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What Porn? Children and the Family Internet

By Donell Holloway, Lelia Green and Robyn Quin - posted Friday, 29 October 2004


Many children and young people are also exploring the social world of Internet chat, with the potential risk of unwanted (and unsafe) face-to-face contact. Leonie, mother of teenage girls, explained her daughters’ ability to negotiate these potentially unsafe contacts:

I suppose you just get a bit concerned about the chat lines and who they’re talking to sometimes but really they usually tell me … [to 17-year old daughter in the room] Like on the chat lines you, when, had that idiot … that one that was going to come over here. Just some idiots on there. A lot of the kids are teenagers. I know Shani’s [14] gotten on there a few times on the chat line and there’s been obviously someone asking them lewd questions and she’s usually blocked them and cut them off …(Leonie).

Daughter Shani also discusses her experiences with unsafe (unwanted) Internet contact: “They go on about stuff that you don’t really want to talk about and it’s just ‘No, I don’t think so’” (Shani, 14). Shani went on to explain that she now prefers to use instant messaging with known (offline) friends—a preference now taken up by many teenagers (Holloway and Green: Livingstone and Bober).

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Electronic media play an important role in children’s transition to adulthood. The ubiquitousness of the World Wide Web, however, makes restriction and protection of children increasingly difficult to realise. Instead, many parents in this study are placing more importance on openness, consultation and discussion with their children about the media texts they encounter, rather than imposing restriction and regulation which these parents believe may well be “counter-productive”.

Of greater disquiet to many parents in this study than their children’s access to unsuitable online content is concern about their children’s possible excessive use of the Internet. Parents were typically more concerned about the amount of time some of their children were spending chatting to friends and playing online games. One mother explains:

They [my daughters] started to use MSN whilst they were doing school work and obviously kids are able to listen to music, watch television, do a project. They can multi-task without all the confusion that I [would have] but we actually now, they’re not able to do MSN during the school week at all … so we now said to them, “if you want to ring somebody, give them a call, that’s fine, we don’t mind, but during the week no MSN” … we’ve actually restricted them. (Stephanie)

Parental concern about children’s excessive use of the Internet was most marked for parents of teenage children: adolescence being a time when “rules about media consumption can be an early site of resistance for young adults keen to take more power for themselves and their own lives”. Father of two, Xavier, expressed his concern about (what he perceived as) his teenage son’s excessive use of the Internet:

Well I think there’s far too much time … Gavin’ll spend a whole day on it. I try to get him to come to the footy on Sunday. No. He’s available for friends [for online gaming and chat on the Internet]. He’ll spend all day on the computer. (Xavier)

Son Gavin (16), in a separate interview, anticipated that this criticism had been made and felt compelled to counter it:

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Well he [dad] makes comments like saying I’m not fit enough “cause I spent too much time on the computer” but I play soccer a lot. Like, I do sport perhaps everyday at school … I mean, I think, such a piece of crap. (Gavin)

Thus, the incorporation of the Internet into the domestic sphere often sees previously established boundaries (who uses what, when, where and for how long) redefined, challenged, resisted and defended by various family members. In this way the Internet (and other new media) helps shape (and is shaped by) the temporal and spatial boundaries within the home.

Conclusion

While all parents in the Family Internet study construct the Internet as a site which requires some level of care and control over their children’s online use, they use a variety of approaches when carrying out this supervisory role. Some parents tend to allow for children’s free exploration of the Internet and are relatively confident that their children are able to negotiate adult texts such as pornography in a comparatively sophisticated manner. Other parents, those inclined to protect their children from the dangers of adult content and unsafe Internet contact, choose to monitor and restrict their children’s access to the Internet to varying degrees. More consistent is parental concern about excessive use of the Internet, and the assumption that this displaces constructive use of children’s time.

Public anxieties about children’s use of the Internet make assumptions about children’s media practices. Children (and their families) are often assumed to be less able to differentiate between suitable and unsuitable Internet texts and to deal with these potential dangers in a sensible manner. These fears presuppose a variety of negative impacts on children’s and young peoples’ lives which may have little to do with daily reality. Our exploration of families’ everyday experiences of Internet consumption highlights the disparity between public anxieties about Internet use and the importance of these anxieties in the everyday lives of families. The major concern of families - ill-disciplined and excessive Internet use – barely registers on the same scale as the public moral panic over children’s possible access to online pornography. These findings say less about the Internet as a locale in cyberspace than they do about the domestic dynamics of the household, parenting styles, relationships between parent(s) and children, and the sociocultural context of family life.

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First published on M/C journal, October 2004.  The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council in funding this research, which forms part of the project on "Family Internet: theorising domestic Internet consumption, production and use within Australian families" which has been running since 2002.



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About the Authors

Donell Holloway is a PhD candidate and graduate research assistant at the School of Communications and Multimedia at Edith Cowan University, Perth. Her current research interests include media consumption in the context of everyday family life as well as aging and society.

Lelia Green is Professor of Communications, School of Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University and co-Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

Robyn Quin is professor of media studies and Dean of the Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries at Edith Cowan University. Her research interests are in young people’s use of new media.

Other articles by these Authors

All articles by Donell Holloway
All articles by Lelia Green
All articles by Robyn Quin
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