II Education and the Media: Schooling the Adolescent Audience

Abstract

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, alternative perspectives and models are presented. In particular, the need to examine the ways in which the school structures the adolescent audience for the media is stressed.