Media Literacy For Teens: Does It Work?
By Rich Hauck
If we have IBM’s computer scientists and the psychedelic-driven programmers that “inherited” the Internet to thank for its evolution, then we owe a nod to adolescents for developing the online world into what it is today. The Internet’s present state isn’t due solely to teens’ use, but rather is the result of advertisers molding the cyber-landscape to reach out to this prized demographic. With all of this online advertising, should we encourage the youth market to be more media literate? Are current methods to educate this impressionable audience about advertising enough?
With an estimated 47 million children and adolescents in the United States using the Internet (this number has surely grown since the 2001 census fact), it’s no wonder that advertisers are scrambling to get their message on computer screens. Current trends highlight the shift in attention from television to the Internet, and the result has advertising revenue suddenly being transferred to the Web and interactive media. Unfortunately for advertisers, the Internet, as an active medium, is unpredictable and can create an uphill battle against the conventional wisdom of an ever-evolving youth market.
Teenagers are a group in search of identity, and during this stage of human development, social networking and brand experimentation are keys to the discovery of self. Unlike other mediums, the Internet compliments both of these keys: teens can use e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, and forums to interact with peers, and brands can be exhaustively researched outside of the advertiser’s control.
Herein lies the problem for advertisers; brands are not born into the “hip” consciousness of teenage conversation, and the feedback loop created by product rating sites, forums, and the ubiquitous word-of-mouth recommendations on the Internet expose the kinks in a brand’s supposedly indestructible identity—that inherent value we associate with a name. As a result, advertisers are forced to base their message less on the facts and more on ethereal contexts in order to reinforce the identity of their brand. With an arsenal of methods less direct, media literacy has become evermore complex to disassemble and analyze.
Perhaps one of the best ways to analyze online advertising is to view it through the perspective of the legally exempt. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which has been in effect since 2000, requires operators of commercial Web sites that target children under 13 to get parental consent to collect information, allow parents to manage, delete, and/or choose if the information is transmitted to third parties, not condition child participation based on disclosure of more information, post a privacy policy outlining exactly what the site is doing, and “maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of the personal information collected from children.” Wasn’t media so much nicer when we were all kids?
From 13 years old on, we are expected to be media literate and no longer need to “approve” our personal information being sent to third parties. For e-mail providers like Microsoft’s Hotmail, Google’s Gmail, or Yahoo! mail, information is used to create a “more personal experience” while visiting their portals. Like their television counterparts in MTV’s TRL or Fox’s American Idol, these marketers want teen feedback in order to determine what to sell them. There’s no cheaper or more honest method of extracting from this hard-to-target demographic than by having them donate the information.
Commercial sites that comply with COPPA are easy to spot, as their ads—or often their entire site—are labeled as advertisements. Do youngsters under 13 realize what the disclaimer, “Hey Kids, this is Advertising” means on mcdonalds.com? Shouldn’t adults supervise their Web-surfing children? Sites like hersheys.com and nabsicoworld.com create icons labeled “Ad Alert!” or “Ad Break” that warn users to get a parent’s permission if they’re under 18 and submitting personal information. Fortunately for us adults, cluttered news sites like CNN.com and MSNBC.com subtly use just the label “advertising” or “advertising links”. Can one imagine the amount of clutter that would be generated if every online ad were conveniently labeled for what it is? Would every Major League Baseball endorsement be labeled as an ad on its seemingly informative site? Would “America’s Army Game” maintain the immersive experience if teens were continually notified that the whole package is a recruitment method? Would AOL users come to a realization that their Internet provider is exposing them to an entire media network spun by parent Time Warner, or would all this labeling of media just be distracting?
COPPA has also prompted many age-sensitive sites to create age verification forms that “check” to make sure that the audience is old enough. How many Internet savvy teens don’t know what’s going on, though? If one can’t get into absolut.com because they submitted their unacceptable birth date, what’s stopping them from clearing their cookies and starting over as a 40 year old? Porn sites often make this an easier step by just answering a “YES” or “NO” answer to the “Are you 18 or older” question.
Of course, the next step in securing what’s accessed online is to purchase Cybersitter, or SurfWatch. These programs monitor usage and prevent teens from viewing particular content. But, as peer-to-peer software like Napster or its heir KaZaa have proven, the Internet is a world that can be hacked, one where the generation difference of a computer-raised youth can exploit the limitations of a computer-illiterate parent.
Marketers would want it no other way, though. The parent often serves as the watchdog of their child’s finances. Pair this parental scrutiny with the escapism a trip to the mall offers, and you discover why online shopping isn’t among teens’ top uses of the Internet. Marketers realize this, yet they also know that what young adults see and interpret online, particularly through their online networks, is what influences their offline purchases.
So, who is responsible for media literacy? NPR and PBS, organizations that investigate the intent and interconnectedness of advertising campaigns without being tied to a media conglomerate parent, are nowhere near the same sphere of cool as, say MTV, and thus don’t benefit as being an authority to the same generation. Yet, while MTV may be a good avenue to introduce media literacy, don’t expect 50 Cent or Ja Rule to do a public service announcement and compromise their street credibility, either. Besides, does anyone want to point to such a media-built role model? Schools could be held responsible for media literacy, but, once again, they don’t hold the same power of influence as the advertiser, not to mention the lack of time to implement such instruction with teaching everything else.
Parents can easily be pointed to as the purveyors of wisdom, but their influence prevails during the same age span that COPPA aims to protect. Parental influence ostensibly wanes during the teenage years, and COPPA has no counterpart for those older than 13 years of age. Perhaps the only answer is that media literacy has ingrained itself into the act of maturation, and the only way to truly recognize advertising is to grow up with it.