Child-Centered vs. Media-Centered Perspectives

Researchers and writers in media studies and media education debate the effects of experience with media (e.g., television, movies, video games, the Internet) on children and adolescents. The two major approaches in this debate are sometimes called media-centered perspectives, which focus on the influence of media on children and adolescents, and child-centered perspectives, which focus on their interaction with media.

Research and writing from a media-centered perspective are characterized by the belief that the influence of the media on children and adolescents is primarily negative and that children and adolescents are passive recipients of media messages, somewhat akin to empty vessels filled and shaped by media messages or even brainwashed by the media. Mediacentered perspectives have a longer history than childcentered perspectives and emerge from media critiques from a wide range of political, cultural and religious views. Some media critics argue that the media influence children and adolescents with morally questionable ideas and images, lead to the degradation of traditional values, or give rise to violence. Other media [Page 156]critiques argue from this perspective that the media influence children with unacceptable messages and images that give rise to rampant consumerism, violence, negative self-images, and discriminatory representations of humans.

Child-centered perspectives, also commonly called audience response perspectives, arose in response to what some researchers and writers saw as an overly simplistic model of audience effect in media-centered perspectives. These critiques contend that the mediacentered approach fails to take into account the individual and social interactions of children and adolescents with the media, which mediate, limit, and shape the viewer's reception of media messages. They argue that children and adolescents are active, selective, and critical consumers of media. According to the child-centered perspective, the meanings children make of media messages are complex and unstable; they are negotiated in relation to viewers' identities (racial, gender, and social class, to name a few), their communities, their peer cultures, and other factors of their contexts. From this perspective, meaning is made in an active exchange between the media and the child or adolescent, and therefore there are many possible messages or meanings that children might make of any single media event.

Child-centered writers argue that media are an authentic part of children and adolescents' cultures and that this perspective is more democratic and more responsive to children and adolescents' interests, desires, and goals. However, media-centered critics respond by arguing that proponents of the childcentered approach are naïve about the power of the media to shape children's desires in ways that are inauthentic or objectionable. The argument between these two perspectives may be said to come down to different perspectives on the power of the media to persuade or influence child and adolescent consumers of media and on what counts as worthwhile culture.

Each perspective brings with it different educational responses. From a media-centered perspective, teaching about the media is seen as a means of providing children and adolescents with tools of analysis that will make them less vulnerable to and more critical of media influence. From a child-centered perspective, media education classrooms may be a place to investigate students' investments and pleasures related to media. In such approaches, critique of the media proceeds by highlighting the ambivalences and contradictions that students feel toward the media—for example, when a student enjoys a song, magazine, or movie but also understands it to present negative messages about a facet of the student's identity. In both kinds of classrooms, students may be made aware of or may make others aware of outlets for alternative media messages.

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