Resources - Discussion Papers

The Book, The TV Series, The Web Site ...
Teaching and learning within the communicational webs
of popular media culture

Helen Nixon, Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures, School of Education,
University of South Australia, Underdale

A keynote address presented at the 2001 AATE/ALEA Joint National Conference

Helen Nixon

ABSTRACT

In this paper I speculate about the implications for literacy educators of the concept of communicational webs (Kress, 2000). I make specific reference to the changing media, modes of communication and meaning-making practices likely to be engaged in by children and adolescents as they operate within the communicational webs of popular media culture structured by books, magazines, film, television and web sites. Examples are drawn from Dawson’s Creek and Teletubbies.

KEY WORDS

Education, Literacy, Popular Culture, Media Education, English Curriculum.

INTRODUCTION

The theme for my talk - "The book, the TV series and the Web site" - arises from my interest in young people’s engagements with popular media culture and information and communications technologies (ICTs). In this talk I want to focus on the ways the book, popular media culture and ICTs come together in the worlds of many children and adolescents.

I have been thinking about children’s interest in and engagement with the traditional and new media during Term 2 this year as I was observing students in the middle years at work in their English classrooms. As part of what we have called the ‘electronic writing’ project, I was observing what happened in a Year 8 class in a low socio-economic area of Adelaide. Their English teacher was working with the assistance of a resource person from our state education department’s the Technology School of the Future (http://www.tsof.edu.au/LT.SA/) to integrate ICTs into the English curriculum. In that classroom students were working in groups to make i-movie versions of poetry they had written. I-movie is Macintosh compatible software that allows students to edit digital text, images, sounds and music into professional looking movies. These can either be played on a large screen from the computer through a projector or can be downloaded into analogue form and played on VHS VCRs.

It’s too premature to talk in any detail about the literacy implications of this project. However, I was struck by the tensions felt by the teacher about what was and was not ‘proper’ work for the English classroom. She was, for example, feeling guilty that she was devoting less time teaching the novel. I was also interested to note that some of the distinctions the teacher wanted to maintain between books and other media seemed fairly irrelevant to her students. On their classroom walls, writing from earlier in the year routinely alluded to the television programs Buffy the Vampire Slayer and South Park. In their discussion of how their new poems might look when published in multimedia form, student suggestions for imagery and effects made reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the music of Eminem and the soundtrack of the film Gladiator. Conversely, in the computer room, as students waited for their turn to be shown some of the resources they could use as sound or graphic designers for their new multimedia text, one student ignored his computer screen completely and turned his attention to the book he carried with him, the book of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. Meanwhile, at other computer workstations, I saw copies of Oliver Twist and the Harry Potter books lying idle for the moment. That is to say students used the media most appropriate to their current purposes, switching effortlessly between the book and the computer. It wasn’t an either-or situation for them. They did not regard one medium as superior than the other. This has also been borne out in the discussions we’ve had with them so far.

These observations may not surprise teachers of many 10 to 15 year-olds across Australia. Today I want to explore some hypotheses about this phenomenon and some of the teaching and learning implications that might follow from it. In particular, I want to think about the complex interrelationships that now exist between the range of meaning-making resources that young people engage with inside and outside school.

THE NEW COMMUNICATIVE ORDER AND COMMUNICATIONAL WEBS

Within the fields of literacy and English education it is now commonplace to argue that young people are experiencing changing literacy practices and new forms of communication associated with computers and the new media. As Brian Street (2001) has noted in a recent book called Powerful Literacies, teachers are educating children for life in a ‘new work order’ as well as a new ‘communicative order’. Both the new work order and the new communicative order are tied up with economic and cultural globalisation and the convergence of old media with new information and communication technologies (ICTs). Street writes that one of the consequences of the new communicative order for literacy education is that children are:

going to have to learn how to handle …. the iconic systems evident in many communicative practices. These include the kinds of icons and the signs evident in computer displays like the Word for Windows package, with all its combinations of signs, symbols, boundaries, pictures, words, texts, images, etc (Street, 2001, p. 15).

It seems to me English/literacy educators are unable as yet to anticipate all the complexities and implications of such shifts in communicative and meaning-making practices and from verbal to visual modes of communication (Kress, 1997, 2000; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) and I imagine that these issues will continue to exercise our minds for some time to come.

Where can we turn to help us think through the theoretical implications of the new communicative order and associated changing meaning-making practices? I find the work of Gunther Kress very helpful in this regard. In a paper called "A curriculum for the future", Kress (2000) considers the new practices of communication and meaning making that young people now engage in. He argues that children today experience communication in what he terms new ‘communicational webs’. He suggests that these communicational webs have implications for how young people become literate, and for how educators might need to design appropriate literacy and English curriculum for the future. Kress illustrates his notion of communicational webs using a description of the communication and literacy practices of a 12-year-old boy and his 10-year-old sister. He writes:

Kress points out that it is possible that the communicational webs of school and beyond school are differently structured, perhaps more so for the 12 year old boy than the 10 year old girl. He suggests that communicational webs are likely to be different in different contexts and for different children of different ages.

Thus Kress alerts us to the possibility that there may be different manifestations of age and gender inclusion and exclusion in electronically mediated learning contexts than in traditional print-focused classrooms. As classroom based studies have shown, even young people of the same age have a range of different profiles as technology users. For example Upitis (1998) categorised adolescents’ characteristics as computer users into seven types or profiles that she labelled hackers, game players, game creators, reluctant users, luddites, eager users and sporadic users. In another study, Vered (1998) showed how girls and boys demonstrated quite different patterns of social interaction and communications practice around computers even when they self-selected what they did and who they engaged with. Girls and boys took up and refused different opportunities, pursued different goals, and operated differently as individuals and groups while engaged in computer-based activity. Thus it seems likely that children’s differing access to and dispositions towards the media and ICT-related communication and culture may provide particular challenges for the development of an inclusive curriculum for the future (Nixon, 2001).

Another point to note from the Kress quotation cited above, is that although children’s communicational webs may include the medium of the book, the screen may be becoming dominant and may be restructuring the page. Similarly, the visual mode of communication may be gaining priority over the written mode. Using examples drawn from contemporary science textbooks, Kress shows that visual images are used to convey central information. They carry the meaning. Visual images are no longer merely illustrations that serve to support or explain print as they have been in the past (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). For Kress it follows that in order to develop and teach an appropriate literacy/English curriculum for the future, educators need to think differently about how children communicate and make meaning in a world of communication no longer centred on the page and the printed book. Moreover, he suggests it may be necessary for educators to explore the communicational webs in which young people operate and investigate the practices they engage in as they do so.

Kress contends that research needs to be done into how some of the new media forms and modes of communication are actually experienced by children in their daily lives as they operate within communicational webs. However, it is by no means obvious how this might be achieved, nor what curriculum and pedagogical implications might follow from it. Certainly ethnographic work with children inside and outside classrooms presents a range of challenges and, judging from my present experience on the electronic writing project, the difficulties of collecting useful data from observations of and interviews with children are amplified when computers are involved. While acknowledging the complexities of conducting the kind of ethnographic research Kress suggests is needed, I want to go on in the next section of this paper to suggest that the examination of television program web sites - and changing media and modes of communication they illustrate — may inform our understanding of communicational webs.

COMMUNICATIONAL WEBS AND POPULAR MEDIA CULTURE

But first, let us consider what we already know about the forms of media and modes of communication with which children and adolescents engage, and why this information might be important. Recent studies conducted in the UK and North America (Buckingham, 2000) and in Australia (ABS, 2001; A.C. Nielsen, 2001; Burton, 1999) suggest that television remains central to young people’s leisure time. This is not surprising in Australia given that in 2000, 62% of homes had two or more television sets, 64% had one VCR and 24% had two or more VCRs (AC Nielsen, 2001). Although the time spent watching television has decreased marginally in the last few decades for children aged 5-12 and teens aged 13-17, the extra time is largely spent engaging with other newer media such as video games or chat rooms on the Internet. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS, 2001) figures for Children’s Participation in Cultural and Leisure Activities in April 2000 show that the main leisure activities for young people aged between 5 and 14 were watching TV or videos, playing electronic or computer games and bike riding. Participation rates ranged from 31% participation in art and craft activities to 97% for watching TV and videos. During or outside school hours, 95% of children aged 5-14 used a computer and 47% had accessed the Internet within the previous 12 months. They had been:

• using email or chat rooms (51.5%)
• playing games (39%)
•  using the web for school or educational (82%) purposes
•  browsing the internet for pleasure (49%)
• using the internet for other (6.3%) purposes.

Similarly, a recent national sample of students in 399 schools found that 85% of all students used computers outside schools, more than half the students (65%) knew how to connect to the web, and 38% could make a web site or a home page (Meredyth et al. 1999). It seems the media engaged with by most young Australians resemble those engaged with by the 12 and 10-year-old children described by Kress.

What do such statistics mean? As David Buckingham’s (2000) research suggests, figures like this, when combined with empirical research, tell us that the electronic media play an increasingly significant role in defining the cultural experiences of contemporary childhood. Buckingham’s research in the 1990s focused on children and television. However, in his recent book After the Death of Childhood, he makes the case that the ‘new media’ such as video and computer games and other forms of multimedia are likely to play no less significant a role in defining children’s cultural experiences in the coming years. Alongside the ‘old’ media of television, the ‘new’ digital media now constitute powerful new sites of education and resources for meaning making (cf. Morgan, 1995). Despite such research, school curriculum has by and large failed to capitalise on children’s interests in and knowledges about television and other newer media. Some researchers in the field of literacy education argue that this neglect has been to the detriment of many young people of school age (e.g. Bean, 1998, Dyson, 1997, Marsh, 2000, O’Brien, 1998). It is argued that for some children there is a large gap between home literacies and school literacies that might be bridged by the integration of popular culture into the curriculum. Other theorists point out that mobile technologies in particular "radically destabilize the institutional contexts in which pedagogical and other power relationships are achieved" (Holmes & Russell, 1999). According to this argument, the home and the school are becoming less distinct from each other as ‘locations’ for the development of literacies associated with new media.

Dyson’s (1997) extensive longitudinal studies of the writing processes of third and fourth grade students in the USA shows how children appropriate popular media cultural forms such as sports broadcasts and rap music. She has shown that there are at least five things which children appropriate from the media. These are:

• content
• communications forms
• graphic conventions
• voiced utterances
• ideologies.

Dyson argues that there are benefits for students when teachers find ways to take advantage of children’s appropriation and transformation of media content and conventions in their writing. She advocates that teachers allow children to play around with what they bring to the classroom from the commercial world of the media and popular culture as an important step towards the production of powerful writing. This might mean allowing the acting out of stories before writing, allowing children to play with voices, to present poetry as performance and so on. Thus she suggests that teachers work with students’ obvious pleasures in popular media culture while remaining aware that they may also be taking up particular ideological positions in relation to race, class and gender that are on offer. In Australia Ray Misson (1998) has argued the necessity - but also the complexity — of English curriculum that works with the principles of both pleasure and ideology critique.

Jackie Marsh’s research in the UK supports the view that the introduction of popular culture into the curriculum has very positive benefits for the literacy development of young working class children. With co-researcher Elaine Millard, Marsh (2001) showed how classroom borrowing of comics in Reception, Year 1 and Year 3 helped some children to read both print and visual elements of texts, a requirement that was replicated in school textbooks. It also provided opportunities for children who had been quiet and shy to contribute to discussions about reading. Many of these were girls. The interactive nature of the comics (e.g. as provided by puzzles and pictures to colour in) was their most popular feature for students in both Reception/Year 1 and Year 3 classes (Millard & Marsh, 2001, p. 32).

In another project in two nursery schools in Northern England, Marsh (2000) investigated the introduction of literacy activities related to the television program Teletubbies. She found that the incorporation of these popular cultural texts into the curriculum provided motivation and excitement for many children, some of whom were not usually participants in talk and writing activities. The activities introduced into the curriculum included:

Marsh found that "the Teletubbies had induced children who were normally disengaged with literacy events in the nursery to read and write" (p. 125). With a few exceptions, these were working class boys. Thus Marsh found that the use of texts from popular culture in the curriculum and the integration of home experiences with school literacy provided young children with a means of locating new understandings within a familiar discourse.

Research shows that this can also be the case for many older children who stop reading as much in the middle years of schooling - even if only temporarily - to spend more time engaging with popular cultural forms and in social interaction with peers (Bean, 1998; O’Brien, 1998). These findings are supported by recent research into young Australians’ reading and other leisure pursuits that showed there was a marked gap in positive attitudes to reading between primary and secondary aged students (Australian Centre for Youth Literature (ACYL), 2001). As Bean (1998) and others have noted, just at the age when young people are more inclined to respond affectively to their surroundings, the school curriculum requires them to engage in reading and writing for academic rather than affective purposes. Popular culture, on the other hand, provides them with material against which to test their identities and with which to connect socially with liked-minded peers. Audience research into the reading and viewing patterns of children and young adolescents suggests that young people use popular culture as one way to ‘learn’ about and identify with people who are several years older than they are (Buckingham, 2000). Pre-teens’ viewing choices are informed by a broad sense of a 'teen' lifestyle, to which many of them aspire, even when they don’t yet see themselves as teenagers. It also seems important for certain children to demonstrate that they are ‘in the know’ and can ‘get’ the joke, innuendo and references in some programs enjoyed by older viewers. It is important to them that they are regarded by peers and adults as grown up and sophisticated (Davies et al., 2000, pp. 14-15).

The importance of popular media culture to young people was acknowledged in the report Young Australians Reading (ACYL, 2001). The report recommended attempting to reach young people aged 10-18 with positive messages about reading through cinema, TV and magazines, and by linking interactive Internet sites about books to other popular sites. The rationale of this approach is supported by ABS (2001) information about children’s leisure and cultural pursuits gained from surveys of 9,700 households. During or outside of school hours, 95% of 5-14 year olds use a computer. 49% of home computer users aged 12-14 and 35.8% of those aged 9-11 spend time accessing the Internet. Other surveys of media use suggest that young people’s Internet use is primarily associated with popular media culture. Many of the web sites and chat rooms visited by young people relate to their interests in other media such as music, film, television and video and computer games (Burton, 1999). Fan web sites of all kinds are particularly popular with young web users.

It is my argument today that the examination of such web sites can inform us about some of the changing media, modes of communication and meaning making resources that constitute the communicational webs in which children and adolescents operate. My discussion is exploratory. It is not intended as an uncritical promotion of commercially produced web sites. My aim is limited to pointing out some of the features of communicational webs that I believe bear closer critical examination by researchers, teachers and students alike. In the final two sections of the paper I’ll illustrate my points with reference to the web sites of two television programs that target two different demographics: Dawson’s Creek and Teletubbies. [1]

Inter-relationships between the book/magazine, the TV series and the web site

I have suggested that many of the communicative practices in which young people engage in their leisure time are very different from the practices on offer in most classrooms. This is despite the fact that popular cultural forms constitute significant new sites for learning and resources for meaning making. I find this a compelling reason for the purposeful introduction of popular cultural material into the classroom, despite the potential hazards of working with material that some young people may consider their own domain, or that some adults may consider inappropriate. I realize that many popular cultural texts raise value-laden issues of an aesthetic, ethical and moral nature, but this is not my focus today (see Giroux, 1994; Misson, 1998; Nixon, in press).

I now want to use two web sites to explore some of the complex inter-relationships that exist between the book or magazine, the TV series and the web site, and make the argument that such web sites can provide a useful base for research and teaching and learning about communicational webs.

The communicational webs of adolescents

One site that I have been visiting over the last few years is the official web site of the teen television drama Dawson’s Creek. From creator and executive producer Kevin Williamson the television series Dawson’s Creek focuses on the everyday lives and teenage angst of a group of young people (originally aged 15-16 years of age) living in Capeside, a small fictional harbourside town in Massachusetts, USA. For over three series now audiences have followed the main character Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek), along with his childhood friends Joey Potter (Katie Holmes) and Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson) and several other regular senior high school characters as they find ways to establish and maintain friendships, to establish autonomy from parents and peers, and come to terms with sex and sexuality. In the current and fourth series the characters are in their senior year of high school (and graduated on Adelaide screens on July 5, 2001).

First broadcast in the USA in 1998 and in Australia in 1999, Dawson’s Creek quickly established a high level of popularity among young audiences. And this popularity has not been confined to the medium of television. Official spin-off books in the young adult book category (Pocket Books) began publication in 1998 and these have now been supplemented by the Dawson’s Creek Suspense Series. Nor has the popularity of the series waned. AC Nielsen research shows that in the year 2000, Dawson’s Creek rated as the fourth highest television series among Australian viewers aged 13-17 years (behind Friends, Popstars and Spin City). The longevity and global appeal of the program is reflected in the fact that several years after its launch, photographs of the main characters continue to feature on the covers of media and teen magazines the world over, including the Paris TV guide (September 23-30, 2000) and the Canadian version of the new magazine title Teen Vogue (Spring, Canada 2001).

The program continues to receive extensive cross-media exposure and has created multiple media spin-offs. There have now been two successful music CDs of Songs From Dawson's Creek produced by Sony Tri-star, makers of the TV series. Every one of the young actors from the central group of characters has appeared in at least one feature film. Their cross-over from television to film has been facilitated by creator Williamson’s career as a scriptwriter of high-grossing ‘teen’ horror films Scream (1996), Scream 2 (1997) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). In addition, Columbia Tri Star Interactive (Sony), the company behind Dawson’s Creek and its CDs, also produces films that feature roles for the series’ characters (e.g. the film Go in 1999 for Katie Holmes). Such cross-overs are indicative of the opportunities for capital investment in the Dawson’s Creek ‘brand’.

But let’s turn now to some of the features of the Dawson’s Creek site that may help illustrate Kress’s concept of communicational webs. What media other than television are represented or referenced on the site? What modes of communication and meaning making are on offer to site visitors? What kinds of communicational webs are implied by what is made available on this site and therefore likely to be the kind of webs engaged in by young television fans?

The site home page includes the headings:

• Episode Guide
• Web Stuff
• Chats
• Music
• Stars
• Gallery
• Shop the Creek.

Assumed to be of general interest to visitors is not only information about program episodes, music and ‘stars’, but also opportunities to engage with other viewers in chat sessions. In addition, there are opportunities to ‘collect’ images of the stars and the series from the Gallery and to buy Dawson’s Creek merchandise such as T shirts, caps, diaries and books.

*(Show home page: note information about the program in clip of the week, episode guide, character updates, news and notes, etc. Note also extension material such as Capeside High Online Yearbook, summer diaries, poll, etc. Have not captured design elements of movement, e.g top of page in which a boat and oar are rocking on the water, and a banner moving from left to right signals that the program is broadcast ‘Wednesdays @ 8pm on the WB’).

Let’s return to our inquiry into what media and modes of communication are being represented, referenced and cross-referenced on sites like this. Some of the older media assumed to be of interest to site users include film, television and music CDRom. The Dawson’s Creek Music Guide contains an archive of information about music from the four series. Links on this page enable users to access information about titles, lyrics and artists, as well as play sound clips and music video clips.

*(Show page: note competitions, awards, opportunities to suggest songs for particular episodes, and have questions answered by composers. Connections are also made to music from other teen TV programs, - e.g. Party of Five, Felicity - and the page features clips of the program stars singing)

Some of the newer media assumed to be of interest to users include web pages, digital video and audio, the mobile phone and hand-held computer. These are some of the new media structuring the communicational webs in which today’s teenagers operate.

*(Show example: Web Stuff (www.dawsonscreek.com/web/index.html) wallpaper, screensavers, e-cards that can be emailed to friends.)

*(Show example: mobiles (www.dawsonscreek.com/mobile/ "Get the latest on Dawson’s Creek from your cell phone or pda")

Users clicking on the Mobile/PDA Channel link on the homepage are invited to "Get the latest on Dawson's Creek from your cell phone or pda". A hypertext then guides users through the steps required to subscribe to and download the Dawson Channel on to personal digital assistants (pdas) such as hand-held computers or wireless web-enabled mobile phones.

These media also provide opportunities for engagement in newer modes of communication, some of which are integrated into the site. These modes of communication include:

• email
• internet chat
• digital movie-editing
• internet gaming.

For example, the Trivia Chat Challenge invites US viewers to tune in each Thursday night to play a game in which they "go head-to-head with other Dawson fanatics to see who really knows Capeside, and who’s pulling a Pacey".

WATCH CAREFULLY, die-hard fans! All new Thursday Night Trivia questions will be all about the episode that aired the night before. We'll be working hard to stump you on the tiniest, most minute details from Wednesday night! So pay close attention - and enjoy the New, even tougher Thursday Night Trivia game!

The characters’ desktop feature of the Dawson’s Creek site is also interesting in that it functions as a form of induction for young fans into the whole gamut of activities now possible on desktop computers. This is a fairly explicit example of the pedagogical function of such web sites and the links between this function and commercial objectives.

*(Show example: Dawson’s desktop)

Similarly, the Movie-Pro Mixer Shockwave software located on ‘Dawson’s desktop’ allows users to edit and play pre-selected clips from the series. The editing software allows users to combine music clips with selected images and write their own text as closing credits. The ‘films’ that they produce on their own desktop can then be emailed to friends. This facility offers the opportunity not only to try out movie editing software, but also to try on the role of amateur filmmaker that the main character Dawson Leery occupies in the TV program. Thus the web site continues to offer users the kinds of subject positions that are offered in other popular cultural forms such as magazines but also provides the tools by which this ‘identification’ can be taken to further levels of involvement.

Elsewhere on the web site can be found a ‘personality test’ that informs fans which character they most resemble. Teen magazines have offered similar quizzes. Such features are attractive to pre and young teens in particular because they enable the pleasures of ‘trying on’ a range of range of identities, attitudes and values. Although the web site includes similar features (personality test, star and viewer diaries, private ‘class notes’ that the characters supposedly pass in class and web users can email to friends, online year-book for signing, etc), the difference between the magazine and the web site is that the latter makes integral to this identity work the ‘trying on’ of new media, and the ‘trying out’ of new forms of electronic communication.

*(Show examples: Personality test on web site and quiz from Dolly (March 1999)).

(The hugely popular web site of the television series Big Brother  would also have made an interesting study in this regard. For example, the site contains opportunities for fining out ‘intimate’ details about participants and life in the Big Brother house. These include diary entries for each day the house has been occupied and records of the opinions and ‘memories’ of evicted Big Brother participants. In addition, the weekly updating of the site as well as invitations to sample webcast streaming and participate in online polling, nominations and voting, highlight the appeal for teenagers and youth of the very fluid, interactive and mobile worlds associated with new media.)

The Dawson’s Creek site offers adolescents opportunities to experience older forms of communication using reading and writing but also newer multi-modal forms of communication that incorporate word, image and music. They also provide opportunities for users to learn about new media forms and to engage in various kinds of interactivity using several modes of communication, some of which — like wireless web casting - are probably new to many of us. My point is that many of the communicational webs in which today’s adolescents operate outside school are likely to be structured by media and modes of communication similar to those we find represented here. And, as Kress has suggested, there are obviously implications for how children who operate in such communicational webs become literate and how these literacies might be incorporated into the curriculum.

The communicational webs of young children

For my second example of the complex inter-relationships between the book/magazine, the TV series and the web site I have chosen the television program Teletubbies. Co-produced by BBC Children’s Programming, BBC Education and BBC Worldwide, Teletubbies is, like Dawson’s Creek, situated within global networks of multimedia marketing, even though its target audience is aged between 18 months and 5 years. With the children’s a market worth 2.5 billion pounds a year in the UK alone (Buckingham, 1998, p. 15), a program like Teletubbies means big business. Pre-school television programs have long generated toys and other tie-in products but are now also a major market for sell-through video, and for ‘educational’ books and magazines like those associated with programs such as Teletubbies. My colleague Rosie Kerin, who owned an Angus and Robertson bookshop franchise in Adelaide when they launched the Teletubbies merchandise, tells me that the merchandise included small stuffed teletubbies, expensive ($60) talking teletubbies, mugs, key rings, T shirts, CDs, book and tape sets, stamps, stickers, plates, cutlery, child-size costumes, and books. She remembers well-educated parents buying for their young children all four of the expensive talking dolls. We can get a sense of the BBC’s investment in and profit from Teletubbies if we consider that 260 of the 25-minute programs were commissioned for production at a total cost of 8.5 million pounds sterling. Earning one third of BBC Worldwide’s revenue in 1997-8, Teletubbies must have brought in at least 250 million pounds sterling for BBC Worldwide for that original 8.5 million pound investment (Buckingham, 1998, p. 15).

What can we learn about the communicational webs being constructed for young children by examining the Teletubbies web site? The first thing to notice is that some of its structural features are very similar to the Dawson’s Creek site. The site is divided into four sections. The first three sections titled Playground, Activities and Gallery, provide information about the program and possibilities for interaction such as submission of coloured pictures and drawings to be displayed in the Gallery. The third section, Goodies, provides information about and opportunities to purchase Teletubbies merchandise. The site includes additional links to a Newsletter and a separate section for parents.

*(Show home page)

The site also functions as an archive about the program that includes press releases and news stories that have appeared since the program was first broadcast on March 31^st, 1997. The creators Anne Woods and Andy Davenport explain their inspiration for the program:

The Teletubby characters were inspired by the idea of a soft toy which a child clings to as emotional support and this was joined to the idea of technology. "We did this by taking a television - the most magical piece of technology for a child - and it put on the tummy of a soft toy. We developed the characters from that, creating technological babies - the Teletubbies."

Unlike the Dawson’s Creek site which is likely to be visited mainly by teenagers and young adults, the Teletubbies site makes specific reference to the supposed ‘educational’ value of the program and therefore targets parents as well as children. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) listed and answered on the site that address the educational nature of the program include:

• What sort of research was there?
• What was the reason for the babyish voices?
• Why are the inserts repeated?
• How important is the sound in Teletubbies?
• Is the audience being exploited?
• Should young children be watching television?

I find particularly interesting the creators’ defense of the program on educational grounds. Some of their comments reproduced on the site include:

"I believe television and video are the most underestimated force in educating our children in the technological age," comments Anne. …. Those who say, ‘I never let my child watch TV,’ are denying their children an opportunity to learn."

Teletubbies are extremely good role models: they’re active; they’re social; they love each other; they support each other; they approach everything with enthusiasm and with curiosity; and they are extremely positive. What’s more, all the evidence is that when children watch television they are not vegetating: they are dancing with the Teletubbies; they are singing with the Teletubbies; they are answering back and telling the Teletubbies what to do.

Teletubbies is designed to develop thinking skills so that children will be ready for more formal learning.

Because such justifications sit well with common understandings of early childhood development, they are likely to appeal to parents who want access to quality television programming and quality educational material for their children. However, the placement of such comments in the context of a BBC Online website also lends support to BBC Education’s recent incursion into the online education provision of school curriculum (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/schools/). In a small way the Teletubbies website does what BBC Schools Online aims to do - support education provision in the home through media other than books.

But let’s return to other features of the Teletubbies website that can inform us about how the communicational webs of young children are being structured by changing media and modes of communication. The Activities section resembles closely the Teletubbies magazine. (The ‘educational’ magazine is what the industry calls a ‘brand extension’ of the television program (Buckingham, 1998).) The only difference is that some activities on the website have to be printed before they can be completed. Other activities, however, use the capabilities of multimedia software to introduce sound clips.

*(Show examples of magazine page and web page ‘activities’ and ‘print and make’.)

The Goodies and Playground sections of the site, however, work much like the Desktop and Web pages of the Dawson’s Creek site in that they induct users into the capabilities and use of the desktop computer and online multimedia. In this context, the child’s ‘playground’ is very clearly the space of the computer screen. The fun games and activities to be played there are electronic and multi-modal in nature and introduce the manipulation of graphics, sound and movement on the screen. At the same time, the games’ listed software and hardware requirements induct parents into the capabilities and requirements of computer systems.

*(Show examples from Playground page).

The games on the Playground page of the Teletubbies site include:

The Goodies page of the website supplements this kind of pedagogy about computers, as do the Tips at the top right hand side of many of the web pages. For example, the Goodies page asserts that it "has lots of cool things for your computer". These include desktop patterns, sound clips, Teletubby postcards and quicktime panoramas of the Tubbytronic Superdome where the Teletubbies live. The Tip on this page explains to users how web pages work, including how to get back to the ‘front page’ of the site.

*(Show examples from the Goodies page).

CONCLUSION

In this paper I have singled out for examination the web sites of two television series popular with different audiences as the basis for exploring Kress’s (2000) concept of communicational webs. Both web sites suggest that the communicational webs in which many young people operate are being structured by changing media and modes of communication including wireless mobile phones, web sites, email, Internet chat and internet gaming as well as more traditional media such as books, television and film. This may reflect changing models of mass communication in which web sites are being developed as complements, supplements or substitutes for broadcast TV programming that are in turn supplemented by videos, CDRoms, magazines and books (Sefton-Green, in press). However, I would argue that this also supports Kress’s contention that emergent literacies are increasingly organised and realised in mixed-mode, multimedia forms and contexts. This is likely to have significant implications for the development of appropriate literacy/English curriculum for the future.

Clearly more socially situated empirical research needs to be done into how young people actually engage with this range of media and modes of communication. However, the examples I have discussed are indicative of the dense webs of media inter-textuality and global capital investment in which young consumers of popular culture operate today. It is important that these young consumers’ interests are taken seriously by educators and that opportunities are provided for them to explore the nature and political implications of the changing forms of media and communication in which their lives are embedded. Children and adolescents deserve to have some meta level understanding of the phenomenon in which text, viewer and producer are meeting in more diverse, intimate and interactive ways than ever before (Sefton-Green, in press). For me this makes the analysis of communicational webs relevant to literacy and English curriculum because that is the space where the study of communication and meaning making practices by young people can be taken seriously. There we can no longer focus on the book alone. Rather, we must rise to the challenge of thinking together the book, the TV series and the web site.

REFERENCES

Meredyth, D., Russell, N., Blackwood, L., Thomas, J., & Wise, P. (1999). Real time: Computers, change and schooling. National Sample study of the information technology skills of Australian school students. Canberra, ACT: Australian Key Centre for Media and Policy.

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