Abstract
This study is about contemporary Korean parents’ social tensions and the cultural meanings around digital play. Through interviews with 13 middle-class Korean parents, they discussed their perspectives on digital play, including their views of popular culture, high-technology, and learning, which created inner conflicts and negotiations with their children in their everyday lives. Furthermore, Korean parents tended to employ digital play for their children with their own purposes and meanings, such as rewards, social competiveness, learning English, and finding effective ways to keep their children occupied. Thus, based on the hypercompetitiveness of formal education in Korean contexts, this study argues that digital play is not merely children’s play with digital technology, rather digital play reflects the social pressures, concerns, and anxieties that these middle-class Korean parents feel regarding their notion of parenting, their parental practices, and their children’s intense competition in education (and the job market) in global and neoliberal times.
Introduction
Modern digital technology has changed the platforms that children can access to play on and the way that they interact with materials; in addition, contemporary children enjoy various digital advancements including a new form of play called “digital play.” In accordance with the current worldwide children’s digital culture, numerous report studies have been conducted focusing on young children’s use of digital media in different countries (e.g. the United Kingdom: Livingstone et al., 2014; Office of Communications (Ofcom), 2014; Australia: Neumann, 2015; the United States: Rideout, 2011). Most of these studies concentrate on children’s use, engagement, attitude, understanding, and interaction with digital technology. The present study also considers young Korean children’s digital play as an aspect of children’s contemporary culture, which can offer a lens into children’s everyday practices and novel playful lives with digital technology. Furthermore, through a critical-cultural perspective, digital play in this study refers to young children’s use of, social and cultural engagements with, and interactions with not only digital technology but also other non-digital technology in a “play-based manner” (Marsh et al., 2016). Examples of this include playing digital games, using applications (apps), taking pictures of their outdoor playgrounds, viewing and editing pictures, making videos featuring their favorite traditional toys, and uploading those videos to YouTube.
Indeed, new and diverse social spheres and meanings have been created as young children’s digital play is filtered through a neoliberalism that “strives for a market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism” (Brown, 2009: 241). One resulting field is “edutainment,” which combines the terms “education” and “entertainment.” Buckingham and Scanlon (2001: 298) claim that “edutainment” is a consequence of the “increasing commercialization of children’s media culture, the growing competitiveness generated by government policy on education, and the increasing levels of anxiety and guilt this produces among parents.”
Contemporary parents do not easily understand digital play because its hybrid and complicated features generate concerns regarding the media—such as young children’s exposure to adverse media and overuse of digital media—as well as problems with physical health (weakened eyesight and obesity) and the inevitable ills of contemporary hyper-capitalism (Karuppiah, 2015; Livingstone et al., 2014; Ofcom, 2014; Veldhuis et al., 2014). However, the complex features of children’s digital play also point to a new style of play featuring a promising high-tech future, entertainment, and social spaces for both interaction and academic learning (Dias et al., 2016; Green et al., 2009; Lauricella et al., 2015; Livingstone et al., 2014; Ofcom, 2014; Plowman et al., 2010).
Accordingly, modern parents often feel ambivalent toward digital play (Dias et al., 2016; Plowman and Hancock, 2014). As noted, much research has been conducted and many “folk theories” have been advanced regarding children’s use of digital technology. However, scant empirical evidence exists on the impact of parents’ perspectives on digital play in young children’s everyday lives. Since parents’ beliefs and cultural values can significantly affect children’s practices and play opportunities with digital devices (Buckingham and Sefton-Green, 2003; Harvey, 2015), it is crucial to examine parental beliefs and attitudes regarding digital play and their capacity to influence and shape digital play. Furthermore, in global and neoliberal times that emphasize market-based values and feature increased competition among children, it has become more significant to understand the meaning of digital play for contemporary parents and its various uses in daily life.
This study reevaluates data from a larger, international study (see Erdogan et al., 2018) that examined parental beliefs regarding children’s digital play in four nations: Turkey, the United States, China, and South Korea. It was found that Korean parents’ preference for digital play was much lower than for parents in the other countries. Therefore, a question arises: What are the meanings of digital play for parents in Korean society, with its education fever and hypercompetitiveness? This study seeks to answer this question by focusing on the data set from South Korea, which discusses middle-class Korean parents’ use and interpretation of digital play. Examining these data provides a better understanding of (1) what middle-class Korean parents believe regarding their children’s digital play, (2) how parents provide their children with digital play in everyday life, and (3) how parents interact within their social contexts and create various digital play meanings for their children. Thus, we are ultimately able to understand the social positions of digital play as considered by Korean parents as well as the social and cultural meanings of digital play in these globalized and highly competitive times.
Background
Social contexts in South Korea
Education in South Korea is considered “one of the major sources of economic growth and social development” (Kim, 2002: 29). Many researchers (e.g. Kim, 2002; Lee, 2004) have focused on two distinctive features to explain Korean education: “the educational equalization policy” and “education fever.” First, “the education system in Korea has been evolved through egalitarianism and has highlighted equal opportunity for all regardless of gender, religion, geographic location, or socioeconomic status” (Kim, 2002: 30). However, educational equalization policy has led individuals to focus on how to gain a competitive advantage in an equal educational system, which results in severe competition and increased pressure to attend a better university and gain a better job.
South Korea has traditionally displayed parents’ abnormal “education fever” to the world. Under Confucianism, Koreans used to emphasize Confucian teachings and learning (Lee, 2006) from doctrines rather than working with practical skills. Moreover, “Japanese colonialism and the Korean War brought about more investment in people rather than in physical capital” (Kim, 2002: 30) and many Koreans tended to think that the best resource they had was their educated and skilled manpower since Korea lacks natural resources.
Indeed, education fever in Korea has many meanings in that it is not only a “national obsession with the attainment of education” (Seth, 2002: 9) but also “an important source of passion toward becoming a member of a higher level of social class, as well as achieving a high-quality education” (Kim et al., 2005: 8). For Korean parents, education is considered “the most powerful means to achieve upward social mobility and economic prosperity, and many Korean parents believe that they can help their children succeed by emphasizing, and even imposing, education for their children” (Park, 2009: 50).
Since Korean parents’ education fever is becoming even more serious in neoliberal times that are focused on “market-based principles” (Brown, 2009) and “standardisation, and the perception of children as investments” (Sim, 2017), young Korean children are forced to study extracurricular subjects such as English, Korean, science, and mathematics, to enhance their competitive edge in later education with an emphasis on passing standardized academic tests. As Heckman and Masterov (2007) argued, as “a major of producer,” many Korean parents feel strong responsibilities for the preparation of young children for school. Accordingly, they in turn pay attention to new information and educational trends and carefully examine their children’s toys, books, and materials based on how they may affect their children’s learning.
Korea’s hypercompetitiveness has led some parents to look for new education avenues for their children’s futures. Nowadays, coding education with computers has attracted them in terms of learning computer languages and skills as a future knowledge involving technology (Kim and Chung, 2017). Meanwhile, since an increasing number of young children regularly use digital devices, there has been a huge amount of news articles and studies about children’s overuse of iPads, smartphones, or computer gaming and smartphone addictions in Korea (e.g. Jung and Ha, 2013; Park and Park, 2014; Kim, 2012); such articles often point out that gaming addictions may result in the learning disabilities that Korean parents fear.
Based on the enthusiasm for education and the complex circumstances regarding digital media in modern Korea, this study explores how middle-class Korean parents understand and utilize digital play with their children and what meaning and social status digital play has in this hyper capitalistic and comparative society.
The complicated concept of digital play: popular culture, digital technology, and learning
Although digital play is not a new field of study, it is still deeply divided in its beliefs about the benefits of technical play for young children. As such, the study of digital play remains incomplete and inconclusive (Downey et al., 2007). One reason for the continuing debate regarding digital play is that it has a complex and multifaceted nature by its combination of popular culture, digital technology, and learning. Recent specific digital play activities in homes include watching YouTube video clips, playing computer games and apps, and searching for information via Google, which are closely related to children’s popular culture. Among these, for example, how can parents evaluate “watching YouTube videos” and “playing apps through iPads?” These activities seem like children’s play with digital technology as well as traditional media play. Therefore, many people who are pessimistic about popular culture and traditional media remain puzzled by digital play. The ambiguous features of play with digital technologies has led many parents and educators to reveal concerns and confusion such as gaming addiction, aggression, and child obesity, which Marsh (2005) called a “moral panic” (Cohen, 1987).
On the contrary, use of digital devices or high-tech toys for young children implies children’s competence in new digital technologies and their future with the latest technology. As a result, some pay attention to digital play under the concept of “children learning to use technologies through play” (Bird and Edwards, 2015). Recently, furthermore, an increasing number of researchers and parents have accepted digital play when it comes to other new possibilities of children’s learning, development, and social interactions. That is, as an integral tool or resource for learning and development (Donohue, 2015), digital play is considered to have great potential for learning, culture, and future endeavors for children. For example, digital play can lead to increased creativity (Dezuanni et al., 2015), emergent literacy skills (Neumann, 2014, 2018), social emotional development, self-control, the ability to deal with limits, persistence (Sharapan, 2015), active collaborative play, and rich storytelling (Wohlwend, 2015).
The complex features of digital play being closely intertwined with popular culture, state-of-the-art technology, and learning may result in parents’, researchers’, educators’, and app developers’ complicated and ambivalent attitudes toward digital play. In addition, this brings about a constant debate over “whether digital play encourages or hinders childhood learning and development” (Stephen and Plowman, 2014).
Good parenting, media, and digital play
Since the post-Enlightenment philosophy of Rousseau, children have been understood as the innocent face of nature, the “hope for the world,” and innocents to be protected from corruption in the world (Walkerdine, 1997). Media is often seen as a powerful, adult, corrupting influence, where children are positioned as “powerless, innocent, and vulnerable” (Tobin, 2000: 4). This ideology understands media, such as video games and television, as a powerful social agent that seeks to harm or brainwash children into consumerism and false consciousness (Buckingham, 1993).
Guiding children’s media consumption has also become tied to the concept of “good parenting,” where good parents effectively and aggressively shelter their children from bad media content. The specific notion of good parenting is tied to class by nature and reflects upper- and middle-class families’ cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). As Bourdieu notes, for upper- and middle-class parents, media with popular cultural content is often seen as low value, non-educational, and inappropriate for young children. It is often compared unfavorably to “educational” content, which aligns with the knowledge economy of schools (Bourdieu, 1984). As Bourdieu (1984) notes, constructions of good parenting, wrapped in their own cultural habits, may lead parents to consider behaviors and cultures outside their class socialization distasteful or disgusting.
Lareau (2011) points out that middle-class parents tend to have strong opinions about “how children should be raised.” As “concerted cultivation,” driven by parents’ distrust of children’s “natural” taste that “children will choose to watch material that is morally damaging” (Davies et al., 2000), they have their own value criteria and evaluate the values of the children’s digital media content accordingly. As such, they shelter their innocent children from non-educational/inappropriate content through continued screening of their digital play to assert themselves as good parents.
To explain the parental screening of children’s media, Grace and Henward (2013) borrow Foucauldian perspectives that interpret how techniques of power work to naturalize people’s general understanding of media. Drawing on Gore (1993, 1998), they articulate that “these techniques of power, including surveillance, normalization, exclusion, classification, totalization, and regulation” (Grace and Henward, 2013: 140), make parents worry, regulate, monitor, and control their children and the media they consume by legitimizing those behaviors under good parents’ pedagogical “regimes of truth” (Foucault, 1977).
As mentioned earlier, however, we should focus on the natures of digital play that is a combination of media (popular culture), digital technology, and learning. Digital platforms, like computers, play a crucial role and have more complicated consequences for parents than other traditional media do. To be precise, some parents associate digital play with the previous media (popular culture) such as computer games or watching videos, whereas others believe that digital play helps children learn important tech skills and knowledge they need as members of the next generation (Dias et al., 2016; Neumann, 2014; Plowman and Hancock, 2014). For that reason, recent edutainment industries such as computer hardware and educational software strongly attract middle-class parents by stressing the “child’s educational success or educational edge on the competition and moving to the front of the class” (Buckingham et al., 2001: 33). In this sense, Buckingham and Scanlon (2001: 298) describe the edutainment marketing as “selling entertainment to children, and selling education to parents.” That is, for parents today, educational value is crucial and one of the key concepts to choose materials for their child.
Based on the tangled social and cultural meanings around young children’s digital play and the complicated social contexts in South Korea, therefore, this study explores (1) what middle-class Korean parents think about their children’s digital play, (2) how they provide their children with digital play in their everyday practices, and (3) how they interact with and make their meanings of their children and digital play. This allows us to grasp young children’s digital culture today, various social and cultural meanings of digital play, which reflects the social status of digital play in complex globalized world contexts.
Methods and analysis
Methods
In order to understand Korean parents’ beliefs about digital play, semi-structured interviews with 13 parents (10 mothers and 3 fathers) of children aged 4–6 were conducted through personal meetings or phone calls, lasting approximately 1–1.5 hours each. Six main questions were prepared for all participants, with additional follow-up questions in some cases. The main questions were (1) “Do you think play is important for your child?” (2) “What do you think about digital play for your child?” (3) “Do you prefer digital play (or do not prefer digital play)?” (4) “Why do you prefer digital play (or do not prefer digital play)?” (5) “What kind of digital play does your child do?” and (6) “How do you guide your child’s digital play?” The follow-up questions were (1) “Could you give me an example?” and (2) “Why? Can you tell me more?” During the interviews, I often asked new questions emerging from parents’ responses in order to better grasp their thoughts on digital play.
I created the interview questions in the parents’ native language (Korean). I audio recorded and transcribed all interviews with the participants’ permission. All participants were informed of the confidentiality of the interviews and audio recordings. After collecting the interview data, I translated it into English.
Participants
The study’s participants were 13 Korean middle-class parents. First, I used email and phone to contact conveniently located preschools and kindergartens in three urban areas including Gangnam, Changwon, and Dongtan. Each of these areas is well-known in South Korea for its concentrated wealth and high standard of living. After receiving approval from the directors and teachers at one public and two private kindergartens, I sent them an adequate number of envelopes containing institutional review board approvals, invitation letters, consent forms, and questionnaires. The questionnaires asked for parents’ demographic and personal information (e.g. work status, educational level, and use of personal digital devices), parents’ play preferences (e.g. checking whether they preferred physical, pretend, constructive, game, and/or digital play for their child), and their willingness to volunteer for the interview on digital play. The school directors distributed the forms to their students’ parents. Finally, out of the group of parents (total 15 parents) who volunteered to be interviewed via the questionnaire and consent form, 13 middle-class parents were chosen.
To uncover parents’ thoughts on children’s digital play, I interviewed middle-class Korean parents. This choice was made because middle-class families with sufficient cultural and economic capital often possess more digital devices than working-class families, so they are more likely to be familiar with digital play and platforms (Marsh et al., 2005: 18). Moreover, due to the distinct characteristics of the school areas in this study, most parents belonged to the middle class. Generally, the interviewees were highly educated with bachelor’s or master’s degrees and showed interest in their children’s education and digital play. The selected parents actively participated in the interview by sharing their opinions, concerns, and experiences regarding digital play. Even some participants were curious and often asked questions about their children’s use of digital technology throughout the interview.
Analysis
All data (e.g. interview transcripts, parents’ written questionnaire responses, and researcher’s notes during interviews) were coded via open coding (Miles et al., 2014). I coded the data through repeated readings using a constant comparison method (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). The initial data codes were “advantages of digital play,” “disadvantages of digital play,” “social and cultural knowledge,” and “fear.” After an iterative analysis of the data, the initial codes were revised according to South Korea’s emerging social and cultural contexts. The study’s coding framework included “learning,” “entertainment,” “rewards,” “social competitiveness,” and “others,” reflecting the conceptual categories of Korean parents’ views on digital play.
The conceptual categories imply that Korean parents perform according to their class, nation, as well as times, which Volosinov (1976) refers to as immediate contexts. Since these sociocultural contexts were significant factors in interpreting the data (Bakhtin, 1981; Seiter, 2005; Volosinov, 1976), sociocultural theories and studies (e.g. Pierre Bourdieu, Annette Lareau) and the Bakhtinian approach were employed for the analysis.
Above all, this study considers the Korean parents’ ideas of digital play as social and ideological meanings and hybrid and complex positions of social interaction between their young children, popular culture, and local and global cultures. Thus, critical analysis with Bakhtinian perspectives could be applied. Tobin (2000) introduces four key Bakhtinian principles for interpretation of utterances: “The meaning of an utterance is always contextual,” “The word is only half ours,” “The content of psychic life is thoroughly ideological,” and “We have an ethical imperative to answer” (Tobin, 2000: 20–21). Among them, this study pays particular attention to “two-voiced discourse,” which refers to a representation of multiple people’s ideas in the Korean social contexts within a parent’s voice and “the ideological content of Korean parent’s life” in which “tensions within larger community will make Korean parents’ way into the speech of individuals” (Henward and MacGillivray, 2014). That is, because the Bakhtinian perspectives allow us to analyze not only “what they said” but also to reveal “what they did not say” as tacit discourses, including “the extraverbal contexts of utterance” (Volosinov, 1976: 99), we can consider that the parents’ utterances about digital play can be considered as expressions of not only their individual expressions but also of others’ voices and larger social concerns and tensions. In doing so, this study allows us to understand diverse discourses of acts, discursive practices, subjectivities, and agencies Korean parents can pick up and negotiate concerning digital play.
Findings
Almost all of the middle-class Korean parents held strong, negative opinions regarding their children’s digital play and tended to examine digital play with a dichotomous view (i.e. advantages and disadvantages) based on young children’s learning and development. Moreover, whenever they heard the phrase “digital play,” most parents thought of computer games and watching YouTube videos first, which implies digital play activities their child mostly does and that are closely related to children’s popular culture. Since the parents were fearing the possible adverse effects of digital media and popular culture, they themselves took on a role as “gatekeepers” (Dias et al., 2016) and were employing (or negotiating) digital play for their own purposes for their child in their daily lives: (1) children’s reward for study, (2) learning English, (3) gaining social competitiveness, and (4) keeping occupied.
Children’s reward for study
Because my child likes it! I am concerned though.
When does your child do digital play?
I think digital play can help them get rid of his stress. So, after studying or finishing his homework, I sometimes allow digital play. He sometimes completes his homework fast in order to play games.
A key finding in this study is that, while parents were concerned that digital play was not educational and that it could actually impede their children’s learning, they believed that their children, when engaging in digital play, were able to relieve stress and provide entertainment. While this is a curious concept to many parents, when taken in the context of the contemporary, middle-class, Korean childhood, it seems to make more sense.
As noted, in Korea, competition surrounding formal education has increased dramatically (Kim et al., 2005; Sorensen, 1994). As a result, Korean parents feel increased pressure to have their children perform well on standardized tests in their children’s future school life (and ultimately, the labor market of the future). This has resulted in young, Korean children being enrolled in substantial extracurricular academics. This shows that, under neoliberalism in the Korean context, hypercompetitiveness and education fever make the parents, such as the ones above, turn to digital play as a reward for their children, particularly if they studied or performed admirably. In addition, for the parents, digital play seemed to work well as a motivation for young children. These successes are incentivized by the fact that parents already recognize their children’s high desire for digital play. Hence, some Korean parents tended to propose digital play as a reward or a motivation for children’s academic learning.
Learning English
My child ONLY does digital play for LEARNING. Mostly, I offer English phonics and alphabet through YouTube and Jr. Naver [a popular Korean educational website and application for young children] or English DVD.
Why do you use digital play for learning English?
These apps are easy to find and have lots of high quality English contents with native pronunciation and accent. I am trying to make my child being familiar with English.
One of the parents’ central concerns was their children’s use of digital technology for what they saw as educational purposes. In their responses, the parents highlighted that they allowed and, in some cases, encouraged their children to engage in digital play for learning purposes. However, this did not mean that they always welcomed digital play for their children’s learning. According to Bakhtin (1981, 1990), we have answerability, which refers to “an ethical imperative to answer” (Tobin, 2000), and Volosinov (1976) argues for the importance of intonation in interpreting utterances. These parents underscoring children’s educational purpose showed their ethical responsibility to answer the interviewer’s questions. In addition, during the interviews, they stressed the word “learning” and often displayed their hesitation regarding digital play. That is, by highlighting digital play’s educational purposes for their children—such as using digital play to learn English and other academic subjects—the study’s middle-class Korean parents with negative beliefs about the media and popular culture tried to negotiate contemporary children’s digital culture.
The parents’ responses could also be evaluated in terms of the social-desirability bias; in other words, respondents’ tendency to “avoid embarrassment and project a favorable image to others” (Fisher, 1993: 303). In this study, however, the parents’ biased responses clearly showed their distrust of children’s popular culture and digital media. When they discussed their worries regarding digital play (especially digital games) and their limited use of it for their children’s learning activities, they often looked for my agreement by stating repeatedly “as you know,” “you already know from recent articles,” and “you may know better.” This revealed the parents’ assumption that I (as a Korean and a researcher) would have critical, negative perspectives on children’s digital culture. In turn, this highlighted the pervasive negative social and cultural contexts in South Korea surrounding children’s use of digital media.
As noted, furthermore, the parents uncovered their notion of good parenting, given their middle-class habitus (Bourdieu, 1984), that digital play they applied was appropriate and educational for their child. Moreover, they tried to identify themselves with ideal parents, they believed, by arguing their active roles as parents, such as their examination and screening of their child’s materials based on academics and education (especially, they hold rigorous criteria when it comes to media and popular culture). This behavior could be interpreted as a social-desirability bias response, yet it also displays some middle-class Korean parental beliefs, social discourses, and subjectivities regarding the notion of good parenting.
Interestingly, one of the key ways in which this was articulated was through the acquisition of English through digital mediums. For these parents, providing their children with good English education was viewed as a significant responsibility, because children’s competence in English is essential in Korea for getting promising jobs and studying at top universities in global capitalism as part of “the rules of the game” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). In the global era, indeed, English has a variety of meanings in Korean society as an international and global language, “cultural capital” (Bourdieu, 1986), a source of sociopolitical and economic power, and a useful tool for global leaders. Furthermore, since the notion “the earlier the better” is taken for granted when it comes to children’s English learning, young children are forced to study English from an early age by their parents. Besides, they believed that they could easily access high-quality English educational content through websites and applications, such as YouTube and Jr. Naver. Park (2009) points out that, for Korean parents, learning English from native English speakers was best for enhancing their children’s English pronunciation and oral language proficiency. In this sense, digital educational content with native speakers could be considered effective educational materials for children in non-English-speaking countries. Besides, digital play was considered as an effective English learning tool in other different countries (e.g. Iran, Singapore, and Hong Kong) as well (e.g. Aghlara and Tamjid, 2011; Karuppiah, 2015; Leung, 2003). Thus, digital play could be not only a compromised site (due to the middle-class Korean parents’ education fever) but also a potential site for their child’s English learning.
Digital play as social competitiveness
What do you think about digital play?
As you know, children can learn how to use computers or how to learn information via the internet. I think it is needed to keep up in our society. Using computers or other digital devices and searching information will become more crucial for children as the future generation.
In keeping with social progress, many Korean parents recognize that, as the next generation, children should be familiar with digital devices and learn how to use technology through digital play. As cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986), digital technology gives parents the impression of a promising future, so they believe in the importance of new technology for young children. We can also see this as a cultural artifact; for some parents, digital devices serve as status symbols to present an image of modern taste, money, and a promising future in “the apparently inevitable face of the IT revolution and global economics” (Davies and Bansel, 2007: 250).
For this reason, some Korean, middle-class parents allow their children to play with digital technology for coding education or other technical education to stay competitive in a changing and increasingly capitalistic society. Learning how to use digital technology and learning programming skills are viewed as essential for their children’s futures with technology. Therefore, these parents considered digital play as a way to gain psychological security in a changing social system and enhanced their children’s competitiveness in the hyper-competitive job market.
Keeping occupied
Interviewee [a mother] and her daughter came to a coffee shop for the interview. When the interview started, the mother showed her daughter some animations on YouTube, saying “You can watch two animations during mother’s interview.”
What do you think about digital play?
I don’t want to allow digital play. It is very sensational and not educational! Further, it makes children look vapid with a blank look toward the screen.
When does your child do digital play?
(Sigh) When I am very busy, I tend to use digital play. Usually, she watches some YouTube video clips or watches his saved pictures and videos in my smartphones like this [looking at their child].
Some Korean parents revealed their inner conflicts that even though they did not want to allow their children to engage in digital play, they could not help it due to several reasons, such as children’s desires and special circumstance reasons. For instance, when parents need time to work (when parents could not watch their kids) or when children needed to stay calm and quiet in public spaces, such as restaurants, they provide their children with digital devices to occupy them. Indeed, recently, the controversy of “kid-free zones” has flared up in South Korea (Ock, 2015) because of the social recognition that noisy, disruptive children interrupt others in public spaces. For this reason, the Korean parents exploited digital play as an effective tool not only for having their own space and time but also for caring for others in public spaces.
However, we need to consider that these middle-class parents tended to be afraid of the possible negative effect of digital media and tended to exert effort to foster their child’s capabilities by actively engaging with their organized activities, which showed the middle-class parents “concerted cultivation” (Lareau, 2011). For them, specific patterns of digital play, such as showing their children cartoons on their iPads or smartphones or letting them to play games to allow time for the parents’ work or laziness (not their child’s learning) might seem inappropriate given their parental beliefs. Consequently, some parents used their own strategies (De Certeau, 1984) to limit their child’s use of digital devices or to get comfort themselves by saying things like “you can watch two animations during the interview” or “this is the LAST GAME today.” Some parents even revealed that they felt guilty because they felt that letting their children play digital games or watch YouTube videos was neglectful. Thus, despite their constant exertions for their child, the parents were experiencing not only a variety of conflicts and negotiations with their child in their everyday lives but also their own inner conflicts that might come from differences in the parental beliefs they pursued and their real practices around digital play.
Discussion and concluding remarks
As “media education goes digital” (Buckingham, 2007), digital play has been considered a new object of study and a new style of learning. However, this also results in complicated and diverse perspectives when combined with previous views of traditional media. As the interview data show, Korean parents already had complicated and mixed understandings of digital play, including regarding popular culture, digital technology, and learning. In addition, they implied their own different purposes and meanings of digital play in their everyday lives: reward, social competiveness, language learning, and an effective way to keep their child occupied.
The middle-class Korean parents tried to perform their own class-based notion of good parenting during the interviews. Obviously, their notion of parenting was more than just being a caregiver and pursued the concerted cultivation approach (Lareau, 2011). In this sense, many parents holding negative views on popular culture revealed their inner conflicts and feelings of guilt when they sometimes allowed their child digital play because of the gap of their parental beliefs and their real practices.
Furthermore, the Korean parents’ active notion of parenting in the Korean education fever context showed their exertion to improve their child’s competitiveness. In this sense, interestingly, using digital technology gave the parents a positive insight into a promising education for their child’s future, like coding education (that they did not consider as part of children’s popular culture). On the contrary, under the same purpose, digital play was also restrictively used by them as an effective motivator to make their children study academic subjects (i.e. when they reward the child with digital play after homework). In these highly competitive and global times, what are the meanings of “computer,” “English,” and “academic learning” in their Korea communities? That is, under the same aim of increasing social competiveness, some parents encourage digital play as “their child’s important technological asset for future,” yet others limit to use it as “a carrot of academic studies,” which shows different sides of social competiveness and a flip side of hypercompetitiveness in Korean neoliberal contexts.
Bakhtin (1981) suggests that the “double-voiced discourse” that our languages embrace represents the previous multiple discourses and backgrounds. That is, the Korean middle-class parents’ utterances may imply not only their own views and experiences but also others’ and the society’s voices and discourses. In addition, “because meaning is contextual and we repeat someone else’s words in a new context” (Tobin, 2000), their meaning becomes new in the Korean social context. In this sense, digital play does not merely mean contemporary children’s play with digital technology in Korea. Rather, digital play can reflect the Korean middle-class parents’ larger social tensions, concerns, and anxieties regarding their “cultural logic of child rearing” (Lareau, 2011), their parental practices, and the intense competitiveness their children face in education (and the job market) in global and neoliberal times.
This study makes the invisible parents’ tensions in Korean society visible through larger social perspectives. As a larger concept of “play” embracing children’s informal learning and other possibilities, exploring digital play requires different and diverse lenses to find and understand multiple invisible and hidden meanings of contemporary children’s culture in the society. Therefore, this study will contribute some grounds of understanding of Korean children’s and parents’ culture and will bridge between childhood research and children’s daily life.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.