First, we need to ask, generally, what is the place of theories of learning in analyzing young people's use of media culture? Why are they important to our understanding of media culture? What implicit or explicit pedagogic relationships and notions of learning do we use when modeling our understanding of how young people use, respond to, or are affected by media? Second, and more specifically, recent research is clearly interested in the "effect" of the digital difference, that is, the impact of digital technologies on predigital theorizations of media culture. How have recent development in technologies and media convergence changed or affected conflicting or consensual paradigms of media effect or influence? How does the rich- ness of the new media ecology create new opportunities for communication and cre- ativity, and how do the new forms of information poverty shape social exclusion and alienation? Finally, we need to be reflexive and ask what roles research and reporting in this field-especially in response to public concern-play in creating assumptions and norms about media, children, and effects. And, of course, what might be the causal relationships among these sets of questions?

The 2005 Pew Internet Survey, for example, claimed that more than half of teen Internet users are content creators

Rampton (2006) argued that educational research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s implicitly but consistently articulated an opposition between home and school and between popular and official culture across a variety of domains.

re the games gendered, or is market demand the determining factor? What is it about games that is appealing? Will alternative games stimulate changes in demand

ecause these kinds of studies provide little insight into the specific pleasures afforded by particular games and we can only infer effects and consequences

hese kinds of statistics do not tell us much about meaning or pleasure-the prob- lem identified in the new audience studies described earlier.

Research has concentrated on structural formal issues, containing little sociology

in general, as Jenkins argued, the events at Columbine were explained by the media as a direct consequence-as an effect--of playing violent computer games, especially, it was alleged, the game Doom.

By the early years of this century, the games industry had outgrown Hollywood in terms of turnover (see http://www.theesa.com and http://www.elspa.co.uk) and had expanded rapidly into international markets.

In an early study of television, Raymond Williams (1974) pointed out that there was (at that time) no reason why TV had to develop simply as a mass broadcast medium; this was a consequence of competing economic and polit- ical factors.

tudies of media and their audiences have tended to seesaw between an effects and an empowerment paradigm. Put simply, the former (which tended to rely on psychological and experimental research models [e.g., Gerbner, 1997]) emphasized the power of the media. The latter (which tended to be more sociological and to use qualitative research methods [e.g., Hodge & Tripp, 1986]) emphasized the power of the individual reader or audience grouping

My opening images of child and screen contrast 1982 and 2005, and the key issue here is how the Internet and other allied production tech- nologies have affected the transmissive "power" of the screen

Their study of the Pokemon phe- nomenon tried to move beyond a simple effects paradigm locating power as imma- nent properties of either the text (or, in this case, the variety of cross-media and marketing products) or the user/reader

However, a salient point of difference between research on child and adult audiences is attention to how the young media consumer or user is positioned as a learner. In this way, the power relationship between text and audience is constructed in pedagogic terms

In recent years, concern with violence as an effect of exposure to the media has seen a definite swing toward an interest in the role of media in influ- encing consumption

the introduction of each new medium (radio, film, television, and finally the Internet) during the 20th century has been accompanied by anxiety about its imag- ined effect on less educated, "vulnerable" social groupings.

we encounter anxiety about the negative effects of the media current in con- temporary debate

This is an image of the media intruding into the family and taking over a child's mind.

In unsupervised experiences online, and through cutting and pasting text, the young child effectively teaches himself to "write" and manages to "seduce" the chat respondent. This satire of contemporary anxiety about children's online vulnerability plays into current press saturation and television's focus on online pornography and pedophilia.

One poignant illustration can be found in the history of nineteenth century industrial mechanization. At Cyrus McCormick's reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago in the middle 1880s, pneumatic molding machines, a new and largely untested innovation, were added to the foundry at an estimated cost of $500,000. In the standard economic interpretation of such things, we would expect that this step was taken to modernize the plant and achieve the kind of efficiencies that mechanization brings. But historian Robert Ozanne has shown why the development must be seen in a broader context. At the time, Cyrus McCormick II was engaged in a battle with the National Union of Iron Mold ers. He saw the addition of the new machines as a way to "weed out the bad

ather than insist that we immediately reduce everything to the interplay of social forces, it suggests that we pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics. A necessary complement to, rather than a replacement for, theories of the social determination of technology, this perspective identifies certain technologies as political phenomena in their own right. It points us back, to borrow Edmund Husserl's philosophical injunction, to the things themselves.

hat there is nothing distinctive about the study of technology in the first place.

t suggests that technical things do not matter at all. Once one has done the detective work necessary to reveal the social origins?power holders behind a particular in stance of technological change?one will have explained everything of impor tance. T

e all know that people have politics, not things.

he increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. I

thus a fitness for machine servitude. In this way the remarkable development of machinery becomes, for most of the work-ing population, the source not of freedom but of enslavement, not of mastery but of helplessness, and not of the broadening of the horizon of iabor but at the conhnemen

from the labor required to deSign, build, repair, and control it to the labor required to feed and operate it -must be dictated not by the human needs of the producers but by the special needs of those who own both the machine and the labor power, and whose interest it is to bring these two together in a special way.

What was mere technical pussibility has become, since the Industrial Revolution, an inevita-bility

The evolution of machinery represents an expansion of human capaci-ties, an increase of human control over environment through the ability to elicit from instruments of production an increasing range and exactitude of response

dachinery comes into the world the servant of 'humanity,' but as the instrument of those to whom accumulation of capital gives the uWllersilip of the machines

The characteristic feature of our modern mechanical improvements, is the introduction of self-acting tool machinery. What every mechanical workman has now to do, and what every boy can do, is not to work himself but to superintend the beautiful labour of the machine.

minor improvements in machinery having for their object economy of power, the production of better work, the turning off more work in the same time, or in supplying the place of a child, a female, or a man, are constant