Childscape Mediascape: Children and Media in India, edited by Usha Raman and Sumana Kasturi (published by Orient Blackswan Private Limited in 2023) revolves around questions of children’s engagement with media and how they are assumed as passive consumers, their consumption patterns, and which ways does this affect their worldview. This work goes on to foreground the lack of scholarly work on children’s media practices in India which has resulted in an insufficiency of adequate media literacy. With 12 essays, across five core thematic, this book attempts to bring forth an array of perspectives and evidence-based studies from different media scholars, researchers, practitioners, and educators, to exhibit a productive discourse on children’s media practices in contemporary times. 

Beginning with an overview of the transition of children’s media from the 1990s to now where media has become more diverse with an ever-emerging conglomerate of global and local, it has become pertinent to learn about the transitions in media practice and its effect on children.

The book offers a critical look at media as a ‘socio-cultural’ site of learning for children. Apart from being a part of the cultural industry, media becomes an effective site of knowledge production, mainstream narrative construction, and identity formation for children. For instance, with examples, the book affirms that popular culture represents children as passive audiences. They are usually used as props to gather empathy as if they are a site of emotional amusement whereas what is flagged as central are socio-political and economic issues. Children are also used to animate these issues. Further, they remain non-inclusive in representing children from marginal communities as protagonists. They are usually projected as either victims or bystanders. The intended media audience targeted has a deciding even if unintended role in this framing.

The political economy scholarship on media practices claims that media as a cultural industry is focused on creating a consumer base for advertisers. This has also been affirmed by cultural studies that draw our attention to how media attracts children as potential consumers for advertisers through rigorous socializing. The book questions this complex phenomenon of content production, socialization, and consumption that invariably needs investigation to understand the multiple aspects of children’s media consumption patterns and the socio-cultural and political implications of media practices. 

The book is organized around five underlying themes – Discourses, Representation, Interactions, Constructions, and Negotiations. The first section of two essays gives a macro perspective on the development of scholarly work on children and their media consumption, the dominance of the global north in this knowledge expansion, the challenges faced by younger scholars in India, the need for a more critical methodological approach to engage better with the issues of media practices and a scholarly productive global collaboration.

The second section with three essays looks at the issues of ‘Representation’ of children in media, interrogating the problematic ways in which media has represented children across popular video games, children’s books, and other channels. In Chapter 3, the author looks at the lack of adequate representation of children from underprivileged backgrounds, whereas Chapter 5 investigates the portrayal of children in news media within certain ideological frameworks during the COVID, where children were used as passive symbols of empathy by fundraisers. 

Under the section ‘Interactions’, the three essays navigate children’s engagement with old media and new emerging digital technologies. They investigate the advantages and disadvantages of these unconventional technologies and the dangers they pose to children. Most importantly it focuses on the inadequacy of media literacy to regulate the user’s engagement. The section on ‘Construction’ advocates for giving agency to children for framing their world through media-making i.e. from assumed as passive consumers to being active participants in their storytelling. An evidence-based study in the rural areas of Chhattisgarh shows how children use community media to develop their agency and find their political voice. 

The last section on ‘Negotiations’ has two essays that are field-based observational studies that look at the complex nature of self-identity and children and also how children are constructing their self-identity through their media practices in empowering ways. They are using contemporary media platforms as an escape and re-constructing their identity while exploring social relationships through online mediums, that otherwise might not be possible. 

The book succinctly urges us to think about the various methodological approaches, an interdisciplinary perspective, and different theoretical stances to initiate discourses on the many intersecting issues related to children and media. It asks us to reflect on the everyday media consumption patterns of children, and how they mediate the experiences of their social world.

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Aarshi Jahan is a PhD Research Scholar in Sociology at Dr B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi.