 All righty. Hi. Welcome. Welcome so much. Thank you so much for being here. It's such a busy point in the semester. I am thrilled that you are all here. I'm Dr. Mara Gubar. I'm a professor in the literature section here at MIT. And I'm Assistant Director of the MIT Communications Forum, which is sponsoring this event. And I am so excited to welcome you guys here for a conversation about all things queen. So I'll start by explaining the format of the comm forum for those of you who have not been here. We will have one hour of moderated conversation. I will ask questions of our panelists who I will introduce in a second. I'm so excited they are here to join us. And after that, at six, we will pause for a second. And any of you who need to run should feel free at that point to exit the room. Don't feel abashed. We understand. But for the rest of you, from six to seven, we will have an opportunity for you to ask questions of our panelists. And those are what those microphones are for, so that when we conclude, I'll ask you to step up to the microphones and get in line, and you can ask your questions at the microphone. OK, so that's a note about format. And now I can introduce our two wonderful panelists who work on youth culture. I'm so excited they are here. First, we have Dr. Merrill Alpert. She's an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. And before that, she actually worked on the production end of tween culture. She worked at places like Nickelodeon and Disney, so we're definitely going to talk to her about that. And now that she's a professor, she's also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. And she's the author of two books. One is out, and the other forthcoming, I think. The first one is Digital Youth with Disabilities. And it came out from our own MIT Press in 2014. And the one she's still working on that's going to come out is called Giving Voice, Mobile Communication, Disability and Inequality. And that's coming out also from MIT. So we must have had a good experience the first time. OK, good. In 2017. So that's Dr. Alpert. Then we have Dr. Tyler Bickford, who is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. His PhD was actually in music. He's an ethnomusicologist. But he got a job at the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh because they have one of the top children's literature and culture programs in the country. And his first book. I got a job because Mara wanted to hire me. I used to work with him, but that is not why. He got the job. He got the job because he was the best candidate and so exciting to have in the program. His first book is in production now, right? Yeah, May 1. At Oxford University Press, and it's called Schooling New Media, Music, Language, and Technology in Children's Culture. And he's also working on a second book entitled Twin Pop. I love that title, obviously. Children's Music and the Public Sphere. So we need to ask him about Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Hannah Montana, all of whom he has written articles about. And also this year, to finish his Twin Pop book, he has an ACLS fellowship, which is a really fancy, prestigious, awesome fellowship. So they are our panelists. I'm so excited they're here. And so I think first we should just start with the basics and say, and I'll ask, what does it mean to be a tween? Well, there you go. Where does the term come from? What does it mean? Yeah. Those are surprisingly big questions, I think. But the simple version, the sort of everyday version, is that tweens are in between children and teenagers, right? And so kids eight to 12, years old, maybe. But the problem, the reason it's not a simple question, is that the history of that is sort of very complex. We used to have other words, like preteen or subteen. So why have we changed the language we use? Microbopper. Yeah, absolutely. Like this amazing poster at Squire Magazine. And that was 1968, Microbopper. So I think maybe the thing to emphasize is that tween has always been a marketing category, right? So it's a demographic category for marketers in the consumer industries and media industries. It comes from that world. Whereas words like preteen, maybe less so, right? Like they also may have had sort of marketing implications. But tween has always been a marketing category. And the kind of eight to 12 that maybe it's stabilized at, never totally was fixed. And if you look at marketing literature from people who, from companies that identify as marketing to tweens, you can go very low and very high, right? So ranges that might bottom out literally at preschool and end up as high as like 15 years old. Or there might be sort of ranges that overlap. So 5 to 11 might be what one person defines as tween and another person might define 12 to 15 as tween, right? And those don't overlap at all. So it ends up being a sort of capacious category, especially because of some of the ways that the market evolved. And when did the marketers start using it, though, tween in particular? So I think that there is a sort of take a step back. All this has to do with a larger conversation about how we define youth. And thinking about how do young people, people of a certain age, spend their time and what they have time to do outside of the things they must do? What do they choose to do? What do they have to do? So we think about distinctions between who has to work, who doesn't have to work, who has to go to school, who doesn't have to go to school, and when is it legally mandated that people go to school and not just when in sort of our history, but where in the world. So in the United States, you at age 11, you are supposed to be in school around the world. That might be the time that you might go to work. So a sort of cultural that we're part of the it's always been a certain way or hasn't been a certain way, certainly a sort of global perspective on any of this and around sort of the rights of kids to do stuff with their time like go shopping or buy stuff. Kind of I think needs to be framed a little bit out in sort of what we're looking at. And then to sort of riff off the sort of age bands. You're right, it definitely does sort of I think bounce off of who's talking about for what purpose to sell what. So for Nielsen ratings, it's 6 to 11. So when I was working at Disney Channel, you'd get bands for 2 to 5, 6 to 11, 2 to 11, and then older kids too. But sort of that's what the advertising was being centered around. And so that's what you would then sort of communicate to the Nielsen marketers. So we can say sort of not yet teenagers or emerging teenagers. Nowadays we have a emerging adulthood. So adolescents who aren't quite adults, but we don't use that term emerging teenager. And I don't know why exactly. It's kind of a mouthful, but we could maybe. Oh, I will take this moment to say we have a sign-in sheet over there if you would like to be on the com forum mailing list. So as you go out, you can sign your name and your email address to be on the com forum mailing list so that you know about events like these before you happen, if you're not already on it. All right, I'm just going to keep going. So can I follow up? Yeah, do. I think the point about over time and across geographies that sort of how we think about youth and childhood changes a lot is an important one. So I think as a reservation, not every 11-year-old is a tween, right? So tween isn't something that exists in the world that we go out and find. tween is an idea that marketers had, right? And that they started using this term in order to sort of define and categorize. So even in the United States where childhood might be very different than in other parts of the world or in the contemporary United States where it might be very different than other parts of history, other times in history, that the idea of tween is a concept and it's not a group of people, right? So it's not a sociological phenomenon. It's a sort of cultural conceptual idea about how people sort of might be or should be that really is in the minds of marketers and spreads out from there rather than being sort of in the world in actual 11-year-olds that marketers are jumping into. So let me ask then, once that happened, it became this cultural category that adults were using, that marketers were using. Did people in that category sort of grab onto it and have a sense like, yes, we are tweens. Like, do tweens, is tweens something that tweens think of themselves as now? So I think that we have two things. So tweens, sorry, people between sort of early adolescents are always trying to figure out who they are and are very concerned with age bracketing. So, and but those definitions are very much shaped by their social context. So it might be the difference between being on one kind of basketball team or another kind of basketball team that you get to age into. And those children are the little kids and those are the older kids. But if you ask them the high schoolers, they'd all be little kids. But they're really into like figuring out how they belong and who they belong to and who they belong with. And I think that those micro boring interaction, they don't have a market value attached to them. That those in group, out group, kids are themselves sort of anthropologists of sort of what items do they use to mark who they belong to and who they belong with? What do they use to purposefully exclude people and create those groups? So I think that the, it's much more interesting to then also think about in what ways they might adapt what is labeled as tween culture to do that demarcation work, to do that belonging, not belonging work. So it's not to say that they're like above or outside of it, but they certainly appropriate it to do that work. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the term itself, right? Is it used by kids who might fit its criteria? It probably never caught on the way that words like teenager cut on, right? So teenager is an invention of the kind of post-war era. That word was not widely used earlier and it sort of spread very quickly and people who fit the numerical category started calling themselves teenagers and now that's a sort of widespread word. I think tween is not that, right? I think tween's, words like pre-teen still do circulate. So I think some of the, one of the interesting things about this kind of experience of being kind of older than a child and younger than a teenager is that it is really ambiguous and there is a lot of different language that you can use and one of the reasons that a word like tween can come into being is because people are trying to figure out what this time of life is. Parents are asking questions about it. Kids themselves are asking questions about it. Marketers are asking questions about it. So some of this is throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. I think parents might say my tween is right to describe their 11-year-old kid and you might find kids less but sometimes using that word. But I'd say I think kids are more likely to use the word kid to describe themselves and to be very sensitive, like you say, to these micro, like kids are often very clear about who's younger than them and who's older than them, sort of where they fit in a kind of age hierarchy, which sometimes labels like tween might be helpful for but other times it might not. Or they might just, you know, they go to the store and they see, oh, that's the tween clothing section. So it's been clearly marketed for them. So, you know, knowing that certain objects that they might be into are labeled, I think they have an awareness of, not as if they're sort of unaware of it, but self-identification is sort of a different thing. And why did the marketers create it? What was in it for them? I mean, I think, well, part of that is that you have, you have spare, you have income. You have kids with spending power with parents who should sort of unpack this even further and to say that there is a gendered component, a class component, a racial component to who is desired as the market and who's constructed as the market and who gets symbolized as being, you know, marketed to. So I think that there's been really interesting work by Allison Pugh, who's a sociologist and Elizabeth Chin who's been really interested in work on going to stores with kids who have lower socioeconomic backgrounds, kids of color, to sort of figure out when you go to a store, do you feel like this stuff is for you and how do you make meaning of that stuff? And I think that the sort of exclusionary kind of boundaries that are created around tween culture do that other work of sort of who belongs as part of a tweeter who doesn't belong in that category. So you're saying that the category tween is gendered and raised? Well, from the get-go actually, I remember reading that sort of the tween teen first emerged around sort of beauty tips, that that was sort of a, as a way of sort of, oh, for it's not teen makeup, but tween teen sort of makeup. So that, like actually having a sort of gendered component from the get-go and a commercial component and a sort of aesthetic component as well. So that's sort of tracing through. And generally we have a sense, right, that when we segregate the market, that creates more and more little niches. You can sell people things too, is that kind of it? Yeah. So I think, so historically in the 20th century, right, you have the emergence of like the children's consumer market in the 20s and 30s and 40s, right, where previously you don't have that, right? You have department stores, but there isn't a separate section for children. And so you start to have like Daniel Cook at Rutgers, wrote a book about the history of this. You start to have sections specifically for mothers and then sections which end up being sections that are sort of about young children. So you have the young children's like clothing market and toy market get consolidated and marketers start thinking about toddlers and mothers as consumers. And then in the post-war period, you have teenagers get consolidated and marketed too. It's interesting in that time when you're looking at youth culture developing and Elvis and the Beatles, right? If you look at the videos of the Beatles coming to the States, there's lots of 11-year-old girls in those videos screaming for the Beatles, right? But they're kind of, they're named teenagers, right? Like they're, so they're the sort of language that exists that is teen. And so, right, so you're segmenting a market. There's this kind of inexorable like logic of consumer markets to kind of try and segment them. Marketers have an interest in dividing new niches to sell to them. And so it makes sense if you're targeting youth. You know, you have very young people, you have teenagers, and then if you wanna segment that even more, you kind of divide out the space in between. And historically, that starts to happen in the 80s. So there is kind of a timeline here that makes sense just from a kind of market logic, right? Yeah, that does make sense. So what kinds of, if you had to say what the sort of cultural stereotype but the tween is, I feel like we're moving towards defining it already, but what would you say about the sort of the cultural stereotype of who or what a tween is based on the culture that's coming out for them, how they're represented in it? It's funny, I think when that question, I more think about colors. Purposely I think about, and that sort of gendered component, pinks, purple, sort of glitter, sparkly. There's always a store at the mall that tends to be sort of labeled as the tween sort of store. I think nowadays it's justice, but maybe a generation or a little bit ago, I see some nods. Limited two might have been the tween store. I see more nods. Like you knew that that was the store to get tween stuff and to see other tweens and sort of congregate in that sort of space or get the catalogs or whatnot. And are those mostly aimed at girls, those stores? So yeah, so that's why I think that sort of there is a, because otherwise it gets framed as sort of boy culture. There's a sort of, I think that the tween niche does get very gendered. Your sort of perspective on that. Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. So on the one hand, yeah, tweens are just categorically girls, right? Like the word kind of always means preteen girls and not preteen children. But it's also interesting that the word itself is about ages and not about genders, right? And so there's the slippage. And when you look at what marketers are trying to do on the one hand, it's clothing and makeup and music and these things that very much are targeted to girls. But there are these other moments where it seems like maybe they actually don't realize and they think they're selling to older kids. But so the question of sort of who is the tween? What's the stereotype of the tween? I think malls are important, right? White, suburban, middle class girls. And so there's this other logic where we have a word that means an age range, right? If it means eight to 12 or six to 11 or something, that seems, that supposedly that encompasses everyone, but what the sort of the image of the type of person that stands in for that is a white, middle class, suburban girl. And so then if you're not a white, middle class, suburban girl, the consumer industries aren't necessarily directly targeting you and you might not fit into that as well. Or you might be outside of it entirely, right? Like malls, you know, stories at malls may not be a space where you're welcome or that's even available to you. And so then one interesting question is what if tweens are categorically girls with these sort of racial and class markers too, is like what exactly is going on with eight to 12 year old boys, right? Like they in some ways maybe sort of outside of this discourse about age and consumer culture and media. Yeah, although I do think it's funny. I think that there is a world that gets created sort of from the market or advertising side in terms of what the stereotypes of tweens are, but just from sort of my experience in television that doesn't necessarily look like that. That tween sort of sitcoms in television are very remarkably culturally, racially diverse in the US. So there is sort of one thing I think where advertisers, you know, catalogs, magazines are shifting in certain ways. And I think that that's pushed, especially nowadays by young people who are online, who have sort of their own messaging about what a tween or a teen or a girl might look like. And sort of a kind of a change that may be driven from sort of the mass produced, you know, fictional content does kind of shift some of that, at least what a tween might look like as well. Can you give us some examples of like some fictional representations of tweens like on TV that were particularly important if you feel like in sort of making that happen? Well, I think during my time at Disney Channel, I would say that that's so Raven, actually Raven Simone, I see some nods, was actually a pretty, she was, I think she was the first African American lead sort of female character on the show, but she was also hugely sort of commercially successful kind of pulling on some of her past sort of notoriety from like the Cosby show and sort of other shows. But she was also from the get-go about, you know, her musical talents, her fashion talents, sort of all the other ways in which she had a sort of entrepreneurial sort of bent to the kinds of things she was interested in. And I do think at least from kind of within the network, sort of thinking about who could be a leading, who could be a star, who could be sort of the centerpiece of a franchise because tween culture is nothing if not franchisable and rebootable and evergreen, the themes, the content. So I think for me that that, for all the shows that now if you go to like disneychannel.com, you know, you'll see sort of a very pretty wide array of who's a, for now, Zendaya sort of being a lead, lead sort of actress and star of not just Disney, but ABC dancing with the stars like the whole sort of world of the Disney ABC sort of franchise. So I think for me that that was a, but again, it tied to sort of like the market logic. It's not out of like kindness or necessarily out of sort of inclusion, although that is, you know, shifting on ABC kind of as a whole. What shows are getting produced in Greenlit there, but I think sort of the market logic behind it underpins it all. So kids media, kids TV especially, right? I think deserves a lot of credit for diverse casting practices going back to the 90s and Nickelodeon. I think there's no question about this, right? Right now we're sort of finally starting to see prime time TV shows with actors of color in lead parts or even just in prominent parts. And that's something that people are celebrating. And it's definitely true that the disney channel Nickelodeon had that 10, 20 years ago. There's also this sort of Disney channel casting logic is this kind of like flat multiculturalism, right? So you have, your casting is kind of nominally diverse, but it's also for starters still suburban and affluent, right? Like that's the kind of cultural center. And to some extent, and not always, but to some extent it treats ethnicity or race as kind of just this sort of flat, interchangeable thing like other sort of forms of consumer taste or something that it's not necessarily that things like race and ethnicity are not sort of historical or kind of structural class divisions, right? That affect the way people relate to each other, that structure of people's relations to each other. They're just these sort of incidental characteristics of a character in a school or something who might relate to each other. So I actually am totally on board with sort of celebrating kids media, kids TV especially for doing things that prime time TV is being celebrated for 20 years later. But there's also a sort of, I think there's an interesting way that the sort of logic of multiculturalism kind of still it is invested in a kind of racial logic that ultimately I think is still kind of white, right? It sort of multiculturalism gets subsumed into, I think that's a complex argument and I don't need to sort of make it right here. I have an idea though to clarify, Dora the Explorer. I feel like this is an argument that gets made about Dora the Explorer that yes, it's great that there's a kids program with Spanish and all this stuff but where is Dora from? Like she has no cultural specificity whatsoever. She has no traditions. She has no geography. She has no, it's completely blank what her ethnicity really is. Well, and you do have shows on the Disney channel and I'm blanking on the names but where you do, you also, you know, if you have a Latino lead, they have a Latino family and there may be, maybe references to heritage and things like that, right? So it's not, it's not perfectly. It's not as bad as Dora. Right, it's not as bad as Dora, absolutely. What do you think, Merrill? So I, so at Nickelodeon worked on sort of the next iteration of Dora but called Ni Hao Kailan. So it was sort of a Mandarin Chinese, Chinese focused version of not of Dora but a lot of the same producers and tease, messy to put together. And there's a lot of, just from the get go, the globalization of children's media as like a huge market. It's not to sort of be understated like how much money, how much of the financial models are sort of pinned on this. So, you know, the sort of pan, sort of representation of being Latina for Dora is partly sort of an adaptation of what cultures sort of make sense for the episode, like what cultural components make sense for an episode and what, so for sort of advancing a singular episode or a story versus sort of the entire narrative arc and world of Dora's sort of identity. But again, sort of the, again where the market sort of comes up here is the show that I was on was canceled ultimately because it couldn't sell as many toys as Dora could. So there's that sort of, and having sort of, we had Chinese cultural consultants, Chinese language consultants. I ran studies with preschoolers, kind of workshopping all the cultural content in Chinese preschools in the San Gabriel Valley. So there was like a great deal of effort and work that went into the specificity of the language and the sort of dialect and all of that sort of stuff. So people are, I think, at least on the preschool side, I think trying to do something with what they've got to work with. Yeah, that's really interesting. And the specificity didn't sell as well as the sort of every girl-ness of Dora? Is that the idea? I don't know all the exact reasons in terms of population or interest. But I should say that then the one of the writers from that show went on, that I worked with, went on to be the creator of Doc McStuffins, which is a preschool, I see some nods, a preschool show on Disney that is very important in the sense that the lead character is a girl, African-American girl who's a doctor, which there's under-representation in STEM and medicine fields with a men of color. And I think that there's a lot of values that if that doesn't kind of come through in one show, then you try something else. Doc McStuffins' mom is a doctor. Doc McStuffins is a stuff-animal doctor. A toy doctor, yeah. Right. There's no liability there. But when kids, you know, when they put on, they carry the Doc McStuffins sort of bag and the coat for all intents and purposes, they're a doctor. I really love this point, though, that it's a complex point, right? Because on the one hand, you guys are saying children's culture kind of led the way, which is really striking because we often think of children's culture as retrogressive, as nostalgic, as backward-looking, as lagging behind the aesthetic experimentation of adult art. Which it also is interestingly, right? Like, if you watch shows like Hannah Montana, their format is this golden age of TV sitcom format, right? So it's more like The Honeymooners than Modern Family. So I can- I'm sorry, just as a sort of quick- No, yeah. That's really interesting. Well, I can partly explain that because the writers of kids' TV shows, the sort of running joke was you either get them sort of on their way up or on their way down. So either people who are cheaper to pay because they're sort of fresh out of college or they are newly employed, or people who used to write for sitcoms that were canceled maybe 10 years ago and the residuals are kind of running out. So kind of on the way up or on the way down are the folks who are mostly writing children's television. I think there are also interesting aesthetic arguments for what happens and not just- I'm not sure what they are. But anyways, just as a side note, some of this stuff also is a sort of archive of genres and styles. But I think the point about diversity are the things that it also can lead the way in important ways. Yeah, it's really interesting. And what about- So I know a lot of people in our culture are really worried about the way kids are getting sexualized, especially girls, like younger and younger. I'm wondering how that sort of fits into these shows and also to pop music. So Tyler, your expertise on popular music, what do you see differences in the way tweens, girl stars and tween boy stars are sort of treated in that or other regards? That's a lot of questions. I know, sorry. I guess what I'm asking is how does pop music compare with the television? Actually, to go back to, maybe there's a, I think there's an interesting conceptual point about tweens and the idea of sexualization and sort of there's a cultural discourse about the sexualization of girls at a younger age. So, and also thinking about why tween is a label that applies to girls and less to boys. And I think one way to think about this is that the idea of being between childhood and adolescence is in our culture and in the sort of way that gender works in our culture is a problem for girls in a way that it's just not for boys. So transitioning from childhood, which is at least culturally constructed in terms of ideas of innocence and innocence specifically as like a sexuality, the absence of sexuality. And then there's some sort of black box and you come out on the other side as a sort of sexually mature, sexually desiring and also sexually desirable person. And the issues there are just so much heavier for girls in part because our culture is kind of obsessed with girls' sexuality, with sort of girls as sexual objects and both with making that something that is a widespread kind of like desire and also that desire turns into a discourse of kind of concern, right? So it's a problem for girls. And so then we get new words because we're trying to sort of resolve a problem to some extent and so something like tween, like naming this and trying to make sense of it. Oh, you kind of are a teenager but you still kind of are a child, right? Like let's combine the sort of playfulness of childhood with some of the markers of youth culture, which are things like fashion and music and whatever else, right? Then it doesn't necessarily resolve it but at least kind of presents a package that says, like this makes sense, it's intelligible. It's not a contradiction anymore. Can I just ask you, so you said it's more of a problem for girls. How does that play out with say, comparing someone like, and you don't have to use these examples, but like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber. We had to get to them, right? Well, right, but so it's, I think it's the first point is that it's a problem that like members of the culture understand as being an issue for, right? Like people think about 11 year old girls and they feel anxious, right? Like they don't know how to process it. They have this sort of like combination of, you know, this like virgin horror thing starts to apply and like, what does it mean to have this person be as sexual object or maybe to be presenting themselves sexually desiring any number of things, right? And that just, that doesn't apply to 11 year old boys, right? Like the kind of cultural construct of an 11 year old boy, the image we have of an 11 year old boy is very different. What, like Tom Sawyer or something? Yeah, sure, any number of things. So I think for, it's less the celebrities, right? Than the sort of the word itself and the way we think about maturation. There's a whole kind of argument about what does happen for boys, but I mean just the sort of simple point is that I think we can see that the people are concerned about that for girls. And so then you do get weird things, right? Like the Jonas Brothers had this thing where they'd wear promise rings and so they were sort of like saying, yes, we're virgins, we're gonna stay virgins. But like men don't have that virgin horror thing applied to them. So you don't have male celebrities who might be objects of like their fan sexual desire have to say, oh no, no, no, I'm still a virgin, right? You don't have that. But then in this weird like tween media environment, you have the boys like really going out of their way and kind of voluntarily taking that on, which I don't know if, which is I think an interesting problem, right? So it's not performing traditional sort of masculine celebrity, right? Which might be more kind of aggressively, you know, desiring and other things. And instead kind of putting themselves in a position that in the past would have been reserved for girls. Whereas the kind of the forms of femininity that someone like Taylor Swift or Hannah Montana are performing are much more conventional and traditional, right? I think you can see them as being pretty conventionally sort of like modest but still sexualized, right? Kind of proper femininity. Yeah, I was thinking when you guys were talking about consumption, I was remembering when my son, when time wanted to watch the Miley Cyrus show. What was this? Is that the Hannah Montana show? And we turned it on and she and another girl were having a huge fight at the mall over a pair of shoes who was gonna get to buy the pair of shoes. And I was just like, oh my God, I don't wanna watch this. I don't want my kid to watch it. Cause it was so about consumption and fashion and superficial stuff. I don't know what's your take on this. Yeah, so I guess from the inside, we're sort of this experience. So I will say, so one thing about a sort of off the record development executive said to me and in trying to sort of create more progressive shows, a sense of frustration of like, I don't know why I'd like spent all of this time going through being a development assistant at an agency to then like a development assistant to like working my way up the like the development chain which is kind of how tends to work in Hollywood. Just so consumer products could tell me what to green light. The real sort of dictation of if it doesn't get pitched in the room with a whole suite of materials, then it's likely not going to get sort of green light. So of course that ends up, but of course at the same time that you still have, you know, rules, how kind of up to date they are from the FCC about the kinds of marketing that can be done on television and can't be done in what sort of order and you can't technically have, although Hannah Montana, I don't think is on the air anymore on Disney Channel. They've moved on to some other shows, but you couldn't have a Hannah Montana, a spot for a Hannah Montana like CD within the Hannah Montana episode because that would become a program length commercial. Of course like you could say sort of the whole channel is sort of a 24 hour commercial. So sort of whether or not it's sort of Hannah Montana in the episode, but there are people who like, who it's their job to like painstakingly because there's huge fees attached to that that ends up happening. So who's jobs it really is to like sort of check every little element that goes. My job, my specific job when I was at Disney Channel was program scheduling coordinator, which meant that I managed the grid of every single thing at every single time that was on Disney Channel and like in a database would like program and plug in episodes. Like the programming sort of executives would decide like this is when high school musical two is gonna premiere and these are all the episodes that are kind of gonna go around it, but the rest of the time you put on what you, what you're gonna put on. So sort of managing like which of those episodes would come in, but this ties us back to sort of the sexualization discussion because you know, the Disney Channel stars then leave the nest at a certain point and go on to more teen or adult careers. And I think you had mentioned something earlier about sort of there were like moments where we're like, oh, something happened and that's sort of like a breakage. So it was pre-Miley, it was Lindsay Lohan that sort of was the sort of tipping point of what, who represents sort of the brand who has sort of gone too far in terms of no longer being representative of what the Disney sort of brand represents in terms of not just sexuality, but then also sort of drugs and alcohol and sort of other behaviors too. But I have a vivid memory of having to scrub, having to pull the parent trap from having aired like one night because like something had come out in the news and everybody at sort of Disney Channel was sort of a flurry that we had to put some other movie on that night because it would look really bad to have the parent trap, the Lindsay Lohan version, not the like Haley Mills version for people in the room who know what that is on the television that night because it would be not a good thing. Wow, that's really interesting. And not just after they leave, right? So like Miley Cyrus had the Vanity Fair shoot and the sort of pole dancing thing. All of which were sort of overblown, right? We live in a culture that's like looking for ways to freak out about girls, images of girls. And the Vanessa Hudgens had these photos like while she was still affiliated with Disney. But going back even further in the 90s when you had the sort of boy band and teen pop explosion in the late 90s, which was not coming from the Disney Channel in Nickelodeon but was definitely very interested in young audiences. You had Britney Spears and NSYNC and these other, they would be on the Disney Channel all the time. Although they did start on Mickey Mouse Club. They did start on Mickey Mouse Club, right? Right, they went away for a while. But they also, they didn't play, they aired on Radio Disney but they also aired on Top 40 Radio, right? Which was not true for Hannah Montana or High School Musical. But you had the Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel like really wanting to have these acts on because they attracted their core audience, right? So if you could have a Britney concert on the Disney Channel that was perfect for Disney. And there was, but that was a real sort of contradiction, right? On the one hand, you really want it. It's sort of exactly what your audience is looking for. But after a year or so Fox Kids and Nickelodeon and Disney Channel all sort of started backing off away from Britney who well before 2006, 2007, she started having her kind of Lindsay Lohan style public drama was seen as kind of too provocative for the kid audience. So there's this real kind of tension where it's precisely that like teen youth culture like kind of provocative, eventually highly sexualized imagery that kind of, that is what sells, right? And is what you sort of want to put on screen which is why you have these stars like Vanessa Hudgens or Miley Cyrus who can sort of be getting into trouble at the moment that they're still kind of kid stars is because you're always straddling that line. And they sort of just constantly are going back and forth, right? Be kind of pushing up against the line and then backing off against the front. Although I think it is really important if we're talking about not just tween culture from sort of 10 years ago between cultures sort of at the moment and the ways in which young women who are stars of sort of Disney Channel shows are themselves on social media are Rowan Blanchard who stars in the show Girl Meets World. There was just a New York Times article on like her definition of feminism and like how she I think identifies as not necessarily heterosexual, not necessarily sort of conforming to sort of gender binaries that she has sort of made sort of certain political statements. I think we're in a sort of different space in which that is not, I don't think kind of controlled in the same way that the Disney machine had been operating and that sort of relationship between and you have sort of also celebrities now like Amanda Stenberg and Willow Smith who maybe became famous as sort of tweens through like Willow Smith, her parents are Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith but you have then also Amanda Stenberg who was Rue in the Hunger Games sort of series as they sort of enter a little bit older becoming engaged in Black Lives Matter, engaged in sort of black girl magic sort of themes and creation of material online. So using some of that tween notoriety to redefine what it is to be sexual, what it is to identify as a girl or not identify as a girl or not identify as any particular gender either that there's this dialogue I think that today's teenage stars of tween sort of media are sort of bringing and pushing some larger cultural conversations not just in sort of the youth space but sort of the larger cultural space overall. Really cool. That kind of anticipates my next question which was going to be you both work on technology and I was thinking that technology is one way that kids have a way to communicate with each other and make connections and engage in activism that maybe wasn't so easy in the past potentially, I don't know. So I'm interested to know what you guys think in terms of how technology fits in, what role it plays in sort of the category tween. So the number one technology that I think has been on my mind for the past few weeks is Musical.ly. Do people know that app? Both nods. Maybe you sort of know about it because it's sort of a musical. Okay, so it is where if you know an eight-year-old they might be on it. It is of course social media when it comes to being 13, age 13 and up. That's what sort of one is supposed to be that age but there's five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10-year-olds that sort of band on Musical.ly. It's an app for lip-syncing but it is a lot like Snapchat and it does not ask you what age you are when you sort of create a profile. There's celebrities who have their own kind of sort of profiles on it but also just people who are instead of YouTubers they're musers and so they have their own followings people who are primarily musically like on the app famous who then become one of the musers just got signed by CAA and I think she's like 13 or 14 or something. So there are these spaces that were not considered to be sort of social networking spaces but because there's certain gray areas in terms of having to be regulated by the FCC, by sort of those regulatory bodies that sort of tweens are finding spaces to connect with one another and to express who they are, express their identities to collect. I think this is also like an important identity development that is certainly sort of a teenage, something that happens in sort of those years but there's also the sense of sort of the sort of age band, the 8211 of like collecting and sorting and sort of amassing and using that sort of as you go along to figure out what you are but sort of yeah that's why like baseball card collections or whatever sort of collection, whatever it sort of is the sort of amassing and then kind of as you move through like sorting and getting in rid and so you can like follow a lot of people and then unfollow them if you want but that's sort of part of the new collection is like following a lot of people and like having them on your feed and that is now because so many young people have some more teens have phones but more tweens have tablets in terms of like what are some of these distinction between teens and tweens but like the 8211 band I think it's spend about six hours a day with media but teens it's closer to nine so you do have sort of some gaps here but TV is the number one technology still a month that tweens are, 8211 year olds are engaging with so not to overplay sort of the high tech social media stuff that TV and music are still number one and do you think that this is, I think it's so striking so we've been talking about tween culture now for 45 minutes, books have not come up says the literary critic which is partly a feature of what you guys are interested in well no we talked about Hunger Games that's true wreaked passing but it does seem to me interesting that a lot of the action I feel like seems to be happening more in these other other fields of cultural production is that fair or right what do you think? well I mean I do think, I mean book series like Hunger Games like Divergent that those are, I mean they're trans-media franchises right but they're not tween I think of them as teen and because it's not that tweens don't read them but I don't think they're culturally marked as tween phenomenon I think they're YA but the publishing industry doesn't use the term tween it uses YA well that's right and that's its own interesting question or middle grades which is I mean is what's the relationship between those yeah that's right as an industry it's not invested in tween but I think there's also like genres and mediums are not equally distributed right so so music, popular music especially has very strong associations to youth culture in particular right and so it's reasonable to expect in fact I think is the case that kids would be invested in certain types of media not other types of media right and these things can be divided by gender so in the 80s when you had the sort of half hour program like commercials the He-Man and Smurfs and these other shows that were kind of developing a kind of new form of kids TV when the developers of these TV programs were looking to target somewhat older kids then the young kids who would watch He-Man the shows that they produced were Jim and the Holograms and Barbie and the Rockers right like these music focused shows whereas like the Smurfs or Rainbow Bright these aren't music focused shows so you're trying to target older kids which means tweens right and you bring in music in the 90s, Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel and Fox News were all in this competition to get older kids Fox Kids do you mean? Fox News 6-O-1 but I think they're actually and what did they do? They went after the tween pop stuff right and they started putting in saying can the Backstreet Boys and so music as being as having strong associations with youth culture with teenage culture and the logic of tween is trying to somehow integrate youth culture with childhood and sort of mix and match them and make them make sense it makes sense that music especially would be one of the most visible and prominent but also it seems like historically the rise of tween as a category is coinciding with the rise of new media right I mean that 1968 Microboppers article is all about Marshall McLuhan and the rise of television and like new kinds of technology so I feel like they're aren't they developing kind of at the same time? There's lots of things that are developing not to make kind of spurious correlations between sort of one or the other I mean you also have things like you know family you know divorce rates you know what does a family look like what does the home life look like you know you have sort of a sort of spike sort of in the 80s but now we're at a point where like divorce rates are about the same as sort of around World War II sort of era so you have sort of shifts in just what family is economic stability or instability families nowadays that are increasingly which because globally diasporic families so young people that are trying to connect with loved ones who don't live not just in like the same town but the same country and so what those tools are for connecting so some of these like broader you know kind of sociological frames around like what does it mean to grow up within a certain time period and there are certain tools available for other kinds of connection and you know your phone can include you know Skype or whatever it is to connect with somebody else and it has all this other stuff too so all of those things our technologies do so much but always in relation to some of these broader themes that aren't just about impacting tweens but impacting the sort of social spheres in which they live and also like there's a whole long list like the sorts of places where people live changing neighborhoods policies where we've actually like criminalized in a lot of cases kids playing by themselves on streets the decline of things like malls which sort of replaced neighborhoods for a while as a kind of semi public space where kids could congregate independently and so to some extent media is just a kind of like small replacement for the public spaces that have all been taken away the decline of neighborhood schools all sorts of things I think it's really comforting to think about the ways in which media can link people together and maybe give teens and tweens who are marginalized a way to find people that they couldn't necessarily find could you speak for that? Well and at the same time though so just talking about musically like yes we can sort of say that there's like new connections new communities then thinking about the biases that are built into any of these systems so I was just going through musically with my students and my mobile communication class and there's a hashtag for like face filters just like Snapchat where you could change your face like a little look while you're using the front facing camera to kind of go into the phone so again this is an app that is largely being driven by sort of this like 5 to 11 sort of age range younger than we might think of as social media and I pull it up and one of the face filters is like a kabuki sort of like mask and so we have sort of yellow face going on in this setting where mostly unsupervised 5 to 11 year olds are hanging out so awesome friend making not so great cultural stereotypes, cultural appropriation and a definite sort of outlook that might not be a thing that you know kids a little bit older or you know even the kids themselves might choose to encounter but it's built it's in the neighborhood that they're hanging out in so I think that the sort of you know belonging not belonging there's ways that these technologies create that code that into their very being and so the sort of it's awesome it's terrible all at the same time it's important to hold on to I was thinking about like it's something like it gets better right the phenomenon where you can have no one in your town who is supportive of you as a queer kid growing up but you through the internet have access to these messages or and the flip side of that is the sort of you bring the bullying home right because I mean one of the kind of consistent findings over the last 10 years of more of research about new media and kids is that social media and kids is that most of the people that you're linked to on social media are people that you know face to face and so there may be opportunities and probably more for kids right to make connections or to be members of affinity groups right like if you really like fantasy novels or something you can find a space for yourself I'm so glad you mentioned that because I was thinking yeah creative opportunities like writing fan fiction and finding a community and a creative outlet both I don't think we're at the point yet where kids really are like developing lots of social relationships that are purely that are just online social relationships right I still think it's the vast majority of the kind of links the social links that you have on social media are people that you have some connection to face to face people you already know very interesting can I make so I the right technology I think an interesting and kind of another kind of funny and problematic example kids bop is the biggest one of one of the biggest music brands period but but definitely the biggest music brand going with kids music so kids bop takes top 40 pop music and like we records it with choruses of kids kind of singing along to the hooks and packages it in CDs in compilations and sells it to kids and they usually edit a little bit of the language and so it's basically very timely pop music that parents might not want their kids to be listening to edit it a little bit add some kids voices and now it's okay to sell the kids right and so you know 4 to 11 year old kids so kids bop their albums are always in the top 10 anyways the point is not kids bop but kids bop com in 2006-2007 through I think starting as early as 2006 but maybe 2008 to 2010 or 2011 kids bop com was set up as video sharing site for kids so YouTube also would be a space that was growing at the time but being on YouTube if you're an 8 year old kid might be sort of a question might be problematic and also sites like YouTube ask for information personally identifiable information that they're not allowed to ask for of young kids so kids bop.com was setting itself up as sort of fitting within the regulations not asking kids for their personally identifiable information and then also kind of being the safe neighborhood space and they were encouraging kids in particular to record themselves performing right sort of like and to post these videos and share and they'd have contests and all these other different things and kids bop.com that version of kids bop.com abruptly disappeared in like it's like hard to date but in like 2011 I sort of looked away for a minute and all of a sudden it wasn't there and kids bop retooled itself as a celebrity driven brand where now they have they cast kid performers whereas previously they always just hired studio singers to re-record the songs just sort of anonymous adult voices singing the leads now they have you know consistent named celebrity kids like on the Disney channel or something right sort of who are celebrities that they're trying to promote as celebrities they have these kids go on tours so they're trying to sell concert tickets and they no longer have the idea of like kids sharing their performances with other kids and having a community of performance and that didn't work right like kids bop.com has always been successful but it's much more successful with this kind of old media celebrity focused you know album sales model then it was with a kind of new media YouTube style peer to peer sharing based based model and I think we can learn lessons from stuff like that right like that that there's not always a perfect alignment between kind of kids and whatever the next technology is kids bop thought maybe YouTube and kids would be perfect and if they invested in it somehow it would turn into the thing that would solve the problem well and also that the sort of the idyllic notion that I was sort of floating for you guys what that kids are using these to communicate with kids and express themselves creatively tends to often get shut down or managed or controlled or appropriated by adults well no and especially in sort of school settings you know that's sort of what what are the computers here for what are you know what's the goal here with the knowledge of course that there's plenty young people for whom the internet is only something that they're able to reliably access maybe out of school or at a library and not at home and so those same sort of pathways to all the skills that we know not just technological skills but social skills cultural skills skills like critical you know thinking about you know sources of information you come across the ways in which any of those spaces are not equally sort of aligned but to go back to something that I realize I hadn't really brought up before but even just sort of talking about tastes between a certain age band that in my work I've been really interested in what ways sort of the notion of age appropriate media can be complicated by issues around you know things like disability and cognitive development different domains of development of young people who don't necessarily fit the sort of ages and stages model that marketing is meant to sort of be geared towards so I've been studying kids on the autism spectrum and you know different interests or engagements that they might have and you can have both a 3 and a 13 year old who love Elmo or who love cars but as you age older you're not going to necessarily find the Elmo sneakers that fit you're not going to find the materials that are intended for sort of an audience but that's still sort of within that biological age range something that somebody loves that somebody is into and that somebody's identity is sort of in relation to so there is these self-organizing groups or spaces where young people can feel like they belong so there's a group of young people who are on the game Minecraft which is a very we can't talk about tweens and sort of culture without talking about Minecraft I don't think but there's like a server on the sort of Minecraft being this online sort of networked blocky sort of game where it's like Legos but plus like Second Life I guess if we're going to like throw a Second Life rings a bell to people but you know a virtual sort of space of building and creativity and you can play it where you're sort of in like a game mode or kind of a creative where there's like monsters and attacking or just sort of cohabitation and there's a and you can have a standalone server in a space where you don't have to worry about other people kind of messing up your game or you can kind of block it off and so there's a server called aughtcraft that is around sort of kids on the spectrum socializing in ways that are most comfortable for them sharing interests in ways that might be most comfortable and not being bullied by others online because online bullying with among young people with disabilities is higher than for kids without disabilities and that's across various kinds of disabilities as well so in what way the internet is a safe or comfortable or welcoming space for various kinds of difference and there's certainly adults who have come to organize around those spaces but it can take a lot of in person support to and conversations and for those kinds of materials are sort of home spun right now that they're not really integrated into larger conversations about like child safety or about privacy or about how to engage on the internet and how to benefit from it so we have in the US 13% of students 3 to 22 receive some kind of special education services that's not an insignificant percentage of young people we can say are individuals that identify as having a disability of some kind so my interest has been in this whole sort of space in which understanding because there's been so much focus on sort of a medical view of focusing on sort of these kids as being sort of in special education classrooms or in therapy settings but not this Mimito and other researchers sort of hanging out messing around geeking out stuff sort of mundane ordinary things and so I've been really interested in well what does that mundane ordinary life look like for them too because that's happening as well and there's a market if you did kind of dig a little deeper thank you so much well I have to pause and say if anyone needs to run now is a good time to make a non-conspicuous exit but for the rest of you it is time for your questions so please line go ahead and line up at microphones while people are filing out you can come to a microphone and ask a question any kind of question about tween culture, teen culture Marilyn Tyler's research what have you got what have you got I'll be brave so lately I've noticed like there's like a big rise in older not kids but like teenagers and young adults who get really invested in like tween based shows like something like Steven Universe or Gravity Falls or Adventure Time stuff like that and it always makes me feel a little bit weird and they seem to like kind of cater to them now too and I was just kind of wondering like what your thoughts on that were so that does help so there is a larger history of the lines between adult culture and children's culture being kind of messy Pee Wee Herman sort of Pee Wee's play house I think is one sort of key factor where there was a show a sort of camp aesthetic around and even sort of earlier I'm forgetting the exact name of the show but adults who would kind of be the performers the lead characters in sort of these variety shows and they're always being sort of aligned there between who is this for who belongs as part of the viewing audience and people other kind of identities taking a hold of children's kind of culture for whatever purpose that might be for some kind of defining what a group might be belonging to so sort of short answer is sort of it's not new but the internet makes things more visible and makes it kind of spread faster and easier to find other people who might kind of share some of that stuff but the are comfort around sort of where those boundaries are have existed for a while In shows like Spongebob and Rin and Stimpy and Nickelodeon in the 90s were pretty consciously were Cerebin A Weiser from USC makes this argument but we're consciously trying to sort of use adult cool kind of counter cultural and specifically in the 90s a kind of like campy gay cool precisely to make their kids media a little bit more edgy and also to to alienate true adults right so what you don't want as your audience is actual middle aged moms and dads right like the moms and dads in this particular model so if you can get some kind of counter cultural group of young people to buy into it right then that kind of that makes it a little edgy and makes it exciting for young kids who also can get the jokes and stuff and also it marks it as not being cultured for middle aged parents being a middle aged parent has changed a lot in the last generation also but right that sort of logic of kind of excluding the least cool but is that really right because I would think like from the production standpoint I would think you would want the widest possible like you'd want to appeal to every single person that you possibly could I mean and yes and no I think that there's I mean there's people who work for all these companies are themselves you know fans they're adults who geek out who fan out who want to you know play a role and play a part but that's not part of the brand identity and so you have to the brand identity above all so there's you know the money source is nothing if not for that so it's a sort of tension there right if you're a network like Nickelodeon your whole reason for existence is targeting kids right so you don't actually necessarily want to expand out in but also there are the flip side of this right like sort of uncool grown-ups like in kids media is another version in the sixties Lynn in her book make room for TV points us out in the sixties there was a real effort to make TV that was like specifically appropriate for kids because there was fewer broadcast channels and everything was kind of for everyone right and that was the idea so you had local networks one show on NBC in the New York area was called Kukla Fran and Ollie and was this like puppet show and was really just sort of insipid and saccharine and it was a good show whatever but it was this puppet show so but the point of like reason that the show exists is that adults are concerned that kids are being exposed to the wrong things right like the kids love the Lone Ranger they're happy with the sort of cop and action shows and whatever else but adults are concerned and so adults have this idea about what kids should watch and so then you make a show for kids and then the NBC was going to turn Kukla Fran and Ollie from a half hour show into two fifteen minute episodes which is more on the model of kids TV and they got all these letters from adults who were like I watch the show it's our kids show why are you trying to turn this into a kids show kind of precisely because the logic of the show is like is adult values about what appropriate you know what's appropriate and then adults end up watching it and then adults end up claiming it as their own and object so that's sort of the weird flip side right of this logic of grown ups watching cartoons. I wasn't I don't know. I wasn't actually going to talk about Kukla Fran and Ollie but I'll just add that I don't think anyone working on that show conceived of it as being for children in any way so the network had this fantasy great but you know just the kind of dialogue was so adult oriented and Bert I can't remember his last name but the puppeteer was always drunk and just you know kind of improvising and you know there's just a lot of ridiculously adult banter not super sexualized or violent or anything like that but you know it's obviously just the level of discourse was on an adult level and pretty sophisticated but what I wanted to ask about was if you could just follow up a little bit on Pee Wee Herman because I was really glad that that came up and you know the original HBO special was so patently dirty and for adults and you know it was just a show I think and they did it out in LA and they happened to put on HBO this was back before the sopranos before HBO sort of became its new version of what HBO was and then the kids show was working very hard to appeal to children and adults obviously and I think the movies as well but the newest Netflix Pee Wee Herman is somewhere between the HBO special and the TV series I guess and I don't even know if that's accurate I'd like to hear your thoughts on it but it just seemed really really not for kids and kind of everything that was submerged and sort of winky in the TV series is much more out there and it's much more aggressively queer than the original was in certain ways or less queerness is less sort of allogized and kind of submerged and closer to the surface so I just wonder if you could talk about that a little bit I think of anything that's more that those sort of specials are maybe geared towards maybe young people who are fans of the show who are now older and so their sort of taste might be kind of between that original series and the kids series so I think it's sort of part of this in general sort of nostalgia repackaging of whether it was the sort of full house like Netflix sort of invested in the fuller house sort of remake as well and we can say whether that is or is not I don't think anybody has enjoyed that show as much as like people enjoyed full house although like that's a show that still airs sort of all the time so the fact that Pee Wee hasn't sort of been sort of airing continuously to sort of maintain that audience of non-original viewers whereas something like Full House another sort of Netflix show Nick at Night has been sort of churning that I was at dinner the other night and a parent there was a kid who was like at dinner with like two adults who were sort of sitting there and the girl had her iPad and I was like oh oh it's maybe not like the best setting for that to happen but then I like took a sneak and I realized that like this like nine year old was watching Full House on her iPad which like I was like oh right cause that's a current show to her or something so I think that the that Pee Wee you know when we talk about sort of these who is the market, who is it for has not been able and whatever like licensing like whether that cause a lot of times where their show has been sort of repurposed or silver heirs is so much so much about the music licensing whether people could get permission or not and how expensive that could be is like a significant reason why shows kind of come out on DVD or don't come out on DVD or do or don't on Netflix so that doesn't really sort of answer it but I think the sort of especially in the Netflix era you know we haven't really talked about sort of streaming versus non-streaming you know television content but how young people can access some of that archival material and so maybe now whatever sort of spaces there are but then again it's like what was Pee Wee sort of then now certain YouTube is Tyler I'm forgetting his last name but like are there sort of campy transgressive sort of YouTube stars who are that sort of Phillip Pee Wee like space for some young people and maybe it's sort of you know should Pee Wee be sort of collaborating with those folks like should that you know is that should it become increasingly more sort of a separate category that isn't tapped into how young people identify or want to have you know conversations with those people at this point or expect to at least and just I mean the small point that like what is for kids is usually more about adults than about kids right sort of like edgy aggressive or campy or any sort of humor often is sort of right in the wheelhouse of kids you know or think about like Bugs Bunny or something which might have a very similar logic as Pee Wee Herman right and stuff that we see now you know early Looney Tunes that now seems like very inappropriate for kids right but actually was targeted to in a successful way and also for a wider audience so that like that I think that's an important question too right it's I think to some extent more about the wider adult kind of expectations about what is for kids right what's appropriate for kids change and then sometimes we look back and see things as being either as being surprisingly inappropriate right when at the time they weren't seen that way it's interesting too to think about like I was thinking about a grad student I had at Pitt who was working on Mr. Rogers neighborhood and she went to the Mr. Rogers archive and discovered all these fan letters from adult women who were so moved by the message I love you just the way you are and would write to Mr. Rod and here was this whole audience that we had not noticed that's not really an answer to your question but I just thought it was so I guess it's answering the question about like reception how important it is to actually study the reception and who's responding because it's not always who you think is responding. Well I mean that's like scholars of soap operas were sort of the original sort of innovators around sort of what it you know when you have a show that's on all the time and these relationships and storylines that don't appear you know on sort of broadcast television and sort of people's identities with that stuff I think we could look like soap opera studies as sort of part of that. Thank you. Yeah I wanted to actually pull away a little bit from popular culture and go back to the definition because I think there's also although you did say it wasn't a sociological category I think the word let's say teen for instance you know when it's it comes into other cultures takes on a certain aspirational quality and so in India if a parent says I have a teenager you know that that parent thinks of the teenager like an American teenager because most other parents would say oh I have a 14 year old or 16 year old they would not describe the child in those terms so so I'm wondering what happens to the word tween if it crosses those sorts of boundaries I mean in a way it is becoming sort of a sociological category or maybe a political one maybe a cultural one I don't know but it is not just a marketing it's not just a marketing unit well doesn't your example sort of prove the point right so it's not like a demographic category like kids of a certain chronological age with a certain economic status and racial status it is more this kind of cultural marketers and cultural norms right and so and so I mean that's certainly sociological right in important ways but I think that's the stuff that words like teenager also I think really leads with and tween leads with whereas words like preteen might at least the way they're used might be sort of have less of the cultural baggage even though they certainly have cultural baggage and more like the way that adolescent has all of this baggage around like medicalization and bodies and development but that has different cultural baggage than teenager does right yeah but I'm just wondering you know I mean as a researcher or somebody who's looking at this and trying to see what sort of terms might universally apply or have some correspondence across cultures then you realize that there is no correspondence or very little correspondence there may be overlap but really not correspondence so when a term like tween let's say travels across these boundaries what happens to it what's the aspirational quality that's attached to it I wonder if that also is sort of that USness if that's part of sort of the buying into part of that culture and if that is part of the sort of aspirational sense I also think when you say I have a teenager versus a 14 year old that maybe there's one of those distinctions with sort of elicited I'm so sorry like how are you doing like you know is your life sort of being kind of turned upside down and that and but that partly being a reflection of a certain characterization of sort of teenage culture as maybe sort of antithetical to or family values or sort of respect for elders that might be sort of respected and held up as sort of a key component and were collective as opposed to sort of an individualist you know spread of that of that component and so I think that that all of that that term and yeah all the stuff that comes with it you know as it's localized in just in some capacity always has a sort of globalized global connection but I think that's sort of that those terms and of course I mean part of that also comes down to what the parents might say is you know I have a teenager if that person would when you're asked who are you like what what label do you how you label yourself that young person might choose one of many other categories besides that one too that could be you know especially against sort of very culturally religiously you name a sort of identity sort of category that would be the first one that would come to mind but I think a really interesting open question I don't have any idea I've seen tween used in like UK and Australian press right so I think it has some Anglophone purchase there's also a way like British popular culture seems to like things like that right sort of twee kind of thing it's teen in between but there's also a twee-ness to it but I think it would be really interesting if because teenager really is this powerful word right that has all sorts of reach and is and and and expanded I don't think that tween I mean even in the states has the same sort of reach and I think it's twee enough my sense is that it won't in 50 years be what teenager is I think it's a little bit too specific but it would be very interesting I think that would be better myself I do remember like I had a magazine that was I mean it did that term did last somewhat I mean I think I don't have a big bop magazine or big bop still exist as like as but that that magazine was like still when I was like growing up was like in the 80s 90s was like a thing I don't know if that magazine title still exists anymore it's like J-14 there's like other like new magazines come and go but bop you know did have a have a have a time there where it still sort of maintained itself in other things beyond the 60s well it makes me think too your question makes me think about the way in which like to say someone is a teenager is to make age a really integral part like really meaningful it really determines your identity it's like when we switch from saying some people have sex with people of other you know orientations to saying there are homosexuals like there are it's a category it's an identity that's what you are right it's almost the same when we say teenager instead of just I have a 14 year old we're saying like we think this age is one of the most salient and important aspects of this person's identity so it kind of ups the ante on how much age distinctions matter in terms of the constitution of identity I think and also then like what again sort of what the market is for that when you've made the category what what you could sell to it now that you've defined it right but it's all I mean it's interesting to start you have adolescent right which is this sort of medicalized term like homosexual which is is circulated and being used for a while before and then teenager kind of comes in and replaces it and the one is associated with consumer industries and the other is associated with like development and bodies and these other things and I think with tweens we have a variety of different words right but but you know the difference between like child and kid and other things there's lots of words that mean lots of different things right that all sort of still refer to age it's like you can be an age in a lot of different ways yes I'm curious with the broader definition of tween so girls and to the extent that this relates to boys as well where you see this group of people feeling safe and also who who you see them trusting it's a very complicated world that they're all in and just I'm really curious yeah sort of across you know whether it's a saying the malls have gone away and in some cases it's you know either the malls have gone away or people aren't letting their kids go to different places because they're helicoptering or whatever the case may be but with all these different dynamics that you've discussed and I'm just curious where you really think they're in a place where they're you know safe and again where where they find this feeling of trust I'd say the definition is social so it depends on it's relational so I mean I think there's lots of people who would say that they from somebody from the outside might say they live in a safe space but experience sort of bullying and don't have somebody to turn to and kids who have resources somebody who asks the question who notices something different who notices a kid is skipping isn't in school much so you have some kids who maybe have more people who are paying attention to their habits and routines and ones who aren't and I and I think you have some people who regardless of what's going on in their lives have anxieties that could be related to what they hear on television about what people who look like them what kind of neighborhoods they live in you know if you have Donald Trump repeatedly saying that where people live people don't have jobs and they're not safe and they're you know in danger constantly the sort of internal idea of what that means for yourself self-worth or self-sense of safety it's very sort of whether or not that is reflective of a given sort of child's own sense of feeling well or safe or understood but I think that the safety component there's a Sonya Livingston and sort of this is really Anthony Giddens sort of a risk society that we live in and sort of what in what ways sort of risk and moral panic and that hasn't come up the whole time I'm like kind of amazed about what people get worked up about particularly adults when it comes to young people's engagement with media and technology and young people can start to take on that language you know when they start to hear people say enough oh you know it's not safe to you know be on that social networking site or it's not safe to whatever that increasingly has meant that girls then might avoid spaces all together so there's that sense of safety being rooted in some idea and not necessarily like statistics but an idea and then that leading to sort of barriers of other kinds of entry points it's not really wasn't like one direct answer to your question I realize but everything of all these sort of terms together right I know I the idea of moral panic like kind of starting in the 80s the idea of child safety became a really important sort of cultural topic and there were important discussions of things like child sexual abuse but there was also a sort of media focused moral panic about the idea of that sort of that children were sort of constantly vulnerable to outside threats right. You get on the milk carton. Exactly. And so just all of these images of victimized kids which didn't reflect sort of like in fact children are much safer and much less susceptible to all sorts of violent and other sorts of crimes than they were a generation ago and a generation before that which interestingly moves in like inversely with discourses about child safety and parents especially right like grown ups in children's lives constantly telling them that this isn't safe, that isn't safe right like walking to school may not be safe going on the internet may not be safe so it's an interesting question when a kid feels safe right because they may be being told like the sort of internet sexual predator is mostly a figment of like ABC's imagination right like you're literally in your room on a device there's no person there who's and it's laughing is not quite right right but these are not real threats in the just remarkably vast majority of actual kids lives right Gunzar. Absolutely Gunzar and like the actual people in kids lives right like family members are much likely to hurt you than a stranger or the like real clear and present threats are things like everyday bullying right rather than sort of sort of strangers outside and so I think it's an interesting question how kids feel safe and a lot of that has to do with how adults tell kids whether to feel safe or not and then going back to the marketing literature the marketing work in some of the like marketing research you get interesting reports about where the sort of category tween I think a lot of marketers understood it as being just aspirational right and so they were sort of very much about pushing the limits and then market researchers come back and they say wait wait wait tweens also are invested in sort of safety and comfort being protected and so and you can actually get like 11 year olds to report to you that they they don't want to grow up too fast right so it's not just kids always want autonomy and independence and to some extent in the kind of cultural environment in the 90s and 2000s you have sort of kids taking on for themselves this language about safety and this language about child vulnerability and it's hard to separate out that stuff from from kind of real is the wrong word right but but from other forms of safety so safety is a really fraught idea for children I trust it's the people in kids lives I mean I think it's it's it's always a good default and it's usually born out of research right that like that when you're online you're online with people you know when you ask about who you trust or who the main influences you have right like the main influences in a kid's life are the people in their lives and so and and the media stuff is just always secondary to that that's kind of comforting as a parent to hear I think I guess I also feel like we have to flag Henry Jenkins who created the Com Forum and who has written so much about this right about how including TV Herman yeah about the video games and how as kids we're getting increasingly penned in and told it wasn't safe to go out into the world where they used to rove around but they could rove around in the virtual space of video games my PhD advisor but I also wanted to say what about I think also adults anxiety about about new media like I feel like as as a parent I'm often like I feel bad or anxious that my kid is using do you know what I mean and so I feel like there's also the way in which it's not just I mean this is not about physical safety it's more just about like a free floating anxiety about the media itself and what kinds of effects it has on personal relationships one of the reasons I love Tyler's work could you tell them about just really quickly about your argument about iPods about how they are not so much like making you go into yourself but out sometimes sure so so so actually cheap generic grocery store MP3 players more than iPods but I did some long-term ethnographic research in like 2006-2007-2008 with some elementary school kids in Vermont kind of thinking mostly focused on music and this was when MP3 players were in three four smartphones but were really expanding and there were sort of more affordable versions and so younger kids had them and could bring them to school and what you see very much with kids in which what I think you continue to see is that when kids listen to music you know if you're on the subway or on the bus and you're a grown-up or you're a college student you listen to music you have both earbuds in right and you're sort of listening by yourself and the music to some extent is kind of separating you from other people but with the kids I worked with it was always the case that you only ever listened with one ear if you're at home or in the car with your parents you might listen with both ears right because social relationships the relationships with the actual people in your life are the things that really determine how media exists in your life right but if you're in school if you're in like waiting before school for school and you were listening to music it would be with one ear in and the other ear dangling even though you're shared with somebody else or exactly or the other ear shared with someone else right and most often so you're always open to talk you could be sitting at the lunch table this was at this funny moment before teachers had caught on and banned the stuff but you could be sitting at the lunch table listening to you know with a friend while also kind of gossiping and talking with other kids and I think that's important and I think the main point of that is less about media and more about relationships right like relationships are sort of always the first principle of any human not just kids and the media stuff is always layered on top of that and if there's a sort of causal direction you can kind of start with the people and people's lives thank you the essays called ear buds are for sharing are good for sharing yeah hi I wonder if you could going back to the idea of the tween as kind of an American culturally specific icon I wonder if you could talk a bit about that icon in relation to other culturally specific modes of considering adolescence I'm thinking specifically here of shojo and shonen in Japanese culture and I mean you could talk I guess from marketing perspective but also maybe from perspectives of kids these age reading shonen jump for example is a common is a really really popular magazine of comics Japanese comics that's now quite popular here in America as well as in Japan and shows like you know Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball Z were really popular in the late 90s and they were specifically marketed when they were created to the shojo shonen audience which has a lot of Japanese cultural specificity to it so I guess thinking about the tween not just as sort of an American icon but like with those other international forms of you know that age in mind well just even you know mobile technology you know far more widely adopted mobile phones adopted in Japan before the US and so then you had sort of cultures around like high and sort of cuteness and you know phone accessories and phone sort of objects and uses of the camera phone uses of graphics emoji or pre-emoji sort of emoticon sort of work there's a lot that American use I think do not realize that they have you know been have been incorporated that that sort of Japanese youth have innovated around around cultural identity and personal technologies as well so these sort of the mobile aspect I can speak to in that yeah I think there's I mean there's a lot of the question of there's this fascinating cultural influence right sort of the idea like cuteness in Japanese culture clearly references childhood right but when it gets imported into American culture it even much more strongly references childhood and sometimes even stops being visible as Japanese right and becomes just sort of cuteness sort of odorless the culturally odorless sort of but I mean going back things like Voltron was clearly modeled on Japanese animation a lot of those sort of 80s shows or things like power range power well power rangers for sure but also the racer one speed racer speed racer right so there's a long history of American animation especially sort of borrowing from Japan and I'm not sure there are other form I mean so now just sort of listing forms of cultural influence but like somehow I think there's also something that's happened where now sometimes culturally specific markers of Japanese can get coded as childish right because in Japan there's a sort of yeah absolutely hello kitty but then also hello kitty has her own there's also adult component we won't go there but that's a thing too so I'm and then the question of sort of specifically tween right so one thing that also didn't come up that I think is interesting about the category tween is that it's sort of started as kind of further segmenting the kids market right sort of like creating new segmentations but then it really became kind of dominant and started to spread outward so media or consumer culture produced for tweens which was always seen by marketers as being like older kids right not the preschool set then can be something that preschoolers can kind of aspire to and then the tween stuff can kind of get coded young and or in 2007 this kind of peak moment of tween culture you had like high school musical which was sort of aged somewhat young kind of Montana kind of in the middle and the Jonas brothers somewhat older so you could have like a 15 year old and a four year old all loving music from the same TV station and so the but the getting back to Japanese culture things like Pokemon right like really problematize these age boundaries rather than like really investing in the strong age divisions you have you can buy a stuffed toy to snuggle with and you can also play an expensive video game right that a six year old couldn't play but a 14 year old can there's a Pokemon club at MIT right for MIT right and everything is different now like we're past the tween moment and living past the river but so there's I think there are really interesting things going on about the way specifically Japanese sort of cultural products both like emphasize childishness but also break down some of the boundaries categories that we think of as existing in children's culture I will say one thing that I like wish like we could talk a little bit more about this tomorrow but part of this also we haven't talked about this either but sort of the funding models for children's media and culture so you know you have a robust sort of national funding for children's you know media in in Japan that you have a hemorrhaging a sort of long term undercutting of sort of public television in the U.S. but I was at a something called the Pre-Junesse which is like sort of this every two year sort of children's television festival and Japan had the most awesome preschool television it was like design thinking oriented and it was like beautiful and the music was rich and like and maybe kind of sad that like we don't have that and I like wish I could like import it and like spread it around because there's like really wonderful innovations and that but again it sort of partly goes down to what is sort of the the funding models for any of this stuff and then what gets prioritized under that financial model and I think it's really important to say in that regard that here in the United States we did have federal funding for children's TV right with Sesame Street was partly federally funded and all these amazing programs zoom all these PBS programs and just how sad it is that that funding which was aimed at really good social justice goals has really drained away I mean there's still there's still stuff like all is not lost but thinking about and but I mean so much that was in reaction to action for children's television sort of campaigning around again sort of some moral panic sort of discourse that like funding then got tied to as well so but you know just talking about sort of public television in general we could sort of get into like what kind of what you know what's in the public interest and what's in private interest when it comes to content well also children's music a lot of the sort of famous children's musicians most notably Rafi are Canadian because Canada has artist grants right and so and so a decent amount of development of children's music is due to Canadian public funding yeah it's really amazing if you go back and study the beginnings of like Mr. Rogers neighborhood in Sesame Street how they were created by experts in collaboration with TV people so psychologists sociologists like educators you know religious leader I mean it's I think it's amazing to look back at that but also that developmentalism is so heavy-handed sometimes I also interned in the education research department at Sesame Street so we can talk about sort of the sort of pros and cons of some of that stuff interesting my question is about literature and why you think tween is very much TV and talk about makeup and clothing but not in children's literature where it's YA middle grade and not really tween part of me thinks that sometimes stuff that gets associated with school becomes less part of the sort of leisure time so just that books to some extent have a sort of school connotation and that's a that's a thing that's going that's always sort of attached to books and I think just from a you know a leisure purpose there's somewhat of an inherent tension that will always sort of exist around that I mean I think that's interesting but at the same time didn't like why middle grade and tween did they kind of evolve kind of around the same time though because there wasn't really middle grade in YA like 60 years ago or right so I think it's more like kids different categories are trying to divine kids different ways so it's not that 8 to 12 year olds don't read right I don't think I think it's that girls do tend to say that they like reading more than boys sure but also like reading is reading is not public right like reading is something that you do alone and quiet or at least we we do yeah right well sure so or or when reading is public the identity that you're performing is student right and whereas like music listening you can share your buds or you can play speakers like the way music as a medium works is is more public but then also just historically right like music is the the and TV is associated with the domestic family home right like TV is not portable the way that music has long been and so even though TV is important it usually happens in family spaces rather than peer spaces reading happens in school spaces which are structured by teachers and other sort of institutions and music listening music is associated with peer culture right so if if you have a category that's trying to define people by an age and not by relationship with parents or by relationships with teachers but by relationships with peers and to identify with other people who are the same age who might be strangers to you right like you're 11 and being 11 in certain context is salient and if you live in New York you you and an 11 year old in Arizona might have that 11 year oldness in common right whereas if you read the same book it might mean that you have really being a student in common if you watch the same TV show to some extent it means you have the same sort of domestic situation in common right not of course not always but so music is like structured in such a way to to to emphasize peer relationships and not just peer relationships but also kind of like horizontal identities as chronologically aged and then also music just historically in the United States popular music specifically is the thing that defined youth culture right the explosion of youth culture in the post war period really focused on music and music was the most visible part of that and so if you're a marketer and you already have existing models for how to define a new consumer group demographic then you would go to that wheelhouse right like print literature what defined like middle class women in the 19th century right but so like you're not necessarily trying to like work on that model you're trying to work on this other model so I think it actually makes a lot of sense I think that's the way music works in our culture do you think the creation of Kappa and kind of breaking people off at age 13 did that help drive the concept of tweens as marketer suddenly couldn't use that media channel to reach that audience anymore did that so just quickly so Kappa is the children's online privacy protection act which is like 98 is that too late and then it's been revised based on like what the internet has become like getting to about 2013 there you go was revised to reflect I mean there's a long gap a lot happened on the internet between those years but yeah so basically people were worried about privacy issues on the internet and advertisers collecting information and so the legislative solution was to really lock down collecting information on children under 13 and have it sort of be totally open for people over 13 so that parental permission right so so for kids under 13 a website can't ask them for personally identifiable information without like verified parental permission which really structures it makes it hard to do research on kids under 13 and websites for kids under 13 either don't exist or like or designed not to ask for certain types of information the rise of tweens is also about that same time and there's different genres that come up so like adver gaming is something that does you know does run rampant you have sort of you know the rise of the sort of McDonald's game the online sort of you know community not community but the sort of branded site and so there's lots of opportunities that you know with the without you know with copa still that you still have sort of sort of this branded online content that is very much driven towards that that sort of community I think it's an interesting question my inclination is that it's more of a coincidence that 13 is a like there's a reason that we define tween the way we do that sort of 13 is a meaningful number as you guys said at the beginning tween is an amorphous term right and older tweens that are on so are not officially allowed to be on facebook because facebook collects personally identifiable information from them but they are often sophisticated enough to lie about their age or even enlist their parents and lying about their age and so sort of even the copa number boundaries are amorphous but I also think that despite the real emphasis in like the way we talk about media on the internet and new media I really think that TV and music and old media are actually are more important not just to kids but sort of to everyone that new media a lot of that is layered on top of it and so regulating the internet would still be sort of regulating like a second or third kind of like tier kind of medium right and so and the things that like so I think tween did peak in the late 90s and early 2000s mid 2000s but really on in music and TV and the internet is kind of secondary to that but it is that's it I don't I think it's a question that's worth following up on because it does line up in interesting ways and I would be curious how these companies like Disney and Nickelodeon other companies that were really invested in targeting this group right at that time and also were investing in the internet how they how how those regulatory changes may have filtered into their whole strategy right and not just their online strategy it's interesting so I did you have a question yeah great so the things you were saying about the app musically was really interesting reminding me my experience is teaching ninth graders which is a little older than the tween age bracket they're in 1415 so they're a little past it and what struck me when teaching them is they were already too old to know like what was cool they were past that point and it seems to me that a generation of memes or what's considered cool in a media sense what's popular with music I'm thinking of like the TZ Anthem Challenge like comes from the tween age bracket I was wondering if you guys could talk to what tweens generate in terms of what's relevant especially with like what's relevant on the internet and the media so one sort of genre that is very I think tween driven is unboxing videos people are familiar with I see some nods of so unboxing videos unboxing used to actually I think it started with like Apple products so like that the packaging was itself so beautiful and wonderful that people then like with this new youtuber around would like unbox on screen would sort of display all of the sort of gadgets and gizmos and like all the pieces of wrapping and stuff whatever but but there's this whole hugely financially lucrative a field of unboxing videos and what those videos are and it's largely kids who are filmed and your parents are involved in sort of the filming of it taking like ordinary not like Apple products but like Play-Doh or like anything really and take opening the box on camera and describing all of the bits of it it is like looking through a catalog like a catalog that you might but it's just the youtube version of that but you also get added things like there's somebody a peer who's presenting the toy to you you get the sensory sort of sounds that are appealing sounds like unwrapping presents there's Jackie Marsh who's a British researcher who's been doing a bunch of research on this whole genre and then you get like adults to kind of piggyback off of Ali's there's a whole genre of adults who are now sort of making their own unboxing videos that are based on the genre that like tweens were creating to sort of share the experience of commercialism and sort of belonging but what's interesting is that you don't have to buy the toy to watch the video it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to go buy it but there's the window shopping component of it it's really interesting because it seems like with the internet there's and with apps there's this disentangling of tween culture from the financial component that sort of created it in the first place so many so much of the internet is free music is a free app and you can post things on youtube for free right just seems like there's some sort of freedom there like beyond financial freedom just like they can be themselves and create culture right but tv is free too right I mean your parents might pay for your cable free for their kids in fact the infrastructure of what gets paid for or like unboxing videos are in the same way that tv is just built entirely on consumer sales right that are then being advertised on tv unboxing videos are like literally about buying stuff right so it sort of depends on a culture of buying stuff they are amazing there are these pokemon ones like pokemon cards where someone will just have like a box of like a thousand pokemon cards and just open them and say here's this one and it goes on for like three hours they're tremendous and there's like I mean but they're also I should say like they're also crossed over where we talked about and I'm teaching a class on youth and communication technology right now so some of the examples are the top of my head but there's sort of young people who are then paid by these companies to and forgetting the exact name of there's somebody who's like a child who's a millionaire purely based on their unboxing videos and I'm blanking on the person's name at this point but they were then hired by Good Morning America to unbox the new Star Wars because they had their own kind of cultural cash there'd be viewership to come on to Good Morning America and unbox the new like Millennium Falcon like Lego sort of set so yeah I would say though that if unboxing videos are associated with tweens then this is evidence for the continued marginality of kids in culture right because unboxing videos are not actually mainstream right like there are this like completely like just punkers internet phenomenon but then they appear on Good Morning America yeah but Good Morning America is always chasing niche things but so on the one hand yeah absolutely but on the other hand so it's the way that the internet with meme culture especially works kind of actually depends on having like sort of marginal niches that can generate things that then sort of escape places like 4chan or something that have their own interests that then escape out and no but I mean the logic might be similar right where you have kids making these videos and then that sort of becomes a genre that leaks out but more broadly right I think the idea of kids influence in culture and especially media and consumer culture and so not just tweens but sort of young people generally the whole idea of social media as a thing right is one of the first examples well so Facebook was Harvard but in the 90s you had a site Casper Montgomery talks about a site called like Bolt or Buzz or Boom or something like that there was like literally a social site for teenagers and the whole point of it was about getting teenagers online with their friends and then getting them to be really specific about their consumer taste and their family and like giving the names of everyone so it's all about collecting data exactly like Facebook is the idea that young people's peer relationships are really important to them and marketers and consumer industries can provide platforms for those peer relationships to take place right and then extract data from the interactions that happen and use it to then sell consumer products is very much originally a marketing strategy targeted to teenagers and young people and that's now like the world we live in right like that's this sort of you know multi-billion dollar social media world and so that business model which now applies to grandmothers and you know 40 year olds was a business model that was developed to target young people and so then does that mean I mean I think the actual lesson from that is that peer relationships matter to a lot more people than just young people and marketers or over emphasizing that with young people and it's a successful strategy but another version another way to think about it is that sort of young people's investment in peer relationships and sort of and social life in these things has expanded outward to be a sort of like dominant way that media works right whereas in the 80s media would have really been you and your nuclear family watching TV in the 2000s and 2010s there's this idea of constantly sharing which is this idea of how social relationships work that comes from youth culture right the idea of friend itself is really associated with young people and I think there are or the media mix right the idea of cross marketing so so you know cross marketing has happened in lots of or franchising right in lots of industries but really the sort of like it really develops and becomes mature and things like the sort of toy based TV shows the Hasbro TV shows like He-Man or something where it's really the TV the toy company that's like developing the intellectual property and actually paying to produce and write these things and kind of just handing it over to the network and then you get things like Pokemon which are these sort of media mixes Now you have Pokemon Go but so with cards and with video games and with TV shows and all these other things and so and now more you have sort of franchising happening in kind of mainstream adult culture right like is Star Wars adult or not but things like Star Wars right which has like book series and movies and toys and video games and and lots of other or the idea of like celebrities making like also making movies so you can sell a CD and you can sell a DVD and you can sell concert tickets and you can sell you know the idea of like pop stars merchandising right that's a response to the decline of the music industry you know merch t-shirts were not as important to rock stars in the 70s they existed but now it's like central to the business model of being a pop star and I think you can plausibly see that as a business model that develops out of things like the sort of cross marketing and youth culture where selling toys and selling and sort of this brand being everywhere so I think I actually think there's a really interesting story about how sort of things that are originated in kids culture expand out in lots of different ways including unboxing videos yeah I was going to say I think it's worth noting that there's a very well respected kids marketing research firm called Smarty Pants that every year does a brand study on the top brands that kids love and they just release their findings for this for the 2016 and the number one brand that kids in America love is YouTube more than Disney, Foreo, Eminem, Apple, PlayStation every you know brand that comes out so I would say that unboxing is not sort of a fringe thing it's a very central thing especially to kids that YouTube is their number one source for content and OTT media in general I would say it is the new TV so it's worth checking out it's free the results of the study are free if you want to check out Smarty Pants asksmartypants.com but first time YouTube has ever been number one that's fascinating thank you for bringing that up well I think we should conclude not to sound too much like a presidential debate person but I was wondering if we could just end by you each saying a question we didn't plan this I know this is a surprise I'm like the Chris, what's his smush so a question that's still motivating your research about between but you're still interested in exploring for me it's just what does it mean to be social what does it mean to do social I'm interested in a population of young people, kids on the autism spectrum who get very often defined as being setting a deficit in social skills or social capacities and I'm much more interested in how do they make social how do they do social in their different kinds of environments and in what way can we build worlds that support kind of a longevity of being participating in some way in the sort of public sphere beautiful thank you and Tyler I'm interested in like tweens as being kind of a historical moment like that maybe is in the past right like so there's still a kind of maybe an analogy to sort of teen culture right like there's a moment in the kind of post-war period when we can see this thing happening in which like a lot of people were talking about it which adults really cared about it and then it stuck around right and the term became important and so it's the recent history but the possibility that sort of the tween was a thing that happened and it like established some categories and some ways of thinking and definitely some sort of market logics and those will stick around but they may not be they may not be the same thing anymore yeah so like why did it happen then and what does it mean that it's kind of diminished potentially yeah fascinating you guys have been an amazing audience thank you so much for all your questions