Trends in Development and Use in the Area of Digital Media and the Concomitant Challenges for Youth Media Protection

By the end of 2015 and in the context of the programme, „Young People and the Media”, the Swiss federal parliamentwishes to achieve an overall appraisal, of whether there is any need for additional regulation in youth media protection at a federal level and of how youth media protection in Switzerland should be formulated in future. To accompany these tasks, the Federal Social Insurance Office, as the body responsible, has instituted a project group consisting of representatives of the confederation, of the cantons and of the media sectors and, in this connection, it has envisaged commissioning various investigative research studies.

The Hans-Bredow-Institut received the mandate for the first of the advertised research investigations, which was intended to demonstrate the trends in development and usage in the area of digital media and to identify the concomitant challenges for youth media protection.

In the first instance, the study collated the existing knowledge from research into media usage in the area of minors and identified what areas of questioning are germane to media usage by children and young people and are capable of being discerned and prefigured. These questions werecatagorized both according to the role of children in communication processes and the nature of the current problemsand offer insight into what it is that produces the pertinent risk and does so for which forms of usage and what potentially negative results this can have. Furthermore, in the context of an analysis of new empirical numbers, the Institute has establishedhow the situation manifests itself in Switzerland in comparison to the other European countries.

Against the background of the foreseeable risks, the part of the study researching regulatory frameworks indicates the abstract-legal thresholds and the broad directive goals of current youth media protection, in order to identify the regulatory programs, as required of the state in general terms and based on risk factors, as well as to analyse the theoretical deficits of some traditional approaches to governance. In this way, the regulations specifically needed in Switzerland were identified and prioritized against the background of the data on usage.