Media and the Family: A Note From the Guest Editors

To say that ' 'the media' ' are constantly changing is an understatement. In just a few short years, the face of media has entirely changed. Just over a decade ago, many people did not own a computer, children listened to music on compact CD players, e-mail was just taking off, and cell phones were primarily for the wealthy and were the approximate size of a brick. Now, the vast majority of Americans have a home computer, CDs are becoming extinct as MP3 players gain steam, social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter, have millions of members, and the majority of Americans (including teenagers and many children) report they could not "live" without their cell phone (Rainie & Keeter, 2006). Teenagers and children are not the only ones who "can't live" without new media. In a recent survey (Popkin, 2011), for example, 3,000 British adults said the top five things they could not "live without" were sunshine, the Internet, clean drinking water, refrigerators, and Facebook. Flushing toilets came in ninth. "Brits are obsessed by the weather, so it's not surprising sunshine was rated as the top thing we couldn't live without, ' ' said the pollster. ' ' But to say you can't live without material things over drinking water is crazy." Humans have social needs that social networking sites like Facebook can help meet, but to rank Facebook ahead of physical needs such as food and water seems paradoxical. Additionally, media are becoming increasingly accessible and portable. With the growing popularity of portable devices, such as smartphones, PSPs, and iPads, we can now access almost any content, anywhere, at any time. No wonder parents are overwhelmed and worried about the role of media in their children's lives (Padilla-Walker, 2006)!The idea for this special issue came out of a small gathering of scholars for a conference on "media and the family' ' at Brigham Young University. As we discussed the current literature, we realized that, although much research had been conducted on individual effects of media (such as playing violent video games on subsequent aggressive behavior; Anderson et al., 2010), very little research had specifically focused on how families use and are influenced by the media. The scant research that did exist often focused on a few narrow topics and was often outdated; media change so fast that it is extremely difficult for the academic world to keep up. As we discussed ways to move the field forward, we came up with some key issues that we thought media and family scholars should examine. Many of the articles in this special issue focus on these topics and are outlined below. We also provide some additional recommendations in this introduction that will hopefully inspire researchers interested in this topic and will substantively move the field forward.First, we thought family scholars should be aware of how other disciplines are studying media effects. Many other disciplines have studied the topic of family and media, including psychology, sociology, communication, education, and economics. In this issue, Price and Dahl give us an excellent review of how this topic is studied from an economic perspective. They give insight into methodologies that family scholars rarely but certainly could use.We also noted that media can be used in many different family contexts, although many of these have not been fully examined. According to family systems theory, to understand how media influence the family as a whole, it is important to examine media use in a variety of family relationships (see Broderick, 1993; Galvin, Dickinson, & Marrow, 2006). This special issue has a number of articles examining media in family relationships. Most notably, there have recently been a few studies examining media use in romantic relationships (e.g., Coyne, Stockdale, Busby, Iverson, & Grant, 2011; Muise, Christofides, & Desmarais, 2009; Pettigrew, 2009). This special issue extends this research with three new studies on how couples use the media to either enhance or impair their romantic relationship. …