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The Creation of Digital Media for Adolescents Essay

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The creation of digital media for adolescent children should take into consideration the importance of “the three C’s”: the child, the context of use, and the content. According to Lisa Guernsey, director of the New America Foundation's Early Education Initiative, all three of these terms must be reflected in the purposeful choice, application, and development of digital media for children. One could consider that the foundation of children’s digital media content must account for the four stages of child development as stated by, social constructivist, Jean Piaget.
By employing active mediation and co-viewing a child’s parents and peers can participate in a child’s experiences; using digital media in the context of learning can …show more content…

Co-viewing can aid a parent or peer in establishing media usage rules, examining media interpretations and their plausible effects, and ultimately promote critical thinking towards media programs (Mazzarella 129). The use of co-viewing allows a parent to directly mediate what their child is watching, which may be beneficial if a parent doesn’t want their child to be bombarded by product advertisements. Many advertisers disguise their products with salient and formal features in order to persuade the child into buying their product. These features are profoundly employed in children’s advertisements and include elements such as sound effects, funny voices, rapid pacing, and lively music (Calvert 209). Essentially, formal features were developed in order to capture the viewer’s attention and in television programs maintained a balance between informational and non-informational content (Mazzarella 185). Advertisers adapted the non-informational, engaging fundamentals of television programs, the formal features, and ran with it creating a variety of commercials capable of capturing a child’s attention (Mazzarella 186). The formal features that appeared on a child’s normal programming, unusual cartoon characters, colorful visuals and loud sound effects, became popular in the various advertisements that they viewed daily. This made it

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