• Young teenagers and media consumption

Josanne Cassar interviews Velislava Hillman about her research

Velislava Hillman’s academic background is in marketing and communications (BA in International Relations, BA in Communications, MA in Integrated Marketing Communications).  Since 2008 she’s worked on Phase a magazine by and for youth inMalta, which was her own creation and product.

Her current goal is to apply for a PhD for which she needed to have a minimum of one scientific work published.  For this reason she began to compile data on media consumption by young people inMalta(12 – 15 years of age).

Briefly, her research focussed on how much time kids spend using various media platforms, from mobile phones – not for talking but for other purposes – to DVD players, to handheld video game players, to pluggable video game consoles, to music, to internet, to watching TV programmes on various media platforms, to TV, to using instant messaging, to cinema, and, of course, multi-tasking..

She explains that, “I have managed to correlate, where appropriate, how kids fare at school, how much time they spend being physically active, their personal level of contentment, with how much media they use, but these have only been indicators for me to use in my next research projects. These in no way can allow me to say that one thing was caused by the other.”

For example, in her research Ms Hillman found a correlation between heavy use of various traditional and new media and poor school results. “In fact, of all 12-15-year-olds, 20% would spend as much time on the computer on a typical day as they would listening to music. It is important, however, not to make too many assumptions,” she cautions.

“Although there is a correlation between poor grades and heavy media use, there are a lot of excellent students who are also heavy users and there are light users (who spend a minimum amount of time with media on a typical day) who fare badly at school. Again to clarify, this is not to say that there is a causal relationship in this equation. The influence can very well go in both directions. My research only shows the amount of media use and media exposure. Causality will be looked at in this second stage of my work, now that I have the first factor (media use) in my hands. There are other strong factors that play their role into the formation of children, their school performance, their behaviour as consumers, their attitudes, values, etc. “

According to her research, Maltese children do spend a lot of time on Facebook and other social sites, such as YouTube, more than they do anything else on the computer. There have been speculations, and incomplete results from studies and considerable literature on whether Generation Y (those born after 1990) will become less social, internet addicts. “This is what I will be researching next. There are findings that confirm two main reasons around which young people migrate online: to strengthen their already existing personal ties that originate offline, and to keep alive their weak ties to acquaintances, what Granovetter calls “the strength of the weak ties”.

Asked whether parents should be monitoring computer use by having the computer in a common area of the house, rather than the child’s bedroom, Ms Hillman believes this would be best while the child is still a minor.

On the other hand she does not believe that communication between children and parents has been necessarily adversely affected by heavy media use

“Kids of a certain age want to talk to other kids, and new media platforms only help kids to socialize more with those with whom they want to socialize and talk to personally. Internet is interactive and not a one-way stream like TV is. I don’t think you feel more isolated or less personal when you communicate to your readers via your website. On the contrary, internet has inspired us to be even more social and open (sometimes too open) about anything really.”

Parents are often at a loss as to which gadgets are age-appropriate for their children.  Although stressing that she is no expert, Ms Hillman quotes French scientists who suggest the following formula: no TV before the age of 3 (in fact, scientists from theUSpaediatrics community also contain several findings on this), no computers before the age of 6, no Internet alone before the age of 12.

“On the other hand, there are inventors like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, modern-day geeks to call them if you will, who, through their dedication (heavy media usage) brought about such innovations as Facebook, and the iPad. I don’t know if they had curfew on media use when they were tweens but I’m saying that when someone is passionate about something, they need to do the 10,000 hours to become experts, inventors, leaders in their field…as Gladwell puts it.”

Some parents worry when their children prefer to spend time alone on the computer rather than to socialise in the traditional sense. However, when Ms Hillman conducted focus groups as part of her preliminary work, she found that kids state their preferred social activity is to hang out with friends, physically that is. “Then, when they can’t go out because of studying, or other reasons, they keep up with their friends online, through instant messaging etc. That makes them a lot more social and friendly than even their parents used to be. But again, a clear distinction needs to be made: if we talk about kids being social or not, I don’t think they are less social than the baby boomers were in their teen years. However, if kids need to study and focus on their sport or an upcoming exam, they have to restrict their chatting on Facebook, watching TV, or listening to music, just until their exams are over….just to put it very simply.”

Meanwhile, the concern of parents who wish to have some kind of control over which websites their children stumble upon can be allayed through the “options” on every browser where the parent can block certain sites. “There are freely available downloadable applications that also block unsolicited content while the child browses the internet. Also the parent can get advice from their internet service provider.”

Finally, Ms Hillman wishes to stress that media is only one possibility which can influence, change and affect children and it is simplistic to blame everything on the media.

“What can be done however, and what I want to work on, is teach children how to use media healthily and to their advantage; how to “interpret” media; how to never underestimate the power of advertising; how to learn to control media use – not by limiting it time-wise, but by identifying the specific purposes of use.  They should be taught how to trust things, to know the structure and organization of media and those who create the media content, the media owners and their agenda

These are things that kids can be taught, but not in a top-down approach (teacher – class) because that will automatically repulse them and they’ll reject the idea, but in a friendly “cool” fashion. I realised this when I conducted my focus groups; the way I spoke to so many of them and the way that it makes them open up and want to understand, through an ‘agent’ who they can relate to and level with them to teach them these things.”