Convergence citizens: the new media literacy of pre-school television.

When Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969, the media landscape for pre-school-age children was limited to what we now refer to as "old media" technologies: television, radio, and print media. The show's innovative programming design, which integrated animation, live action "street" scenes, and segments featuring lovable Muppets, aimed to use television as a tool to foster early acquisition of language, math, and social skills. Sesame Street also addressed what would become one of the central goals of the media literacy movement of the 1970s: encouraging children to become "active users" of media rather than "passive consumers" of "interactive" programming models. In the days of the old media landscape, such interactivity took the form of children responding to on-screen characters (counting along with the Count) and recognizing the mediated nature of their televisual experience (actors looked directly into the camera/at the audience while simultaneously interacting with fictional muppets in Mr. Hooper's store, on their front stoops, and even in the trashcans lining Sesame Street).

Through these strategies, Sesame Street became the model for "good" children's programming in the age of media literacy by encouraging children to engage with media and become active learners. Parallel to the academic goals of the Sesame Street model was the objective to spread multiculturalism through the presentation of diverse communities interacting in an idealized neighborhood where antagonisms are channeled into dialogue and "teachable moments." The academic and ideological goals of Sesame Street were to use a form of media literacy based in the old media landscape to produce children as multicultural citizens whose media "citizenship" was formed through a highly mediated participatory community.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Since the advent of Sesame Street, the world of children's media has changed dramatically, resulting in reformulations of how children consumers of such media are perceived and engaged. A prime example of these transformations is the extraordinarily popular program for preschoolers, Dora the Explorer. Dora was piloted in 1999 and became a cornerstone program of the Nickelodeon cable television network in 2000. The show emerged within what we commonly describe as the "new media" landscape that includes digital, computerized, or net worked information and communication technologies that allow for new modes of content delivery (downloads and file sharing), media experience (interactive DVDs and iPods), and media production (viral videos and blogs). The program's investment in new media is reflected in the show's transformed notion of "interactive." The character Dora is a seven-year-old Latina who explores her neighborhood and community with a team of multicultural, Spanish-, and English-speaking friends. Dora encourages bilingualism and development of storytelling skills through the format of a play-along adventure. A typical plot begins with Dora, or one of her friends, discovering a need that can only be met by going to a specific destination a shoe repairman, the City of Lost Toys, etc. Dora consults the dancing map she keeps in her backpack to get instructions and directions for the adventure, which requires the gang to travel through two intermediary locations before arriving at their final destination. These locations are presented in boxes at the bottom of the screen, and are highlighted with the click of a virtual "mouse" as the group passes through them.

As they move through their adventure, the gang learns new Spanish words that help them make progress. In the traditional model of para-social relationships used in televisual interactivity (an audience's perceived interaction with a media character is actually one-sided), the audience is prompted to yell out the Spanish words in unison with the characters in order to help them accomplish their goals. In one episode, yelling "arriba," instructs magical flowers to grow high enough for Dora and her friends to pass through a dangerous garden. These strategies culminate at the end of each episode when the characters achieve their narrative goal and prompt the audience to sing along with their victory song, the refrain of which emphasizes the show's presentation of the narrative as a peer-produced act: "We did it! We did it! We did it!"

As the closing song illustrates, Dora takes part in the tradition of encouraging active spectatorship that is emblematic of children's television programming such as Sesame Street. But it removes this "interactivity" from the old media landscape and relocates it in the new media landscape through the presentation of a media literacy model that hinges on children mastering the convergence of various media platforms. Children do not just act out. para-social relationships with on-screen characters; these relationships are mediated through a virtual "user" who clicks the "mouse" and changes the television's screen space into a multi-media, proto-manipulatable space. Being media "literate" in the world of Dora (and similar shows such as Blue's Clues, Little Einsteins, and The Upside Down Show) requires pre-school-age children to become "convergence citizens" who experience these shows as more than 10- to 20-minute narratives that combine entertainment and instruction. Rather, viewers are meant to experience and engage with these shows as sites for sustained interaction across media platforms; they watch the shows, visit the websites, read the books, download the theme songs, and more.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The history of Dora's evolution helps clarify the nature of this new media landscape and the ideal of the "convergence citizen" at work in contemporary media targeted at early childhood groups. Dora was created in the 1990s when Nickelodeon was advancing a branding strategy for its various programming blocks to target specific markets: "Nick at Nite" for late night re-run viewers and Nick Jr. for its daytime children's television viewers. This branding strategy was part of a broader set of strategies developed by various cable channels to "narrowcast" to niche markets. They move toward narrowcasting has had profound effects on television viewing experiences. Karen Lury describes the effects as a shift from temporal to spatial experience: "The strategy of channels is to define their identity as a brand, and through this, effectively to establish them as a place." (1)

Dora has been the cornerstone in the branding of Mick Jr. as a place for children's television. As Lury explains, Nick Jr. is not only intended to be a place for children's television it is to be my place for children's television. Describing the station identification and mini-promotional sequences, Lury points to sequences that show close-ups of children's faces saying "Just for me" to illustrate how Nick Jr. is "owned" by-children as their place in the world of cable television: "Nick Jr. is therefore a 'personality' and a place ... it is also 'owned' and inhabited by the child viewer it is 'just' for them." (2)

Arguably, Dora's focus on the characters' and viewers' spatial navigations is aligned with the branding strategy of Nick Jr. Recall that the goal of the show is to navigate through unfamiliar territory in order to arrive at a specific destination. The interactive nature of the program is designed to encourage children to look closely at the screen to find paths and tools to help them progress toward their destination. Just as children are encouraged to gain mastery over the territory in Dora, is Dora likewise encouraged to gain mastery over the territory of Nick Jr. Lury describes this connection in terms of the programming schedule: "[T]he schedule in its entirety is no longer a book, but a map, and the child orientates themselves spatially rather than temporally." (3) Thus, by encouraging children to become empowered explorers like Dora, the show is also encouraging them to become regular viewers of Nick Jr. and consumers of the network's programming.

At the same time that Nickelodeon was branding Nick Jr. as a place "owned" by children within the televisual landscape, they were also developing a presence on the internet for parallel programming and marketing. These two goals are mutually supportive since the internet provides an opportunity to break out of the linear programming format of televisual flow and into the spatially layered format of the web. Julian Sefton-Green describes this shift: "the distinction between a channel (Cartoon Network, BBC, etc.) and a program (Johnny Bravo, Blue Peter, etc.) is blurred. ... The boundary between 'content' and 'context' has effectively evaporated." (4) Dora has served as a model text for bridging this convergence of televisual and web worlds to foster "convergence citizens" as the new media-literate children. Convergence citizens are able to participate in the proto-manipulatable worlds of the television shows as well as traverse online worlds where they are encouraged to further interact with and manipulate their shared "place" and characters.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The effort to create media destinations for pre-school-age children is also clearly manifest in the 2002 re-development of the cable network Noggin, which was originally a joint venture between Nickelodeon and the creators of Sesame Street, Children's Television Workshop (now called Sesame Workshop). In 2002, Noggin targeted pre-schoolers as the audience for their media destination, and now the myNoggin website offers a full extension of the media destination onto the web. It emphasizes the continuity between the televisual and the web worlds through the use of characters developed for their television programming. Parents contemplating whether to enroll their children are told. "The first stop: a warm greeting from our host--Moose A. Moose, a familiar and trusted friend. From there, kids can team up with Blue, Diego, and Dora in exciting, adventure-based games based on core curriculum subjects, such as literacy, math, art, and Spanish." (5)

The new media landscape for pre-schoolers is a world that fosters the development of "convergence citizens" capable of navigating across media platforms by understanding how the various platforms seamlessly construct "their" world. Convergence citizenship becomes the ultimate destination. Children (as convergence citizens) are encouraged to participate in media worlds through various forms of para-social and proto-manipulatable activities. Emphasis is placed on a new ideal of participatory culture that Henry Jenkins describes as shifting the notion of media literacy away from one of individual expression to community involvement. (6)

So what does all of this mean for the contemporary discussion of media literacy? Traditional approaches to media literacy emphasize training viewers to analyze and decode the "messages" delivered through various modes, genres, and forms of media, often encouraging them to produce their own media in order to better understand the processes and conditions through which media messages are formed. This view of media literacy does not account for how the very notions of interactivity analyzing and decoding "messages," consumer-produced media--have now become core activities of the new media landscape; it is what the kids do for fun. Consider the plethora of mash-up videos on You Tube as a salient example of how the old media literacy activity of decoding media texts and re-investing them with the viewer's point of view has become its own form of entertainment media on the web.

The vast network of new media convergence citizens also opens up new avenues for the tradition of "total merchandising." Pioneered by Walt Disney, total merchandising wraps a wide range of toys, entertainment, and lifestyle products around a specific media object to magnify financial profits. The classic example is the marketing of Disneyland during ABC's 1950s broadcasts of The Wonderful World of Disney (originally titled Disneyland) as a "family destination" where children could meet and interact with Disney characters.

In the 1970s, Sesame Street adapted the total merchandising approach to help bring their televisual world home for preschoolers; stuffed Big Birds and Tickle Me Elmo's reinforced a televisual connection. Now, MyNoggin sells extended media experiences that bring the preschoolers into their "own" worlds beyond the televisual or the home, encouraging them to customize their relationship with such characters as Dora through online games and other proto-manipulatable activities. The merchandising, then, is presented as an extension of this notion of self-definition and participatory culture: wearing a Dora backpack to preschool is presented as a sign of belonging to a community rather than merely of product consumption (a new media wolf in sheep's clothes). This is especially true if the child's latest Webkinz is hanging off of the zipper of his backpack. Don't know what a Webkinz is? Perhaps you are not new media literate.

AMY SHORE is an assistant professor and director of the Cinema and Screen Studies program at the State University of New York at Oswego.

NOTES (1.) Karen Lury, "A Time and a Place for Everything: Children's Channels," in David Buckingham, ed., Small Screens: Television for Children (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2002). (2.) Ibid. (3.) Ibid., 26. (4.) Julian Sefton-Green "Cementing the Virtual Relationship: Children's TV Goes Online" in Buckingham. (5.) See https://secure.mynoggin.com/about.php; (retrieved July 23, 2009). (6.) Henry Jenkins,. Ravi Purushotma, Katie Clinton, Margaret Weigel, and Alice J. Robison. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Chicago; John D. and Catherine (7.) MacArthur Foundation, 2006).