Handbook of Children and the Media

Abstract

Handbook of Children and the Media Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer, eds. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2012. Tables, charts, indexes. 803 pp. $150.00 cloth. isbn: 978141298249"Sir, is this your bag?" The TSA agent looked serious. "Yes," I responded, surprised. As a frequent traveler, I have become adapt at moving smoothly through airport screening lines. Why was my laptop-free bag being searched? She reached in my bag and pulled out the second edition of Singer and Singer's Handbook of Children and the Media. To my amazement, she dropped the heavy 803-page hardcover onto a stainless steel examination table and began carefully swiping the inside pages for explosive residue. She told me the thick hardcover was blocking the x-ray machine's view of my bag's contents.This raises some questions. If a hardcover book is an outlier for our national airport security system, are the ideas it contains-frozen in ink and on paper- equally as troublesome? Or does this heavy book achieve its intellectually heavy goal "to review, through the contributions of research experts, the past and potential future impact of the electronic media on growing children" (p. 3). The answer is yes to both questions.The book meets its goal in part due to the skill, experience, and deep scholarly connections of the editors-Jerome and Dorothy Singer, the Yale-based husbandand- wife team who have been conducting and reviewing research on children's television since 1961, when former Federal Communications Commission chair man Newton Minnow called the medium a vast wasteland. The historical frame, which stretches back to media as cave drawings, is provided in the introduction as well as in each of three sections, containing, in all, thirty-five articles from sixty-four researchers. Short biographies, with research interests and university affiliations, appear for each, which makes it possible to spot that all but three writers come from the United States.Part 1is the largest and the most useful part of the book, with twenty-three articles loosely organized under the heading "The Popular Media as Educators and Socializers of Growing Children." Its buffet of themes have appeared throughout television-inspired discourse for the last sixty years, many massaged here, sans specifics, to account for new digital media. Many of the articles follow a similar pattern: they state that older children are spending vast amounts of time-seven hours and thirty-eight minutes per day, to cite Vicky Ridout's 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation survey-with various forms of media, and then they look at what this means from different angles. The well-worn media worries are present and accounted for, including video game violence (Anderson, Gentile, and Dill), reducing (or enhancing) creativity (Valkenburg and Calvert), food marketing (Battle Horgen, Harris, and Brownell), gender stereotyping (Signorielli), advertising (Kunkel and Castonguay), and drugs (Strasburger). …