ICA Presents: Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today our architect is Sonia Livingstone. Sonia Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She's published 20 books on media audiences, especially children and young people's risks and opportunities, media literacy, and rights in the digital environment. She has advised various government agencies in Europe and across the world. Today, she directs the Digital Futures Commission with the Five Rights Foundation and the Global Kids Online project with Unicef. She's the founder of the European commission funded 33 country European Union Kids Online Research Network. Sonia is a fellow of the International Communication Association and was its president from 2007 to 2008. She was awarded the title of Officer of the the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2014 for “services to children and child internet safety.” Today, Sonia Livingstone is in conversation with Tijana Milosevic. Tijana Milosevic is at Dublin City University's Anti-Bullying Center as a researcher. And here is Tijana:
Hello, Sonia! I'm super excited to talk to you about your work and your journey. We can start off if you can tell me a little bit about your personal history. So where did you go to primary, secondary schools, university? Was there something in your childhood that led you to become a professor and researching this area specifically?
Hi, Tijana! I think there was. So, I could say on the one hand, I had a perfectly ordinary childhood, I went to the local primary school, the secondary school in town, and London University. Because I was brought up in a regular sized town, I was always desperate to get to London, and a sense of the kind of cosmopolitan center. I think there were two things in my childhood that made my career choice fairly predictable. One is I have to say both my parents are professors. And I was just brought up surrounded by books, talk about universities, talk about everything, actually. My parents are both literature professors and so there were always lots of languages. There was, you know, I think about this now, in relation to the kind of European collaboration that has become very important to me in the EU Kids Online Network. So, we have lots of languages, lots of books, lots of ideas, but no television, because my mother was dead against any television, and indeed, any electronic devices. So, I was the kid who, every time I went to play with my friends said, "Can we watch television?" and they would like to do almost anything else because watching television was what they did when their friends didn't come around. So yeah, I had this kind of slightly contrary childhood, which did lead me to a fascination with the media. And maybe that is why things turned out as they did.
Yeah. didn't actually know that that there was such a ban on TV and in your household. I wonder how did you come into the field? So you are a social psychologist. And yet, you became a trailblazer in the field of communication research. So can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Right. I think when everyone looks back on their life history, some things can be explained retrospectively and some things are just a bit random. So, I got fascinated by psychology. That's what I did for my undergrad in London at UCL. I got a place to study for my PhD in Oxford in the Department of Experimental Psychology, which was kind of as hard-nosed psychology as you could be. But in the social psychology group, which felt itself to be very other, actually – in relation to all those people with kind of labs and white coats. We were the ones that gathered together and talked about people. And I just happened to get a grant that was linked to the communications regulator. They said, “Do anything you like, but please link it to the media.” And, there was I – a kid who'd grown up without any media, but lots of books. So I did have to scratch my head for a while and work out what a project could be. I was very conscious that a lot of the research in communication actually is from a social psychological perspective. So it is a kind of well traveled journey, to go from social psychology to communication. At the time, our little group of social psychology was very philosophically-orientated, kind of anthropologically-orientated. And what was since called kind of on the sociological end of social psychology, rather than the kind of individual psychology. And so that partly shaped my thinking. Something that was happening at the time, was the kind of birth and boom of cultural studies in Britain. And that was creating what Stuart Hall then described as a new and exciting approach to audience research. And suddenly I felt, “This is somewhere I can get engaged. Things are happening. I'm in this kind of interesting group that is quite well positioned to kind of speak to that.” And after all, my grant says, “anything to do with the media.” So, that's what I did.
So who were your mentors as you came into the field?
Well, partly, my supervisor. My supervisor, Michael Argyle, was a very well known social psychologist who made a point, as many scholars did then, of never having anything to do with the media or television. He was fantastically supportive of anything I wanted to do. But he also evinced deep skepticism. And every supervision I would have to kind of prove that I had anything to offer at all. But then – he was very well known – he would kind of open doors and introduce me to people and encouraged me in a way that I think was completely brilliant at the time, and gave me a lot of confidence, actually. Because a PhD student never has a lot of confidence. Especially later, I would say two key figures in our field of communication. One was Elihu Katz, who I met when I gave my very first conference paper – actually even before – and who was just a kind of fantastic interlocutor, and support. And again, a bit of a kind of skeptical champion of me, which was brilliant. And the other person was Jay Blumler, who was my PhD examiner. That PhD examination was such a lovely conversation. I was stilled for, you know, to be torn apart, as I think everyone feels. He was just friendly but quizzical. He had a way of asking hard questions in a nice way, that I think, is very good as a mentor because you don't want it too easy, but you do need a lot of encouragement. Both of them actually stayed mentors for my entire career really, until sadly, both of them died very recently.
As you reflect back in time, what is the highlight you remember where communication had an impact?
I mean, perhaps the biggest highlight that I've paid attention to in the field of communication research has been the very long standing debate about TV and violence and childhood. I would say there's been some manifestation of that debate at every kind of phase through my career, and the public has always taken note. Policymakers have always taken note. People are often very critical of that debate as too linear, too causal, too reductionist as an account of the media. But, in a way, you could see it as an extraordinary learning moment for the public. A kind of public understanding of how communication works, that we've held our debates in that public domain, you know. What is the relation between causation and correlation? What are the multiple factors that influence children's lives of which TV violence is one? How do we measure any of these things? How do we kind of conceptualize what good would look like for children? Do we want to turn TV off and go back into the sort of pre-media age? So I think it's been a really influential and impactful debate, but in more nuanced and complex ways than it's sometimes understood. I've never worked on TV and violence. But I've noticed it there as an impact for our field. For me, I think the passing of the General Comment on children's rights in relation to the digital environment has been, perhaps it's the most important thing that I've ever worked on, and perhaps will work on. It represents that moment that I think many people are facing in the field where we have to see how what we want to say from the field of communication connects with what people want to say in the field of law and human rights. And also what people say in relation to technology and how technologies are changing. Just to kind of backtrack slightly for those who don't know, quite a number of us concerned with the way in which children engage in the digital environment, and its kind of possible benefits and harms have really kind of mobilized around the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and what that says, or how that can be interpreted and implemented in relation to digital technologies. It's involved a lot of, for me, a lot of legal thinking, a lot of thinking about technology, a lot of thinking about what's kind of practical in policy terms. That has stretched my understanding of what the field of communication is about. But it has also been an extraordinary kind of multidisciplinary debate in which communication has something to offer. And there is always, the experience of the child and the everyday life of children, living kind of, you know, with and in media in ways that needs to be understood by the lawmakers and needs to be understood by state to pass rules or regulate platforms or call for certain kinds of education for children. So I often find myself saying yes. That's what we have to keep in the picture is, what is children's pleasures with media? What are children's anxieties about media? How do they even imagine a mediated world? All of that is part of the story.
And so what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in your career as a scholar working in the field of communication? And I wonder, were there ever times you felt frustrated to the point of considering another career path?
I am always considering other career paths actually. When I meet colleagues in other fields, I think, “Oh, did I really want to be a geographer or a political scientist or a lawyer?” I mean, I have spent some time in the last few years wondering if wouldn't it have been better just to be a human rights lawyer? What a fantastic thing that would be. There are many, many possibilities. There are many careers I never think about. I did seriously think about becoming a baker for a while because I do like baking. There has been one challenge that shaped, I would say, the first half of my career and has almost disappeared now. And that was that in Britain, and I think in a number of other countries, perhaps in most countries, the field of communication was invisible. And when it was visible, it was derided, it was denigrated, it was thought of as the lowest subject. And that still comes back. You know, here our Minister of Education likes to call it a Mickey Mouse subject, by which he doesn't mean study Mickey Mouse as an important cultural emblem and significant figure in the political economy, but you know, what a stupid a ridiculous thing to study. So when I arrived at LSE, I was in the psychology department. And the study of media was a kind of a fringe issue. We spent about 15 years probably kind of fighting to create a Department of Media and Communication, and define what it would be in this relatively elite institution. That was a real challenge. And there were moments when LSE just said, “You know, we don't believe in this subject, we're going to close it down.” You know, we were put through lots of kind of hoops and scrutiny and obstacles put in our way. I think it's taken, in the end, 20 years, really to kind of establish that not only is this a viable academic subject and area of intellectual research, but actually this is so needed now because we're in a digital world. And we have got to have people who understand how the world is mediated and how important communication and technology is to everyday life into the economy and politics and so much more. So, I think finally, the argument is getting won, but it stays a bit fragile.
Those of us who came a bit later, we're here to sort of reap the benefits of that hard work that you've done before us. And so I wonder, what would you recommend to junior scholars for starting out in the field?
What I would recommend to anyone really, is find a position an argument and a kind of a problem that is outside yourself, but to which you have some resources to contribute. So there is a kind of assessment of what can you offer? What kind of a scholar are you? Do you analyze concepts? Do you make an impact? Do you build build initiatives? Turned out that one thing I do is build networks, and I kind of quite like creating collaborative enterprises that together can kind of address and sometimes – well, solve problems is a bit grand – but can certainly kind of work together to highlight and make visible and find new ways of thinking about problems. But our lone scholars like to work on a kind of an intellectually knotty problem. So I think it is finding whatever motivates you that somebody out there needs. It has a kind of place and a contribution and makes you excited as you have your morning cup of tea – whatever it is – and say, “Oh, I need to you know, I've got to go over and contribute. Do something.” I'm a very motivated person, as you know.
So what do you enjoy most about your job? And what does your working day look like?
Well, every day is different. And that's one of the joys of being an academic I think. Every day is a bizarre mixture of kind of more or less under my control and kind of already completely lost control. Every day kind of begins with the coffee and slightly anxious look at the email in which there are the things I'm late with and the things I forgot I should have done and the things that someone wants me to do that I don't know how to do and the thing that I know I can do. So it always begins with a kind of moment of triage. And trying to kind of prioritize. You know, a good day is a day that I do feel is under my control, and that has several hours of thinking in it. And that thinking might be with other people – it might be a kind of a brainstorming meeting. And I do love setting up brainstorming meetings with the kind of small group of people who can kind of throw around a problem together. And it might be just me and 1000 words to write. But, too many days I have to say, are taken up with meetings that other people want and academic tasks that have merit and are needed, and are part of keeping the whole thing afloat. But, you know, they don't make my heart sing. Well, I've just come from a lecture right now that was great. And watching students faces, and listening, you know, thinking about their thoughts. That's fantastic, too. But we've invented a lot of other stuff that does fill our academic lives in ways that are quite problematic.
So, speaking of sort of getting people together and brainstorming in your area of research, what do you think are the big intellectual questions for communications scholars to address in the next decade?
Let's stay within my area, because communication is such a huge field where I'm so aware of all the different ways that people do this kind of work, and the different kind of expertise and the different agendas that they have. I mean, the obvious answer, which is also true, is that we are moving from thinking about media as somehow kind of optional and extra, to media being infrastructural and inevitable. And that's involving a kind of reconfiguration of lots of concepts that, I won't say we thought we'd got them sorted, but they are transformed. So, some of them are very kind of detailed, like, how does datafication transform our understanding of the concept of privacy? But, it is really important, a lot of interesting intellectual thought going into that. I guess, I tend to think of the big questions that surround ordinary people as they face an increasingly digital world. Questions around trust, around privacy, around how we kind of build a sense of commonality in our world that is surveilled, and commodified and scrutinized? So I think lots of our everyday concepts in a way have become hugely problematized. People are studying them from new vantage points now, which makes everything very multidisciplinary in ways that are challenging. Perhaps the key thing is around rights – human rights. When I read human rights statements, they're written in everyday language, but that everyday language uses quite a kind of reserved vocabulary where privacy does have a particular meaning, or trust, or family or culture, or expression, voice. You know, all of these. Our challenge is to rethink those for the digital world in ways that respect what is so important about human rights.
I think you've already answered partly my next question, which is what do you think are the big societal challenges and opportunities where communication scholarship can make a major contribution? And this is the final question: Since this podcast series is titled the Architects of Communication Scholarship, what would you say you have built?
The architect metaphor is a really interesting one, isn't it? Because what architects do is they plan and they design and they sometimes design ideal or idealistic kind of buildings, which may never get built. But, I do think part of our job is to keep thinking about alternatives and how things could be different and how things could be better. And the work that I'm doing at the moment with the Digital Futures Commission, I hope will be one of the things I've built, is to try to move our discourse from one that has become very dystopian and very pessimistic in lots of ways. Not to one that is, you know, kind of naive or optimistic or too idealistic, but just to say how can we use the resources we have on the imagination we have to think differently, and to harness the possibilities that do exist. And so what have I built? I think the EU Kids Online and the Global Kids online networks are fantastically collaborative. They're made of many partners, choosing to work together in ways that have been very productive. But I do think together, we have built not only a kind of a cross national evidence base for thinking about children's digital lives, but also an awareness of what that evidence base can offer and what resources it requires. But also how that evidence can be used in ways that have all kinds of, I think, largely beneficial consequences in ways that make sense in different places and different times. So, maybe an argument for the importance of evidence. And that evidence, for me, always must include the voice of the audience – and particularly the voice of children. And so, again, with many others, I think we are trying to make the hidden voices and the voices from under more visible and more heard.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a very modest answer. I'm just going to say Sonia – it's been a great pleasure for me and an honor really to have the opportunity to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time. Myself and the research community are tremendously grateful for your scholarship and all your work. So, I wish you all the best in the time ahead.
Thank you, Tijana
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcasts Network and is sponsored by the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Maria Caamaño. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. Our production consultant is Nick Song. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening!
