Miles, 19
Media consumption: iPhone/iPad/Macbook everyday
Favorite media/technology: Instagram
How do you and your family interact with media/technology?
I usually watch TV in the living room to catch up on college football games. My family and I are big college football fans.
How do you and your friends interact with media/technology?
I communicate over social media like Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat. I use group chats with my guy friends. Groupme conversations for my fraternity.
Were you exposed to media/techonology during your childhood? If not, how early on were you exposed to them?
My parents were relatively relaxed about media use as long as the devices were off by 10pm. I used to watch Nickelodeon shows with brothers on TV. My parents are also big college football fans so I was exposed to TV culture early on during my childhood.
What is your favorite/least favorite thing about media/technology?
Favorite thing is that I can communicate freely and easily with my friends and family. Least favorite thing is how distracting social media and TV is from doing my class work.
What do you use media for?
I mostly use social media to keep in touch with my friends and family. I mostly use technology, like my phone and iPad, to do homework or to do Zoom meetings.
How did you use media during the COVID-19 pandemic?
I have noticed that I used social media to communicate with my friends more during the pandemic because there was limited in-person interactions. I participated in Zoom classes and Zoom meetings during the pandemic and still use Zoom to do my internship over my computer.
What is one thing you want the people who create the media you like to watch/play/ interact with to know?
Media plays a huge role in day-to-day life even in ways that people don’t realize. Therefore, one thing people who create the media should be more aware of is the rapid spreading of information over the internet and create a more safe and welcoming environment for adolescents.
Interviewed by: Julia M. Park, UCLA student
Ariana, 18
Media Consumption: about 5 hours a day
Favorite Media/Technology: TikTok, Netflix
How do you and your family interact with media/technology?
My parents and I watch TV together as a form of bonding. My mom is very involved with social media and is constantly “sharenting” about my life without my permission. I don’t care that she does it, it’s just that she chooses the most awful pictures of me and I honestly feel embarrassed.
How do you and your peers interact with media/technology?
On Sundays I host Milf Manor where we watch this TV show called MILF Manor. It’s the one time a week where my friends and I set a time to ensure we all see each other to catch up and hang out. BeReal is my favorite day-to-day app because I can see what my friends are currently doing at that moment.
What do you use media for?
I use it to distract myself from the concept of aging and facing reality as an “almost adult”. I like it as an outlet from the real world to entertain myself.
What is your favorite/least favorite thing about media/technology?
I think that certain forms of social media can bring people together. On TikTok, there’s always running jokes in the comments that make me laugh and it brightens up my day. It helps me feel more normal as a teenager because I’m not out of the loop with pop culture. My least favorite thing is how draining it can be. I feel like I shouldn’t use it as much as I do and I can be more productive with my time.
What is one thing you want the people who create the media you like to watch/play/interact with to know?
Something I want them to know is to reflect on their morality and what their social media has turned into versus what it was when they started. I can tell their content becomes different the more popular they get and strays away from their authenticity.
What media do you interact with the most?
Short form videos like TikToks.
Where do you get most of your information about what’s happening in the world (e.g., news, internet, parents, etc.)?
TikTok. I think it depends on what the subject is for me to trust the source. If it’s a natural disaster there’s not a lot of ways to distort that but when it’s pertaining more to celebrity news and pop culture, I wouldn't say it’s more reliable than the news.
What media helps you stay busy/stay calm during challenging times?
TikTok. If it’s to stay calm, I wouldn’t read the news or something because it will stress me out, TikTok is very mindless and helps distract me because there’s no thought behind it.
What lessons have you learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and other challenging times?
As bad as the situation was, I learned that once you hit rock bottom, things will get better. Even if the economy drops, it will always come back up, and the world supply of toilet paper will not disappear forever. I spent more time doing activities I never really focused on beforehand like painting, baking, and decorating my room. I started to pick photos for my wall, and decorations for my room and I started to tap more into my own specific interests and what I truly liked for myself. I learned more about myself during the pandemic and I definitely developed more of my personality.
Have you learned anything about how you use media and technology because of the COVID-19 pandemic and other challenging times?
The time I spent on social media expanded on my personality rather than influencing it. I realized the content and people I watched online helped me to understand that my interests and humor are niche but that there are people that understand me as well. I would say that’s a positive factor of the pandemic that I experienced and that my time spent on media during COVID helped me shape myself and personality to the person I am today. I should’ve focused on posting content because now these platforms are being used as an opportunity to make money and get famous. In terms of education, it taught me that education in person isn’t something I necessarily need. I can learn just as well on a computer and it really shows that all classes have the accessibility to be online. Technology allowed me to stay in touch with my friends and family during the pandemic.
Interviewed by: Lillie Yazdi, UCLA student
Why are sitcom dads still so inept?
This article originally appeared on The Conversation June 16, 2020.
From Homer Simpson to Phil Dunphy, sitcom dads have long been known for being bumbling and inept.
But it wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, sitcom dads tended to be serious, calm and wise, if a bit detached. In a shift that media scholars have documented, only in later decades did fathers start to become foolish and incompetent.
And yet the real-world roles and expectations of fathers have changed in recent years. Today’s dads are putting more time into caring for their children and see that role as more central to their identity.
Have today’s sitcoms kept up?
I study gender and the media, and I specialize in depictions of masculinity. In a study I did in 2020, my co-authors and I systematically look at the ways in which portrayals of sitcom fathers have and haven’t changed.
Why sitcom portrayals matter
Fictional entertainment can shape our views of ourselves and others. To appeal to broad audiences, sitcoms often rely on the shorthand assumptions that form the basis of stereotypes. Whether it’s the way they portray gay masculinity in “Will and Grace” or the working class in “Roseanne,” sitcoms often mine humor from certain norms and expectations associated with gender, sexual identity and class.
When sitcoms stereotype fathers, they seem to suggest that men are somehow inherently ill-suited for parenting. That sells actual fathers short and, in heterosexual, two-parent contexts, it reinforces the idea that mothers should take on the lion’s share of parenting responsibilities.
It was Tim Allen’s role as Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor of the 1990s series “Home Improvement” that inspired my initial interest in sitcom dads. Tim was goofy and childish, whereas Jill, his wife, was always ready – with a disapproving scowl, a snappy remark and seemingly endless stores of patience – to bring him back in line. The pattern matched an observation made by TV Guide television critic Matt Roush, who, in 2010, wrote, “It used to be that father knew best, and then we started to wonder if he knew anything at all.”
I published my first quantitative study on the depiction of sitcom fathers in 2001, focusing on jokes involving the father. I found that, compared with older sitcoms, dads in more recent sitcoms were the butt of the joke more frequently. Mothers, on the other hand, became less frequent targets of mockery over time. I viewed this as evidence of increasingly feminist portrayals of women that coincided with their growing presence in the workforce.
Studying the disparaged dad
In our new study, we wanted to focus on sitcom dads’ interactions with their children, given how fatherhood has changed in American culture.
We used what’s called “quantitative content analysis,” a common research method in communication studies. To conduct this sort of analysis, researchers develop definitions of key concepts to apply to a large set of media content. Researchers employ multiple people as coders who observe the content and individually track whether a particular concept appears.
For example, researchers might study the racial and ethnic diversity of recurring characters on Netflix original programs. Or they might try to see whether demonstrations are described as “protests” or “riots” in national news.
For our study, we identified 34 top-rated, family-centered sitcoms that aired from 1980 to 2017 and randomly selected two episodes from each. Next, we isolated 578 scenes in which the fathers were involved in “disparagement humor,” which meant the dads either made fun of another character or were made fun of themselves.
Then we studied how often sitcom dads were shown together with their kids within these scenes in three key parenting interactions: giving advice, setting rules or positively or negatively reinforcing their kids’ behavior. We wanted to see whether the interaction made the father look “humorously foolish” – showing poor judgment, being incompetent or acting childishly.
Interestingly, fathers were shown in fewer parenting situations in more recent sitcoms. And when fathers were parenting, it was depicted as humorously foolish in just over 50% of the relevant scenes in the 2000s and 2010s, compared with 18% in the 1980s and 31% in the 1990s sitcoms.
At least within scenes featuring disparagement humor, sitcom audiences, more often than not, are still being encouraged to laugh at dads’ parenting missteps and mistakes.
Fueling an inferiority complex?
The degree to which entertainment media reflect or distort reality is an enduring question in communication and media studies. In order to answer that question, it’s important to take a look at the data.
National polls by Pew Research Center show that from 1965 to 2016, the amount of time fathers reported spending on care for their children nearly tripled. These days, dads constitute 17% of all stay-at-home parents, up from 10% in 1989. Today, fathers are just as likely as mothers to say that being a parent is “extremely important to their identity.” They are also just as likely to describe parenting as rewarding.
Yet, there is evidence in the Pew data that these changes present challenges, as well. The majority of dads feel they do not spend enough time with their children, often citing work responsibilities as the primary reason. Only 39% of fathers feel they are doing “a very good job” raising their children.
Perhaps this sort of self-criticism is being reinforced by foolish and failing father portrayals in sitcom content.
Of course, not all sitcoms depict fathers as incompetent parents. The sample we examined stalled out in 2017, whereas TV Guide presented “7 Sitcom Dads Changing How we Think about Fatherhood Now” in 2019. In our study, the moments of problematic parenting often took place in a wider context of a generally quite loving depiction.
Still, while television portrayals will likely never match the range and complexity of fatherhood, sitcom writers can do better by dads by moving on from the increasingly outdated foolish father trope.
Professor of Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst
This article originally appeared on The Conversation.