John Hartley on theory-making, digital media, and children from a cultural point of view

“Theory is the difference between science and story-telling” – he says, provoking my interest early on in the conversation. Theory is itself a story that needs to be understood as part of the process of making ideas work. Science tends to pretend that it’s not telling a story, it’s an objective fact, but we need to bring science and story-telling into closer contact in order to understand the process of making evidence meaningful. He also makes a comparison between evidence and children:

Evidence is like children. It involves waste, manipulation, time, control, nurture and it points to the future but it’s easily destroyed. Children are like evidence – they are both real and textual, social and mediated, both cultural and political. So, we should care for text and meanings as we care for children and that’s what cultural science is for.

We talk about his interests and theoretical inspirations, and John conveys vividly his passion for exploring children as an audience type for popular media with a focus on what media organisations and text imagine children to be (children as textual effects). He is also interested in what researchers imagine children to use media for – how children join society and enter social groups through media. John is critical of how public policy tends to focus on the protection and correction of children in a way that reduces children to “the effects of control culture”, while what could be more interesting is to think of children as cultural creators and innovators.

While discussing the current debates around children’s media use, John Hartley makes interesting connections to the work of Juri Lotman and Claude Lévi–Strauss. He is influenced by Lotman’s idea of the semio-sphere as a precondition of speaking any language and the notion that communication occurs when two languages come together. Hence, the importance of looking at meaning, language, culture and whole systems and to ask what role children play in such systems of reproduction of language and culture. The work of the French structuralist Lévi-Strauss offers the interesting conceptualisation of the taboo – a sign of which is when something is both undervalued and overvalued. The idea of the taboo can be applied to understanding children’s media use. Children, he argues, are at the same time undervalued (because they are not included in policy-making or curriculum development) and overvalued (as they are overrepresented in psychological studies of the effects of television and protectionist approaches).

So the task at present, as John Hartley sees it, is to close the gap between two different approaches. The first is the scientific approach which is often characterised by individualistic features and a strong emphasis on children’s media behaviour, sometimes leaving out other important aspects of children’s lives or how children are part of the (re-)creation of culture. The second approach is that of humanities which understand children from the perspective of writing fiction, plays, drama, songs– creativity that they might enjoy. Our job as theorists is to open up these understanding of children, to contest them and to question how they operate.

One of the lessons from the work I have been doing on children’s activism is that there has to be serious attention to what it is that they are trying to say… which is “change the system” and I agree with that.

Further reading

Buckingham, D. and H.S. Jensen (2012) ‘Beyond “media panics”: reconceptualising public debates about children and media’. Journal of Children and Media 6(4): 413-29.

Hartley, J (2021) Children of media – worldbuilders for justice. LSE: Parenting for a Digital Future

Hartley, J (2020)  Children of Media – Worldbuilders: Culture, deme formation and children’s class consciousness in the global-digital semiosphere. Media@LSE Working Paper Series. London: LSE

Hartley, J. (2020) How We Use Stories and Why that Matters: Cultural Science in Action. New York: Bloomsbury

Hartley, J., I. Ibrus and M. Ojamaa (2020) On the Digital Semiosphere: Culture, Media and Science for the Anthropocene. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Lotman, Y. (1990) Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. London: I.B. Tauris.