New WG4 special issue: Children’s Cultures and Media Cultures

New special issue of the COST Action Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies:

Children’s Cultures and Media Cultures
Edited by Piermarco Aroldi and Cristina Ponte
ČASOPIS ZA UPRAVLJANJE KOMUNICIRANJEM
COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT QUARTERLY
Special issue 29, VIII, 2013

Free download at: http://www.fpn.bg.ac.rs/wp-content/uploads/CM29-SE-Web.pdf

This special issue is resulting from the work of the Working Group 4 on “Audience transformations and social integration” of the COST Action IS0906 “Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies”. COST is an intergovernmental framework for European Cooperation in Science and Technology, allowing the coordination of nationally-funded research at the European level.

The connection between children's cultures and media cultures can be considered a privileged area of innovation, in which many different actors and stakeholders (children, parents, educators, producers, marketing agents, regulators, policy makers and, last but not least, scholars) constantly negotiate the meaning of childhood in our globalised societies.

In the ever changing landscape of (old and new) media and their audiences, convergence between children’s cultures and media cultures is an increasingly topical field of study. To name but some of the challenges this reality presents, one could note how children and adolescents are continually exposed to the expansion of global digital TV channels addressed to them; how the growing investment in marketing activities is often associated with new forms of publicity and participation in new platforms like SNS sites or mobile communication; how new social practices born of changing family structures and the fast paced rhythm of everyday life make children’s lives not only far more institutionalised, but also increasingly individualistic. In fact, today children’s lives are influenced by a culture that is dominated by personal and mobile media far more than it ever was in past generations.

In this special issue, some of the aforementioned topics are studied in greater depth and debated on different levels, starting with children’s experience of everyday life and arriving at the concepts put forward by public policies and institutions.

Contents:

Introduction: Children’s Cultures and Media Cultures
Cristina Ponte, Piermarco Aroldi

The Complex Process of Children’s Identity in New Landscapes of Media and Culture
Ebba Sundin
Youth Media Participation: Global Perspectives
Sirkku Kotilainen, Annikka Suoninen

TOPmodels and Top Designers: Forms of Social Interaction and Creativity in the TOPmodel Online Forums
Mari Mäkiranta

Dress up and What Else? Girls’ Online Gaming, Media Cultures and Consumer Culture
Giovanna Mascheroni, Francesca Pasquali

Media, Children and Play: New Practices in a New (and Complex) Ecosystem
Carolina Duek

Meet me at the Coconut Gate at 8.30: ‘Mikmak’ as a Site of Socialisation
David Levin, Sharon Ramer Biel

The Efficiency of Regulation and Self-regulation: Croatian Media’s Protection of Children’s Rights (2008 – 2012)
Lana Ciboci, Igor Kanižaj, Danijel Labaš

More Technology, Better Childhoods? The Case of the Portuguese ‘One Laptop per Child’ Programme
Sara Pereira