The emergence and ethics of child-created content as media industries
Publication details
| Year: | 2020 |
| Issued: | 2020 |
| Language: | English |
| Start Page: | 217 |
| End Page: | 225 |
| Editors: | Green L.; Holloway D.; Stevenson K.; Leaver T.; Haddon L. |
| Authors: | Burroughs B.; Feller G. |
| Type: | Book chapter |
| Book title: | The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children |
| Publisher: | Routledge (Taylor & Francis) |
| Place: | New York |
| Topics: | Learning; Internet usage, practices and engagement; Social mediation; Content-related issues; Digital and socio-cultural environment; Researching children online: methodology and ethics |
| Sample: | Child ‘influencers’ as a part of the emergent digital media landscape and children’s media industries, including the emergence of entire genres such as ‘unboxing’ and the family vlogging phenomenon. |
| Implications For Parents About: | Parental practices / parental mediation; Parenting guidance / support |
| Implications For Policy Makers About: | Other |
| Other PolicyMaker Implication: | Relationship between media industries and child-created content |
| Implications For Stakeholders About: | Researchers; Industry |
Abstract
The profitability of content created for and by children on social media platforms such as YouTube has sparked an entire sector of content catering to young children. The research looks at the cultivation of child ‘influencers’ as a part of the emergent digital media landscape and children’s media industries. Child-created content is also the site for discursively codifying particular articulations of concepts such as family to reinforce purchasing and marketing norms within these sites.
Outcome
"The initial promise of YouTube as a discourse of “empowerment”, where anyone could make, share, and even become a “YouTube Star” or “influencer”, is reified through child- created content. YouTube’s Kids, like Ryan, engage in productive practices of production and disseminate that production to audiences, but YouTube’s Kids, like Ryan, also open new toys seemingly every day. They remain intertwined in a system where watching and witnessing per- petuates capitalist consumption. But potentially more worrisome is that an entire generation growing up watching this mode of consumption reinforces the pernicious promise of YouTube that anyone can be like Ryan through consumption and play. Anyone can find fulfilment and joy through constant consumption. Child-created content is not just a potential future for digital media industries, it is the present of children and media." (Authors, 223-24)