and display physical assaults), ‘fraping’ (having one’s online identity taken), ‘sexting’ and ‘revenge porn’ (sharing and potentially losing control of explicit material) warn of the new kinds of risk associated with the documenting and publishing of self. Each is associated with a temporal lag — and a failure of empathy — expanding the space between a trusting relationship and the moment of regret and humiliation. Commentators have drawn attention to the importance of non-synchronicity as an important characteristic of cyberbullying, as well as the problem of indelibility, as digital footprints created in the moment accumulate over time, challenging our ability to forget or be forgotten, or simply to shape and reshape our story.® As quickly as new technologies of display appear to solve these problems (such as Snapchat, which disappears after a few seconds), so too do technologies of capture (the screenshot) evolve to foil them.

While the risks of personal exposure associated with social media have generated much public concern, there is also growing interest in how the aggregation of self-documentation makes personal privacy vulnerable in new ways.® Alice Marwick (2013) has coined the term attention economy to characterize teenage social media use, usefully alerting us to the complexity of real and imagined audiences associated with the kinds of documentary practice that appear to be at the centre of young people’s culture. Also useful is danah boyd’s (2014) idea of context collapse, which refers to how the public nature of social media cuts across the moral communities that shape young people's

5For non-synchronicity, see Kofoed (2014). For indelibility see MayerSchénberger (2009); Kofoed & Larsen (2016).

®Tifentale & Manovich (2015).

worlds (relationships with friends, parents, teachers/ professionals, strangers and acquaintances). The affective power of social media appears to be rooted in the dynamic collisions it can create between concrete local embodied relationships and more mediated relationships online.

We are interested in the ethical hotspots encountered by children, young people and teenagers as they engage in the documentation of everyday life in what Jodi Dean calls an era of communicative capitalism (Dean 2005). By focusing on ordinarily awkward moments as well as more spectacular exposures, we aim to generate tools and methods that may prove useful to others. In Chapter 4, we propose a model of teenage social media use that maps an imperative to participate against an imperative of in/visibility. Social media constitutes a universe in which value is generated by participation and the cir culation of content. Such participation may be relatively passive, lurking and liking, or it may be much more active and extend into the creation of content. Once content is created, the question is whether content is controlled and who reaps the reward of the value embedded within it. In the case of sexting for example, the victim loses control of her image and the value is assumed by and between the persons who circulate the image and whose reputations are enhanced by this.’ However, it is possible to use oneself as content and to gain some of the value that accrues from your audience's attention as the YouTube celebrities demonstrate. There are also less visible forms of participation associated with content creation that are both high status and involve some control over self-image.

Description, as Claudia Castaneda has noted, is a form of ontological politics; it makes a claim to the real (Castañeda 2002: 142). Some of the language we have already used indicates how acutely any attempt to describe children’s lives is caught up in such politics. Are we dealing with gaming, friendship and flirting, or addiction, bullying, sexting and porn culture, for example? Our very vocabularies can pathologize, objectify or depoliticize. We recognize how the figure of the child can operate within popular and public culture, mobilized in reactionary ways to secure an idealized and normative future. In this respect, we embrace the queering of childhood studies and the disentangling of notions of development and growth from ideas of becoming and experimentation (Stockton 2009). Any engagement with children’s culture is caught within what David Oswell (2013) describes as a double paradigm, in which we are preoccupied by portraying the child as having agency while at the same time understanding that child as caught within a compelling nexus of material and social relations. The approach we have taken in this project does not resolve this tension, but works with a post-empirical but materialist

7See Ringrose et al. (2013).

orientation to recognize intra-action (Barad 2007) between bodies, identities and material/cultural resources, showing what young people do with these resources and what these materials might do to them, without slipping into a moralizing register. The task is to navigate a path through a contemporary landscape in which cultures are — often highly self-consciously — mediated by class and other social differences. Our methods as well as our theoretical and ethical orientations incline us away from the spectacular (the explicit or idealized images shared on Snapchat and Instagram respectively, for example), or the isolated focus on single products (such as push-up bras for tween girls), towards the creative and often unpredictable improvisations of children’s everyday lives in context, in order to emphasize complexity and contingency.

Concepts for a post-digital age

From school whiteboards and tablets to portable game consoles and home televisions, the screen has become a ubiquitous presence in children’s everyday spaces and routines. From the outset, the social and moral functions of screens became a focus of our research. As screen technologies have changed, so do the battle lines of fighting over the remote control, shar ing devices, negotiating ‘screen time’, managing the presence of multiple screens, and extending the boundaries of the personal through mobile media that enable us to manipulate our sense of intimacy through sound and vision. As we describe in Chapter 2, the proliferation of screens also shaped our research methodology — prompting choices in our use of mobile devices and the representation of the documents captured by these devices back to participants, forming the basis of a highly layered, reflexive and mediated data set.

Though the term ‘screen’ is largely identified with electronic media, it also has meaning that is older and broader — referring both to acts of obfuscation (to hide or protect) and presentation (to display or show). These definitions also proved highly pertinent to our study, enabling us to imagine the screen as both a noun (‘the screen’ as a Surface) and as a verb referring to acts of ‘screening’. This helped us to interrogate and move beyond assumptions that young people overshare by ‘broadcasting’ their lives on social media or become socially isolated and awkward by ‘hiding behind screens’.® Instead, we looked at the ways that screens enable both display and concealment — for example, by sharing photographs taken with friends and family or using a pseudonym whilst publishing fanfiction. Screens also facilitate both connection and disconnection — such as when ‘sonic bridges’ are forged with friends over Skype whilst playing Minecraft or when the world is