Children’s Cultures and Media Cultures / Special issue of CM - ČASOPIS ZA UPRAVLJANJE KOMUNICIRANJEM - COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT QUARTERLY (29, VIII, 2013)

The connection between children's cultures and media cultures can be considered a privileged area of innovation, in which many different actors and stakeholders (children, parents, educators, producers, marketing agents, regulators, policy makers and, last but not least, scholars) constantly negotiate the meaning of childhood in our globalised societies.In the ever changing landscape of (old and new) media and their audiences, convergence between children’s cultures and media cultures is an increasingly topical field of study. To name but some of the challenges this reality presents, one could note how children and adolescents are continually exposed to the expansion of global digital TV channels addressed to them; how the growing investment in marketing activities is often associated with new forms of publicity and participation in new platforms like SNS sites or mobile communication; how new social practices born of changing family structures and the fast paced rhythm of everyday life make children’s lives not only far more institutionalised, but also increasingly individualistic. In fact, today children’s lives are influenced by a culture that is dominated by personal and mobile media far more than it ever was in past generations. In this special issue, some of the aforementioned topics are studied in greater depth and debated on different levels, starting with children’s experience of everyday life and arriving at the concepts put forward by public policies and institutions. The articles in this special issue are predominantly characterised by an international dimension. Some of them focus on the dialectic between local contexts and the processes of globalisation, sometimes in comparative terms, while others look at cross-national products, such as TV programs or SNSs. The methodology adopted in these studies is heterogeneous, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses. In addition to textual analyses of media documents, audience research tools such as surveys, face to face interviews and focus groups with children appear alongside the virtual ethnography that is delineated through young media users’ interventions on the websites they frequent. The role played by cultural contexts in differentiating children’s media experience emerges in all of these articles, as does the relevance of age, gender and reflexivity in the shaping of children’s agency and participation.