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Portrait of the Child as Consumer
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Maire Messenger Davies |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 Rather than regarding broadcasters as commercial entities whose primary motives could be far from simply providing innocent entertainment, children have been shown to regard those who produce television as being in a quasi-parental role. Children feel they can confide in 'children's television': their letters demonstrate trust, and an expectation of understanding and interest in return. In this extract from her book 'Dear BBC', Maire Messenger Davies looks at some of the issues surrounding the child as consumer of television in the United Kingdom. |
 he child's role as consumer has been the subject of adult contention since the early days of television, although most research has focused on the impact of television advertising rather than on the child as a consumer of the medium itself (see, for example, B. Gunter and A. Furnham, Children as Consumers, 1998). The model of the consumer in market research is someone who can choose between competing brands; the word 'choice' is the mantra of its exponents. It is now the dominant model of the television audience member, driving expensive new technological developments such as digitisation in the UK, which promises greater 'choice' for viewers to select between hundreds of channels. In 1999, the British Minister for Culture, Heritage and Sport, Chris Smith, announced that the analogue signal for broadcasting would be switched off in 2006, and that digitised programming would become the norm. The resulting multiplicity of channels will, it was argued, give consumers more power to decide what they will and will not view, and it will be up to individual users to decide how to construct their own viewing schedules. Institutional schedulers and regulators, necessary in an era of spectrum scarcity, and making decisions on behalf of the public, will thus become outmoded and redundant. |
New possibilities
In this new world, with the possibility of calling up programmes from digital menus, as well as the possibility of using video for 'time-shifting' (already well established in homes with children), the public service idea, embodied in the Independent Television Commission (ITC) regulations, that the period between 4 and 5.30 p.m. is a special, after-school 'slot' during which all children in the country can 'consume' specialist programming, will supposedly become outdated. Shari Donnenfeld, the American in charge of marketing at Nickelodeon UK, interviewed for our Broadcasting Standards Commission study (see M. M. Davies and B. Corbett, The Provision of Children's Programming in the UK, between 1992 and 1996, 1997), was enthusiastic about the commercial opportunities this would create for children's providers:
The whole emergence of digital will offer a whole world of opportunities as well as video on demand. [This] creates more air time for us, producing more, making sure it's quality and the quantity will need to be there as well... There will be more available to kids--there will be a kids' sports channel... Today children are watching television because they want to, not because there is nothing else on.
Children are thus seen as very important consumers in this new expanding market, both for niche channels--and five new cable channels for children have been set up in the UK between 1993 and 1999, the time of writing--and as consumers of new technology in the future. Children's individual opinions have come to be increasingly valued by broadcasters trying to maintain a competitive advantage in this marketplace--indeed, this was one reason the BBC commissioned the study described in the book from which this extract is taken. In this new, fragmented environment, how will the 'person' embodied in 'Children's Television' be perceived by children? Will 'television' be perceived in a personalised way at all? |
Public versus domestic space
Studies with children, including my own research in Philadelphia (M.M. Davies, Fake, Fact and Fantasy, 1997), have shown that younger children, broadly under 8 years of age, have little grasp of media providers as institutions: their accounts of the nature of television providers tend to focus on persons: 'the writer'; 'the guy on the camera'. Their relationship with television is formed in the home, along with other early social relationships: they are introduced from birth to it, and become familiar with the persons encountered in media products. The TV screen, what Steven Kline (Out of the Garden, 1993, p. 17) has called 'the modern matrix of civilisation [sitting] in most living rooms', is found not only in nearly 100 per cent of all households in the USA and UK, but also in the majority of British children's bedrooms (S. Livingstone and M. Bovill, Young People, New Media, 1999). As Livingstone and Bovill comment, there is no doubt that the screen is seen as a friendly and welcome presence there. |
Thus, institutionally, the broadcast media coexist in both the private and public domains, with a tension between publicly funded broadcasting (seen, particularly in the USA, as having the main, if not only, responsibility for serving children) and commercial broadcasting, whose primary purpose is to make money for shareholders. The model of the child as future citizen, with a role to play in the public sphere, and thus the responsibility of the state, can be more easily sustained when broadcasting is regulated according to socially agreed ideals of how the children of a given society should be treated. |
A site of tension between public and private in the consumption of television consists in the fact that broadcasting is an arrangement whereby large, economically and politically powerful public institutions deliver a service, frequently consisting of controversial meanings and representations, which is consumed privately, domestically and often uncontrollably. Nowhere has the boundary between these public and private functions been more contested than in the relationship of children to television. In our study, over 50 per cent of our 1,300-plus children had televisions in their bedrooms; in Livingstone et al.'s nearly contemporary study, also of 1,300-plus children, 63 per cent did, including 50 per cent of 5-7 year olds. Livingstone and Bovill (op. cit., 1999, p. 34, summary version) describe the children in their study as having 'a bedroom culture'--'a social place where they can combine friends and media, establishing a life style away from parental monitoring'. Livingstone's findings indicate some ambivalence in parental attitudes to this state of affairs: 'Parental beliefs about the effects of television programmes have little to do with whether or not the child has their own set' (ibid., p. 35). Nevertheless, large numbers of parents obviously do collude with the child's private access to broadcast media, not least--as Livingstone and Bovill point out--because it is a 'safe' form of leisure activity, which enables them to know where their children are. |
The 'watershed' mentality
The British 9 p.m. broadcasting 'watershed' illustrates the uneasy nature of this public/private interface; the public institutions of broadcasting are regulated by the state so that no material deemed to be disturbing to children can be shown before 9 o'clock in the evening, after which time children are assumed to be in bed, or 'the responsibility of their parents'. However, there is no guarantee that children will be in bed by 9 p.m., and the state lays no legal responsibility on parents for making them go there by this time. The fact that television is increasingly likely to be in the bedroom when the child gets there, further complicates this assumption of the bedroom as a place safe from possible harmful influences of media.
The watershed has provided a disciplinary backup for concerned parents and represents an attempt at a public/private contract. It is sometimes violated by broadcasters with extreme violence, or bad language, or explicitly sexual behaviour taking place in early evening programming, resulting in complaints. Nevertheless, it has traditionally provided the basis of a partnership between broadcasters, government and families in managing the access of children to television in the UK. No similar regulatory arrangements exist in the USA; however, 'adult' (meaning sexual) programming is usually shown after 10 p.m. The genre which has managed most successfully to evade this protective approach to children's viewing is the daytime talk show. It is possible for children to watch adults discussing their sexual relationships, and to witness adult conflict, both in Britain and the USA, in the middle of the day, and in the early evening--traditional 'children's time'--via programmes such as Jerry Springer's and Rikki Lake's. |
The watershed contract is further becoming unstable with the advent of new technology--multichannel choices, with material on satellite/cable not covered by watershed regulations, as children in our study were aware:
It's people like Sky and cable who are making all these gruesome and bloody films and putting them on at 4 or 6 where the kids are getting into watching television before dinner... It's like, on Sky, I was flicking through the channels and Pulp Fiction was on at 8 o'clock and some kid could be watching this and think, 'yeah'. (Boy, 12, outer-London secondary school)
Dedicated children's channels, mainly featuring imported programming, and special children's videos, which substitute for broadcast TV in many homes, allow more parental control over viewing. Ironically, parental control over viewing may well be more limiting to the child's access to a range of different forms of content, than the control of a BBC or ITV scheduler would be. When children's channels are primarily subscription-based, and hence paid for by parents, and intended to be profitable for other adults
--the channel's shareholders--then the direct contract between producers and children offered by a public service system, is dissolved. As Peter Tabern (interviewed for the BBC study in spring, 1996), a British independent producer, put it:
[The schedule] is quite different in this country from the experience that you might find in America, of having totally dedicated children's channels... It [American children's programming] is based much more on previous perceived success than our programming. It is much more ratings driven; you just have to get viewers and if it doesn't keep children sitting watching it, for whatever reason, that show just cannot survive. You will find on those stations things that are of genuine worth and value, but that is not chiefly why they are there.
The increase in channel choice (if not programme choice--see Davies and Corbett, op. cit., 1997) is certainly conferring on the child the sovereignty of the consumer, one who decides from a range of options what he or she will view, and when. However, not only is subscription to new channels dependent on parental choice, but the child's choice is further limited by the fact that all new TV equipment sold in the UK has a parental control mechanism attached to it. |
The decision about what these viewing options will be is thus shifting from public to private--from broadcasting schedulers, participating in a public sphere determined by government, professional and institutional policy considerations, many of them with élitist, conservative and paternalist tendencies, to parents in the home, choosing which videos to buy, and which channels to subscribe to. Giving parents more choice was seen as perfectly reasonable by many children in the study, for example:
I think there should be more teenage programmes on more often and not so late like The X Files, because it could be on at 8.30 p.m.; then parents could choose if they wanted their children to watch and we don't have to go to bed so late then, if we watched it. (Girl, 12, outer-city secondary school, Cardiff) |
Commercial models
The public service ideal sees the child as a potential citizen who needs to be informed, stimulated, included in the social world, and--increasingly--consulted through, for example, the Children's BBC and Children's ITV websites and email addresses, as well as demanding to be entertained. The model of the child is somewhat different in purely commercial television, as in the USA: in commercial television, money has been raised traditionally by 'selling audiences to advertisers', and audiences of children have to be sold too. The notion of selling children in this way has often prompted some public uneasiness, for example through parents' and citizens' groups such as Action for Children's Television in the USA, and Voice of the Listener and Viewer in the UK. There is no such uneasiness inside the American children's television industry, or even among regulators, as S. Kline has documented in his account of what he sees as the primarily malign relationship between television and other children's consumer products, especially toys, Out of the Garden (1993). He asserts (p. 277) that 'Contemporary children's culture [in the USA at any rate, which is the only system he discusses] exists because merchandising interests are willing to invest in the production of children's television.' The Reaganite deregulation of all television, including children's, in the 1980s, resulted in a situation where 'toy marketers' enthusiasm for character promotions resulted in an enormous boom in children's television production activities (p. 278). The overriding need to serve the marketing priorities of Care Bears or Dyno Riders (toys based on dinosaurs), argues Kline, not only was a marketing strategy for selling toys, it also had a negative impact both on consumers and on storytelling quality. Narratives were distorted to make sure that key characters were of sufficient appeal to make children want to go and buy the models in the shops, hence 'dinosaurs must talk for there to be a bond between the audience and the characters' (p. 281). |
His concerns are mocked by some representatives of the children's toy and television industry. Cy Schneider, a former toy-marketing executive who also worked for Nickelodeon in the US, wrote a book called Children's Television: The Art, the Business and How it Works (1987, pp. 5-9) in which activist groups' concerns about the wholesale commercialisation of children's culture were breezily dismissed:
What these people fail to realize is that commercial television, even for children, is just another business... The television business works on three simple principles: keep the audience up, the costs down, and the regulators out. The reformers forget that television's first mission is not to inform, educate or enlighten. It isn't even to entertain. Its first mission is to entice viewers to watch the commercials... Advertising is part of a child's socialization process in our culture and protecting him from it does no good in the end.
UK commercial producers are less overt in justifying the training of children to be consumers. |
Commercial television, as in the case of Nickelodeon, raises funds through audience subscription, as well as advertising, and both commercial and public television (such as the BBC) raise money through sales of programmes abroad, marketing programme-related consumer goods, such as the highly lucrative Teletubbies, and other spin-off commercial activities. Children are aware of some of these commercial ramifications, but, in our study, they were not in the forefront of their thoughts when discussing how television 'ought' or 'ought not' to be organised. Most of their comments referred to content or scheduling, with little awareness of how content and scheduling could be affected by economic and institutional considerations. This was quite striking in the scheduling exercises where children acting as schedulers, and forced to jettison programmes to save money, rarely argued for keeping a programme because it would be economically more profitable. Considerations of content and audience were usually paramount, although, within the general context of concern for the audience, some children did show awareness of economic considerations and the chain of connections between profitability and serving, not the child consumer (significantly), but the parent:
You see The X Files, if a child was watching it, they may scream and then their mums would come and phone up our company and we would get bad business and we would probably be in the newspapers for scaring little kids and then all our business would go down. (Girl, 10, inner-London primary school)
Other children in the study showed awareness of how the competitive economics of a world in which 'choice' is the selling-point, can actually restrict the choices of the 50 per cent of the population who only have access to terrestrial television:
Well, Sky Sports have taken all the football and other sports. The same thing happens with the children's channel, Sky have taken them too which is unfair to people like me who do not have Sky. As you saw on page 12 [of the questionnaire], BBC just normally show repeats which I find silly. Our family thinks that when we pay our TV licence we should get the same amount of programmes as Sky. Why should we pay more? [his emphasis] as Tesco say!! (Boy, 12, inner-city primary school, Milton Keynes)
The notion of child as consumer needs to take account of the fact that the consumer role coexists within the citizen role and the vulnerable juvenile role, and that children themselves will express these multiple perspectives in their perceptions of how media function. For instance, children in the BBC study, although supportive of public service ideals of informing and protecting, were aware of the wider functions of advertising on television as a potentially beneficial way of funding programme-making:
I think you are a bit over the top about not advertising. Why do people have to have a TV licence if they are perfectly happy not to have the BBC channels and just cable? (Boy, 12, outer-London secondary school) |
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