Young Voices, New Qualities? Children Reviewers as Vernacular Reviewers of Cultural Products
Publication details
| Year: | 2020 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/978-981-15-7474-0_9 |
| Issued: | 2020 |
| Language: | English |
| Start Page: | 185 |
| End Page: | 208 |
| Editors: | Kristensen N.N.; From U.; Haastrup H.K |
| Authors: | Jaakkola M. |
| Type: | Book chapter |
| Book title: | Rethinking Cultural Criticism |
| Publisher: | Palgrave Macmillan |
| Place: | Singapore |
| Topics: | Social mediation; Internet usage, practices and engagement; Literacy and skills; Content-related issues; Digital and socio-cultural environment |
| Sample: | Data set from Jaakkola (2018), https://doi-org.ezproxy.ub.gu.se/10.7146/mediekultur.v34i65.104485, along with a data set from Instagram consisting of 598,804 posts by 65,534 unique users. "Only accounts that could be identified as child-centred in their production of content were included; excluded were, for example, accounts or channels with adults as the channel owners and the main protagonists (e.g. parents, teachers, librarians, and journalists reviewing children’s literature). The two datasets, with complementary exploratory searches, totalled 91 child-centred accounts (53 from YouTube and 38 from Instagram), with a focus on two prevalent areas of cultural engagement (toys and literature), and in which reviewing occupied a long-term rationalized practice in the strategy of the communicators instead of just a curiosity applied for a change." (Author, 192-193) |
| Implications For Parents About: | Parental practices / parental mediation; Parental digital literacy ; Parenting guidance / support |
| Implications For Policy Makers About: | High-quality content online for children and young people; Stepping up awareness and empowerment |
| Implications For Stakeholders About: | Researchers; Industry |
Abstract
As a consequence of the decentralization and democratization of content production, even reviews have started being produced by ordinary citizens and consumers. In this context, young children present an entirely new group of reviewers that has been previously excluded in the previous, institutionalized traditions of reviewing. This chapter examines children, from toddlers to 12-year-olds, as producers and co-producers of online reviews in two vernacular reviewer-type categories, professional amateurs and consumer reviewers. These categories are embedded in a wider context of institutionalized and non-institutionalized reviewing and discussed in terms of the children’s roles in producing criticism. It is observed that children most typically occur as co-producers, supported by active parents, whose actions guide the reviewing to a large extent. In their reviewer roles, children are anchored in both aesthetic or non-profit and commercial contexts. It is suggested that the emergence of public child reviewers may, at least in theory, contribute to a situation where young voices that were previously ignored in discussions concerning cultural objects in the public sphere become better heard, supporting discourses and practices of more child-oriented citizenship and consumership.
Outcome
"Compared to the institutional counterpart professional reviewing that has been controlled top down by cultural organizations and has cherished a parental tradition of recommending products of children’s culture from adults to adults, the vernacular categories of pro-am and consumer reviewers, organized bottom up, show new ways of incorporating children in the public reception of cultural products and goods. However, platform vernaculars constantly need to adapt to changes in platform policies and overall regulation, which may quickly make overviews as undertaken in this chapter obsolete." (Author 204)