Research On "Childhood Disappearance" In The Media Ecological Environment

Childhood is the first physiological stage that everyone comes into the world, inwhich we have a lot of memories. With continuous progress of society and continuousinnovation of media technology, dramatic changes of our childhood occurred in thismedia ecological environment. Children’s games changes from playing with mud,picking up stones in the past to listening to the radio, watch TV program for children,monochrome game machine in21Century and to the present a variety of new mediagames for children such as computer, tablet game and new game machine.Today’ssociety is the era of rapid-developed science and technology. One new media mayemerge every one or two years on average and the continuous media have a lot ofinfluence on children. By using new media, children broaden their horizons and get alot of knowledge which they could not obtained in schools and books; emergence ofnew media, such as network puzzle games, could improve children’s teamwork abilityand skills of communicating with playmates.Nevertheless, along with new maturingmedia technology, the negative impact of new media on children is prominent gradually.Due to the rapid development of new media, policies and regulations of our countrycould not fully cover all aspects of new media, therefore, some unhealthy informationconveyed by new media may also generate serious negative effects onchildren.Children are unable to discriminate violence in TV and pornographic pictureswhich is easy to induce play children in their growth. Network role-playing games bestreflect these views, because these games are addictive and attract juveniles by lifelikeproduction of violence and setting with pornography hint. Cases of juveniledelinquency caused by the network game can be found everywhere. Excessiveexposure to new media makes children to reduce their time for reading and literacy, butto indulge in entertainment of new media, and take up the time for learning knowledge. The study of children’s media starts earlier at abroad than home, and there is stilla big gap between home and abroad. In the early20thcentury, a great master ofmedia—Professor Schram carried out a wide range of surveys and experiments inNorth America, which provided some basic methods and theoretical framework forlater research on children’s film and television. From the rise of Internet in the late20th century to its present popularity, researchers pay their attention to the impacts ofnew media’s widespread use on children. Domestic researchers began to studieschildren’s media mainly since the early21stcentury, in which an influential andrepresentative researcher is Professor Bu Wei in Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.She had written two books about important role of studies on children’s media: Effecton Mass Media and Children and Media and Education for Children. At this stage, itis widely studies on the relation between children and media at home and abroad, aswell as on the usage features and status of children’s media and all sorts of influenceof media on children. However, there is no extensive system research on mediaecological culture at this stage and “media childhood”—main performance amongchildren, and no theory about the content and essence of media childhood for themoment. The importance of “children’s media” in the current media ecologicalenvironment was not given enough attention, which leading to the lack of variouselements. There is no possible way to establish positive health strategies of children’smedia.In this background, this paper takes status analysis of childhood in mediaecological environment since this stage as the breakthrough point, realizes thechildren’s current situation in media ecological environment at this stage in Chengduand Jinan through questionnaires, analyzes the features of today’s children in mediaecological environment, and finds out that various effects of new media at this stage onchildren.In current media ecological environment, children’s programs present theadult; their games present the violence, as well as many pornographic factors at times.This paper puts forward its own suggestions to these problems and analyzes the twomain causes of “childhood disappearance” in the media ecological environment fromthe perspective of communication studies: the one is society and the other is mediaitself. The causes of social aspect are as follows: firstly, society pays no attention tochildren, thus ignoring the importance of children’s physical and psychologicaldevelopment; secondly, the system of education makes children to participate in socialcompetition prematurely; thirdly, adult environment excessively influences children’sliving environment, and gives impetus to “childhood disappearance”. The media causes of “childhood disappearance” are as follows: firstly, diversification of informationmedia promotes the emergence of “childhood disappearance” phenomena; secondly,the space of children culture is greatly taken up by new media.Based on the abovecauses of “childhood disappearance” phenomenon, this paper puts forward thestrategies and methods on how to solve “childhood disappearance” in the mediaecological environment. Besides, this paper provides several ways to strictly regulatechildren’s media information from the source of communication of children mediainformation, presents the methods on how to improve children’s own media literacyfrom perspective of all aspects of society, as well as suggestions on how to strengthenthe management of children’s media from the perspective of the country.Overall, this paper focuses on the cause of “Childhood Disappearance” in mediaecological environment, aims to provide some feasible comments and suggestions onhow to tackle this problem based on “Childhood Disappearance”, in order to lookforward to contributing to the development of children healthy growth of our country.