debate on children being an active audience
... Television is one of the largest forms of media and as technology has developed so to has the television, progressing from black and white through to colour and being digitally interactive. ... It is the audience of these new media forms that have become central to many socio and psychological studies; in particular with reference to the effect that media has had upon our lives. ... Where this effect is causing the greatest concern is the impact that television has had upon children and in this case, raises the question can children be regarded as an active audience? Discussions about popular culture always seem littered with patronising assumptions about the audience, often centred on and around women. The female audience is frequently seen as being a part of the bottom end of the spectrum, in terms of how they react and are influenced by what they watch e. ... Yet children also seem to be defined in this category of being most at risk to media and Buckingham in his work Electronic Child Abuse? ... Children are frequently defined in terms of their inability to conform to adult norms, this can be seen in positive terms as a form of innocence, but in this situation childhood innocence is often patronised. Compared to adults, children are seen to lack the experience, knowledge and intellectual capacities that allow them to have social power and thus, without these three fundamentals they are seen to be highly vulnerable. The debate then continues around television images that children should not be seeing and is largely based around violence, as in this case the argument is that children have an inability to distinguish between fiction and fact. Generally speaking it is the belief that children will just copy what they see on television because their lack of experience results in them failing to see through the illusion of reality that television produces. Children believe that what they see on television is an accurate reflection of the world that they live in and therefore the actions that they witness should simply be copied. ... Media violence could conceivably produce many different effects but studies have become preoccupied with them producing aggressive behaviour in children. ... In more recent studies they have moved away from the notion that the audience is an undifferentiated mass and instead they have concentrated on individual differences, which means that viewers simply respond in different ways to the same message. Buckingham uses research that has been conducted on the effects that television advertising has on children, which challenged the dominant view that children are just passive victims of the ‘hidden persuaders’ (Young, 1990).