Tag Archives: kids media

Back in 2010, I sat in a small office on Sveavägen in Stockholm, Sweden. It was fall, which in Scandinavia means that it is dark all the time, and rainy most of the time. My colleague Emil Ovemar and I were doing some research for a potential project regarding touchscreen devices. When doing work like this, you tend to start broad and look at anything and everything. Then you start whittling things down, building hypotheses, and finding concepts that seem…

In this second installment of the Podcasts for Families series, I was thrilled to be able to interview the enthusiastic Mindy Thomas, co-host of Wow in the World, a show featuring cool science and technology. If you haven’t listened to their show yet, this interview will give you a pretty good sense of what to expect! Although there’s not a totally contiguous storyline in this show, the big personalities of hosts Mindy Thomas and Guy Raz—along with regular characters like Reggie…

The topic of kids and technology is a hot topic again. This would normally be a good thing, if the questions that are being discussed weren’t fundamentally the wrong ones. It is, however, a familiar situation. We are going through a normalization of a new technology, and it will be met in the same way that technology has been met before: with skepticism, doubt and the occasional hint of technophobia. Discussions like these cloud the interesting part—the choices that parents…

This post originally appeared in New Media Literacies on October, 25, 2010. I recently attended Digital Hollywood, a digital media trade conference in Los Angeles for executives in the film, television, computer, music, and telecommunications fields. As a Ph.D. student in Communication at USC Annenberg, I attended four panels relevant to my research interests in children and media. These panels were organized around the following themes: immersive touchscreen media, mobile apps, crossmedia content reinvention, and one specifically on children in…