Views from Advisory Editors II Education and the Media: Schooling the Adolescent Audience

Fears that the mass media are detrimental to the work ofthe school are as old as the media themselves. This concern was greatly amplified by the advent of television, giving rise to a lively if intermittent research tradition. The rapid diffusion and integration of satellite, cable, video and computer technology have added fresh impetus to the issue. At the same time, the explanatory power ofthe dominant theoretical perspective, with its simple negative effects model, has increasingly been rejected as inadequate. In this review, alterna-tive perspectives and models are presented. Inparticular, the need to examine the ways in which the school structures the adolescent audience for the media is stressed. AN EFFECTS TRADITION Educators have always been somewhat hostile to the modem media of com-munication. This first became apparent in the 19th century when many ofthe literate products of the new compulsory schools perversely used their skills less for the perusal of'good ' literature than for 'pulp ' literature. The chronicles of the period echo the moral debate which ensued (Neuberg, 1981). Since then, successive media developments-from film to computer games via comic books, television, rock music and video recorders-have been seen as undermining the moral and intellectual fibre of the young, provoking simila