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2008
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When a child wakes up in the morning and turns on the television, how does she know where in the world she lives? Does it matter if she does?
Is children’s television a cultural expression – a means of introducing young people to the world around them – or just another division in the global media business? On its surface, the answer is “both”: international corporations with programs made to play anywhere in the world exist side by side with shows and channels designed to disseminate local culture. In many places, the line is blurring as global businesses play both roles – blending domestic production with imports, or creating culture-specific adaptations of worldwide hits.
Traditionally, young people acquired knowledge – and extended their world – in a relatively universal sequence tied to developmental capacity but shaped by cultural norms and systems. Babies’ worlds expand with their growing cognitive abilities, from self to include home and family. Mobility and independence then extend kids’ ken to the neighborhood and community. Worldview is acquired through education, in school and at home.
Today, developmental boundaries remain constant – before a certain age, local and global mean nothing to a child – but everything else has been thrown into flux by changing technology and its common uses. Knowledge and cultural transmission are now as much controlled by media as by families and communities.
As global television channels and program sales blanket a growing percentage of the earth, is there still room – is there still need – for content that roots young people in a unique culture or tradition?
What, in fact, do culture and tradition mean to today’s youth? Migration takes many families far from their roots. Even children born and raised in their ancestral homeland are likely to find themselves in amazingly diverse schools or neighborhoods. I was recently with a colleague from London whose child attends a school with 26 different languages spoken among the students’ families. With such diversity, can traditional media hope to offer anything more than a superficial veneer, when they attempt to reflect local culture and honor diversity?
Moreover, when children in many parts of the world have the ability to pick and choose from a borderless digital smorgasbord, what do they themselves consider their “community”? Many young people in the digital age are redefining themselves via a multi-dimensional mash-up, where race, ethnicity and nationality are not necessarily the defining elements. Today, a Pakistani teen may feel closer culturally to a teen in Tokyo or Amsterdam – based on choices of music, video, clothes, hobbies, dialect, worldview, even choice of online social network (are you a MySpace, a Facebook, a Lokalisten?) – than he is to someone just down the block.
Moreover, we read daily about how children and teens try on and cast off personas like so many pairs of jeans – becoming completely different people at home, at school, with friends, and especially online.
Given this, is it possible that global media has become simply a part of youth culture, one more jigsaw piece they fit together alongside nationality, ethnicity, race, religion and other factors? In other words, if global TV had never been invented, would today’s MySpace/YouTube generation be creating it?
Let’s examine the flip side, as well.
Even as young people navigate a world of almost limitless virtual choice and reach, they still grow up in particular and concrete cultures where, ultimately, they will live, work and participate in public life. Indigenous children’s media is an invaluable vehicle for conveying societal history, lore and values; it affirms the right to control over portrayal of one’s own history, cultures and stories.
Still, the right to control one’s own images is a multi-faceted.
Recently, I attended the inaugural Forum of the Alliance of Civilizations, a UN project to bridge cultural gaps, particularly between the western and Islamic worlds. The Alliance has chosen youth and media as two of its primary focal areas, in part because of the high prevalence of stereotypes conveyed via media – in both directions. These stereotypes misinform, using the very communications technologies that could be applied to building connections and increasing trust.
Next, I went to the nominating jury for PRIX JEUNESSE International – the worldwide children’s TV festival. The festival has always stood for the best of all worlds – unique cultural expression, cross-cultural exchange and efforts rooted in a particular culture but still able to travel across borders. But even there, I saw programs that sought to poison children’s minds against dissimilar cultures.
On the other hand, the The Washington Post recently ran an article about the popularity – among children and their parents in India – of superhero cartoons built around Hindu gods and goddesses. The article noted that for decades, Indian children have grown up on American TV and movies, and so for parents, the “mytho-cartoons” are a way to reconnect young people with their heritage.
Even here, though, we see interesting nods to global culture. In the cartoon version, monkey-headed Hindu god Hanuman is reborn as a boy who wears shorts, uses computers, speaks “Hinglish” and captures Osama Bin-Laden. Moreover, the pioneer in broadcasting Indian mythology cartoons has been the global channel Cartoon Network.
Then again, the animated Indian stories are good business as well as good local entertainment. The Indian animation industry is worth $285 million right now, and expected to quadruple by 2010. While much of that money now is work for hire, this genre represents a chance to keep the money – and the creative control – at home.
In the UK, as well, parents value TV that gives their children roots. Research by the British regulator OfCom revealed that 81% of parents believe children’s TV has an important social role to play; however, relating to the question above about the feasibility of reflecting diverse cultures, 80% said children’s TV should increase a child’s awareness of different types of people and alternative viewpoints, and a roughly equal number said it should represent different British cultures and opinions. At present, satisfaction with these goals is lower – fewer than half of parents believe they are being fulfilled.
The Ofcom study also found – and Europe-wide viewership surveys confirm – that children themselves prefer home-grown programming, especially dramas and factual shows.
India is a huge country with a child audience big enough to support a domestic industry, and the UK has a 50-plus year tradition of home-grown children’s TV. What, though, are smaller countries with unique languages to do? From my outsider’s perspective, a number of elements have to be in place to sustain local programming in these places:
• national priorities (Norway was the first country to designate a governmental “children’s ombudsman”);
• broadcast philosophies (television has been a key contributor to fostering cultural diversity and reconciliation in South Africa, and more recently programs like Takalani Sesame and Soul Buddyz have done amazing work to counter children’s misunderstandings and fears about HIV/AIDS);
• financial stability and commitment (with a global children’s television marketplace in 2006 of 1.027 billion Euros – per Screen Digest’s "The Business of Children's Television" – local production means a monetary sacrifice to sustain tradition); and
• personal dedication (it was a longtime head of Danish children’s TV who first introduced me to the idea of the child who wakes up and instantly knows where he is because of TV).
Where do we go from here? The genie can't be put back in the bottle -- international media companies and content are here to stay, as are the technologies young people are using to connect globally. How do we determine what children need to grow up as good citizens both of their land and of the world; translate that knowledge into media that will attract, engage and inspire young people; and find ways to make such content affordable?
One effective strategy for producing an affordable balance of global and local is seen in the many emerging international program exchanges. Each participating country produces one or a small number of programs on a theme, guided by an executive producer. In exchange for sharing the rights to these productions, they receive broadcast rights to everyone else’s works.
Teletubbies creators Ragdoll Entertainment subsidize
What Makes Me Happy, a follow-on to their brilliant Open a Door exchange in which each story followed a child’s adventure that began and ended in his or her home doorway typical to the producing country. Soon, every region except North America will be participating in the worldwide “item” exchange of short films for pre-school magazines. On a smaller scale, the European Broadcasting Union continues to exchange dramas and documentaries. Co-productions often end up as a “pudding” of compromises that removes all traces of culture. Exchange stories can air in many countries but keep a sense of where they come from.
Some governments have created financial incentives – grants or tax relief – to support local children’s program production. But, in many cases, these funds need to be leveraged through co-production or international sales, and so end up supporting content that isn’t uniquely targeted to that country. If so, are these funds simply keeping global work at home, and does that fulfill the spirit of the support?
Media literacy education is an important contributor to keeping local and global media in balance. Understanding that all media is constructed, and a critical ability to deconstruct the methods and purposes behind its messages, is the best counterbalance, whether the content is local and politicized or global and commercialized.
We can also use the unique power of television to transport children into the lives of others, to see how all children grow up with equal dignity but under unequal circumstances. Denmark continues a longstanding practice of sending camera crews to countries in the developing world to document other children’s lives for Danish children. They have perfected a style that makes connections through what is similar while ensuring that what is different is not shown in a light that makes it seem weird or distancing.
In its first half-century, television evolved in unique ways in different countries, suited to the infrastructure, ownership and culture of each. In the US, commercial TV was developed before public service television; far more countries had only public service or state-owned media until it was well-established, only then opening the doors to commercial channels. Those early choices are still evident on the screen – in indigenous programming requirements, restrictions on imports, or even just tendencies to home produce or acquire content; in mandates for certain kinds of programming, such as “educational” content; or in limits on commercial content.
I would contend that even after 50 years, television is only in its adolescence; perhaps even in that awkward teenage phase where growth is so fast that balance is a little wobbly! If TV is a teenager, interactive digital media is still an infant, and so we still have time to consider how we will raise it to be productive and rooted in its home culture, as well as an open, generous and empathetic world citizen.
To comment on this article, send e-mail to info@centerforchildrenandmedia.org
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