Networked World-Making: Children’s Encounters with Media Objects

Abstract

How do screen media transpire through the spatialities, temporalities, and socialities of Arabic-speaking children and their processes of world making? This chapter addresses the complex dynamics of children’s media use and preferences by going back to these everyday mediated encounters to unravel the multiple layering of space and time in relation to the enactment of being as an ‘Arab’ child in the early twenty-first century. The chapter proposes an understanding of media within Latour’s (2005) notion of ‘objects’ as active bearers and explicators of the ‘crushing exercise of power’. It also reconciles Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) with a phenomenological understanding of cultural encounters used in this volume. Taking a comparative approach across the three field-sites, the chapter interrogates dominant epistemologies around the TV as a central object/medium/device found in established research on Arabic-speaking children’s media use. It opens up the analysis of media use by shifting focus from ‘availability’ to ‘presence’, which allows the exploration of the affective connection between the child user and the media-object within the complex temporalities and spatialities involved in their media use. This approach fleshes out the social-medial ‘assemblages’ shaping the agency of Arabic-speaking children and their media uses.