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Abstract
We investigate the ways young children’s use of mobile touchscreen interfaces is both understood and shaped by parents through the production of YouTube videos and discussions in associated comment threads. This analysis expands on, and departs from, theories of parental mediation, which have traditionally been framed through a media effects approach in analyzing how parents regulate their children’s use of broadcast media, such as television, within family life. We move beyond the limitations of an effects framing through more culturally and materially oriented theoretical lenses of mediation, considering the role mobile interfaces now play in the lives of infants through analysis of the ways parents intermediate between domestic spaces and networked publics.
We propose the concept of intermediation, which builds on insights from critical interface studies as well as cultural industries literature to help account for these expanded aspects of digital parenting. Here, parents are not simply moderating children’s media use within the home, but instead operating as an intermediary in contributing to online representations and discourses of children’s digital culture. This intermediary role of parents engages with ideological tensions in locating notions of “naturalness:” the iPad’s gestural interface or the child’s digital dexterity.
Funding
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) under Discovery Early Career Researcher Award grant number DE130100735.
Notes
1. Ethically, the content of these videos cannot be assumed to be unproblematically available for Internet researchers to access as found data analyzed using unobtrusive methods, as research shifts the context in which they were originally shared (Markham & Buchanan, Citation2012). Using this data for research purposes is particularly difficult in this case given these videos involve children, whose anonymity cannot be protected. We are aware of these ethical concerns. Nevertheless, given that the intention of posting these videos on YouTube was to communicate them to a broad networked public, and that they have been viewed by a large number of people, we feel the benefits of this analysis outweigh any potential negative outcomes.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Bjorn Nansen
Bjorn Nansen (Ph.D., The University of Melbourne, Australia) is a lecturer in Media and Communications at The University of Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include media consumption and practice, children’s media, and interface studies.
Darshana Jayemanne
Darshana Jayemanne (Ph.D., The University of Melbourne, Australia) is lecturer in Game Studies and Media Theory at Abertay University, Scotland. His research interests include media temporalities, distributed technologies, embodied experience, and narrative form.