Young People and New Media : Childhood and the Changing Media Environment

We can no longer imagine leisure, or the home, without media and communication technologies, and for the most part, we would not want to. Yet as worldwide the television screen in the family home is set to become the site of a multimedia culture integrating telecommunications, broadcasting, computing and video, many questions arise concerning their place in our daily lives. Young People and New Media offers an invaluable up-to-date account of children and young people's changing media environment at the end of the twentieth century. By locating the insights drawn from a major empirical research reported in Young People, New Media within a survey of the burgeoning but fragmented research literature on ne "Combining a comprehensive literature review with original empirical research on young people's use of new media, this book provides a fresh and in-depth discussion of the increasingly complex relationship between the media and childhood, the family and the home." "We can no longer imagine our daily lives without media and communication technologies. At the start of the 21st century, the home is being transformed into the site of a multimedia culture. This book looks at the discussions around the potential benefits of this new media and asks: What impact are the new media having on childhood and adolescence? Are these technologies changing the nature of young people's leisure and sociability? And has the participation of children in private and public life changed?"--Jacket. This volume presents an account of children and young people's changing media environment at the end of the twentieth century. With the current proliferation of personal media in the home and particularly in children's bedrooms, analogies between early television and today's new screen-based media are taken as a basis for applying to the personal computer lessons learned from television. A parallel can be drawn in terms of usage and effects on domestic time and space, on social and family relations and on lifestyles, for young people are generally at the cutting edge of these developments.

Livingstone reports on a study designed to update that reported in Himmelweit et al.'s Television and the Child (1958), which examined the place of the new medium in children's lives then. Both studies were conducted at the London School of Economics, but significant changes in conditions and concepts prevented exact duplication of the earlier one. Among the perspectives are the changing media environment, the diffusion and appropriation of new media, leisure and lifestyle, the media-rich home, families living together separately, and changing literacies. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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Livingstone reports on a study designed to update that reported in Himmelweit et al.'s (1958), which examined the place of the new medium in children's lives then. Both studies were conducted at the London School of Economics, but significant changes in conditions and concepts prevented exact duplication of the earlier one. Among the perspectives are the changing media environment, the diffusion and appropriation of new media, leisure and lifestyle, the media-rich home, families living together separately, and changing literacies. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Machine generated contents note: 1 Childhood, youth and the changing media environment 2 The diffusion and appropriation of new media 3 Media, leisure and lifestyle 4 The media-rich home: balancing public and private lives 5 Living together separately: the family context of media use 6 Changing media, changing literacies. Combining a comprehensive literature review with original empirical research on young people's use of new media, this text provides an in-depth discussion of the increasingly complex relationship between the media and childhood.