Temporalities and children’s media encounters

Rebekah Willett

This reflection draws on several studies over the past 5 years which included interviews with children (ages 4–15) and their parents in the US about family media practices. Time is a frequent topic in these conversations. Talking through daily routines, we often hear about allocations of screentime for children and daily routines that involve co-viewing. Family media practices are also part of weekly and seasonal routines: Friday movie nights are common in families, parents have lie-ins on weekends by giving their children more screentime on Saturdays, and screentime rules are more relaxed in summers when time is less structured.

“Clock time” also emerges in discussions with children about their digital making activities (e.g. creating art, videos, code, music). We hear about children using media differently depending on the time available. Part of digital making is playing around with the possibilities of technologies—having Canva create AI generated images that respond to particular prompts, for example. These “messing around” activities (Ito et al., 2009) require small amounts of time and can be done in interstitial moments; and, as one child shared, they require little creative effort. However, when immersed in a complex digital project, investment of time is necessary. Importantly, children indicate that these deeper media encounters allow them to be more creative compared with moments they might spend on a platform or technology as a way to “pass the time”. In their theorization of “living literacies”, Pahl and Rowsell (2020) stress the importance of children having time to experience a “what if state of mind”, particularly in relation to creative activities: “What if I take this sheet of cardboard and use it to make a hydraulic arm? . . . making entails these kinds of fluid, continuous, passion-driven practices that mix reason with sensation” (p. 21). Clock time is connected with different types of digital practice and varying “sensations” of creative making.

However, “clock time” is only one temporal experience framing children’s media encounters. The feeling of time is also important to consider. In their analyses of young children’s sense of time in preschool settings, Dýrfjörð et al. (2023) argue that there is “an embodied sense of time that is subjective, relational and situational” (p. 1). In our discussions with children, we hear how time can “fly” when immersed in a digital making project and can “creep” when a problem arises and frustration ensues. In one of our studies, a child talked about being on their tablet playing Minecraft “all day” one summer day; however, this did not mean she played Minecraft non-stop from morning until night; rather, it felt like the whole day because she was playing Minecraft in between all her other summer activities.

Finally, children express a sense of time passing and feelings of nostalgia in relation to their media practices. Children’s reflections align with Compton-Lilly’s (2016b) temporal discourse analysis of children’s literacy lives. Compton-Lilly writes, “temporal comparisons not only contribute to how families made sense of ongoing experiences, but also to the possible futures they envisioned” (p. 42). Children share recollections about mistakes they made as a “newbie” in a game or online space, positioning themselves as now older and wiser. As children revisit their earlier digital creations, they have memories of what it felt like when they were younger and struggling with what now seems simple, sometimes even nostalgic for times in their past. Looking back also reflects moments of placemaking—children might remember a particular time and place from when they were younger and engaged in a particular digital creation. Memories of making are often infused with relational components—a connection to something they were interested in at that moment of making, a problem a sibling helped them solve, a project they worked on with friends, an old piece of technology that is now handed-down to younger family members, a Scratch club at their former school or a nearby library. If we as researchers are interested in understanding children’s encounters with media and technologies, we need to consider the affordances and constraints of clock time and the more experiential sense of time through which children are making sense of their worlds.