"Let's fight fire with fire"

Analyzing the effect of new media on children is like trying to get your arms around a school of fish. The little buggers just slide on past, and you swallow a lot of water in the process. But here's another institution that has decided to give it a try: The Future of Children, a joint initiative of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and the Brookings Institution.

Yesterday, the group held a forum to promote the release of a policy brief and new volume of its journal dedicated to electronic media and children. "What we learned," says Elisabeth Hirschhorn Donahue of Princeton University, "is that content matters." The second half of the forum focused on how media -- big and small, old-fashioned TV and social networking sites -- can be used to get positive social messages to children and adolescents. "Let's fight fire with fire," said Isabel Sawhill, a senior editor for The Future of Children.

During the forum, a smattering of policy wonks, communications scholars and health experts were treated to new forms of public service announcements that included the use of text-messaging, user-generated content, viral video and Web sites. Examples came from the 4parents.gov (a campaign to get parents talking to kids about sex), an HIV-awareness campaign on Think MTV , Stay Teen (to reduce teenage prenancy), and That Guy (to halt binge drinking).

Some other tidbits:

• Television use isn't going down with the rise in other electronic media, Hirshhorn says. Instead, "all these other things have added on top of it" and "multi-tasking is on the rise."
• This summer, futureofchildren.org will feature a database that allows researchers to examine media consumption by state.
• Three concerns were voiced by members of the audience yesterday: Where do we get the funding for positive social marketing? How do we get these messages into schools? And how do we measure whether any of it works?