Global, Local/Public, Private: Young Children's Engagement in Digital Literacy Practices in the Home

JACKIE MARSH

Since the early 1980s, numerous studies have offered valuable insights into the literacy practices undertaken by young children in the home (Heath, 1983; Cairney & Ruge, 1998; Taylor, 1983; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988; Weinberger, 1996). These studies have raised awareness of the way in which children's formative experiences in the family are central to a developing understanding of the role and nature of literacy. However, all of these studies were conducted in the last decades of the 20th century when technological advances were transforming the way in which societies communicated, but the effects on children's communicative practices were less well understood. In this chapter, I focus on examining how popular culture, media and new technologies have impacted on the literacy experiences of young children in the home in the 21st century. I draw on data collected in three different studies which explored the media-related literacy practices of 83 young children, aged two-and-a-half to five years, in the UK. These studies were conducted over a period of four years (2000–2004) and the data from all three studies have been used to inform an analysis of the contemporary communicative practices of the children involved. The purpose of this task is two-fold. First, I intend to trace the continuities in family practices across the last three decades, despite rapid technological developments. Secondly, I hope to identify the innovative ways in which children's communicative practices in the home are changing, the discontinuities in practice, due primarily to social change engendered by technology. Throughout the chapter, drawing from Street (1997), I use the phrase 'communicative practices' to refer to the range of multimodal meaning-making in which young children engage (Marsh, 2003). Using the term 'literacy' for these practices would be to confuse the issue, as Kress (2003) insists, as the word more accurately describes practices which relate to 'lettered representation' (Kress, 1997).

In this chapter, the classification of literacy practices within homes that was developed by Cairney and Ruge (1998) is revisited in the light of children's changing practices in a digital world, and the categories they identified adapted accordingly. In addition, children's engagement with popular culture, media and new technologies in the home is explored in relation to current debates concerning the polarization of global and local, and public and private. Space, place and time are central to consumption and production of media discourses and are thus embedded in the daily practices of many families who live in highly technologized societies (Pahl, in press). The focus in this chapter is on the way in which the complex web of space and time, within both a local/global, public/private context, frames children's media-related literacy practices in home contexts.

Globalization/Localization and Children's Media

Globalization takes place across economic, political, social and cultural planes (Giddens, 1990) and this multifaceted process is endemic in relation to media texts. Some investigations of the way in which media texts are globalized are predicated on notions of cultural imperialism, such as Ritzer's (1998) concept of 'McDonaldization' or Bryman's (2004) 'Disneyization' thesis. In this analysis, cultural heterogeneity is made problematic because of the way in which American media and cultural discourses saturate the international arena. Others suggest that globalization is not such a one-way process, but involves international exchanges of material resources and human capital (Hannerz, 1990). Hay and Marsh (2000), however, suggest that globalization as an international phenomenon has been misrepresented:

International flows of capital (such as foreign direct investment, FDI) tend to be extremely concentrated within the core 'triad' (of Europe, North America and Pacific Asia) providing evidence of regionalization, 'triadization' or internationalization but hardly of globalization. (Hay & Marsh, 2000: 5)

Certainly, in terms of young children's media culture, the 'triadization' process can be seen in the worldwide take-up of British television programmes such as the Teletubbies, the American-Hollywood influence on children's films and computer games and the appeal of Japanese anime, which has informed countless permutations of computer games and collecting cards. Indeed, a careful tracing of cultural trends would suggest that Japanese culture is currently highly fashionable across a range of artifacts. For example, Japanese cool is encapsulated for young children in the introduction of the Bratz doll, 'Tokoyo a Go-Go', which is packaged complete with mobile phone and digital video camera and comes with additional accessories such as a Sushi Bar, Karaoke Bar and a set of robot pets known as 'Virtual Buddiez'.

Although the process of globalization has often been projected as one of cultural imperialism and the homogenization of societies through market-driven goals, a number of theorists have pointed to the way in which localizing practices ensure that cultural goods are never simply adopted, but are adapted to local contexts (MacDougall, 2003; Murphy & Kraidy, 2003). In addition, the synergy produced by the global–local nexus leads to hybridity, which is indicated in Juluri's (2003) summary of the development of satellite broadcasting in India. Although early programming was dependent on American culture, this gave way to a far more...