Television Culture and Media Socialization across Countries: Theoretical Issues and Methodological Approaches

This chapter illustrates the relevance of a \nsocio-cultural approach in children and media \nstudies and the challenges of adopting such an \napproach when comparing different cultures \nin order to identify their commonalities. \nTraditionally, universalistic approaches aim \nto identify recurrent patterns of action and \nmeaning and are often characterized by a \nprogrammatic bracketing of any culturally \ngrounded variable. Investigating what is \nrecurrent despite cultural differences, universalistic \napproaches mostly lead to large-scale \nquantitative surveys on who consumes what \nand where. Conversely, when culture is seen as the \nmain matrix of media experience and sense \nmaking, a relativistic perspective is often \nrequired. A strong conceptual link between \nculture and relativism may explain why, \nhistorically, cultural approaches have mostly \nled to national-specific studies, the results of \nwhich are often hard to compare. \nThe growing globalization of cultural \nproducts of information and communication \ntechnologies explains the contemporary resurgence \nin interest in international studies. \nNonetheless, comparable research projects \nare still rare. While some studies basically \ndescribe similarities and differences between \ndifferent countries, others provide a cultural interpretation of \ncomparative data. Even though national \ncultures frame children’s media experience, \nthis localization also incorporates patterns \nof globalization. The main hypothesis of \nthese comparative studies is that local cultural \nreferences are not in an aut–aut relationship \nwith respect to the trans-national common \nworld made up of media and contents. On \nthe contrary, children are able to move \nin and out of these worlds, to cross the \nboundaries of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ in their \neveryday life and create situated lines of \nconsistency. Their results aside, the value of \nthis new generation of studies lies primarily \nin their attempt to identify the multiple and \nconnected levels of media experience, to \ntake into account both its local and global \nnature, and to explore how these levels \ninteract. \nAfter presenting a brief history of the \nchanging paradigms in children and media \nstudies, the chapter will focus on two main \ncontemporary theoretical frameworks in studies \nof children’s media experience: the sociocultural \napproach and the phenomenological \nperspective.Acritical examination of the main \nmethodological approaches in investigating \nchildren’s sense of television is followed by \na report on a pertinent cross-national study. \nThe general aim of the study involving seven \ncountries (Argentina, Canada, Chile, Greece, \nItaly, South Africa, and Uruguay), was to \nexamine different cultures in order to identify \ntrans-national recurrent patterns of thinking \nabout and experiencing television (if any). \nParticularly, we analysed: \n1 The ways children perceive television as a member \nof their social world. \n2 How they experience television as a routine activity \nof their everyday life. \nAs we will see in the conclusions, the \nrelevance of this study is both substantive and methodological. \nThe empirical results show \nhow and to what extent children’s television \nculture is grounded in their everyday world \nof interactions and situated discourses while \nalso functioning as a connecting world of \nshared references. The methodological design \nis an attempt to cope with the challenges \nof adopting a socio-cultural perspective in \ncross-cultural studies.

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