A major new contribution to the hot topic of children and the internet from one of the world's leading researchers in this area. It considers children's everyday practices of internet use in relation to the complex socio-cultural conditions of contemporary childhood.
Focusing on soap operas, the book delves into the concept of 'parasocial interaction' where viewers form one-sided relationships with television characters. It examines the dynamics of the 'active viewer' and how television texts influence social psychology. Additionally, the work critiques and explores various theoretical models from social psychology and related fields, providing insights into how audiences engage with and are affected by televised narratives.
"In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. Drawing on extensive research with diverse parents, this book reveals how digital technologies give personal and political parenting struggles a distinctive character, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent, or support. The book reveals the pincer movement of parenting in late modernity. Parents are both more burdened with responsibilities and charged with respecting the agency of their child-leaving much to negotiate in today's "democratic" families. The book charts how parents now often enact authority and values through digital technologies-as "screen time," games, or social media become ways of both being together and setting boundaries. The authors show how digital technologies introduce both valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look toward varied imagined futures. This results in deeply diverse parenting in the present, as parents move between embracing, resisting, or balancing the role of technology in their own and their children's lives. This book moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research in the United Kingdom, the book offers conclusions and insights relevant to parents, policymakers, educators, and researchers everywhere"