protection of minors, construction of childhood
Ongoing research
Different media may appear similar when you approach media content in isolation. Sex is shown in computer games as it is on mobile phone displays as well as on the Internet. Violence can be found on the Internet and in the other medias as well. However, we may look in vain for similarities when studying the ways in which different media are used. Crucial differences also appear between the forms of production and forms of distribution of the three technologies. What about media regulation for the protection of minors? What differences and similarities do the regulation of computer games, Internet and mobile phone content display? And which are the discourses of childhood constructed through these regulation regimes? These are the questions posed by this research project. Germany is the first 'case' in a longer row of international comparative studies of media regulation. The aim is to learn about the ‘materiality of governance’ and the imaginaries of childhood produced with these different materialities.
Methodological approach: the ‘how’ of multiple
regulation
Legal and political studies have to some extent described the formal
and structural differences between the forms of regulation. We however
lack a micro-analytical understanding of how legal rules and political
structures are enacted in practice. The focus of the study is directed
towards regulation processes and less on the results of regulation. The
question is how regulation is done, not what is made. Regulation is done
in regulatory agencies. But not only here. Also in retail stores, in
schools and in homes is children's access to new media regulated. Just as
it is in the development of a computer game and in the press. The sites of
regulation are multiple, and my study covers these multiple sites in order
to achieve the complexity and distributed character of regulation that
regulation studies fail to describe.
Theoretical focus: governance as a social-material
assemblage
The study’s theoretical focus is the question of how the technical
materiality of an object of governance contributes to forming the
governance process. While the governance literature generally focus on the
social dimensions of governance like interests, traditions, decision
processes and ideologies, this study highlights the material aspects of
governance. Thereby, a new perspective is suggested in the theory of
governance in which governance is understood not as a construction of
social actors, but as an assemblage of socio-material entities.
Research questions
On the basis of these theoretical and methodological interests the
project raises among others the following questions:
· How do media’s different technological platforms influence the
way in which they are regulated?
· What characterizes the particular forms of regulations of
computer games, mobile phones and Internet?
· Where are the different media regulated?
· Which infrastructure of actors and technology must be in place in
order for regulation to work?
· Which role do human actors play (producers, distributors,
testers, classifiers, users, parents, educators) in procedures of
regulation and which how do they relate to each other?
· Which role do law, formula, guidelines etc. play in the practice
of regulation? When and how are these involved in by the process of
regulation?
· Which other resources (e.g. scientific investigations, political
requirements, administrative procedures) are involved, and how?
· Which differences can be found in the forms of talk about users
and media harm emerging in the process of regulation?
For more information, read the project description here.
Department of European Ethnology
Collaboratory: Social Anthropology & Lifesciences
Mohrenstrasse 40/41
10117 Berlin
Germany
Phone: +49 30 2093 3769
Fax: +49 30 2093 3726