Meryl Alper

I’m having tons of fun collaborating with the Story Pirates on a number of projects, and wanted to share a FANTASTIC opportunity to intern with the organization in their Los Angeles office (in Westwood Village by UCLA) this summer:

Jon Stewart, in true Story Pirates fashion, has a heart to heart with Barbie.

"The Creative Power of Your Audience" panel at Kidscreen, moderated by Amy Friedman, with Fred Seibert, Jonathan Mayers and Ross Martin.

From February 6-10 in NYC, I attended the iKids Conference and Kidscreen Summit, the largest annual children’s entertainment industry event in the world.  Kidscreen Summit, with 1500 delegates representing 800 companies and 43 countries, is part conference, summit, networking event, exhibition and trade show.  With every major children’s media industry player (and everyone who very much wants to be a major player) under one roof, pre-conference iKids and Kidscreen delivered a number of highlights, recurring themes and critical questions about the past, present and future of children and digital media.  Trying to toggle between industry and academic lenses, I’ve summarized a few key issues raised below:

Transmedia “_____.”  At iKids, Stacey Matthias, co-CEO of Insight Strategy Group, presented qualitative research from depth interviews conducted with a small sample of kids (aged 7-14, across 8 US states) on how they would define “transmedia” (abridged version PDF available here.)  Two notable points from Matthias’ presentation: 1) Developmental differences in how children ages 7, 10 and 13 described how their experiences with character-driven narratives across different media story worlds “helped them do the work of growing up,” as Matthias described, and 2) That none of the children they interviewed entered the story world of their favorite media property through that franchise’s original media (e.g. Harry Potter, not through the books or even the movies, but through Lego Harry Potter).

In relation to the work I am doing with my advisor, Prof. Henry Jenkins, and Erin Reilly, Managing Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, I’d caution that if “transmedia” in its most basic sense means “across media,” then we need to be more specific about what “transmedia” means in very different mediated contexts.  Matthias’ presentation primarily focused on children’s “transmedia” as branding and storytelling, but understandably less so (given the setting) on transmedia’s potential applications as learning, ritual, performance or activism (such as the work of the Harry Potter Alliance).

Non-digital game app inspirations.  David Kleeman moderated a “hypothetical app” creation challenge between Andy Russell of Launchpad Toys, Jason Krogh of zinc Roe Design, Carla Fisher and Anne Richards of No Crusts Interactive and Juliet Tzabar of Plug-in Media.  David’s rules were that the app had to 1) Be targeted to 5-8 year-olds, 2) Promote “pass back and forth” between children and caregivers, and 3) Use as many possible affordances of smart phone and tablet computers.

The result was a number of apps with non-digital counterparts.  One type of app was the digital version of the “exquisite corpse.” “Le cadavre exquis” was a parlor game favored by French Surrealists, involving players making a contribution to the whole (be it an image or set of worlds) without having knowledge of anyone else’s contributions.  This “pass along” game involves one person writing or drawing on a piece of paper, folding that paper over to hide all but one piece of their creation, and then passing it along for the next person to add, fold, and pass along again.  The completed “corpse” (revealed when the paper is unfolded) can be the basis for collective creation and creative communication, regardless of language.  No Crusts also drew inspiration from analog games like Telephone, and the panel discussed the possibility of incorporating non-digital elements from improvisational theater games with their “Yes, And” philosophy.

One area into which the panel did not get a chance to dig deeper was the distinct qualities that separate the physical folding and unfolding of paper from the “metaphorical” folding and unfolding of an app (e.g. a child’s fine motor and metacognitive skills needed to choose and fold a select portion of their drawing to pass along.)  It is differences such as this that leads me to another note of caution for fellow children’s media researchers.  Just because one has knowledge of child development, and even how children learn from pseudo-interactive television, does not necessarily apply whole cloth to an understanding of how children learn from apps, nor how to research and design user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX) for this age group.  Nor, on top of that, how to account for cultural differences in child development.  As David Kleeman stated at the conclusion of the panel (and I apologize for paraphrasing), “The more functionality there is in these devices, the harder it is to separate what’s possible/fun/cool from necessary/usable.”

Monetizing “digital natives” rhetoric. “Co-creation” with young “digitally native” media audiences is a rather warm and fuzzy notion that was shared over the course of the conference, but there needs to be more open and honest discussions about the ethical implications of monetizing crowd sourced user generated content from kids under 13, as well as the serious social, economic and educational consequences for children across the globe who do not fit the ideal consumer profile.  Under the umbrella of what counts as “content,” there’s more than just posting YouTube videos.  Do children’s anonymous click-through data, collected and delivered to advertisers, count as “user generated content” too?  “Gamifying creativity” could end up, and perhaps already is, what Georgia Tech games rhetoric scholar Ian Bogost calls “exploitationware.”  Surely, an understanding of children’s media literacy in the 21^st century involves a critical understanding of what goes on under the mostly-opaque hood of our increasingly networked society, such as how Wikipedia pages get edited, how data is collected based on each badge-like goal obtained on a website, and how electronics get made in China.

More youth in the US may be viewing video on YouTube (as noted in research presented by Dubit Research at iKids), but that doesn’t mean by virtue of the year they were born that all these young people have the opportunities (e.g. free time to spend on the Internet, informal mentorships) to gain the cultural capital, knowledge and social skills to participate, learn and engage in their world.  Young people can find incredibly innovative ways to overcome some of these inequalities, but in order to learn more about these strategies, the first step is to stop pretending that all kids have, or even will one day soon have, iPads both at home and at school.

Readers, do you have any thoughts, comments or feedback you’d like to share below?

In my previous post, I wrote about the associations between the social and cultural context in which children learn about storytelling, and children’s individual and collective relationships with objects that become props for their stories (e.g. physical objects for trading and sharing; sounds and words as objects with a social currency or cultural cache).

As a follow up, I’d like to highlight the work of University of Chicago Laboratory School kindergarten teacher and MacArthur Genius Grant winner Vivian Paley, as well as non-profit arts and literacy organization the Story Pirates (currently partnered with the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles).  These teacher-artist-researchers support children’s storytelling and playwriting as a form of object play with words and other literacy materials.

In highlighting sections of Paley’s book The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter (1991) and my own observations from recent Story Pirates performances, I hope to draw some connections between their innovative approaches to honoring children’s agency as playwrights, and the ways that those approaches are underscored by sensitivity to each child’s evolving developmental, physical, behavioral and cognitive needs.

Every child’s need is a special need

Special rights must, under US law, be extended to children with disabilities in order to support their equal rights to participate as citizens along with their typically developing peers.  New mobile, lightweight and inexpensive digital technologies for facilitating participation and communication are increasingly developed and produced for children with physical and cognitive disabilities.  Such technologies include a range of apps geared towards children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and other forms of augmentative and assistive communication apps (AAC).

However, this hardware and software does not necessarily meet children’s need for social communication around narratives and interaction through storytelling (be it peer-peer, child-adult or sibling-sibling).  Preconceived notions of children with physical and intellectual challenges’ “limited” capacity for communication shortchanges the possibilities for their rich engagement with storytelling.  These notions around “deficits” as opposed to “assets” also reciprocally circumscribes the power of storytelling to potentially motivate therapy practices (e.g. a child with cerebral palsy using AAC to tell a story, the desire to express a narrative also pushing them forward in practicing a range of motion and motor control.)

This discrepancy is yet another component of the digital divide or divides – blowing asunder the singular notion that all children are “natives” when it comes to their comfort and dexterity with digital technology (when compared to adults.)  But by noticing the media creation, consumption and distribution by children with disabilities, we are forced to ask difficult questions about which children are afforded the means of expression for storytelling with media (and which children’s families can afford these means), using what digital or non-digital technology and where that child is situated within a cultural environment and geographic location.  The questions are difficult to ask, and even more challenging to answer.

Phrases planting and taking root: The seeds of storytelling in Vivian Paley’s classroom

The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter is a wise and humble account of Paley and her assistant teachers’ challenging yearlong experience in integrating isolated children within the classroom, and by extension, the community.  The book focuses primarily on one such child: Jason, the titular boy who would prefer to be a helicopter and do helicopter things for every moment of the school day.  Though no diagnosis is made explicitly clear (and left purposefully unlabeled by Paley), Jason exhibits many behaviors of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), such as lack of interest in sharing enjoyment with other children, preoccupation with a specific part of a toy (in Jason’s case, the helicopter blades), and difficulty initiating conversation.

Storytelling, Paley describes, is the “academic inheritor of the creative wisdom of play” (p. 35).  Particularly for children having difficulty making friends, story creation and storytelling can create a liberating space for all children to experiment with their emotions and feelings.  She writes, “Playwriting need not involve reciprocity and can therefore sidestep personal issues for a while.  Story and stage provide a laboratory for every sort of child: those who are sociable but not articulate and those who speak better than they play; those who are trapped in a single theme and those who scurry quickly along the edges of too many” (p. 34-35).

While Paley is the storyteller of The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter, in the classroom she is story facilitator – helping children document their narratives (whose structure and themes grow increasingly complex over the year) and perform these stories with their fellow classmates as actors (while the playwright also directs.)  Paley notes the evolution of her approach to helping children in this way in the classroom, her early teaching philosophy being limited to:

If you keep trying to explain yourselves, I will keep showing you how to think about the problems you need to solve.

then shifting to…

Let me study your play and figure out how play helps you solve your problems.  Play contains your questions, and I must know what questions you are asking before mine will be useful.

and eventually landing on…

 Put your play into formal narratives, and I will help you and your classmates listen to one another. In this way you will build a literature of images and themes, of beginnings and endings, of references and allusions.  You must invent your own literature if you are to connect your ideas to the ideas of others (all p. 18).

Paley sets the stage for playing with story/stories as play within her classroom space.  The children’s dictation to her is not covert or hidden – banished to a special “story corner” – but is part of the social fabric of the classroom, located at a large table in a prime spot in classroom.  “Stories are not private affairs,” writes Paley.  “The individual imagination plays host to all the stimulation in the environment and causes ripples of ideas to encircle the listeners” (p. 21).

Jason’s difficulty in interpreting social cues often leads to his interruption of his classmates’ dictation and story performances.  However, Paley frames Jason’s interruptions as additive: “In storytelling, as in play, the social interactions we call interruptions usually improve the narrative.  Yet I can recall a time when I would say ‘Please don’t interrupt.  Let people tell their own stories.’  That was when I missed the main point of storytelling.  I did not understand it to be a shared process, a primary cultural institution, the social art of language” (p. 23).  Paley shifts her notions of what “classroom participation” means so that it does not exclude the form of Jason’s participation.  What good is any pedagogical theory if it does not account for outliers?

Paley’s story “intake” process with the children models free expression and critical inquiry for her students.  Her patience and determination is evident in her repeating of each sentence the storyteller says in order to give them the opportunity to correct errors or edit.  Not everything we adults write the first time is what we want to express in our final version, but we have more experience than children with wielding the power to change our minds and practice exerting control without having to be asked or given explicit permission.  Paley questions any aspect of her students’ stories she might misinterpret, for the classmate-actors will need clear instructions for performing them, and the story must be coherent to the audience and narrator as well.

I thought these quotes from Paley on modeling critical inquiry for her students were particularly rich:

“The children learn that figuring out what we do and say and read and play are equally important.  Everything is supposed to make sense; if it doesn’t, ask questions, go over it again, find out why the picture is blurred.  The range of possibilities for misunderstandings is quite astonishing.  And is this not a lucky circumstance?  It means we ought never to run out of great curriculum materials, free for the asking.  We only need to listen for our own errors and there is enough text to fill the school year” (p. 48-49).

Basically, questions = free school supplies!  YES! And…

“We can never fully discover the essential issues for each child or set up the perfectly safe environment.  What we do is continually demonstrate the process of searching for solutions.  This is the point at which studying becomes teaching” (p. 57).

This is also the point in which everyone in the classroom – child and adult – becomes a student, teacher, researcher and artist.

The overlap of popular culture and “pure” classroom culture

In Paley’s classroom, children are not chastised for bringing popular culture into their play and narratives.  The distinction between classroom culture and popular culture is by definition vague.  The children in any group decide for themselves the social norms for children “copying” material from other children, or other texts (books, games, TV shows).

Regarding pop culture in the child’s classroom, Paley writes, “There is a tendency to look upon the noisy, repetitious fantasies of children as non-educational, but helicopters and kittens and superhero capes and Barbie dolls are storytelling aids and conversational tools.  Without them, the range of what we listen to and talk about is arbitrarily circumscribed by the adult point of view” (p. 39).  There is a pleasure in a shared notion of texts outside the classroom, of children borrowing lines from the books many have all read before bedtime in their respective homes.  Of this material, Paley writes, “These verbatim bits of book dialogue bring a group closer together.  The children understand that an appropriately used phrase from a favorite book has the power to release pleasurable memories of a special world held in common.  Furthermore, the question of appropriateness is for the group to decide by its own usage” (p. 44).

In Paley’s account, a key moment in Jason’s social development is when he beings to borrow recurring phrases that children in the classroom use in their stories within his own fantasy play and narratives.  “Every year,” she writes, “certain phrases are planted and take root, the shoots continually coming up in stories and in play […] The use of a communal symbol is as tangible a demonstration of socialization as the agreement to share blocks and dolls” (p. 40).  Paley may notice and express her noticing to her children, but she cannot artificially manufacture those “verbal banners” strung from the ceiling, mingling with the sounds of classroom conversation.

‘Theory of mind’ in the spotlight: Story Pirates and the staging of children’s dramas and comedies

Regarding Jason’s success at using of one of these “verbal banners,” Paley writes, “A child who listens and responds to another child’s story may indeed be ready to tell his own to the group” (p. 38).  These social nuances of storytelling seem very relevant to what is known in psychology as theory of mind, or the ability to understand both that oneself holds a wide range of things in the brain (like emotions, feelings, thoughts and beliefs), and also that other people have this same range of things, but that those person’s brain contents are distinct from ones’ own.

“Everyone thinks, but not everyone thinks like me” is a concept that children with autism spectrum disorders have trouble understanding and acting on.  Since actors have to toggle between their own thoughts and the thoughts of their audience, theory of mind is central to storytelling and performance.

(PS Did you know that there is an International Society for the Study of Narrative, and that there is a whole branch of research on Cognitive Narratology?).  Cognitive narratology encompasses the “mind-relevant” aspects of storytelling (though, does that isolate it from “body-relevant” aspects?  Or “machine-relevant” aspects of storytelling, like with computers and robots?).  Just based on a Google Scholar search, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of research on “cognitive narratology” and “children” and “autism”…

The importance of theory of mind, in a child relating to an audience as a storyteller, is evident in Jason’s story, as well as in recent observations I made at Story Pirates shows.

Paley writes, “Two friends alone will memorize each other’s stories and learn a private language.  But the storyteller is a culture builder, requiring the participation of an audience.  Play is not enough [emphasis added]; there must be a format that captures the essence of play while attaching to it a greater degree of objectivity.  Storytelling and story acting can perform the task” (p. 34).  The Story Pirates have honed this format though their school creative writing workshops and subsequent new story shows when they return to those schools a few weeks later.

The group is keenly aware of this distinction between storytelling, play and playwriting.  “When storytelling becomes playwriting,” writes Paley, “children are even more sensitive to the preferences of others” (p. 24).  I saw this sensitivity in the children sitting next to and in the rows surrounding the child whose story was being performed for the first time in a recent Story Pirates performance in their school auditorium.  As the performance began to take shape, a number of the non-author children were engaged in watching the Story Pirates’ live performance, and also simultaneously asking questions related to the story to their classmate the playwright.  They asked for live-DVD special feature-type running commentary of their classmate-playwright: “Did you name that dog?” “How did you come up with that part?” “Who is HE supposed to be?”  These children, whose stories the Story Pirates did not select to perform, were so so so happy for the Story Pirates announced the name of the child whose story they would be performing.  Not one child displayed jealousy or envy – just effusive glee.  Though teachers fear hurt feelings, it is what adults have learned to do, whereas most children do not know to go there first.  But they do know to ask of their friend, “Why does that princess have monster hands?”

Another moment during a Story Pirates show that made me think about empathy and theory of mind took place during their show Brillance!.  The smart and silly musical is based on the life of Marie Curie, and was created as a companion piece to Alan Alda’s Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie, which opened at the Geffen Playhouse on Nov. 1.  At one point in Brilliance!, the cast invited three young audience participants to act out the roles of an electron, proton and neutron.  The proton, as a positive charge, was supposed to act happy.  The child got a practice run, before the real deal, in pretending to be happy when there’s stuff going on on stage that might make you feel sad.

On one side of the child, one of the actors told a sorta sad story about a dog dropping an ice cream cone and getting pistachio nuts stuck in their nose.  Upon hearing the increasingly sad story, an actor on the other side of the child would ask the child how they felt.  To really play the proton, the child was encouraged prior to the dog story to keep saying that they felt fine/happy/good when asked how they felt.  The person asking “How do you feel?” also asked the question with a sad tone.

Zoe Jarman of Story Pirates as Marie Curie in Brilliance!

The interesting thing happened when the child on stage, a boy probably around six years old, upon being asked “How do you feel?” responded “Sad.”  There was a little bit of confusion on stage, as the boy had gone a bit off script, and the boy started to feel not just pretend sad, but real sad, and turned to his sister (on stage playing the electron) for a hug and a place to hide.

I think, besides a bit of stage fright, part of the boy’s difficulty may have been due to his age and his development of interpretative theory of mind (iToM).  That is, the recognition that two people can hold different real beliefs about the same event or provocation.  Without iToM, a child cannot appreciate that both alternate interpretations – ‘This same story makes you feel sad’ and ‘This story same makes me feel happy’ are both valid and true.

It seems there is something to the role of iToM specifically in storytelling – in being able to understand rules of reciprocity, and of knowing that using the phrase that gets repeated in stories by one’s classmates (perhaps symbolizing someone in your class who originated the phrase) is like a tribute to them, and makes them like you.

The event on stage during Brilliance! was almost like a task used to measure iToM.  Traditional tasks for measuring ToM include the “Sally-Anne” task for false beliefs, regarding swapped contents in closed containers or location changes.  A child may pass ToM tasks but fail iToM tasks (Carpendale & Chandler, 1996; Chandler & Lalonde, 1996; Myers & Liben, 2011).  These tasks for measuring iToM include divergent conflict narratives, ambiguous figures tasks, and droodle tasks.  (Yes, DROODLES – like a doodle, drawing, and a riddle.)

Droodles

Children with autism spectrum disorder often have difficulty engaging in pretend play.  One of the most important benefits of children with ASD engaging in storytelling activities may be the gaining of an understanding of the exchange of symbolic phrases – of gifting someone a story that acknowledges their contribution in your social space.  The implied but not explicit meanings in humor are challenging for these children to communicate, but not impossible to understand.  Paley cautions the over-labeling of children with learning disabilities (e.g. as “fast” and “slow” children).  “None of these labels apply in a classroom that sees children as storytellers,” she writes.  “These labels don’t describe the imagination.  A storyteller is always in the strongest position; to be known by his or her stories puts the child in the most favorable light” (p. 54).

We can choose to take a deficit view of children like Jason: “A boy who would be a helicopter cannot be expected to spin his blades in the same way as, let’s say, someone who invents trapdoors and magic keys.  Traps and keys capture and release people; rotating blades usually keep people away” (p. 50).  Or we can celebrate Jason’s assets: “A boy who would be a helicopter enters society in full control of his vehicle” (p. 65).

Lingering questions

Children are not explicitly taught how to sit, crawl or walk – nor how to fantasize.  Is fantasizing inherently human?  Based on evolutionary psychology, how have we evolved for fantasy to make us more suited for survival?

Thinking about that boy on stage at Brilliance!… Is there a difference in how children learn to cope with the anticipation of fear and the fear itself?

How often do we as teachers or parents either consciously or unconsciously “implant” the lesson?  Pretending that an idea has come from a child when it has not, and while the child may go with it, their hesitation may derive from knowing that the adult has chosen to see something that is not really there.

References

Carpendale, J. I. M., & Chandler, M. J. (1996). On the distinction between false belief understanding and subscribing to an interpretive theory of mind. Child Development, 67, 1686-1706.

Chandler, M. J., & Lalonde, C. E. (1996). Shifting to an interpretive theory of mind: 5- to 7-year olds’ changing conceptions of mental life. In A. Sameroff & M. Haith. The five to seven year shift: The age of reason and responsibility (pp. 111-139). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Myers, L. J. & Liben, L. S. (2011). Graphic symbols as “the mind on paper”: Links between children’s interpretive theory of mind and symbol understanding. Child Development, 00.

Who am I?  And what is this “I” capable of?

Who are WE?  And what is this “WE” capable of?

The process by which a child becomes conscious of her or himself and the limits on what she or he can do is deeply tied to that child’s growing understanding of where he or she stands within a social context, as well as what that child can or cannot accomplish in the presence or absence of other people.  For example, a three year-old can build a block tower, and can also knock it down when she wants to.  A three year-old and a four year-old can build a block tower together, and while the three year-old can knock it down when she wants to, that action might incite the opposite emotion in her play partner.  This development is culturally specific, heavily influenced by the value placed on individualistic or collectivistic notions of identity within the society in which that child grows up.  The “whole” in that part-whole relationship between the child and some entity might be a “whole” family, village, community or classroom.

In one of my blog posts from this past summer, I started to think more about children’s social, emotional, cognitive and physical development in relation to their favorite physical objects, the nature of their play with these objects and how that object play contributes to children’s individual and collective identity development at home and at school.  I borrowed from theorists in anthropology and social psychology (particularly Erik Erikson) to noodle a bit on how preschool and early elementary school-age children often perform rituals with objects to control randomness in their daily lives: the same story before bedtime, the insistence on wearing a superhero cape on each trip to the supermarket, or the seemingly-incessant repetition of a silly song learned from a favorite musical DVD.  (For example, I’m sure my parents rue the day that my sisters and I stumbled upon the Wee Sing collection of videos and the song “Make new friends / but keep the old / one is silver / and the other gold…” which looking back on it is a pretty messed-up song.  I mean, who wants to be a dull silver old friend when you can be a shiny new gold friend?  But I digress…)

I think my sisters and I broke the Guiness World Record for how many times that "Make new friends / but keep the old / one is silver / and the other gold" song has been sung in a row, and this VHS is to blame.

Sometimes these rituals are performed with physical objects – books, bath toys, costumes – and sometimes the object shared and ritualized is a word, phrase or song.  I am particularly interested in the way that children use storytelling as a form of community building/destruction/re-building and socialization – and the ways that digital and non-digital technologies can either support or suppress that storytelling.  The phrase “You’re not invited to my birthday party!” is a particular weapon in every child’s arsenal – whether it is yelled over a fight over Legos or some version of it is texted on a cell phone in ALL CAPS.   Stories are places for transactions, negotiations and currency trading.  The playwrights may be young children in a preschool classroom; adolescents inventing, forgetting and chronicling inside jokes; or adults re-Tweeting thoughts organized around a common hashtag.  Throughout the life span, these language markers can both draw lines dividing people and create group cohesion.

Now that this semester has ended – a rich and exciting time for willfully falling down research question rabbit holes – I’ve emerged with a whole pile of non-required reading and a new appreciation for reading without a deadline.  In particular, I’ve started to work my way through more writing by Vivian Paley, the brilliant former University of Chicago Lab School teacher and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient.  She has published prolifically on her observations, reflections and research on her own teaching practices.  Though she hasn’t been on any required reading list in my classes at Annenberg, Paley IS a communication scholar – studying the way young children communicate with other young children through storytelling and fantasy play.

Akin to Paley, I think another group of researchers, theorists and practitioners of child communication development are the Story Pirates, with whom I am very excited to collaborate in the coming year.  In the span of a week, I read Paley’s “The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter” and saw two Story Pirates shows in different environments – one small show in an elementary school auditorium in West Hollywood and one large-scale production at the Geffen Theatre at UCLA.

I believe that the Story Pirates are kin to Paley’s passionate legacy.  In my next post, I’ll scratch the surface on how Paley and the Story Pirates support children’s storytelling and playwriting – specifically as a form of object play – underscored by sensitivity to each child’s evolving developmental and cognitive needs.

Discussion

As explored in part one and part two of this series of posts, the proliferation of YouTube videos of young children (and sometimes their parents) playing with Apple devices potentially offers a good empirical lens through which to view much broader trends around children and technology, but not without shortcomings.  Certain themes seemed to recur within the aforementioned sample – themes of parents highlighting children as “acting their age,” children as being “exceptional” for their age, or locating the power of transformation within the affordances of the technology itself.  Going forward, a triangulation of research techniques (e.g. interviews with the creators of these videos, home observations, case studies) and a richer analysis is needed to know more about both the role these technologies play in shaping parent-child interactions, and also the role that consuming, creating, and distributing these artifacts play in shaping conceptions of parents/caregivers, children, and their relationships.

As a site of cultural and material exchange, YouTube is a system that both self-organizes hierarchies (e.g. user likes and sharing), but also confers power and status (e.g. recommended videos, featured playlists).  French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1986) expands upon the notion of “capital” as purely monetary or economic, to include social and cultural capital as types of resources well.  Historically, Bourdieu conceptualized a direct relationship between available capital resources and children’s outcomes and achievement in school and out-of-school contexts.  One way to examine the evolving relationship between consumerism, technology, and parenting is to understand these videos as the performance of different types of capital, under Bourdieu’s typology.  The public presentation of the digital YouTube asset speaks to children’s current and future value, visibility, agency, and identity within their families and to a commoditized society as a whole.  Though organized here independently, these forms of capital are deeply intertwined.

The Economics of Nascent Technology and Nascent Beings

As a form of economic capital, these videos were not commercials per say, but they inherently promoted a commercial product.  Some even directly appropriated the genre, form, and camera angles of the Apple television and print ads.  The videos put a face to the oft-disembodied (though primarily identifiably light-skinned) figures in Apple’s U.S. commercials and billboards.  As such, they blended the commercial and the amateur, taking a part in the new Internet “hybrid economies” of the social-network market (Lessig, 2008).

In the spirit of YouTube’s slogan “Broadcast Yourself,” the site allowed for a parent to portray their progeny and their technology as extensions of themselves.  The videos suggest parallel, linear developments in the upgrading of hardware and software with the often staggered development of children.  Phrases to describe this population of children, such as “iGeneration” or “Generation 2.0” employ this rhetoric of nascent technology and nascent beings.

As children outgrow their clothes and toys, a certain demographic of parents in these videos displayed a need to “keep pace,” introducing their children to the newest digital technologies as soon as they came to market.  In The Second Self, Turkle describes how the first generation of personal computers in the 1980s also flourished in part to this generational ambiguity: “Onto such complex and ambivalent images manufacturers project more concrete promises as well: the machine will help Father with his finances, mother with her writing, the children with their schoolwork.  The machine is presented as a way of asserting status, a way of saying that this is someone who has not been left behind” (Turkle, 1984, p. 184).  These videos help us understand the role communications technologies play as both physical and symbolic objects among generations of children and adults.

Social Media and the Home Learning Environment

When we talk about the social impact of these devices and the ways these YouTube videos portray them, it makes sense to talk about the culture that develops around them rather than solely talking about the isolated usefulness of the devises.  The ritualized behavior of children’s play with toys and tools is not just expressive of their problems and conflicts, but also an attempt to work through symbolic solutions (Erikson, 1963).  Solutions can be developed through children’s independent, dependent, and co-configured use (Vygotsky, 1978).  The child’s play as represented in these videos introduces another layer to this independent/dependent dynamic, as other people can only be made aware of the parent-child experience with these devices through the adult’s capturing and dissemination of these moments.  Technology forges a link between the home learning environment and the social media environment.

In terms of intergenerational relationships, educational children’s apps have the potential to transform the device into a tool for practicing pre-literacy skills and hand-eye coordination, as well as provide an opportunity for practicing a conversation about consciousness, feelings, and intentions between parents and children.  Technology use can spur mediated but also interpersonal communication (Fisch, Shulman, Akerman, & Levin, 2002).  Most of the parents in these YouTube videos engaged their children in conversation, and provided praise for their children’s efforts.  There is little evidence that these devices – independent of environmental and contextual factors in childrens’ learning ecologies – are actually improving children’s academic outcomes, social and emotional development, or physical activity.

There was also much in these videos to analyze through the lenses of social and developmental psychology.  Freud, Piaget, and Bandura provide a great deal of insight into the way the children interacted with their parents and the Apple devices in these videos.  To touch briefly and all too shallowly on one such analysis, Jacques Lacan’s Wallon- and Freudian-inspired psychoanalytic mirror stage theory focuses not just on the child’s relation to his or her image or behavior in a mirror, but also the child’s relation to other children as a way of presenting physical mastery in the form of an image or set of behaviors (Lacan, 1977).  In The Second Self, Turkle relates this self-referential mirroring to children and technology to creating “storm centers in the mind” (Turkle, 1984, p. 33).  A baby laughing while watching a video on an iPad of a laughing baby watching another laughing baby on an iPad might create its own cognitive “storm center.”

Cultural Narratives

Within these YouTube videos, children displayed the ability to practice the orientation of their bodies to the Apple devices and gain the class-based advantages of a home digital learning environment at an early age.  The 2.5 year-old in “A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad” already had practice with the touchscreen Apple interface, which was presented as “natural” and without effort in the context of the video.  Bourdieu writes that this advantage of cultural capital via domestic access “has nothing ‘academic’, ‘scholastic’, ‘bookish’, ‘affected’ or ‘studied’ about it, but manifests by its ease and naturalness that true culture is nature – a new mystery of immaculate conception” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 68).

The videos shape a narrative that children with this enhanced pedigree and privileged cultural capital are natural.  By being introduced at an early age to a “noble” instrument of cultural capital, be it a piano or an iPhone, the bourgeois child bears the least visible marks of inculturation to an industrialized, networked society.  Ellen Seiter traces the legacy of home technology in the middle-class home from computers back to pianos in living rooms.  She writes that such children experience “the privileged role of early domestic learning in gaining the ‘right’ skills, the kind of competence that seems to come naturally and is therefore of higher status than what is learned at an institution such as a public school” (Seiter, 2007, p. 29).  This early exposure to digital technologies at home might have implications for the ability for children to benefit from technology use as adults, be it in the “workforce” (if there any jobs to be had) and/or as lifelong scholars.  These videos, in contrast to the opportunities that most children globally will never have, are evidence of a widening “participation gap” (Jenkins et al, 2006).

Limitations

My analysis is limited by significant methodological shortcomings and theoretical underdevelopment.  Methodologically, my analysis was limited to YouTube videos featuring Apple products.  Other operating systems, such as Android, offer products with similar touch capabilities.  However, Android systems have much greater security flaws and hacking vulnerabilities than iOS, leading to more cautious adoption by developers creating content for young children.  Generally, parents have greater control over the content on their devices using native apps (versus mobile apps or the Internet), of which Apple has the largest share of the market.  My sample was limited to 85 brief videos, thus my findings are not generalizable to the entire population of parents and children using Apple devices, nor even completely representative of this entire somewhat random group of videos.  Each caregiver and child presented in these videos can certainly not be fully personally represented by a single short clip.  The research could also have benefited from a more in depth look at the content of the apps the children used.

Theoretically, the lack of contextual information regarding the parents and children also confounds a thorough understanding of the intended audience of these videos (e.g. known others, family, peers, talent scouts, Apple executives).  I am not privy to the multiple layers of these exchanges, so an analysis of these videos as a form of economic, social, and cultural currency is incomplete.  A sustained class analysis would benefit from a more thorough probing of race and gender, but it would be quite speculative considering the limited information available about the children and parents in the videos via YouTube.  If I were to expand my sample, I would also have to reframe the “children acting their age” section by subcategories to account for developmental stages and milestones over a range of ages (infant to potty training).  There are also richer ways to engage with existing research in the area of parent-child relationships and the mediation of technology, as well literature more broadly on social/technological interfaces and technology consumption, creation, and distribution.

Conclusion

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins addresses the social protocols that develop around media delivery systems, encompassing “the economic, legal, social and cultural practices that emerge surrounding a new communication medium” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 331).  The role of YouTube and other forms of social media in the home learning environment may shape the protocols around how home videos as a genre are watched, made, and shared.

For children and families, these YouTube videos can provide the ability to remember loved ones and serve as heuristics for childhood memories.  However, as Robert Heverly writes, “Where children are entangled in and become a part of digital media artifacts, we must consider the nature, importance, and future potential of that entanglement when thinking about the creation of and control over those artifacts” (Heverly, 2007, p. 201).  The positive and negative are likely to coexist in what technology does to and with children and, perhaps most importantly, what children do to and with technology, particularly in terms of the creation, distribution, and persistence of digital artifacts.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste.  (R. Nice, Tran.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241-258). New York: Greenwood. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/bourdieu-forms-capital.htm

Erikson, E. H. (1963). Toys and reasons. In Childhood and society (pp. 21-108). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Fisch, S. M., Shulman, J. S., Akerman, A., & Levin, G. A. (2002). Reading between the pixels: Parent-child interaction while reading online storybooks. Early Education & Development, 13(4), 435-451.

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self (pp. 16-49). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Heverly, R. A. (2007). Growing up digital: Control and the pieces of a digital life. In T. McPherson (Ed.), Digital youth, innovation, and the unexpected. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (pp. 199-218). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection.  (A. Sheridan & B. Fink, Trans.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York: Penguin.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the Twenty-first Century. MacArthur Foundation.

Seiter, E. (2007). Practicing at home: Computers, pianos, and cultural capital. In T. McPherson (Ed.), Digital youth, innovation, and the unexpected, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (pp. 27-52). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Smith, J. R. (2010, October 6). Would you want a digital footprint from birth? AVG Blogs. Retrieved December 2, 2010, from http://jrsmith.blog.avg.com/2010/10/would-you-want-a-digital-footprint-from-birth.html

Turkle, S. (1984). The second self: Computers and the human spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Other Relevant Resources

Alanen, L. (2001). Childhood as a generational condition. In L. Alanen & B. Mayall (Eds.), Conceptualising child–adult relationships (pp. 129-143). London: Falmer.

Alexander, V. A. (1994). The image of children in magazine advertisements from 1905-1990. Communication Research, 21, 742-765.

Banet-Weiser, S. (2004). Surfin’ the net: Children, parental obsolescence, and citizenship. In M. Sturken, D. Thomas, & S. J. Ball-Rokeach (Eds.), Technological visions: The hopes and fears that shape new technologies (pp. 270-292). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Chalfen, R. (1987). Snapshot versions of life. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press.

Longhurst, R. (2009). YouTube: a new space for birth? Feminist Review, 93(1), 46-63. doi:10.1057/fr.2009.22

Wartella, E. A., & Jennings, N. (2000). Children and computers: New technology. old concerns. The Future of Children, 10(2), 31-43.