Screenplay is book that wants to come away from speculative or inaccurate studies in the area and present an empirically
rigorous study of how technology affects young people’s lives, avoiding the oversimplification of either treating them as a homogeneous category or overlooking the fact that technology acts within a pre-existing social context. ScreenPlay emphasized that the computer itself is not used by all children in the same way, and that in light of its versatility it is more appropriate to approach it not as a single technology, but many, serving different purposes such as entertainment, information-seeking, or communication, to name but a few.
Facer et al’s book followed the case-study families through a crucial stage in the children’s development, and was able to determine which approaches contributed towards enhancing proficient use of technology. In tackling the issue of whether the computer ‘influences’ the behaviour of young people, ScreenPlay points to the fact that children use the computer as a tool to further their own pre-existing social interests, and that even the heaviest users of technology were still mostly influenced by social networks outside the digital world.
What sets ScreenPlay apart from most other studies in this area is the fact that it relies on its own purpose-made quantitative and qualitative research. This ensures that the book as up-to-date as possible in its relevance to the particular issues raised. In order to establish the answers to questions regarding children’s ownership, access to and usage of computers, it first outlined a statistical base for its study using 4 quantitative questionnaire-based surveys dating from 1998 to 2001. From the 855 children who completed the 1998 questionnaire, 18 were chosen as case-study subjects. Furthermore, in order to avoid narrowing the scope of the project, a multi-disciplinary approach was chosen, drawing on Media and Cultural Studies, Sociology, and Psychology.
ScreenPlay spends 18 months following their case-study families - observing their media habits, investigating parental technological biographies, and conducting interviews with teachers, parents, siblings and friends. It is clear that the amount of time invested in the ScreenPlay study helped the families to feel comfortable with the researchers, perhaps leading to more genuine responses than could be obtained in an interview or focus group where subjects might try to provide the responses they perceive are wanted of them.
ScreenPlay asserts that there is in fact a ‘digital divide’, meaning that access to ICTs is far from equal and young people who do not have computer at home are also disadvantaged at school. The ScreenPlay study concludes that the current emphasis on teaching computer techniques in a linear fashion means that children who do not have a computer at home will not have the opportunity to experience the vital ‘learning by play’ experience which is shown to be vital in the development of IT literacy.
While evidence gathered over the course of this study does not suggest that ICT has “taken over” children’s lives, in many cases the computer helped them construct their developing identities in the same way as it was used to further their involvement in their pre-existing areas of interest. The study concluded that the computer’s ‘psychological significance amongst the children seemed relatively modest’. Most children had relationships both at school and at home which were not disrupted by their use of ICT, and which in fact seemed to influence the children far more than their computers did.
Contrary to the view that computers are driving children and young people towards an isolated lifestyle, it was found that the formation of support networks for ICT use is vital to the successful development of young people’s ICT skills, and this often led to the establishment, expansion and maintenance of social networks.
ICTs have certainly contributed – Facer et al notes – to the weakening of boundaries, as traditional childhood roles - learner, player, and consumer - are often replaced with more adult roles - expert, teacher, and trouble-shooter. Children often recognised the computer as a tool for entry into an adult world, and in many cases chose to use ‘adult’ software as opposed to software targeted at children.
The media are often blamed for undermining ‘childhood’ or ‘family life’ - whatever those idealised terms might mean for different people – and as Bazalgette and Buckingham point out, this is not a new phenomenon: ‘The arguments being made in the 1990s about the harmful effects of computer games and violent videos echo those which have been made throughout history in relation to successive ‘new’ media such as theatre, the press, popular literature, cinema, radio and television (1995;2). Yet as tempting as it might prove to make a scapegoat of a particular media form , the ScreenPlay project helps us to understand that we must look at childhood in a complex social, economic, ethnic, political and gendered context of which ICTs are but one part.