The use of digital media has increased with technological advancement within our society. This inevitably increases the concerns of both positive and negative effects of the exposure to digital media. Today, many children as young as the tender age of 1 year old are exposed to some form of digital media on a daily basis.
Developmental milestones can be defined as ‘’ behaviours or physical skills seen in infants and childrens as they grow and develop. This milestones have been formed in order to determine what a child should be able to do at a certain age. For example an infant would gradually be able to turn, crawl, walk, etc as infants grow.
There are four types of milestone: physical milestone, which is the motor skills of the child. Followed by the cognitive milestone. This is defined as the ability to learn, think and is the development of problem solving skills. Thirdly, social and emotional milestone is when the child starts and is able to express their emotion by interacting and responding to people around them. Lastly, communication and language milestone, which is the verbal and nonverbal skills of the child.Displaying certain acts or reactions at a stage would represent the extent of reaching that specific milestone.
Each milestone varies from age to age and is developed as the child grows older. The rate at which the child reaches each milestone would be different from another child. There are many factors which may influence the rate at which a child achieves this milestone. The environment and social culture are just two of the main factors which influences the rate at which the child may reach the developmental milestone. Most of a child's’ development is till the age of 18.
Digital media is defined as ‘’any format or device used to convey content using digital signal’’. Examples of these would be the exposure to television, a smart phone, video games, etc.
There have been numerous queries in particular as to how the digital media affects the development of a child. A child, in most countries, is anyone under the age of 18 and at the age of 18 they legally become an adult.
Many questions and answers comes together with children being exposed to digital media, be it positive or negative. For example, it is said that exposure to violent video games tend to make young children grow into aggressive adults. However at the same time, it is also known that being exposed to digital media may help younger children with their literacy and social skills.
A link can be seen between exposure to digital media and developmental milestones. It is evident that individuals show different kind of reaction as a result of the influence of digital media under various circumstances and with the influence of other factors. The scope of the investigation will identify specific social and cognitive effects on an individual and give supporting evidence based on various case studies, experiments and theories.
This interest in research within this was stimulated after an tragic incident which took place in Saudi whereby a four year old shot his father because he did not buy him the game he wanted, assuming he would come back to life, after playing several violent games. The incident added fuel to the debate that playing violent video games would make youngster grow into violent adults and alter their way of thinking.
A research has focused on how video games and television may have the potential to increase and improve visual attention and decrease self control. In addition, how video games have an impact on the visual spatial memory (VSM) which affect the human perception and performance produces findings on the positive impact of digital media on the developmental milestone. These findings are also relevant to aggression. Using the general aggression model (GAM) as a supporting theory and other research studies, this essay will take a look at the social implications of digital media on a child. Using jean Piaget’s theory as a supporting theory along with others this essay will take a look at the cognitive impact of exposure to digital media. Therefore, the different kind of impacts caused by the exposure of digital media to various age groups have to be considered in order to examine: how does the early exposure to digital media have an impact on a child’s developmental milestone?
Social impact of exposure to media
Erikson's theory of psychosocial development:
Erik erikson's theory of psychosocial development is used to describe the impact of social experience throughout an individual’s lifetime. It involves both psychological and social aspects in human development. He emphasises that one's personality develops in different stages. Beginning from the time of birth, each stage is built upon the previous stage. This is only when the previous stage is handled well to be completed successfully. If for instance a stage is not completed successfully and is mishandled, it would create problems which would have an effect on their development. The possibility of mishandling a stage can be because of the influence of external factor such as digital media. Each of the eight stages (figure 1) in erikson’s theory of psychosocial development is linked to a specific area in one’s life. Psychosocial is defined as the ‘’psychological development of an individual based on their interaction with a social environment.’’
General aggression model (GAM):
Geen (2001) describes aggression with four different situations. Firstly ‘’delivery of a harmful stimulus or stimuli such as an insult, punch, etc.) to another person, 2) an intent to harm another person, 3) a belief that the action will be effective, and 4) a target (or victim) who is motivated to avoid being harmed. To the extent that these four conditions are met, we can consider a specific behavior as aggressive” The general aggression model (GAM; Anderson & bushman (2002) ,has been used to provide a more comprehensive understanding of aggressive behaviors in humans.
The GAM has two different components to it. (Figure 2) It first discusses the proximate processes and then the distal processes. The proximate is the immediate aggressive behavior which may be displayed for example when insulted or hit. it is a reaction which may be shown immediately after a trigger.
On the other hand, the distal processes is more relevant to how continual exposure to aggressive stimuli, in this case media violence, may have a influence on developing a long term aggressive personality. In other words, these are the examples which would influence short term processes through the long term. GAM suggests that they are many external factors that would influence the development of aggressive personality. biological and environmental are the two primary factors. Hormonal imbalance, serotonin levels, possessions of disorder, etc are all examples of biological modifiers. The environmental influence may include, (harsh) parenting styles, culture and community they were brought up in exposure to violence, etc. the general aggression model proposes that observational learning plays a key role in the development of aggression, in addition to continual interaction with aggression related stimuli would allow children to learn, rehearse and reinforce the behaviours they have observed.
A study offering support for the influence of observational learning is the study by researchers bandura, ross and ross (1961) aimed to show that learning can happen through observation of a model. This is the famous bobo doll experiment where children below the age of 6 were divided into different groups and were told to observe models assigned to their group. This resulted in the children who observed the aggressive model imitating the models physical and verbal aggression and non-aggressive children were significantly more in the group that observed the non-aggression model.
The group of children were a mix of boys and girls and it was also found that the boy imitated the physical and verbal aggression than the girl of the male model. Whereas the girls imitated the verbal aggression of the female aggression more than the boy. This study showed that aggressive behaviour can be displayed as a consequence of just observing and imitating a model. The gender of the model as well as the child plays a significant role in this as well. However, of course, the limitation to this experiment to the research is that the children were not directly exposed to digital media such as a television or video games, but they were still sitting in another room observing the model. Another limitation to this experiment is that the aggressiveness of the child is measured almost immediately. Thus, it is not discovered is this short exposure would have long term effects on the child. Children who had not played with the bobo doll before were more likely to display aggressive behavior which was found by cumberbatch, (1990). This was not taken into consideration during the experiment by bandura (1961). This study also has low ecological validity because the exposure to a stranger as a model for a child is a very unlikely situation to take place.
In a follow up experiment, Bandura (1965) set up a similar experiment to determine how the displayed behavior of the observer is affected if they saw the consequences of the models behavior. One group saw that the model was given sweets after their behavior, another was punished and the last group didn’t see any consequences.
It was found that the children who saw the rewarded model and no consequences displayed more aggressive acts but the group that saw the punishment had learnt the aggression but did not display it because of the expected negative consequences. This is called vicarious reinforcement. This is just one example to how children may be influenced by something they merely observe for such a short time. It goes on to show how media, something they may be exposed to for a longer duration almost daily, may have such a great negative social impact such as expressing violence and aggressiveness. However at the same time, it was also proven that if they understand the consequences from the same media, they would not display such act even though they learned the behavior, which is a rather positive impact.
Another study offering support for the influence of violent video game on the aggressive behavior of dutch adolescent boys was Konijn (2007).The participants were of low education ability. they were assigned to play realistic or fantasy violent or non-violent games. After they played the game they were assigned to, they were told to compete with a partner employed by konijn (2007). In order to test the aggression of the participants, the boys were told that in the competition the winner could blast loud noises through the headphone to the loser. Even though the participants were told that very loud and high level of noises could cause permanent hearing damage, it was found that the boys who played the realistic violent video games had shown the most aggressive behaviour by using noise levels loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage, wanting to be like the game characters. Therefore lead konijn (2007) to the conclusion of exposure to violent video games would be especially likely to increase aggression when players identify with violent game characters.
However, similar to many short term case studies and experiments, it is unknown if this exposure would have a long term impact on their aggression level, given that, this was a short term case study. Konijn (2007) conducted the studies with only adolescent boys. This would be a setback to the study because it was not found if girls would have the same reaction and results as the boys and therefore cannot be generalised that exposure to violent video games would cause an aggressive behavior in all children as In another study by bandura et al. (1961) it was proven how aggression levels may differ in boys and girls. Secondly, the researchers only used Dutch boys to participate in the study. According to Dasen (1944) and lev vygotsky (1978), culture plays a huge role in the developmental milestone of an individual. Therefore it is unreliable to generalise the findings of the study to all children from different cultures.
Cognitive impact of exposure to digital media
One concern that is raised all the time when children are exposed to digital media, is how it may affect their intelligence.
Jean piaget’s (1936) theory of cognitive development states that ‘’early cognitive development involves processes based upon actions and later progresses to change in mental operations’’. He believed that intelligence is malleable and is not a fixed trait. His theory also suggests that children goes through four series of stages of mental development as they grow. Piaget said that intelligence is developed through these 4 series of stages as the child interact with the environment. The four stages of development are sensorimotor, followed by preoperational, then concrete operational and finally formal operational. Additionally, he viewed intellectual growth as something that happens through adjusting and adapting to their environment around them. These adaptations happens through 3 processes involving schemas. First, assimilation, then accommodation, and lastly equilibration.
According to piaget it is possible that most children go through the four stages up to the formal operations but dasen (1994) found that amongst adults only one-third reach formal operational stage and keating (1979) found that 40%-60% of college students failed at formal operational tasks. Piaget's theory does not consider the impact external factors such as the environment and culture may have on the development of a child. Lev vygotsky’s (1978) social development theory suggests that a child’s environment plays a strong role in learning in contrary to piaget’s theory.
Dasen (1944) conducted a study to show that culture plays a role in influencing the achievement of different operations at different ages. He used aboriginal children from the of 8-14 year old. He found that in the children conservation developed later and spatial awareness developed earlier as opposed to piaget's findings.
In addition to aggression, another negative side effect that raised a concern due to the exposure of digital media is the minimized opportunities for children to interact face to face. This therefore is thought to an impact on the ability to read and understand the emotions in others. Uhls et.al (2014) came to a conclusion that a preteens’understanding of non verbal emotional cues may be improved with lesser exposure time to digital media with an increase in opportunity for social interaction. Uhls (2014) conducted a field study with two groups of teens who attended a US school. The first group was completely cut off from any kind if digital media for five days, whereas the second group still had the chance to have access to their digital devices. All the participants were test before and after the experiment in order to measure their ability to identify feelings and emotions shown. After the five days, from the test, the researchers found that preteen’s, who were kept away from their digital devices, ability to recognise non verbal emotions expressed had improved significantly compared to the participants who had kept their digital devices with them for the five days. The findings were applied for both boys and girls equally and therefore came up with the aforementioned conclusion.
However a major limitation to the findings by Uhls (2014) is that reading an emotional cue is an ability that varies from person to person. It is also important to conduct further research to understand how this has a long term effect as long term effects are not demonstrated in this short term field experiment.
It is very inaccurate and unreliable to assume the long term influences of the exposure of digital media on the developmental milestone from short term experiments and case studies. In favour of Uhls’s (2014) negative impacts, Huesmann, moise-titus, podolski and Eron (2003) found that media diet does have an influence on aggressive behavior. The researchers conducted a longitudinal study with 450 children. They simply asked them about their media habits and their aggressiveness. After 15 years, the children were asked about their media habits and their aggressiveness again. From the reports they found that aggressive behaviour in adulthood can be predicted based off the amount of media violence they were exposed to during their childhood. Similar longitudinal studies have been conducted in Japan, anderson et al. (2008), singapore , Gentile, li khoo, prot and anderson (2014) and in germany (Krahé, Busching and Möller (2013). All this studies have showed similar results to that of Huesmann et al.’s (2003) study.
This shows that,even though it has been found that culture has some impacts on certain cognitive processes, Dasen (1944), the overall aggressive behaviour displayed due to the exposure of media violence is not as influenced by the culture an individual grows up in. the amount of aggression shown may differ from culture to culture but from these studies it can proven that exposure to violent media does have an influence on aggression.
In comparison to laboratory experiments or studies, longitudinal studies may give a more accurate insight to the impact on the developmental milestones because of the exposure to digital media.
Longitudinal studies may be more accurate when it comes to understanding the long term impacts of something because the study is conducted with the same people over an extended period of time. However in huesmann’s (2003) study, his way of measuring the aggression in participants was to ask them to describe it themselves. Since aggression is generally considered a socially unacceptable behavior, there is a possibility that some participants may not have been completely honest about their aggressive behaviour and underreported it.
While the results gained by uhls (2014) showed the negative impact of exposure to digital media on children, valkenburg and peter (2007) had found that online communication had a positive effect on friendships and satisfaction. They conducted an online survey with 1,210 dutch adolescents, both boys and girls, to gather evidence of how digital media may be a suitable platform for them to communicate and interact with one another more. The questions in the survey had asked about their overall life satisfaction and about how long they spent on social media and many friends that had. From the results of the survey it was found that the more frequent a child used social media, the more satisfied they were as the social media brought their friends closer.
Another study offering the support for the positive influences of exposure to digital media on interaction amongst children is that of Manago in 2012. Manago et al. (2012) developed an online survey about life satisfaction for eighty eight students. They aimed to investigate how using social media, specifically facebook, had an impact on life satisfaction. They gathered eighty eight students from various ethnicities, asian, european and africans. Similar to valkenburg and peter’s (2007) experiment, participants were asked to answer questions on how much time they spend using facebook, how many friends viewed their status and how they would classify their friendship, etc. they were also given psychological tests to measure their life satisfaction, self-esteem and perceived availability of social support. After the survey and tests, from the findings, manago et al. (2012) concluded that emerging adults are adapting psychologically to social network from the fact that the participants were found using facebook as a took to build intimacy with others to connect and become closer with friends.
As much as the results from both valkenburg and peter (2007) and manago et al. (2012) showed a positive results these studies do contain inherent limitations such as researcher bias. The researchers on both studies were trying to find the positive impacts of digital media on their participants. Therefore, this may allow the researchers to ignore data that do not match their aims. These studies were also limited by its method of data collection which depends completely on the participants honesty and ability to respond. They may not want to give true answers and may even give answers in favour to represent themselves well.
It is important to look at the effects of digital media on cognitive processes. A study by Small et al. (2009) determined how digital media may improve VWM and cognitive functioning. Through the study he found that, when participants were engaged in an internet search, the part of the brain which is associated with complex reasoning and decision making was recorded of higher levels of activation. Thus, concluded that this experience may alter the brain’s responsiveness inneural circuits controlling complex reasoning and decision making. Though his study showed a positive effect of digital media. However, was conducted with older participants. Therefore, it would be unreliable to generalise it for younger developing children.
Another study by blacker, curby, klobusicky and chein (2014) supported the findings of small et. al (2009) positive impact of exposure to digital media on the capacity of VWM. the experiment consisted thirty nine males students who were separated into two different groups randomly, to investigate how video games could expand the capacity of VWM. the first group were assigned to play an action game and the control group did not play an action game. The participants were told to play their games for an hour a day for 30 days. Action games were chosen by the researchers because it involved rich visual environments. After 30 days, when the participants were tested for their measure of VWM, it was found that those who played the action game had a significant improvement in the measure of VWM in comparision to those who played the controlled game. Therefore coming to the conclusion that the exposure to rich visual environments like the action video games over a period of time, would allow the individual to improve the capacity of VWM.
Brad J. Bushman and Craig A anderson (2009) concluded that they is a decrease in the tendency to help someone due to the exposure of media violence. They conducted two studies with four groups of participants. The participants in the first study was exposed to violent or nonviolent movies and the participants in study two were exposed to violent or non violent games. After this they were placed in a situation, to test their helping behavior. Bushman and Anderson (2009) found that the participants who were exposed to violent media showed a decrease in the tendency to help other compared to those who were exposed to non violent media. Therefore, concluded that exposure to exposure to violent media influences their emotions and empathy. These studies therefore, offer compelling support for the impact of exposure to digital media on cognitive processes.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it appears that the exposure to digital media does have significant impact on a child’s developmental milestone. Each cognitive, physical and social studies favour each of the different milestones. The cognitive studies supports the impact of the cognitive processes such as improvement of the visual working memory.
Still studies in the social branch of psychology supports the social behaviour of an individual by suggesting that exposure to violent digital media does increase the likelihood of the display of aggressive behaviours. The studies reviewed in this paper thus indicates that the the exposure to digital media influences cognitive processes with both negative and positive impacts.
Regardless of digital media influencing our cognitive processes, it appears that exposure to digital media can have a worsened social impact. though there are some positive impacts of the exposure to digital media on the development milestone in children such as life satisfaction and interaction, one huge impact found is increasing aggressive behaviour.
When social impacts were investigated, there were some studies which proved that violent digital media does influence the aggressive behavior displayed by a child. However something that can be questioned is if the exposure to only non violent digital media would have a positive influence on a child behaviour. While an examination of biological factors such as hormones, gene's, etc. is beyond the scope of this paper, the author suggests the inquiry into the biological factors with the exposure to digital media’s impact on the developmental milestone is a worthwhile starting point.
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