Mediacy Articles – Volume 17, No. 3
This article is the first in a series of explorations which aim to make a critical study of interactive television. During the series, I will make an analysis of how children use "regular" TV on the one hand, and how they use an interactive computer interface on the other. This can assist in creating an overall picture of how interactive TV, which is a combination of both, will fundamentally impact how we live and work in the future.
In writing for Mediacy, I hope to address the need to look more closely at what Barry Duncan calls "cyber-literacy and the information highway" (Fall '94 issue). In this first article, I aim to introduce certain ideas about interactive TV as one of the areas media teachers need to concentrate more on over the coming years. In doing so I will point to the rapid development of a children's market in interactive TV which, on the eve of the next millennium, takes a central place in corporate visions of the future of telecommunications. Interactive TV will be highly commercial, which sounds negative, but we also have to remember that it could also be positive in its uses and implications for schools. Children are the media industry's real target audience, as they are already big consumers in the multi-billion dollar industry that has been made out of computer and video games. The future of interactive TV is also inextricably bound to these young users. Media teachers are obliged to help children deal with the information overload as never before, but also to learn from children's experiences with technology now and to listen to their needs for the future.
Many parents and teachers feel overwhelmed by new technology, and helpless in trying to control their children's "addiction" to TV, video and computer games. Considering the rising number of hours per day in which children watch TV, it is by no means surprising that a debate is heating up about what children should consume and what children's TV should be like in the future. With more TV-based products for children coming onto the market, there is some hope that the children who use them, the children who are normally ignored in this debate, could begin to be consulted for their opinion.
If we really take a hard look at how society is structured, we have to admit that, with or without their consent, children in particular cannot do without TV anymore. It is, for better or for worse, our "information highway". We get more news, information and educational material from TV, at less cost per head, than from any other traditional medium. For most people, TV is considered a "primary need", as essential as the fridge or telephone. It is a powerful and positive tool for children, if only we adults could just be convinced that it can be used for more than surrogate baby-sitting or as a pacifier in the home.
Unfortunately, TV is still seen as an unworthy object of study. It is considered to be generally meaningless, dismissed as just light entertainment, and is banned from having a rightful place at school in most countries. Europe is a glaring case in point. Another prevailing attitude amongst many teachers and parents is that watching TV is just a phase in life; "the children will get over it" sooner or later. This notion grossly underestimates the central role that interactive TV, as well as other media, will come to play in society within the next decade. Hand in hand with this goes the realisation by children themselves that TV as it is now is also important, like computers, in preparing them to live in the electronic era we have created for them.
Canada, it must be said, is a positive exception to this tragic scenario, at least to some degree. Its promotion of YTV and other "cable-in-the-classroom" projects, as well as its activities through pioneering associations like the AML, point to a willingness to discuss with children the impact of electronic media on their lives, and to take their responses seriously. If the media market has its way, interactive TV will inform our lives on every level once computer, modem, and TV screen have merged in earnest. What needs to be taken into account is the fact that the ways in which people interact with multimedia in the future will be shaped by the extent to which children today can assert a degree of independence in their social and physical interaction with these media. Design is the key to this freedom, but education is the catalyst that will make the technology a source of independence.
As interactive TV becomes a reality, the social and psychological spheres with which children identify will increasingly accommodate the uses and meanings of multimedia. In urbanized, industrialized societies, access to information increasingly depends on access to interactive media. The rapid merger of audio-visual and print media with telecoms and computers into a single industry is aimed at creating one multimedia product which promises (or threatens) to change fundamentally the way we access information, culture, entertainment and education.
Behind this convergence of electronic media is a belief that "with the help of technology, television will be revolutionised"1
The "idiot box", "boob tube", or "conventional" television as we know it today is the target of an electronics industry that is trying to transform the old "nothing's-on-telly" into a powerful interactive computer with more channels, more entertainment and more information than ever before. The "electronic highway" is the utopia of multimedia producers, in which film, telephone, video and radio features have been augmented by satellite transmission, two-way cabling, laser disks, CD, CD-ROM, CD-i, virtual reality, cyberspace, hyperspace, 24-hour access to computer games, on-line informational home shopping, video-on-demand and other digital information networks in the home. Is this really all just a hypeway? Take a look.
This is an industry that is already worth billions of dollars a year despite its emergence only within the last decade. And it caters primarily to consumers of popular culture -- children and young adults. "Adformation" and "edutainment" are already packaged in products geared towards the youth market, ranging from individualised portable Gameboys to interactive games such as "Doom" on the Internet, accessed by 25 million users around the world.2
Note, however, that new technology is being designed to reflect the kind of social or group dynamics that take place at home, rather than catering solely to the technical or commercial goals held
by broadcasters or product suppliers. Companies are very eager to make media like interactive TV easy to use, so that it becomes second nature, as it were. What can be wrong with this?
As any confused parent sitting in front of an installation manual can testify, it is the kids who absorb the know-how faster than anybody. It is your 11 year-old who can fix your programming
problems, because like most children, he or she loves to play and learn how to control the computer. This control is a kind of power, and their knowledge of interactive media (of which computers are
the first) is a skill. The importance of this skill should not be taken lightly by adults, let alone techno-peasants, as youngsters so fondly like to call many adults.
Working as a media literacy instructor at an international school, I was struck by the extent to which TV and computers are still dismissed by teachers, many of whom still represent the down side of
techno-peasantry, but who still insist on acting as a model of learning for their students. TV is still seen as having the power to exercise a form of unilateral psychological control over children
which "causes" apathy, passivity, or a blind imitation of violence and pornography. This accusation is often a direct result of the very real threat which interactive media poses to the position of
the teacher as the all-powerful one in the classroom. This unfortunately has nothing to do with education, but everything to do with power of speech and the position of children in society.
Naturally, I am concerned and frustrated by the continuing resistance of teachers and parents to other technology in the classroom, at the point where information technology is the number one
informer of our futures. As intensive users of new technology, children recognise, as Hartley argues, that an electronic medium such as the TV "is the power of speech" in our society. The main
advantage of interactive TV for children will be the new services it makes possible, and the degree of control it gives children over both the form and the content of programming, by virtue of the
fact that they can interact directly with the screen. This does not condone bad television programming, but it does emphasise the need to struggle for an increase in the access which children have to
television, and soon interactive TV, as it is an important tool with which they can work, play and express themselves.3
Media studies is an important marker of TV and the role it plays in society, and should be involved in the debate about its future from the very beginning, before industry standards are set, designs
are fixed, and commercial campaigns or legal regulations are non-negotiable. Also, media studies needs to figure out a way to approach interactive multimedia. Just as conventional TV has come to be
seen as a newspaper, a magazine and a radio rolled into one, so interactive TV is a "virtual" shopping mall, a bank, a workplace, a school, a social meeting place, a cinema, a games arcade and a
computer all in one. Interactive TV is actually more of a computer with a two-way screen, than a TV with a one-way screen. What curriculum do you use to approach such an inter-disciplinary and
wide-ranging topic?
I can only suggest that it is necessary to work towards a new model for TV studies, which encompasses the multimedia nature of interactive television. Secondly, it is essential to regard the role of
interactive television's users in a different, more intelligent light. We need to consider that interactive TV can be very empowering for children. Thirdly, since TV is already central to children's
social interaction outside of school and part of the everyday dynamics of the home, TV is also at the centre of our culture.
Watching TV and interacting around TV offers children a way to participate in that culture, to negotiate an identity within a social group which is often denied to them in other contexts. By
extension, a knowledge and control of the formal features of interactive TV can only empower children if they are allowed to take the future of TV seriously, and to use the form of TV that is
available to them today intensively as part of their learning process at school. TV is not a passive, antisocial activity for children, but an opportunity to socialize in a positive and creative way
with each other. Often this is demonstrated by children themselves in a pastime of changing "negative meanings" on TV to farcical or satirical ones, thereby taking a distance from the so- called
"influences" of TV by commenting on what a programme or ad is supposed to be doing to viewers. As John Hartley notes, "so-called consumers of meanings cannot be thought of as passive or as
powerless"4
The more children use TV as a tool, the more adept they can become in controlling their relationship to the commercial programming on more powerful information highways in the future. The one
constant is that the processes of socialisation around TV, not the content of TV programming as such, will constitute the most important influence on the uses of interactive TV by children.
Interactive TV, coming down the infobahn into our living rooms, can be a much more responsive, flexible source of information for children than conventional TV is today. Rather than dismissing
interactive TV as so much hype, or seeing nightmare scenarios of an onslaught of subliminal advertising, TV-shopping sprees or violence-on-demand, I think the main impact of interactive TV could be
– and should be – to allow children to increase their power of speech in our society.
As the AML informed us, the Australian Children's Television Foundation organised a World Summit for Children and Television in Melbourne in March 1995. Their aim is to look to forms of TV for
children "which do not exploit them; which are wide ranging in terms of genre and content; which entertain and also promote an awareness of the wider world in parallel with the child's own cultural
background." A focus on interactive TV can help children have maximum access to these programmes in the future.
1. Television: What if they're right? The Economist, February 12th 1994.
2. Elmer-Dewettt, P. Battle for the soul of the Internet Time Magazine, 25 July 1994, p . 34.
3. Hartley p. 21.
4. Hartley, J., Tele-ology: Studies on Television, Routledge (London 1992), p. 6.
Readers who wish to comment on this article can write to:
Mrs. M.L. Evers
Insulindeweg 662/II
1095 EE Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Telephone: 31-20-694 1042