Study: Tween viewers get new message about fame
LOS ANGELES — As a parent, Yalda Uhls found herself immersed a decade ago in TV series including “Hannah Montana,” “iCarly” and “Victorious,” and uneasy about the message they sent to her 9-year-old daughter and other youngsters.
“They were all about these people getting famous at a very young age,” Uhls said, suggesting that celebrity above all was the key to popularity and happiness.
When Uhls made the shift from Hollywood studio executive to academic at the University of California, Los Angeles, she looked more closely at the issue.
Uhls devised a study of the values prominent in shows most popular with “tweens” — the catchall name for youngsters age 8 to 12 — over five decades starting in 1967.
Fame, it turns out, may indeed be fleeting, according to newly released research, a sequel to her previous work with colleagues at UCLA.
Being famous, which ranked No. 1 on a list of 16 values measured in the top-rated tween shows in 2007, fell to sixth in 2017, with achievement and self-acceptance in the No. 1 and 2 spots and community feeling not far behind at No. 5.
The study focused on tweens in part because they consume more TV than any other media, including gaming, and averaged between four to six hours daily depending on family income level, according to 2019 figures.
Youngsters nearing adolescence also are especially susceptible to media influence as they “dream about their future by shaping their value systems,” the study said.
The new research found that the comedies “Girl Meets World” and “The Thundermans” seemed to be “driving a shift” away from an emphasis on fame, but competition series “American Ninja Warrior” and “America’s Got Talent” continued to reflect the trend of “self-focused values” as seen in 2007.
“If tweens watch, admire and identify with people who mostly care about fame and winning, these values may become even more important in our culture,” the report’s lead author, Agnes Varghese, said in a statement.
In earlier years, the study found that community feeling, benevolence and tradition were stressed in hit series including “The Andy Griffith Show” from 1967; “Happy Days,” 1977; “Growing Pains,” 1987; and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” 1997.
Community ranked first in three of those years, falling once to No. 2. Then fame, which had lingered at the bottom of the list, jumped to first in 2007, with researchers attributing the shift to the embrace of social media platforms including Facebook and YouTube.
In revisiting the subject for 2017, “we were seeing if that trend was still happening because by then social media wasn’t such a new thing,” said Uhls.
Another factor that led researchers to expect fame’s allure to have receded from tween shows was the backlash against the influence of social media on youngsters, she said.
©2019 Knight Features. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.