Literacy and Identity Through Streaming Media: Kids, Teens, and Representation on Netflix 9781032010694, 9781032009766, 9781003176992

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LITERACY AND IDENTITY THROUGH STREAMING MEDIA

In this book, Damiana Gibbons Pyles guides readers through the fast-changing landscape of digital streaming services such as Netflix and explores their impact on children’s and teens’ identities. Children interact with streaming media in novel, hidden, and unforeseen ways that shape their digital, material, affective, and embodied worlds. By analyzing how Netflix represents gender, race, and ethnicities, Gibbons Pyles explores how this new media phenomenon portrays and influences young people’s development and sense of self, and how streaming media pushes children and teens to particular ways of being in its interfaces, algorithms, and content. Drawing primarily on Bakhtinian, feminist, and female Black scholarship, her incisive analysis reveals how the new media streaming phenomenon molds children’s understandings of their ways of being in the world. Ideal for scholars and graduate students in literacy education, media studies, and communication, the text is an illuminating view into the hidden role of streaming services as an essential, complex component of literacy scholarship. Damiana Gibbons Pyles is Professor in the Department of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum at Appalachian State University, USA.

Expanding Literacies in Education Jennifer Rowsell, Carmen Medina, and Kate Pahl, Series Editors Jennifer Rowsell and Cynthia Lewis, Founding Editors

Community Literacies as Shared Resources for Transformation Edited by Joanne Larson and George H. Moses Posthumanism and Literacy Education Knowing/Becoming/Doing Literacies Edited by Candace R. Kuby, Karen Spector, and Jaye Johnson Thiel Exploring Critical Digital Literacy Practices Everyday Video in a Dual Language Context Jessica Zacher Pandya Affect in Literacy Teaching and Learning Pedagogies, Politics, and Coming to Know Edited by Kevin M. Leander and Christian Ehret Literacies that Move and Matter Nexus Analysis for Expanding Expectations in Contemporary Childhoods Karen Wohlwend Black Girls’ Literacies Transforming Lives and Literacy Practices Edited by Gholnecsar Muhammad and Detra Price-Dennis Playful Methods Engaging the Unexpected in Literacy Research Carmen Liliana Medina, Mia Perry, and Karen Wohlwend Literacy and Identity Through Streaming Media Kids, Teens, and Representation on Netflix Damiana Gibbons Pyles For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Expanding-Literacies-in-Education/book-series/ELIE

LITERACY AND IDENTITY THROUGH STREAMING MEDIA Kids, Teens, and Representation on Netflix

Damiana Gibbons Pyles

Designed cover image: © Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Damiana Gibbons Pyles The right of Damiana Gibbons Pyles to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-01069-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-00976-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-17699-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003176992 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

For my mom, Barbara Gibbons, whose love made everything possible. For Bea, who kept on learning all her life from the telegraph to Skype. For Dru, who dreams big at all ages.

CONTENTS

List of Figures viii Series Editors’ Introduction ix Acknowledgments xi A Note on Terminology xii 1 Children Go Streaming

1

2 Streaming Media, Streaming Time: How Netflix’s Children’s Programming Changes How Time Works

19

3 Visible Interface, Invisible Algorithms: Children Enter into Netflix’s Algorithmic Space

30

4 Interactive Dialogic Play: Interactive Streaming Media on Netflix

48

5 Girls Are Snapping: Feminism in Netflix’s Youth Programming 70 6 What Is Blackness?: Netflix’s Representation of African-American Youth 7 The Benefits and Necessary Evils of Netflix Kids and the Streaming Media Child

92 112

Index 125

FIGURES

  3.1   3.2 3.3a 3.3b   3.4   4.1   4.2   4.3   7.1

Netflix’s home screen 33 Netflix video preview accessed by computer screen 37 Video preview of show on computer 38 Video preview of show on smart TV 39 Intra-action between kids, Netflix’s algorithms, and Netflix’s interface 44 Story Map of Boss Baby: Get That Baby! 56 Story Map of You vs. Wild’s “Lost on Snow Mountain” 58 Story Map of Captain Underpants Epic Choice-Rama 61 Streaming Media Environment in Netflix’s Youth Programming 114

SERIES EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

The Expanding Literacies in Education Series features books that highlight the changing landscape and explore new directions and theoretical tools in literacy studies as it is transforming education—including material, embodied, affective, and global emphases; digital and virtual worlds; and transcultural and cosmopolitan spaces. Some books in the series locate emerging literacies in practices that extend or trouble their historical uses and functions. Others cross disciplinary borders, bringing new epistemologies to bear on evolving practices that question the very foundations of literacy scholarship. Polemical and forward-looking, encompassing public and vernacular pedagogies as well as formal education, these books engage researchers, graduate students, and teacher educators with new and emerging theoretical approaches to literacy practices in all of their complexities, challenges, and possibilities. In Literacy and Identity Through Streaming Media: Kids, Teens, and Representation on Netflix, Damiana Gibbons Pyles opens up the blackbox of a popular streaming service. Televisions have been a fixture in homes for a long time now. Yet, tv and media consumption more broadly tend to be seen as a leisure practice that seldom finds its way into literacy studies. In particular, there is a lack of attention paid to the tremendous influence of streaming services. That is until now with Damiana Gibbons Pyles’ groundbreaking study of children and young people’s media consumption and its impact on their identity formation. Gibbons Pyles’ deep dive into Netflix invites readers into the complex, dynamic world of streaming and the ways that Netflix directly influences how children and young people position themselves in the world. Each chapter unpeels layers, revealing the ways that Netflix presents gender, race, and community and the hidden world and orchestrations of algorithms. Gibbons Pyles

x  Series Editors’ Introduction

has a rare ability to take the reader by the hand and usher them into the bingeinducing ways that streaming services shape children’s and young people’s lives and identities. It is a gem of a book that expands our series into a powerful media ecology. Carmen Medina, Kate Pahl, and Jennifer Rowsell Series Editors

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I would like to thank Jennifer Rowsell for supporting me in this book project every step of the way. Jennifer has a perfect combination of kind encouragement and keen wit that have been such a help in writing and revising this book at every stage. I would also like to thank my family who have made this book possible. My three kids, Evie, Sam, and Ollie, have been co-watchers with me, and they have provided many suggestions and insights on the Netflix shows. They make watching fun. And, Adam, my husband, has been so supportive with creating time and space for me to write over the long two years, especially during our times of COVID lockdowns. As a middle school teacher and an amazing husband and father, he had little free time and energy as it was, but Adam gave me so much. I would also like to thank the faculty and staff in Curriculum and Instruction here at Appalachian State who supported my writing with an OCSA, also known as a sabbatical, so that I could finish revising the last chapters. This gave me much needed time to continue this work during the pandemic. Also, I have had some wonderful graduate students who have helped me with background research for this book. I’d especially like to thank Hayley Rose and Mason Poling for their help with this book. Last, I’d love to thank my mom, Barbara Gibbons, who always believed in us, and who was a role model for how to live kindly in the world.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

In this book, I use a lot of terminology, so it might be useful to begin with some explanation. At the most basic level, this book is about computer interactions as I’m analyzing digital media that children and teens view using devices such as smart TVs. All computer interactions, including online content, are based on codes, which are bits of computer language that make up what is seen or what is manipulated on the screen. The way that these codes operate within a program is through algorithms, which are like sentences of code. We see these codes translated into words, images, and formats we can understand through interfaces, which is how a computer can present the codes to people to see or use. Algorithms are what allow the computer code to become recognizable first within the computer program and at the end of the process to us as the users of the computer software or online technologies. Algorithms also are what determine what can be seen as they are a way to sort through the billions of bits of data that are present in any kind of digital interaction. For instance, it is a large set of algorithmic “sentences” that make up a word processing feature in Google docs. As I type into a Google document, I’m typing on my keyboard and looking at my screen. The processing that works behind the scenes of my typing, though, in its simplest level is many, many algorithms that are translating the letters I’m typing into something recognizable within the format of a document that I can see and that it (the computer interface) can manipulate. Watching streaming media, which is audio and visual digital content that people watch or listen to in online or mobile settings, happens in a similar way. People turn on their devices, e.g., televisions, smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc., and they log into Netflix (and other streaming services) or an app logs them in. Then, they choose the show they want to watch, and it streams for them. This process is actually composed

A Note on Terminology  xiii

of thousands (maybe millions) of algorithms working with the code to make this viewing possible. The more people are able to work with the algorithms to make choices, the more interactive, the media is said to be. For instance, video games allow for more choices to be made at more stages in the interaction, so they are considered to be more interactive. Watching streaming media is usually on the lower end of interactivity, but Netflix has tried to make some shows with more choices, making them more interactive. Another set of terms that I use in this book has to do with social and cultural environments and issues. Essentially, in this book, I’m wondering how Netflix programming is entering into the current drive in culture to be “woke,” which is, in its simplest understanding, a sense of being aware of racial oppression, especially for Black people, and how this oppression must be fought through awareness-building, political correctness, and policy changes. In particular, I’m exploring two broad identity categories: gender and race. With gender, I examine how feminism is represented in different ways in Netflix programming for teens. Feminism is a set of beliefs and practices that advocate for the rights of women, and it has shifted over time to include women of all races as well as a range of sexualities and/or gender or sexual expression. With feminism, the concept that is most helpful in my analysis is the idea of the feminist snap, which is the idea that women (and teen girls) sometimes break down emotionally or physically in response to patriarchal oppression. Sometimes this break is by choice, a political act that signifies that the woman will no longer accept the oppression by acquiescing to the patriarchal demands. In terms of race, I begin by discussing the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement, which is a political and social movement that began in response to police killings of black people but has now changed to include multiple oppressions of all social groups. Also, I discuss Blackness through a range of Black Literacies scholars who focus on the literacy and lived experiences of Black people, especially Black girls, believing that they have particular oppressions, desires, abilities, and insights to offer literacies research. The last set of terms that are important to understand for this book is theoretical. One of the central theorists in this book is Mikhail Bakhtin, an early 20th-century scholar who created theories around literature. One of the key terms that I use is his idea of chronotope, which is the idea that time and space in a novel have particular features that matter and that these features are interconnected. One cannot separate time or space within the narrative, and each part has a particular part to play in how the narrative progresses. Another key term from Bakhtin is his idea of heteroglossia, which refers to the voices that go into, run through, and come out of a text. I believe that the voices are often expressed in different modes, or ways of representing meaning socially, especially through image, print, gesture, and sound. But, for Bakhtin, he didn’t believe that the meaning that the author wanted to convey was the only meaning to be found.

xiv  A Note on Terminology

Instead, he understood that there are pressures or beliefs outside of the text, both the authors and others, that go into the text’s meaning. Then, there are voices within the text itself, be it in the beliefs expressed by the characters or the dynamics set up by the places in the setting or some other aspect within the text itself. And, there are voices that stem from the text as it is read by others. This reading by others ties into another idea of Bakhtin’s: aesthetic seeing or contemplation. With aesthetic seeing or contemplation, there is a dynamic between the text and the reader in which the reader of the text completes the meaning of the text. Without the reader, the text doesn’t have a full meaning; the text is incomplete. The reader makes the text complete. I add to this idea the concept of adaptation in which a text is made in collaboration with readers who add to, take away from, or change the text, which is a common occurrence in Netflix’s youth programming. Sometimes, as well, the way that texts are made is what Ahmed calls willful, which is the idea that some texts make themselves known despite conflict and/or in response to oppression. In this sense, the text becomes “crafty,” in that its existence is a way to push back on the patriarchal demands placed upon it. All of these concepts work together to explore how Netflix’s original programming for children and teens is drawing young people in and how it is expressing particular ways of being along with the children who make meaning in their own ways with these shows.

1 CHILDREN GO STREAMING

When I was a child many years ago, we had to wait for our favorite shows to come on, week after week, eagerly anticipating what the next episode would hold. Or, we watched whatever TV shows came on our cable channels after school with my sister and me having epic battles over whether we would watch Wonder Woman or Scooby-Doo. Like most families, we only had one TV set, which meant that we could only watch one TV show at a time. Whoever lost would have to wait until the next day to get her pick. Adding VCRs to the mix was helpful, but we still had to wait to see our favorite primetime shows week after week. It is a totally different story now for my own children. They still fight over which shows to watch since as a media educator and English Language Arts (ELA) teacher, as parents, we limit the screen time of our kids and, by choice, have only one TV in our house located in the living room. But, with all of the streaming channels that exist, my kids have access not only to entire seasons of their favorite shows, but they also have access to all shows at one time. They need only to click on one of many streaming services and then scroll up, down, or over to find something to watch. As streaming media companies clamor for children’s attention, they are creating a wide variety of original children’s shows themselves to add to the vast collection of shows that they distribute for kids. This has made me wonder, though, what exactly are these streaming media companies creating for my children and others? What kinds of worlds and identities are these shows representing, and what might that provide for opportunities for children’s identity identification as they consume this ever-increasing lineup? This book is an attempt to grapple with these questions and more.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176992-1

2  Children Go Streaming

Television Goes Streaming Known first for its subscription DVD service started over 20 years ago, Netflix has become a powerhouse in the streaming media industry by a huge margin, even with slightly flagging numbers, with approximately 150 million subscribers worldwide (Pallota, 2019). By comparison, Amazon has 100 million subscribers globally (Reisinger, 2019), and Hulu has about 27 million (Spangler, 2019). Clearly, streaming media is here to stay for millions worldwide. Though all of these media streaming services are actually distribution sites for streaming a variety of video content created by other companies, a large part of their current business model and success stems from their push to create new programming within their own company. In this regard, Netflix is leading the charge. In 2013, Netflix began creating its own programming with the acclaimed House of Cards.1 Other shows, such as The Orange Is the New Black,2 quickly followed, and some shows have been huge hits, such as the multi-season Stranger Things,3 a cult favorite with teens and adults alike. Along with creating content in the United States, Netflix has not only garnered the streaming market globally, but it also has partnered to create original programming internationally, such as its recent push to create Korean dramas and other shows in South Korea (Stangarone, 2019). Recently, Netflix has also gone into the movie business with such big-budget movies as The Irishman,4 with a budget of $125-$250 million along with making deals for other big original movies (LaPorte, 2019). Netflix currently spends approximately $8 billion on original content, with its target goal of having half of its content be Netflix-created (Derousseau, 2018).

Why Streaming Media Matters Some might say that the media has moved on from analyzing media consumption practices and that our scholarship must as well. We have strong scholarship about how children and teens are building identities around video games (Gaydos & Squire, 2011), affinity spaces online (Gee, 2017), makerspaces (Peppler, Halverson, & Kafai, 2016), youth video production in school (Potter, 2012) and out of school (Halverson, 2010), and other digital spaces (Burn, 2017; Burn & Kress, 2018). Even my own past work has focused largely on youth producing videos not consuming them (Curwood & Gibbons, 2010; Gibbons Pyles, 2015; Halverson, 2010). From this scholarship, we have learned that when it comes to media, youth are agentive and productive: Children and teens consume media, but they also develop strategies of engagement and production in media spaces that shape and reshape their identities in a myriad of ways (Holz, 2017). This might lead one to ask, “Why write a book about streaming TV? Isn’t a book about TV in any form outdated?” On the one hand, I, too, am excited to think through how children and teens engage with and produce media in different ways. And, I agree with the idea that cable TV itself might not be the best option to study as most consumers

Children Go Streaming  3

are “cutting the cord,” so to speak. But this does not mean, however, that TV is irrelevant. Even without taking the largely free-to-access YouTube into account (Palmer, 2019), even on streaming media services, which charge a fee for access, people can watch on-demand whatever they want from a seemingly endless selection of video content. Streaming media has changed the landscape of how people consume movies and television content with at least 60% of young adults, 18–25 years old, watching streaming media over broadcast television (Pew Internet, 2017). Even as adults, we have adapted the way that we “watch tv.” And, streaming services have invested a good amount of money on garnering the market on streaming original children’s programming to provide this access. This means that children and teens are still watching a lot of produced media content, and when they do watch, media is streaming. Not only this, people can watch an entire series of shows at whatever pace they would like to, and this pace is usually fast and continuous, changing our narrative conventions. No longer having to wait for their favorite television shows to come on week after week, people can consume an entire season in one sitting—leading to a new term of “binge-watching.” Many commentators both in the popular press and scholarly writing have noted that binge-watching changes how we experience television and have reframed this form of television spectatorship in reference to other media, [such as binge-watching a television show while still engaging in daily activities, i.e., ordering take-out, texting friends, etc]. (Baker, 2017, p. 40, author’s italics) This shift in viewing behaviors has consequences for the narratives themselves in streaming media, making watching media on streaming services both repetitive and cyclical as the streaming media keeps people hooked on watching the shows to find out what happens throughout the entire arc at one time or over a short period of time (Baker, 2017, p. 40). Children and teens are not immune to this phenomenon; in fact, children and teens are used to a media-consumption practice that is characterized by media that is accessible instantly, that is catered specifically to their age group, and that is able to be accessed from beginning to end at one time. This way of viewing media is so new to adults, but kids have been born into these streaming practices. Therefore, the key question of this book is: “What exactly are children and teens born into exactly with streaming media, and what could this mean for how they see not only media but themselves?” I am not someone who is an alarmist about the media, decrying its decaying effect on our culture or worrying that it is creating low morals in children’s sense of self and community. But, it matters what we put into our kids’ brains and psyches. Children and teens are developing their own sense of themselves and their place in the world, and it’s worth exploring what streaming media is contributing, for better or worse, to these

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burgeoning sense of self not only in the content that is streamed but in how the streaming media is encouraging children and teens to engage with this content through the viewing practices themselves.

Streaming Media as a Literacy Practice In this section, I will broadly outline the theoretical tenets of this book as they relate to streaming media for youth. In essence, streaming media is a socially and culturally situated practice that brings with it artifacts through children’s programming that can shape how children see themselves and others.

Streaming Media Shapes Interaction My theoretical background rests, in large part, in theories of multimodality and identity. The way that kids access streaming media has inherent multimodal features that play a significant role in how children and teens interact with streaming media. We have long known that multimodality is a factor in meaning-making (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). When consuming or analyzing video, however, one must also account for the kineikonic mode, or the mode of the moving image (Burn, 2013; Burn & Parker, 2003). In a video, there are the modes of image that one sees on the screen, and these images change or move every few seconds to create the visual narrative of the video. Along with these images are the dialogue, music, sound, and gestures as other modes as well. This means that all of the filmic elements, such as shot level, angle, etc., combine with the other modes to create the kineikonic mode. In my previous work, I have found that one can trace how identities are being expressed through the kineikonic mode in videos produced by youth in marginalized communities in the dialogue around and the videos produced themselves (Curwood & Gibbons, 2010; Gibbons Pyles, 2015). Culture plays a big role in this meaning-making as multimodality now includes an understanding of how social and cultural dynamics are at play in multimodal productions as “[v]iewing digital texts with a dialogical frame opens possibilities for layering of modes not only as a video resource but also as a medium for expressing one’s diverse social identities and linguistic repertoire in digital communities” (Domingo, 2011, p. 221). What I’m finding with streaming media is more akin to Domingo’s (2012) linguistic layering. Domingo coined the term linguistic layering in her ethnographic work with six Filipino British boys in London as she analyzed the multimodal design of media creations and found two different types of linguistic layering: instructional layering and compositional layering. In these layers, Domingo found that the way that modes were being used were interrelated, e.g., the way that the written or spoken language was used in the design also included interactivity. Importantly, the linguistic layering actually embedded “social and cultural meaning” in the layers. Something similar is happening multimodally in the streaming media on Netflix and other streaming

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services are operating as well. While the children are not creating the content in those sites, the way that these sites are operating is creating its own type of linguistic layering through the interfaces themselves and the way that children must decipher and engage with those interfaces. Though I will discuss the multimodality of the streaming media services in Chapter 4, it is important to have a basic understanding of its features from the beginning. For instance, the interfaces on the opening pages of these streaming media contain a mix of modes, primarily image and written, some of which are video texts that add movement as well. The interfaces of the different streaming media are all similar in their use of clickable content (on computers and mobile platforms, this would be mouse-driven; on televisions, it is controlled via remotes). The content is also a mix of images and written text. In a manner similar to YouTube, all have recommended content generated from the many algorithms at work behind the scenes of these platforms, which for some platforms has proven to be controversial, such as the accusations of racial profiling in Netflix’s recommendations (Zarum, 2018). Netflix’s interface also has scrolling capability, where viewers can move the list of recommendations or chosen content in watchlists, queue, etc., to find the videos they are searching for. Even though Netflix can be accessed on many types of devices, e.g., televisions, laptops, smartphones, there is always some type of search function, usually in menus on the top or left side screens where viewers type in their search terms. Netflix’s interface is highly visual. For instance, one part of Netflix’s interface includes a row with a list of characters from its content, both originals and the ones it distributes. Children simply have to click on the character images to open up the episode list. Alternatively, children can click on the thumbnails of the videos in a manner similar to YouTube. Children must be able to cipher through the layers of modes, often dodging advertised content or recommended videos from algorithms to find videos they want to watch, and these layers shift around when they move from screen to screen. Unlike YouTube, Netflix’s interface doesn’t have audio searches at this time, which means that children primarily rely on either their caregivers or siblings to type in the searches. Though, if they are very young, they would only use the visual modes of the images. Kids can also create their own list of video programs, called watchlists. In a small way, this collecting of one’s own favorites has some ties to Potter’s (2012) concept of curatorship, in which youth (and adults) are “collecting, distributing, assembling, disassembling, and moving media artifacts and content across different stages” (p. 5). The difference is that the children are curating their lists within Netflix, and they are asked to move between their curations as I discuss in later chapters.

Streaming Media Shapes Identities What this means is that there’s something about how kids are asked to interact with and/or consume streaming media. In this book, watching streaming media

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is not simply entertainment for children and teens. Instead, when engaging with these types of media, kids are engaging in what Gee calls “Discourses” (Gee, 1996, 2005). Discourses are ways of being in the world that go beyond linguistics to the “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” (Gee, 1989, p. 6). Identity kits are the linguistic, gestural, and cultural ways of being that signal that one has a particular identity. Identity kits are formed with children as they watch with their parents and family in that the children learn how to navigate the interface from the adults. What they also learn from the adults and then develop on their own are the practices of Netflix. Children learn how to be watchers of streaming media, e.g., to binge-watch, to choose shows only they want to see from the many choices, to return to their favorite shows, and so on. In this way, children can be the kind of watchers their parents or guardians are. In thinking about I/Identity (Rowsell & Schamroth Adams, 2011), which extends from Gee’s discourses, one can see how the discourses of streaming media are setting kids up for particular ways of seeing themselves, and this book explores those possibilities within the practices of these I/identities. What is so fascinating about streaming media that adds to this idea of identity kits is that it is often the interface itself that is governing the creation and maintenance of the identity kit for children and teens. Along the way, I also explore how the mechanics of Netflix’s streaming media interfaces are offering up particular ways of engaging with these representations. For instance, children have seemingly unlimited shows and movies to choose from on Netflix, and there are over 100+ shows and movies of original programming created for children and teens alone. Children can tailor the sites to match their interests and identities, within the limits of what is available. Also, if allowed, children can stream entire seasons or series, watching show after show, increasing their exposure to whatever identity representations that show illustrates by the sheer amount of time spent watching any particular show or set of shows. In this way, children could be developing specific literacy practices around streaming media that has yet to be explored, which can have an impact on the identities they see as possible in a similar way that television shows impacted how youth identities were developed and expressed with cable television shows (Fisherkeller, 2002). The interfaces in these streaming media services are part of these identity possibilities as well. Children learn to scroll through to find their shows from the lists, how to move up and down to find other recommended videos, and how to move from episode to episode or to wait until the auto-play feature moves them to the next one. They learn how to pause to get a snack, or one might hope to listen to their parents’ requests, and they learn how to rewind and fast-forward to their favorite parts (even when my youngest was three years old, he could navigate these different functions). Each media streaming service has its own quirks that children must learn. On their own, children navigate the interfaces of

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the media streaming platforms. In this way, though children do not produce the content, children develop “competence” with streaming media (Buckingham, 2000) in its many forms. With this streaming media, the identity kits (Gee, 1999) include independence from adults as navigators of these platforms as the children use its affordances to find content to stream.

Streaming Media Plays with Time Even if one accounts for the time that children and teens watch streaming media, streaming media also plays with the notion of time itself for viewers, which I discuss in Chapter 2. “‘Time-shifting’ through the use of DVRs, and perhaps even more importantly through the widespread adoption of streaming services such as Netflix, has fundamentally changed the television consumption habits of people all over the world” (Heyer & Urquhart, 2019, p. 290). In many ways, there is timelessness to streaming media in that it can be played at any time of day for as long as children and teens are allowed. The programs themselves have beginnings and ends, but the way that streaming media works, these times are almost immaterial. The content on streaming media is almost seamless. Though there have been inklings that Netflix will change this practice to put in advertising, unlike cable television and YouTube, the programming on Netflix does not have commercial advertising at this time. This means that the programs are no longer interrupted by advertising breaks, and the storyline continues on for an entire episode. With auto-play for Netflix, the episodes continue playing one after the other until the child switches to a new program (or until so much time has passed that there is a prompt to see if the child is still watching). This gives the appearance that the content is unending; one could watch forever and not run out of programs to watch. This gives kids the idea that they could find everlasting fulfillment from this media as it will not run out. Also, without the restrictions given to programming times known to cable TV that must allow for half-hour or hour-long programs broken up by commercials, Netflix and other streamers can play with the time of programs in ways that haven’t been done before. And, given the mechanics and drivers of consumption for streaming media, e.g., binge-watching, people can spend a significant amount of time watching a show in one sitting. In this way, rather than a narrative arc that ends in one episode to be picked up and continued in the next, the narrative arcs of programs can extend throughout entire seasons. Children’s programs do not usually follow this lead, in that most of the children’s shows are much shorter, running from 10 minutes to 20 minutes, with a story arc that is completed in that time. Teens’ programming, however, follows the model set up by adult programming in that the arcs and characterization extend over entire seasons in such programs as 13 Reasons Why or Sex Education. The way that kids consume this media has a different construct of time than in the previous television era.

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Streaming Media Situate Identities Through Everydayness and Repetition Alongside the way that time works in streaming media, the use of repetition of content for children and teens matters in ways that it hasn’t before. In this book, I see video media on these streaming media sites as artifacts because they are similar to books, games, and other digital works that are part of the worlds of these children and teens and who shape the way they see themselves and others. Rowsell & Pahl’s (2007) concept of sedimentation is useful here. Though they discussed sedimentation in relation to children creating multimodal artifacts, the way that children and teens watch streaming media interrelates identities and texts in a similar manner. We use the metaphor “identities sedimenting into texts” to describe the way in which the process can be slow, as sand becomes more rock-like and multifarious, as different grains of sand become assembled into a rock. The term indicates that sedimentation is a process, and it can be observed taking place within a variety of modes and across sites and domains. (Rowsell & Pahl, 2007, p. 392) In this book, I take from the concept of sedimentation, but I see the process as flipped. It is not that kids are sedimenting the media’s identities into artifacts; rather, the artifacts are sedimenting into their identities into the children’s through the repetition that stems from how streaming media can and is viewed. Also, so many kids are watching streaming media in their everyday life, it makes sense to discuss the literacies within these artifacts. It is a slow, gradual process, but it is magnified by the amount of time spent interacting with this media content, the sheer repetition from binge-watching and other streaming media practices, and from the volume of streaming media available to these kids. It is the very everydayness of their Netflix media consumption that allows for the sedimentation of identities to happen without notice or comment. What identities are reinforced through repetition? What is new and what is different? In the streaming media for preschoolers, for instance, one can see fairly traditional representations of boys and girls in shows while stretching the boundaries of these representations in interesting ways, which I will discuss more in Chapters 5 and 6. For instance, Netflix’s Super Monsters5 show girls as pretty and soft-spoken and boys as kind yet boisterous. This show does expand its representations with race and ethnicity, though through fairly stereotypical ways, such as introducing a new Mexican girl monster to discuss Día de Los Muertos at Halloween time. These representations are not all that dissimilar to television shows, such as Sesame Street, with their depictions of different groups of people in safe, contained ways. Other shows have a slightly different take on representations, such as the Boss Baby spin-off called Boss Baby: Back in Business,6 in which

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the central characters are a baby who acts like a businessman and his brother who is portrayed as a typical boy. The side characters provide a different take on gender with Staci, a young girl baby, defying stereotypes by being a physically violent and ruthless character (though some could say, this portrayal is reifying a stereotype of women as “crazy”). What these shows illustrate is a mix of traditional and different ways of representing children and childhood experiences. So, what this all means is that within this cultural moment, children are being situated in particular places, namely the home (Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016), where they experience a variety of identity representations through different modalities in ways that encourage new literacy practices and new ways of engagement, such as binge-watching. Parents and kids are experiencing this phenomenon together, though with content tailored to each age group, yet one would hope that adults have some cognitive and cultural distance that they can use to navigate this new streaming phenomenon. Children and teens, on the other hand, have known nothing else. Childhood is packaged through these media streaming services, and this book attempts to explore what that could mean for children and teens as they consume the video content created for them through these new platforms.

Streaming Media as a Heteroglossic, Choronotopic, and Feminist Space In addition to a grounding in literacy research, I utilize two main research strands in this book. The first is Bakhtin’s (1990, 2004) theories of chronotope, heteroglossia, and the self. At the most basic level, Bakhtin’s theories are useful for signaling that there are voices that go into, circulate throughout, and flow out of any text, which he calls heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 2004), and that these voices follow particular generic patterns along time and space, which is chronotope in a nutshell (Bakhtin, 2004). In every show that Netflix produces, there are many, many people who work on the show along the way from the writers and producers through to the actors. But even beyond those voices, there are cultural factors at play that affect which ideas make it to the production room and which do not. There are also ways of seeing children and teens that impact what is produced and how it is done. For instance, if Netflix executives see children as innocent, in need of protection, then they will produce cartoons and other shows that do not push any boundaries. If they feel that children are media-savvy (Buckingham, 2000), then they will produce shows that might be somewhat transgressive. This becomes even more true as children get older in that, understandably, teen shows explore more issues, such as a suicide in 13 Reasons Why7 than would be explored in shows for preschoolers, which are more about learning basic social concepts, such as sharing or learning numbers. There are also voices that run throughout the shows themselves as the shows delve into larger cultural and social understandings. For example, in Anne with an E8 explores coming out in a gentler way

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with a secondary character than One Day at a Time9 in which the central teen’s coming out is the main part of an entire season. In another example, there are a few examples of race or ethnicity in the sitcom The Expanding Universe of Ashley Garcia10 beyond some allusions to her uncle as a Latin lover or eating chips sprinkled with Tajin, while other shows, such as Gentified11 or On My Block,12 explore issues around Latino/a communities more fully, especially for teens and young adults. The ways voices circulate within the Netflix shows may be different, but it’s true in all of the shows and movies. Alongside this discussion of heteroglossia, then, are Bakhtin’s theories in Art and Answerability (1990) about the way that readers and texts interact with one another goes beyond a one-way interaction, meaning that the texts have an impact on who the reader is within the interaction, so there are implications for the self when reading texts. When youth are engaging with the Netflix original programming made for them, they are entering into an interactive space in which they are not simply passive consumers. The youth bring their own lived experiences and understanding to the interaction as well as they watch and, with some shows, interact with the programs. Netflix might be fostering a particular way of engaging with its media, and in a sense, it became clear in my analysis that this engagement was expected or hoped to foster a particular type of child viewer, which I will discuss in the next section. In essence, streaming media assumes and fosters a different kind of viewer in young people. This is the case with adult viewers as well, but it’s important to think through how our youth are being enculturated into a particular kind of selfhood in their streaming media consumption and what that might mean for their own sense of self as they interact with this media throughout their entire childhood. Beyond the Greek Romance, though, Bakhtin’s theories do not delve into what it means to have a text within lived experiences. After all, it’s been over 100 years since these theories were written, and much has changed. So, Bakhtin can point out that there exist voices within texts and that there is some sort of interaction when reading, but there still needs more theoretical work to understand what constitutes these voices and what they mean in an everyday lived experience, especially if one is not a white male. To add to these theories, then, I ground the analysis of the content of Netflix’s streaming media for youth in feminism, especially thinking through feminism for women and girls of color, through the works of Sara Ahmed. Ahmed (2017) writes that “a feminist project is to find ways in which women can relate to other women; how women can be in relation to each other. It is a project because we are not there yet” (p. 14). I explore how Netflix is or is not working toward this project primarily by drawing from Ahmed’s theories of the feminist snap (Ahmed, 2017) and her discussion of wilfullness (2010) to examine how feminism plays out in Netflix’s original programming with girls and teens, especially girls of color. With Ahmed’s feminist snap, one can attend to the context that surrounds the teen girls as they have grown up and as they are interacting with people in their worlds now. The teens in the Netflix shows whom I discuss are all struggling

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with their own identities, which are often in conflict with those around them, but with the feminist snap, that conflict is seen as no longer simply the fault of the teen girls. Instead, there’s a nuanced understanding of how the conflict comes to be for the teens, and this understanding sheds light on how truly difficult their positions truly are as they are navigating growing up, especially for the girls of color. The girls snap, and rightly so, given the patriarchal environment they live in. I combine Ahmed’s concept of willfulness with ideas from Black feminist scholars, such as Price-Dennis & Muhammad’s Black Girl Literacies and Thomas’s (2019) idea of the dark fantastic, to try to understand how Blackness is represented in Netflix’s original programming for youth. Willfulness is helpful in understanding how race and gender are playing out in Netflix’s original programming in different ways. As Ahmed (2014) concludes her book Willful Subjects, she reflects on how being “willful” is something that one can be called by someone else, but it is also something that one can take on for oneself. Drawing from scholars, including Black scholars such as Alice Walker, and examples, such as Rosa Parks’ activism, Ahmed discusses how “[f]eminist, queer, and antiracist histories can be thought of as histories of those who are willing to be willful, who are willing to turn a diagnosis into an act of self-description” (p. 134). In this book, I wonder how much the creators at Netflix and Netflix itself as a company are willing to receive the call toward willfulness and, if so, how this willfulness is expressed. What these theories provide is a way to understand how feminism can and cannot account for the representations of these youth. In essence, I’m wondering how boundary pushing is or is not happening in the shows and movies that Netflix is producing for these audiences and what that might mean for how these girls see themselves in different ways. What possibilities do they see out there for their own identities?

An Overview of Literacy and Identity Through Streaming Media: Kids, Teens, and Representation on Netflix What makes streaming media different from other sorts of media is the way that its content is displayed, chosen, and played for the viewers. It’s not as simple as turning on the television and watching what is on there, perhaps adding the task of “channel flipping” to make choices. Instead, children and teens (and adults) navigate to Netflix on their smart TVs (or TVs with streaming technologies, such as Roku or Amazon Fire sticks), or their gaming consoles, or their smartphones, or their iPads, etc. Each of those platforms has slightly different interfaces, and each comes with different ways to select through the hundreds of shows that Netflix streams on any given day. Add to this the way that children and teens can watch shows continuously and anytime, and the way that streaming media keeps attention is different than other media. All of this, of course, is governed not just by child interest; but rather; algorithms determine what is shown as possible choices for the sets of viewers or profiles within Netflix. All

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together, the way that Netflix sets up the content is what I call a streaming media environment, and how that environment is set up matters. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, I begin to develop the idea of what I call the streaming media child. Given that identities are laminated and texts have multiple voices coming in, circulating throughout, and coming out of them, streaming media fosters a particular selfhood in children. In particular, the chapters in the first part of this book discuss how Netflix’s streaming media and its platform fosters certain aspects of children and teens: • Streaming media children have a set of expectations of their media. Specifically, streaming media children expect their media to be accessible and customizable to their ages and interests at any given time. • Streaming media children have specific digital and multimodal literacies skills as they navigate through multiple, different interfaces when choosing and streaming content. • Streaming media children expect adaptation of texts and want to have a part to play in that adaptation process. • Streaming media children are comfortable being both aided and constrained by algorithms. The algorithms used by Netflix (or other streaming platforms) provide certain selections based on unknown factors controlled by the company but also by known factors, such as what has been watched previously. These children accept these constraints as they know that certain shows will be provided based on their interests. • Streaming media children are savvy at digital media play. With interactive media, these children expect to and do play with narrative and characterization of their favorite shows’ plotlines and characters. While each chapter rests on Bakhtin’s ideas, especially chronotope (Bakhtin, 2004), each chapter also adds in different theoretical concepts as needed to fully understand what is occurring in the Netflix streaming space. Chapter 2 discusses these characteristics in terms of time by exploring how Netflix’s interface changes the way that time is working in media consumption for kids and what that means for their acculturation into these new practices. In Chapter 3, I discuss the “space” part of chronotope by analyzing what Netflix’s visible space, in this case, the interface tells one in relation to child and teen viewers, and what the invisible space of the algorithms adds to this dynamic. In Chapter 4, I develop what I call interactive dialogic play, which is the way that children navigate a new genre that Netflix is developing for children and teens with their interactive programming, or shows where the viewer can decide what happens next by making choices with the narrative and characterization. All of these chapters are pushing toward trying to understand what type of child or teen Netflix is assuming is watching and/or what type of child or teen Netflix is attempting to foster as a consumer.

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In Chapters 5 and 6 of this book, I move away from how Netflix is setting up its interface toward an analysis of the content within the shows themselves. In my research for this book over the past few years, I’ve watched hundreds of hours of Netflix shows, and this doesn’t count the hundreds with my own children. Clearly, Netflix is focused on entertaining children and teens to keep them viewing its content. Toward that end, there are many, many programs that are intended solely for entertainment. This is especially true in its distribution of mainstream media’s movies and television programs, such as making sure it had all of the Marvel movies before they moved to Disney+ when they were very popular, or showing the most recent movie hit, especially pre-pandemic. But, over the years, Netflix also created over one hundred new shows and movies for children and teens, and they are creating more and more. The shows that they create are largely for entertainment as well, but there are also moves toward content that is more representative of their different demographics, especially in race and gender. Netflix is pushing boundaries, and I’m interested in how they are doing this in their programming for younger audiences. In particular, I’m wondering how “woke” Netflix is trying to be in its youth programming. In the latter half of the 2010s, there was a resurgence of resistance to violence in black communities, especially after the killing of Michael Brown. These types of killings by police led to the Black Lives Matter movement, among many other forms of resistance. It also led to a resurgence of words to describe an increasing awareness, especially among white people, about what was happening to black communities. In response, the terms “stay woke” or “woke” came into the popular lexicon. If I’ve learned anything from the work of Sara Ahmed, whose theories I rely on extensively in this book, is that the meaning of individual words matter as she explores words in-depth, such as her study of “happiness” (Ahmed, 2010) or “willfulness” (Ahmed, 2014). In the case of “woke,” it has a long history of being used by Black people in response to violence against Blacks. In 1938, it was used in song decrying the mistrial of 9 Black men in Alabama as he states, “Just stay woke. Keep your eyes open” (Harriott, 2021, para. 2). More recently, the word was used in songs by Childish Gambino (though this was code for infidelity) and Erykah Badu as she sings, “I stay woke” as a refrain for social justice awareness. The term woke was also used for the Black Lives Matter movement as a rallying cry. Wokeness has broadened out to include multiple oppressions, e.g., sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc., though its original intent has been racial and, specifically, Black. “For black millennial activists, remaining “woke,” as a mode of social consciousness, involves no less than keeping track of the interlocking systems of global oppressions that render the lives of people of color, black people in particular, vulnerable and dispensable” (McCormack & Legal-Miller, 2019, p. 260). At the same time, though, the use of “woke” is double-edged. As early as 1962, there was backlash. The term circulated in the African-American Vernacular English for the rest of the 20th century in poetry and in everyday

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speech, but it was not uncontested. For instance, interestingly, “woke” was used in the title of a New York Times article entitled “If you’re woke, you dig it,” an article that discussed how white beatniks appropriated black slang (Oxford English Dictionary, 2017, para. 8). In 2022, it has become a term that conservative politicians and others use as a slam against liberals, which is its own issue. But, also, as it came to be used by white liberals in recent years, there has been backlash by Blacks. In fact, a big part of the critique is linguistic as well as cultural as it asserts that the term itself has been radically altered by whites to aggrandize themselves and their (token) support of Black communities' struggles. According to Harriott (2021), [the way the word is used now is] a definition [that] was created by and for white people, in direct opposition to the term’s original intent—a warning to Black people about white people. By co-opting and transforming “woke” into a beacon for self-congratulatory allyship, white wokeness had been reversed-engineered into the actual thing that Black people needed to stay woke about. (author’s italics, para. 6) As I analyzed the Netflix original programming for youth, though, I kept finding shows that fit right into this line of trying to celebrate women and girls of color, especially Black children and teens. Therefore, one of the key questions I have in this book is: Does Netflix think that streaming children are, or ought to be, woke? In my analysis of the Netflix programming for youth, my answer to this question is “Yes, kind of,” especially in light of both the use of the term and its critique. In Chapters 5 and 6, I explore how in its streaming media content for children and teens, Netflix has a range of boundary-pushing and boundarykeeping when it comes to gender and race. In terms of gender, in shows with female leads, some of the shows make progress with the girls and young women being represented as strong, independent advocates for themselves and others, but this is true only to varying degrees, especially when the girl is Black. Issues of race fare better in its representation, especially for Black leads. While there are a few shows with Latino/a and Asian American characters, most of Netflix’s programming around race centers around Blackness. In these shows, there is more boundary-pushing and added complexity. In Netflix’s original programming for children and teens, then, even when it is trying to be woke, the way that wokeness is advocated in these shows is double-edged as is the word itself.

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Literacy and Identity Through Streaming Media opens up the door to continued conversation about what streaming media’s growing influence on even our very youngest people means for their identities and for their viewing perspectives and habits. What kind of viewers are we creating with these media? What does it open up for the youth, and what does it constrain? What does it mean to be a streaming media child, and how might this impact how that child grows up to be an adult in our societies? As parents and educators, we can decide what our children watch and how they do so. But, first, we need to think deeply about how this new streaming media landscape operates in its very structure and with the children and teens who are engaging with it and what Netflix’s streaming media does and does not offer in terms of literacy skills and cultural engagement. Rather than leaving youth on their own to navigate this space, understanding more about what this new media affords and what it lacks, especially for young people, helps us as we foster ways of engaging with this media in healthy and productive ways.

Summing Up Streaming media is changing the way that people consume serialized media content, such as TV shows and movies. The key aspect to understand about this change is that while it has changed the way adults consume media, it is also shifting how children and teens also watch, such as fostering binge-watching shows and expecting unlimited access to shows that are tailored to their own interests. Streaming media, then, is fostering its own literacy practices in the everyday settings of the home. Using concepts from Bakhtin (2004), namely chronotope, heteroglossia, and identity, and from Ahmed (2014, 2017), namely feminist snap and willfulness, in this book I explore how Netflix sets up particular ways of engaging with its programming and particular identities with that engagement. The key findings from this book can be summarized as follows: First, the way that Netflix’s programming for youth functions sets up what I term the streaming media child. Streaming media children have grown up with unfettered access to countless streaming media tailored solely to their age groups from preschool on. They expect to have media that appeals to them at whatever age they are, and they expect this access to continue over time. They expect to see the shows they like over and over again, entire seasons at a time. And, they expect their narratives to be uninterrupted by commercials during viewing and uninterrupted by time between viewings, moving from one episode to the next seamlessly. Second, Netflix is also attempting to create programming that is “woke” in terms of gender and race, and it is attempting to foster a similar mindset in its viewers in ways that are successful in some ways and problematic in others. While there are some ways that gender is explored, especially with characters of color, there is more progress made with race in Netflix’s original programming, especially for African-American youth.

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Notes 1 Fincher et al., 2013–2018 2 McCarthy, 2013 3 Cohen, Duffer, & Duffer, 2016–2022 4 Scorsese, 2019 5 Arad & Bohbot, 2017–2021 6 Sawyer, 2018–2022 7 Gomez, et al., 2017–2020 8 Bradley et al., 2018–2019 9 Calderón Kellett, Royce, Lear, Miller, Signer, & Jones, 2017–2020 10 Kurland, Lopez, Kendall, & Schulman, 2020 11 Macer, King, Williams, Roth, Ferrara, Weinberg, Lemus, Chávez, & Fernandez, 2019–2021 12 Iungerich, Gonzalez, Haft, & Dooner, 2018–2021

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Cohen, D., Duffer, M., & Duffer, R. (Executive Producers). (2016–2022). Stranger things. [Streaming media series]. Netflix. Curwood, J.S. & Gibbons, D. (2010). ‘Just like I have felt’: Multimodal counternarratives in youth- produced digital media. International Journal of Learning and Media, 2(1): 59–77. Derousseau, R. (2018). The one company that Amazon can’t disrupt. Money, 47(7): 26–27. Domingo, M. (2011). Analyzing layering in textual design: A multimodal approach for examining cultural, linguistic, and social migrations in digital video. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14(3): 219–230. Domingo, M. (2012). Linguistic layering: Social language development in the context of multimodal design and digital technologies. Learning, Media, and Technology, 37(2): 177–197. Fincher, et al. (Executive Producers). (2013–2018). House of cards. [Streaming Media Series]. Netflix. Fisherkeller, J. (2002). Growing up with television: Everyday learning among young adolescents. Temple University Press. Gaydos, M. & Squire, K. (2011). Role playing games for scientific citizenship. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 7: 821–844. Gee, J.P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (2nd ed.). RoutledgeFalmer. Gee, J.P. (2005). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (2nd ed.). Routledge. Gibbons Pyles, D. (2015). A multimodal mapping of voice in youth media: The pitch in youth video production. Learning, Media, & Technology. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2016.1095209. Gomez, S., et al. (Executive Producers). (2017–2020). 13 reasons why. [Streaming Media Series]. Netflix. Halverson, E.R. (2010). Film as identity exploration: A multimodal analysis of youthproduced films. Teachers College Record, 112(9): 2352–2378. Halverson, E.R. & Gibbons, D. (2010). “Key moments” as pedagogical windows into the digital video production process. Journal of Computing in Teacher Education, 26(2): 69–74. Harriott, M. (2021). Weaponizing ‘woke’: A brief history of White definitions. Roots. Retrieved from https://www.theroot.com/weaponizing-woke-an-brief-history-ofwhite-definitions-1848031729 Heyer, P. & Urquhart, P. (2019). Communication in history: Stone age symbols to social media. Routledge Holz, J. (2017). Kids’ TV grows up: The path from Howdy Doody to SpongeBob. Mcfarland & Company, Inc. Iungerich, L., Gonzalez, E., Haft, J., & Dooner, J. (Executive Producers). (2018–2021). On my block. [Streaming Media Series]. Netflix. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). Routledge. Kurland, S., Lopez, M., Kendall, D., & Schulman, M. (Executive Producers). (2020). The expanding universe of Ashley Garcia. [Streaming Media Series]. Netflix. LaPorte, N. (2019). The Netflix shuffle: Can the streaming giant get serious about movies without alienating filmmakers? Fast Company, 230: 24–28. Retrieved from http:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=133682039&site= eds-live&scope=site

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Livingstone, S. & Sefton-Green, J. (2016). The class: Living and learning in the digital age. NYU Press. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18040ft Macer, M., King, C.D., Williams, A., Roth, K., Ferrara, A., Weinberg, T., Lemus, M., Chávez, L.Y., & Fernandez, M. (Executive Producers). (2020–2021). Gentified. [Streaming Media Series]. Netflix. McCarthy, A. (Director). (2013). Orange is the new black. [Streaming media series]. Netflix. McCormack, M.B. & Legal-Miller, A. (2019). All over the world like a fever: Martin Luther Kind Jr.’s world house and the movement for Black lives in the United States and United Kingdom. In V.L. Crawford & L.V. Baldwin (Eds.), Reclaiming the great world house: The global vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. (pp. 254–284). University of Georgia Press. Oxford English Dictionary. (2017). New words notes June 2017. Retrieved from https:// public.oed.com/blog/june-2017-update-new-words-notes/ Pallota, F. (2019). Netflix added record number of subscribers, but warns of tougher times ahead. CNN Business. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/16/media/ netflix-earnings-2019-first-quarter/index.html Palmer, A. (2019). Teens choose YouTube over Netflix for the first time, according to new survey. CNBC. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/08/teensprefer-youtube-over-netflix-piper-jaffray-survey-finds.html Peppler, K., Halverson, E.R., & Kafai, Y. (2016). Makeology: Makerspaces as learning environments (Volume 1 & 2). Routledge. Pew Internet Research. (September, 2017). About 6 in 10 young adults in U.S. primarily use online streaming to watch TV. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2017/09/13/about-6-in-10-young-adults-in-u-s-primarily-use-online-streamingto-watch-tv/ Potter, J. (2012). Digital media and learner identity: The new curatorship. Palgrave Macmillan. Reisinger, D. (2019). Amazon Prime has more than 100 million subsribers. Fortune. Retrieved from https://fortune.com/2019/01/17/amazon-prime-subscribers/ Rowsell, J. & Pahl, K. (2007). Sedimented identities in texts: Instances of practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(3): 388–404. Rowsell, J. & Schamroth Adams, S. (2011). (Re)conceptualizing I/identity: An introduction. National Society for the Study of Education, 110(1): 1–16. Sawyer, B. (Executive Producer). (2018–2022). Boss Baby: Back in business. [Streaming Media Series]. Netflix. Scorsese, M. (Director). (2019). The Irishman. [Streaming Media Film]. Netflix. Spangler, T. (2019). Netflix is nearing subscriber peak in the U.S., PwC Says. Variety. Retrieved from https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/netflix-subscriber-peak-uspwc-report-1203234190/ Stangarone, T. (2019). How Netflix is reshaping South Korean entertainment. Diplomat, 55: C211–C214. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true& db=poh&AN=136742208&site=eds-live&scope=site Zarum, L. (October, 2018). Some viewers think Netflix is targeting them by race. Here’s what to know. New York Times, Retrieved from https://www.nytimes. com/2018/10/23/arts/television/netflix-race-targeting-personalization.html

2 STREAMING MEDIA, STREAMING TIME How Netflix’s Children’s Programming Changes How Time Works

On the way to school one day, when my then-5-year-old son complained, yet again, about how he couldn’t always do what his older brother and sister do. On this day, he wanted to stay up as late as his then-13-year-old sister. This is an age-old conversation in my house, and I have had similar conversations with his older siblings through the years, both of whom couldn’t wait to be old enough to whistle or to ride their bikes without training wheels, or to be old enough to stay home alone. Though the wishes might change for different children, on some level, childhood is largely about the passage of time, and in their rush to grow up, children often feel that time moves too slowly. The truth is that the marking of time is fundamental to childhood. Adults mark children’s developmental stages, beginning by weeks and months when they are babies and progressing to years as they grow older. Time is often the key determiner for school readiness as children enter kindergarten at age 5 and then progress through school, usually graduating at age 18 to move on to work or university. And, just like my children, one knows that children can sometimes feel time quite dramatically. They are all about growing up. Young children can’t wait to grow into big children. Teens can’t wait to become adults. Each age wants to get to the next one faster and faster. And, as parents, we oscillate between wanting our children to be independent and wanting to slow time down so that we can enjoy time with our children for longer. But time doesn’t just pass as children grow up. The children themselves change, evolve, and become anew while still being themselves. Children progress through developmental, emotional, psychological, and social stages. They shift identities from babies to toddlers to preschoolers to children to teens. The way time progresses impacts how the identities progress, though neither is bound DOI: 10.4324/9781003176992-2

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to the other. Some children “grow up too fast,” while others hold on to earlier stages past their due. For children, time and identities are intertwined but not mutually binding. What children consume as media must necessarily shift with these identities as well if it is to have any sustainability as part of children’s lives. Children have their favorites of books, movies, and music that ebb and flow in their lives, and what they want to read, watch, or listen to changes from year to year. Along with these more traditional texts, Netflix is becoming an emerging constant in modern children’s lives as millions of children stream Netflix shows into their homes: “The company, [Netflix], doesn’t release ratings for its shows, but it says that nearly 60% of its customers, or roughly 83 million households, watch children and family content” (Lang, 2018, p. 53). Even if each of those households only had one child, this means that, potentially, at least 83 million children and teens are watching Netflix. Streaming media for children’s entertainment is conceivably a part of millions of children’s lives. Given that so many children are consuming streaming media on Netflix, it makes me very curious about what is going on with Netflix’s content. Theoretically, for the next two chapters, I will ground my analysis in Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope (2004). The term chronotope was first articulated by Bakhtin (2004) as a metaphorical categorization of “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (p. 84). In particular, Bakhtin sought to explicate how time and space interrelate and become markers of genre in literature by applying chronotopes to types of novels throughout history. For each time period, Bakhtin analyzed different novels, e.g., Greek Romance, to uncover how each used aspects of both time and space as in the way that the novels constituted a genre. Similarly, Netflix uses the features of other streaming media, such as shows on demand, streaming whole series, etc., but Netflix does so with particular features around time and space that I will discuss in these chapters. In particular, I would like to draw understanding from Bakhtin’s idea that “[t]ime, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope” (Bakhtin, 2004, p. 84). Though Bakhtin applied chronotopes to literature, in this case, its scope can be broadened to streaming media as one can examine how this newer form of media “takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible.” Though for Bakhtin, timespace is not separated out—time and space are interconnected—the concepts are large enough when applied to Netflix that I will be discussing each in its own chapter. Therefore, in the next chapter, I will cover how space is operating in Netflix’s interface. In this chapter, I will examine how the shows in Netflix and Netflix’s interface itself remixes “time, plot, and history” in interesting ways. Namely, this chapter hopes to address this question: How is time working in Netflix’s original programming for young people, and what does this mean for

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how children and teens are being acculturated by the structuring of Netflix’s interface itself into relationships with time in streaming media?

Theoretical Background In contemporary analyses of chronotope, scholars are examining how chronotope is helpful to show how texts themselves are organized. In particular, chronotope is useful for seeing patterns through time and space in interactions (Kumpulainen, Mikkola, & Jaatinen, 2014). In examining how Netflix organizes its shows, one can see how Netflix arranges not only the content of the shows but also how time operates within the shows and how the shows are accessed. For instance, Netflix has a category called “Binge in a Weekend,” in which it organizes shows that can be finished in a couple of days of continuous watching. Though broadcast media has similar types of organization, such as marathons of re-runs that showed hours of episodes at once, these were special events rather than everyday patterns. In the world of Netflix, this type of organization makes sense in a way that would look different in other media as people have access to shows without a set programming schedule; also, these categories are a normal, regular feature of Netflix. More importantly, however, chronotopes are useful for helping one to see culture at work in texts. Based on Lemkian semiotics (Lemke, 2004), Kumpulainen, Mikkola, & Jaatinen (2014) assert that “chronotopes are the defining features of a culture or a subculture and of communities of practice as they inform our design choices in shaping social–institutional spaces for particular uses” (p. 57). Chronotopic events can shape the way that people interact and how they know themselves and others. I will unpack this a bit more in terms of Netflix in this chapter, but Netflix shapes the way that people engage with streaming media as Netflix itself is or is increasingly becoming its own institution. Netflix is becoming a definer of culture in streaming media rather than just part of the subculture of streaming. Just as YouTube changed the way that people consumed self-made video media (Burgess & Green, 2009), so too has Netflix shaped the way that people, young and old, consume streaming media.

Chronotopic Time on Netflix Children’s Programming One way that Netflix becomes this determiner of culture is how it stages time. On some level, time is accessible all at once in the space of Netflix. Adding to this experience is the accessibility of all shows at one time as Netflix shows are available in entire seasons rather than single episodes spread out over time. Netflix’s offering of seasons at one time both contracts and expands time for children (and adults). With mainstream television, even with re-runs, there is a schedule for when shows run and for how long they run. There are identifiable seasons, and only a certain number of shows are broadcast at any given time. This

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can have consequences in what is available for children to watch. For instance, when a cartoon is canceled, the children can no longer watch that show on the TV. Netflix is different, however, at least for its own original programming. Children can watch any show that Netflix has produced, no matter when it was produced. Though Netflix does not produce all children shows for unlimited seasons, the children can access the episodes from any series that Netflix has produced at any time. For instance, children in 2020 can access the first ever Netflix original program produced for children called Turbo Fast1, including all of its three seasons. This type of accessibility changes the way access to episodic media works on Netflix, as its original programming for children is a constant no matter how much time has passed between production and viewing. The time of episodes, though usually fairly standardized in episodic television, is also different in Netflix shows. Most children’s shows on Netflix are either 10 minutes, either in two segments or in 10 minutes episodes individually listed, or 20–30 minutes individually listed. Other forms of media have commercials or other interruptions as part of the interface. Other streaming services, including YouTube, include an increasing number of commercials in its videos. Yet, original programming on Netflix has no such breaks. While the shows that Netflix distributes are often TV shows that have been broadcast on television first, meaning that there are pauses for commercial breaks, there are no commercials when they are shown on Netflix. What this means is that on Netflix’s programming minutes are experienced consecutively—the shows are not broken up narratively by commercials. Given that there are no commercials or other interruptions in Netflix’s programming, the narrative experience for children is not broken up, creating a more coherent and cohesive narrative experience for children. The timing of shows changes, of course, based on the age of the children whom Netflix is trying to attract to its shows. Shows for preschoolers and younger start out in smaller increments of time. Following the model of Baby Einstein and other similar marketing campaigns to parents nervous about screentime (but, I suspect, still wanting a couple of minutes of break that these sorts of media provide), Netflix has created short programming for little children, such as Puffin Rock2 which runs at approximately 6 minutes per episode. This timing goes up to 10–14 minutes, depending on the show, for the younger elementary set. Shows, such as Chico Bon Bon3, Hello Ninja4, or Kazoops!5 usually run 14 minutes per episode. Some of these shows have very simple narratives, such as Jim Henson’s Word Party6, which focuses on lessons around household objects, colors, and basic emotions, or the Super Monsters7 series that center around preschoolers who are monsters attending a monster preschool at night and who explore simple social concepts, such as sharing with one another. Others have narratives that have a full plotline, usually around problem solving, such as Yoohoo to the Rescue8, in which a group of child animals solve a problem for another animal in need in a mini-adventure.

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As children get older, their shows get longer. Animated series are usually 24 minutes long, such as the True series9, The Last Children On Earth10, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts11, and the Captain Underpants series12. Live-action series geared toward children have the same timeframe. The main difference with these shows is that the narratives usually run through an arc through the series rather than being episodic, though some are still resolved within the episode, such as in The Inbestigators13. Similarly, both animated and live-action shows geared toward tweens and teens are usually 24 to 40 minutes long. While some are episodic, such as Creeped Out14, most of these shows have longer narrative arcs, such as Never Have I Ever15, with plot lines that run through the series. Most shows that appeal to teens or have teen protagonists are often rated MA, and they have longer episodes upwards of an hour and narrative arcs that take one or more seasons to complete, e.g., 13 Reasons Why16, Stranger Things17, or Atypical18. What is most significant in terms of time, however, is that the time increases with age, and, one can assume, the complexity of the narrative. Time, plot, and characterization are working together, and this interaction changes over time from preschool toward adolescence. Moreover, Netflix has compressed time, on some level, with its access. Gone are the days when children would have to wait until the next day or next week for another episode of their shows to come on the television. Instead, children have access to entire seasons at once. In some households, it would be parental rules or other factors outside of Netflix that would determine whether or not a child could watch episode after episode rather than the time between the shows being broadcast. This accessibility of entire seasons changes the way that meaning is accessible to children with Netflix programming. Blommaert (2015) adds insights into how this works: “Specific chronotopes produce specific kinds of person, actions, meaning, and value. Interactionally decoding and deploying them are also, in themselves chronotropic phenomena, in which other historicities convene in the here-and-now historicity of production and understandings” (p. 109). When children had to wait until the next episode aired, they went to school, played with siblings or friends, ate dinner, watched other shows, and so on before watching the next episode, if they watched the next at all. The Netflix interface itself provides access without the time delay, which changes the way that the chronotopes are “decod[ed] and deploy[ed]” and it changes the “historicity of production and understandings.” Without that intervening time, the possibility is that much less life is lived in between episodes for children. The interruption is less, which keeps them in the narrative world longer, and of course, keeps them in the Netflix interface longer as well.

Narrative, Time, and Netflix Children’s Programming This means that not only do children not have to wait to see the next episode immediately, the way that children can experience the narrative of the shows shifts also. With Netflix’s original programming for children, the narrative is

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not broken up by time itself. For example, take the show Boss Baby: Back in Business19, which is a spin-off of the movie Boss Baby. This show, now in its fourth season with its own interactive episode that I will discuss in another chapter, focuses on the antics of a baby named Boss Baby who talks and acts like a businessman and his older, more typically normal brother, Tim. Each episode is 24 minutes long, and the stories themselves follow a narrative arc across the entire season, similar to adult programming. Each season has a villain that is threatening “baby love” or going after the coveted CEO position that Boss Baby craves: One season, it was a man raised by cats; in another, it was old people; the third, it was a corporation capitalizing on parents’ own insecurities around raising their children; and the fourth involves talking animals in a show aimed at children. The 24 minutes episodes have their own plot points that roughly have a beginning, middle, and end. But, the shows build on one another as well, leading up to the penultimate episode in which the villain is often revealed and the final episode when the children defeat the “bad guy.” The 24 minutes, then, stretch into 200 minutes once the season is over, none of which is interrupted at regular intervals by commercials. It’s the plotline that is built episode by episode, 24 minutes by 24 minutes, to form a coherent narrative arc.

Time on Repeat On Netflix, time is repeated and repeatable. Anyone with children knows that they like to watch the same shows on what feels like a constant repeat. We know that sites, such as YouTube, capitalize on children’s propensity to have narrowed and intense interests in certain things, e.g., cars, trains, etc., with their desire to watch videos over and over again (Lafrance, 2017). Similarly, the way the interface is set up, Netflix’s original programming for children allows for shows to be revisited time and again, which means that time can be devoted to the show again and again. What this means, though, is that as the shows repeat, time within the show repeats. Time on Netflix children’s programming is cyclical. When children move from show to show, their time on the Netflix interface grows, of course, but given that children like to watch the same shows over and over, this repeating of time often happens with the same shows, meaning that the time children spend with any one show can multiply. The content of those shows matters, then, which will be discussed in later chapters. But, for the purposes of our discussion of time in this chapter, especially with younger-aged children, what time children have to spend on Netflix shows is often concentrated on the same handful of shows at any one time in a child’s life. This time spent on one show can really add up. Let’s return to the Boss Baby: Back in Business example. My children have watched this show since it came out, and they have watched the show over and over. Even as a parent, I have seen the entire first three seasons not once but at least three or four times. My children

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have seen the series even more. So, this means that not only would children watch the show for 200 minutes per season, adding up to 800 minutes for all four seasons, but if children watch the series with a conservative estimate of at least three times, they will have spent 2400 minutes on one show over time. One doesn’t have to have a complicated math lesson to see that spending 40 hours on a show is a lot of time. And this is just one show with one set of children. Imagine how this works across all of Netflix’s over 100 original children and teen shows. Often, children are returning to the same content for a significant amount of time.

Spanning Time The last point I’d like to make about how Netflix works chronologically is the social and developmental aspects of time with children’s programming. One constant that Netflix has to face is that children grow up, and as they do, their tastes will change. This means that as children grow, they want access to new programs that fit their newer and emerging interests and entertainment desires. The choice of shows on Netflix for children, though, is extensive, even if one only takes into account their original programming of over 100 different shows. What this means, then, as children grow in time and age out of shows as they grow, is that Netflix has to not only provide shows that work within the episode times the children understand and with longstanding access, Netflix also has to offer a wide variety of shows that cover the entire childhood through adolescence to keep the children watching as they grow up. It is conceivable that a child could begin watching shows for babies, move through preschool and lower elementary, go through the shows for older children and tweens, and continue on through the teen shows. Given that teens are often watching shows geared toward adults, the transition to programming for adult viewers is practically seamless at that point. The constant is the Netflix interface and persistent yet varied content. So, in this way, Netflix ages with the children, while still offering everything to the children that they had before. In this sense, Netflix is timeless.

Reflections and Connections A chronotope is a specific time and space, and as such, chronotopes are highly specific forms of context that must be recognizable. “[W]henever we see chronotopes being invoked in discourse, we see them through the scalar effect of recognizability: They can be recognized by us only when they have been performed using the register criteria their type presumes” (Blommaert, 2015, p. 113). What this means is that people get used to seeing particular ways of making meaning, and when they see something new, they try to figure out where to place it with whatever they already know. If a child sees a show that has animated characters, she knows that it is a cartoon. If she is a young child, then, she will likely put this

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show into a category of possible shows that she would like to watch. If she sees a show with actors in it, she is likely to put that show in a category of shows she wouldn’t necessarily like, if she generally watches animation. The “register” of the show determines how well a child would recognize it as a possibility. Shows on Netflix also become recognizable through how they function with time, e.g., the time of shows, their accessibility of entire seasons, or the time of production being irrelevant for access, etc. They are all Netflix original shows, and as such, they are recognizable for children as having particular features in terms of time. But, chronotopes are also one way that people articulate their identities and roles. These interrelationships with time as a chronotope in Netflix children’s programming not only shift how time is working in the shows, but it also could shift how a child’s identities are (re)formed when she is using the interface, turning her into what I call a streaming media child. The way that programming is operating on Netflix allows for children to have access to too many shows to count, many of them Netflix’s own programming. This access is persistent over time, which makes it possible to watch old favorites as well as find new ones. That means that children have the privilege of choosing from any number of shows, geared just for them at any age group. This access makes it so that entire seasons are ripe for the picking. This accessibility encourages a child viewer to watch episode after episode of any one show. Features, such as auto-play, encourage this watching, but so does the fact that all of the episodes of a season are right there to be watched without delay. This push toward consuming more and more encourages children to become binge-watchers. In fact, if children really like a show, they can re-watch the seasons themselves time and again quite easily. In a nutshell, the chronotope of time as represented in and through Netflix children’s programming encourages a streaming media child to be a privileged, impatient, binge-watcher who has high expectations of narrative in shows. Of course, not all children have any or all of these characteristics, but the way that time operates within the space of Netflix encourages children to exhibit these characteristics. As scholars and educators, we might ask ourselves: What are the cultural implications for how time has shifted with streaming media, such as the programming in Netflix’s original programming for children and teens? Essentially, as a literacies scholar, I’m intrigued by the idea of the literacy practices around media streaming fundamentally changing how children and teens are growing up with an understanding of how time operates in media spaces. If time contracts between media viewings, making viewing itself continuous, then how does that play into what children expect from other forms of media? Given that transmedia (Jenkins, Ito, & Boyd, 2016) allows children and teens to experience their favorite media in multiple forms, how might time be a factor in that enjoyment as well? If a child wants to continue experiencing Last Children on Earth, the Netflix show, might that child turn toward the novels, including the new graphic novel, or would continuous viewing of the shows over and over be sufficient for

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the child’s curiosity? The answers to questions like these could impact which media are consumed more often and what it means when they are consumed by young people. In past work, colleagues and I have analyzed how a kindergarten teacher was able to leverage YouTube with her kinders to learn scientific concepts (Buchholz, Pyles, Hagaman, & Hash, 2021; Buchholz & Pyles, 2018). Even though many of these kindergartners had never encountered YouTube in this rural, relatively socio-economically deprived area, they were able to pick up quickly the literacy skills needed to learn from YouTube. This leads me to wonder what the streaming media child is like as a learner in a classroom setting. If time operates differently in media than it does in the classroom, how might there be a disconnect between what the child expects and what she actually gets in a classroom? If media viewing is continuous and on-demand, growing with the child in complexity, then does the child expect the same in the classroom, and how are those expectations communicated? It is highly possible that learning will have to change the way that it operates in terms of time and access in order to be relevant to the streaming media children we have in our classrooms today. As parents, we might want to consider what Netflix is fostering in our children. I have no judgment for parents who allow their children to watch hour after hour of Netflix and other media. After all, I freely admit that I do the same. And, at the same time, I think it might be worth examining what we are modeling for our children. After all, aren’t adults binge-watching Netflix as well? I wouldn’t recommend limiting the exposure that children and teens have to Netflix, but I do think that some self-examination might be helpful. If we are also binge-watching adults, we are likely to create binge-watching children. Of course, there are differences. Adults don’t usually watch the same show over and over, but we do stream a lot of Netflix. And, we didn’t grow up with Netflix and its streaming practices, which is made evident any time I have to try to explain, awkwardly at best, what “cable” is to my own children anytime we stay at a hotel. But, asking ourselves how our own perspectives are changing and what changes we’d want to allow for our own children’s development might be useful for parents (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020).

Summing Up Bakhtin’s (2004) concept of chronotope asserts that both time and space in literature have special features. For Bakhtin, time shapes the narrative and determines what can happen in it, namely in the plot, and this is what is happening in Netflix Kids as well. In Netflix youth programming, time both compresses and expands. Youth can spend a chunk of their viewing time watching any Netflix show no matter when the show was created as all seasons of shows are available at any time, which compresses time as youth don’t have to wait for shows to come on TV episode by episode over a week or more. Children can watch their

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favorite shows repeatedly, and they do. Therefore, the amount of time spent watching Netflix can be significant. Streaming media children, then, are shaped into binge-watchers with high expectations for access to their programming.

Notes 1 Prygnoski & Thomas, 2013 2 Deane & Dow, 2015–2017 3 Boyle & O’Connell, 2020–2022 4 Berkowitz & Ledding, 2019–2022 5 Edwards & Egerton, 2016 6 Henson, Stanford, & Rockwell, 2016 7 Arad & Bohbot, 2017 8 Corradi & Noh, 2019 9 Schultz & Williams, 2017–2020 10 Brallier & Peterson, 2019–2020 11 Sechrist & Wolkoff, 2020–2020 12 Grimes & Hastings, 2018-2020 13 Butler & Hope, 2019–2020 14 Blake & Butler, 2017–2019 15 Kaling, Fisher, Klein, Miner, D., & Shapeero, 2020–2022 16 Gomez & Laiblin, 2017–2020 17 Cohen, Duffer, & Duffer, 2016–2019 18 Gordon & Rashid, 2017–2022 19 Sawyer, 2018–2022

References Arad, A. & Bohbot, A. (Executive Producers). (2017-Present). Super monsters. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Bakhtin, M. (2004). Forms of time and the chronotope in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Trans.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin. University of Texas Press 84–258. Berkowitz, M. & Ledding, G. (Executive Producers). (2019-Present). Hello Ninja. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Blake, B. & Butler, R. (Executive Producers). (2017–2019). Creeped out. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Blommaert, J. (2015). Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44(1): 105–116. DOI: 10.1146/ annurev-anthro-102214-014935. Boyle, B. & O’Connell, D. (Executive Producers). (2020-Present). Chico Bon Bon. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Brallier, M. & Peterson, S. (Executive Producers). (2019-Present). The last children on earth. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Buchholz, B. & Pyles, D. (2018). Scientific Literacy in the Wild: Using Multimodal Texts In & Out ​of School. Reading Teacher, 0 (0): 1–10. DOI: 10.1002/trtr.1678. Buchholz B. A., Pyles, D., Hagaman, K. Hash, P. (2021). Teaching comprehension in the digital age: Pausing videos to scaffold scientific literacy practices. Science and Children, 58(5): 43–50.

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Burgess, J. & Green, J. (2009). YouTube. Polity Press. Butler, R. & Hope, W. (Executive Producers). (2019-Present). InBESTigators. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Cohen, D., Duffer, M., & Duffer, R. (Executive Producers). (2016–2019). Stranger things. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Corradi, M. & Noh, J. (Executive Producers). (2019-Present). Yoohoo to the rescue. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Deane, F. & Dow, F. (Executive Producers). (2015–2017). Puffin rock. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Edwards, J. & Egerton, P. (Executive Producers). (2016-Present). Kazoops!. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Gomez, S. & Laiblin, K. (Executive Producers). (2017–2020). 13 reasons why. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Gordon, S. & Rashid, R. (Executive Producers). (2017-Present). Atypical. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Grimes, T. & Hastings, P. (Executive Producers). (2018-Present). Captain underpants. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Henson, L., Stanford, H., & Rockwell, A. (Executive Producers). (2016-Present). Jim Henson’s world party. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Jenkins, H., Ito, M., & Boyd, D. (2016). Participatory culture in a networked era: A conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. Journal of Identity and Migration Studies, 10(2): 214. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Kaling, M., Fisher, L., Klein, H., Miner, D., & Shapeero, T. (Producers). (2020–2022). Never have I ever. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Kumpulainen, K., Mikkola, A., & Jaatinen, A. M. (2014). The chronotopes of technology-mediated creative learning practices in an elementary school community. Learning, Media and Technology, 39(1): 53–74. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2012.752383 Lafrance, A. (25 July, 2017). The algorithm that makes preschoolers obsessed with YouTube. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ archive/2017/07/what-youtube-reveals-about-the-toddler-mind/534765/ Lang, B. (2018). Netflix gets animated. Variety, 342(1): 52–55. Lemke, J. (2004). Learning across multiple places and their chronotopes. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, 12–16 April. Livingstone, S. & Blum-Ross, A. (2020). Parenting for a digital future: How hopes and fears about digital technologies shape children’s lives. Oxford University Press. Prygnoski, C. & Thomas, J. (2013–2016). Turbo fast. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Sawyer, B. (Executive Producer). (2018–2022). Boss Baby: Back in business. [Streaming Media]. Netflix. Schultz, B. & Williams, P. (Executive Producers). (2017-Present). True. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Sechrist, R. & Wolkoff, B. (Executive Producers). (2020-Present). Kipo and the age of wonderbeasts. [Streaming media]. Netflix.

3 VISIBLE INTERFACE, INVISIBLE ALGORITHMS Children Enter into Netflix’s Algorithmic Space

Once when I was studying abroad in London during my doctoral studies, I was traveling back from a visit to the University of Bristol when I remembered that I had a meeting with my writing group in a few minutes. That’s how I found myself sitting on the floor of a busy train station somewhere en route and “Skyping” into a meeting with my fellow grad student friends. This was long before “Zooming” was an everyday practice, so it was quite funny at the time. In fact, my friend, Jen Scott Curwood,1 sent me a picture she’d taken on her phone of my face on the screen that they had projected unbeknownst to me, and I kept it as my Twitter pic for ages. Now with my professor job, I have spent a lot of time meeting online with colleagues and students while in car lines to pick up my kids or in airports while traveling. This type of interaction is increasingly common after teaching and learning moved online to a large degree during the COVID pandemic, which pushes boundaries between the personal, the professional, and the digital in new ways. Given the push and pull of modern everyday digital life, I often wonder if, perhaps, the focus of research and advice to parents might be better served if shifted toward a focus on how media is actually consumed within the family system without judgment. For many parents, games and other media are a best-fit solution to the problem of resource constraints. Time is the resource; the demands on real-life parents and families are the constraint. The two-hour restriction on screen time for young people is a sensible rule of thumb, but it admits little about typical family needs and routines. (Steinkeuhler, 2015, p. 3) DOI: 10.4324/9781003176992-3

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Steinkuehler rightly asserts that the two-hour limit is easily reached during the often long and frequent commutes to and from school, and in pre-pandemic days, to and from various activities meant to enrich our children, and during moments where parents are completing other household tasks, such as fixing dinner or doing laundry. Sometimes media is just what parents need to get everything done in the time they have, which became even more important during times of lockdown or school shutdowns. The truth is that for various reasons, children and teens are consuming media, in various forms, largely on their own, not out of neglect but out of modern-day time and energy constraints. Yet, the space of media consumption varies from home to home how, when, and to what extent kids and teens are allowed to access the media. In my household, my 15-year-old, 13-year-old, and 8-year-old all share Netflix on our one TV located in the living room, and though they each have his or her own profile, they have to negotiate their viewing together, for the most part. Game consoles, tablets, or laptops are allowed in their rooms only on occasion, and their use is reserved for certain times. Yet, this is only one of many ways that media access is configured in the space of homes. In a recent key study, Livingstone & SeftonGreen (2016) sought to analyze different spaces and places in the lives of a set of 13-year-old teens living in London. One chapter is devoted solely to examining the children’s home spaces and uses of electronic media there. They found that “…the use of media at home—along with the baggage they bring from the wider society regarding ‘good’ and ‘bad’ use of time and resources—is a key point of contention between children and parents” (p. 150). Livingstone & Sefton-Green found that there was an array of different media, print, digital, and broadcast, and time also became a big factor, as some parents created time restrictions on their teens’ access, such as no television during weekdays, while others made no such restrictions but encouraged family time to be spent doing other activities instead. Moreover, the spaces were often demarcated differently, such as media being in the more public spaces of the living rooms or in the more private spaces of the bedrooms. What this means, then, is that home is often a contested space when it comes to media consumption as children and parents negotiate media use. This contested space is necessary, though, in shared spaces. Doreen Massey (2005) discusses space as having throwntogetherness in which “places pose in particular form the question of our living together” (p. 151). Space is socially constructed as people exist in it. What is happening when Netflix becomes part of this thrown togetherness for children and teens in familiar media spaces, such as the home, car ride, restaurants, etc? If children are often consuming media in varying times and in different spaces within the home (and outside of the home), then it’s fair to assume one constant for kids viewing streaming media on Netflix is Netflix’s interface itself. In this chapter, then, I will explore this guiding question: What does the Netflix interface itself offer children and teens? Given that time and space are tied up in this contested space, again I turn to Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope as one of the key aspects to understanding the space of Netflix. In

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the last chapter, I explored how the “time” of the timespace operated in Netflix. For Bakhtin, space occurs within the novels he analyzes as a corollary to setting. Moreover, space is interwoven with time in the chronotope, and it’s not to be separated. In this chapter, through combining Bakhtin’s chronotope with theorists, such as Doreen Massey and others, I’d like to explore the “space” of timespace as the complexities of space in Netflix necessitate its own exploration as Netflix is actually a set of relationships with time, space, and people that is multiple and varied. Netflix transcends place on some level as children and teens can access Netflix from their living room couches in the United States or Colombia or the United Kingdom or any number of countries. Kids can even access Netflix from different locations with mobile technologies, such as via mobile phone on a car ride in North Carolina, or a train ride in Tokyo, or a tablet in a bedroom nook in Canada. What persists is the interface that is connecting all of these kids in all of these places to the content of the Netflix shows. Youth become connected through this access to Netflix in a way that is multiple and spatial. In re-imagining how space is constructed by Netflix and co-constructed in relationships with young people interacting with it, I hope to express how powerful these spatial interrelationships can be for youth, even without us realizing it. To this end, I will explore both how space is made visible and invisible for kids in Netflix’s interface.

Netflix’s Visible Space At the most basic level, Netflix’s interface is immediately visible by necessity. Of course, this interface varies depending on the tool used to access it, e.g., smart TV, smartphone, computer, tablet, etc., but the Netflix interface is primarily set up the same way on the home screen throughout different media spaces. By seeing the options available in Netflix’s digital catalog of shows and movies, children and teens can choose what they want to watch as they have to see the options to be able to choose them.

Netflix’s Multimodal Space(s) The first aspect to notice in Netflix’s interface is that it is inherently multimodal. In this, I mean, in particular, that there is a blend of the visual and the written in how the different shows are displayed (see Figure 3.1). For children (and adults), navigating Netflix is a semiotic task in which the modes shift along with the functional load (Burn, 2009). Though all modes work in conjunction with one another to make meaning (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), functional load refers to the mode that is the most semiotically salient at any one time (Burn & Parker, 2003). What is fascinating about navigating Netflix’s interface is that the functional load keeps changing. First, the primary mode is image as children must see the whole homepage first with its rows, and then look at what is shown to them as thumbnails, or images that represent the shows, within the rows (see Figure 3.1).

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Netflix’s home screen FIGURE 3.1 

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Children and teens must also find their location within the homepage, essentially visually finding the cursor or highlighted box. This is where thumbnails become vitally important to Netflix. Though I will discuss the algorithms that determine what is visible in the next section, at this point, it’s important to note that they must visually scan over the thumbnails before them to see what is available for them to watch, and they must watch for the cursor or box to find their location within the thumbnails. For instance, the home screen on a smart TV will likely have a featured show or movie on the top with a list of rows below. Recently, dominating the home screen has been a large-scale thumbnail from a show that Netflix is advertising, usually a Netflix Original. At times, this image will turn into a video preview, if a child hovers over it with the cursor or clicks on it with the remote. Also, there is written information or links, such as a button to click to watch the show or movie, or if it has been watched previously, an indication of which season or episode he or she is on in the show and how much time is remaining in the episode or movie. There are rows of different lists of shows the children can choose from that are categorized into headings. Some headings have shows that have been chosen by the children, such as “My List,” “My Favorites,” or “Continue Watching.” Then there are other rows given to them by Netflix’s algorithms, such as “Popular” and the seemingly redundant category of “Everyone’s Watching,” followed by rows that are based on what the kids have watched before, such as “Because you watched Luna Petunia,” and a row that is simply clickable thumbnails of characters in the popular shows. Within these rows, there are images, called thumbnails, that represent the different shows, and these thumbnails include the title of the show in written text. Though the location of this menu varies, to the left of the screen might be a menu made up of icons, representing commands, such as Search. Adding to this complexity is the fact that the thumbnails often change, so what was once pictured might not be any longer. In that case, the child would either have to read the words, or likely given that children often re-watch shows (see previous chapter), they would recall the scene pictured from the previous viewings. What this means is that at any one time, kids must visually process multiple images at once with the large thumbnail or video at the top, the many thumbnails in each row, and the visual menu to the side.

Netflix’s Movable Space(s) As soon as the youth start moving within the thumbnails and rows, the functional load shifts again, this time to gesture as Netflix’s interface is designed to be movable. To navigate within Netflix’s interface to the shows the children want to watch, they move the cursor throughout the rows, up or down, side to side, and row by row. In this sense, it is a good example of Massey’s (2005) thrown togetherness idea. Children move through the space of Netflix in ways that are

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socially constructed. They literally move around the page to see new information or to find old favorites. If a child wants to watch the show being advertised in the large thumbnail, then she can click on that image. If she wants to move to shows in the first row, she moves the cursor or highlighted box left and right. If the child spots a show she wants to watch in another row, then she moves the cursor or highlighted box up or down to find the row, then navigates right. To expand the list of rows, she simply scrolls down repeatedly to find the different rows, each time changing the set of thumbnails to see and navigate. Any parent who has ever navigated this interface with their children or overheard siblings navigate this will have heard this phrase many times: “Over, over, over, down, over” as kids put words to this navigation with each other. The mode of gesture that is happening as young people interact with the Netflix interface is much more of an “intra-action” in the Baradian sense (Barad, 2007), than a gesture in the senses within the world (Pink, 2015). In one sense, gesture is a physical mode only in the sense of moving one’s fingers on the remote or to move the cursor around on a tablet or using the keypad mouse to move a cursor around on a computer or laptop. This is a sense in the world. But what is interesting here is how the interface itself gestures to the children. For Barad (2007), “[a]pparatuses are not mere instruments serving as a system of lenses that magnify and focus our attention on the object world, rather they are laborers that help constitute and are an integral part of the phenomena being investigated” (p. 232). In terms of Netflix and children, the highlighting of the thumbnail is a type of gesture to the children to let them know the show’s location, and it maintains this pointing out of its location as they move the cursor or box. The changing of the rows not only signals more show or movie choices to the children, but also signals the location in the space of the interface within which they can move. It is similar to a map on an airplane that shows one’s location as one flies across the country or ocean. It says, essentially, “Let me show you where you are here and now,” and it moves along the path to continually show one’s place. This type of movement, though, is only the first layer. Semiotic possibilities are opened up when youth click on the thumbnails as well, which I discuss in the next section.

Netflix’s Accessible Space(s) In Netflix’s interface, it can’t be overstated that children and teens having access to the shows is important; that’s the purpose of the interface, after all. But the steps that children have to go through to access Netflix are complicated semiotically. Once they select a thumbnail, their task becomes semiotically more complicated as even more multimodal and clickable information pops up. In this sense, the interface combines modes into ensembles (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), with the functional load being in the movement (Burn, 2009; Burn & Parker, 2003, 2001).

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There’s a multifaceted nature to the access to the shows on Netflix’s interface. For example, if youth want to preview a show, then there are multiple ways to do so (see Figure 3.2). The way that children access the interface changes what is available to them in terms of the device. If watching on a computer, when they hover the cursor over the shows’ thumbnails, a new, small window pops up with a preview to the show. If watching on many smart TVs, then another page opens up with a large thumbnail on one side of the screen and clickable options to play the episode, choose an episode, etc., on the other. Tablets are similar to smart TVs, in that the children must click on the show to open up the options, with a video preview and show description on one side of the screen and two tabs on the other, one for choosing episodes, each with its own thumbnail, and another for “More Like This,” from which children and teens can choose shows that are similar to the one they are on. But the layering does not end with the video preview. In order to access individual episodes of a show on Netflix, the interface offers a more complex set of options with multiple modes. On a computer, for instance, another window opens up, overlaid on top of the home screen, in which the video preview is shown with a list of episodes underneath, each with written text and a thumbnail (see Figure 3.3a). Also included in this window is a list of shows that are similar to this show, which I will discuss later on in this chapter, and other information, such as ratings, etc. On a smart TV, there are similar options, but it is shown differently. When a child clicks on the thumbnail on the home screen, another screen entirely appears, that includes information about the show, such as the title, ratings, and a description (see Figure 3.3b). To one side of that information is a large thumbnail that takes up half of the screen. On the other side is a list of clickable options, such as Play Episode, Episodes and More, More Like This, and Add to Favorites, which are represented in both icon and written text. In her work analyzing digital video texts created by Filipino British youth in London, Domingo (2011, 2012) found that by locating her participants work dialogically (Bakhtin, 1981), she was able to attune to the various textual and multimodal layers of her participant’s video production. Though Domingo’s analysis of time in the videos was centered around the time within the video, as was her analysis of the modes, the way that she conceptualizes modes as both layered and social within that digital space is salient to this chapter. What is happening within the various layers of the Netflix interface is that the space of Netflix expands, becoming filled with new information and new options, all within a set pattern determined by the device the kids are using. What this means is that there is a semiotic layering that drives the access for kids (and adults) to the streaming media programming in Netflix’s interface, and this layering becomes increasingly complex with just a couple of clicks. Youths have to move themselves through the different layers to get to the shows they are wanting to watch.

Netflix video preview accessed by computer screen

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FIGURE 3.2 

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FIGURE 3.3a 

Video preview of show on computer

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FIGURE 3.3b 

Video preview of show on smart TV

Netflix’s Invisible Space With the meteoric rise in social media and streaming services, we are just now having to come to terms with what this new media means. While computer scientists tend to see algorithms in general as more complex, intricate problem-solvers (Williamson & Schmoys, 2011), others also explain how these algorithms work as a set of processes, similar to how stories operate (Erwig, 2017). Other scholars, though, see algorithms in media less neutrally. Some scholars have pushed back on the need to let media dominate our lives, instead embracing “digital minimalism” to mitigate some of its detrimental effects (Newport, 2019). Others are exploring how media conglomerates are using and selling big data in ways that can marginalize specific groups, especially women and people of color. Noble (2018) has conducted an in-depth study of Google’s search engine, for instance, and found that while many believe that search engines are “neutral,” instead Google’s search engines are in fact set up to benefit its own company through advertising, hiding many of the ways that the algorithmic structure is set up to marginalize groups of people, especially African-Americans meaning that the results in searches are both cultural and social (Noble, 2018). In examining algorithms in Netflix’s programming, it’s important to acknowledge that on one level, the space in Netflix is invisible as Netflix’s interface is controlled by algorithms. As a company, Netflix owns the algorithms, and it doesn’t share these formulas or how they are created with the larger world. This makes sense as this is how it makes its money, but it is also in the nature of algorithms themselves that makes them invisible. Algorithms are computer code working behind the scenes to provide more code that is visible. By design,

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algorithms are not visible in the interface itself. Therefore, given that access to Netflix’s programming is also built on a complex algorithmic structure, it makes sense that one must acknowledge that there is a third party in the interaction between the youth and Netflix. Netflix’s spatiality is also social, which means that understanding this spatiality matters. Massey (2013) discusses how spatiality, time, and matter function in interconnected and important ways: I mean, we don’t think of time as being material. Time is ethereal and virtual and without materiality. Whereas space is material: it is the land out there. But there’s a dimension of space that is equally abstract and just a dimension…Space concerns our relations with each other and in fact social space, I would say, is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other. (Massey, 2013, n.p.) This means, then, that if space is socially constructed and algorithms are not neutral, then examining how the algorithms are setting up what is possible for kids’ viewing on Netflix’s interface becomes important to do. So, in this section, I will analyze what one can glean from the interface to show how Netflix’s algorithms are governing what is possible to watch for young people.

Glimpsing Netflix’s Algorithmic Spaces Space on Netflix is constantly moving, but it’s moving in line with the algorithms. As I discuss in the previous chapter, kids spend a lot of time watching shows, many times over and over. Other streaming services, such as YouTube, have similar systems: Kids watch the same kinds of videos over and over. Videomakers take notice of what’s most popular, then mimic it, hoping that kids will click on their stuff. When they do, YouTube’s algorithm takes notice, and recommends those videos to kids. Kids keep clicking on them, and keep being offered more of the same. Which means video makers keep making those kinds of videos—hoping kids will click. (Lafrance, 2017, para. 6, author’s italics) Netflix’s algorithms, though proprietary to Netflix, seem to follow a similar pattern, but one has to catch glimpses of the algorithms through what is made visible in the interface. Analyzing the parental controls available within Netflix offers one way to see how the algorithms might be operating behind-the-scenes. Within the account features of the parent’s Netflix account, one can manage the profiles

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for the family. For the Kids profile, parents can control the following: Language, Viewing Restrictions, Profile Lock, Viewing Activity, Ratings, Subtitle appearance, Playback settings, and Order in my list. Some of the key ways parents can control the algorithms are through Viewing Restrictions and Playback settings. In Viewing Restrictions, parents can choose the Profile Maturity Rating, clicking or not clicking on a box that displays the Netflix Kids experience with titles just for kids, and a fill-in box for Title Restrictions for Kids. Clicking the box for kids automatically chooses the ratings: TV-Y, TV-Y7, TV-G G, and TV-PG PG, which are considered “kids.” Clicking on the higher ratings is possible in this profile, e.g., PG-13, PG-14, R, MA, NC-17, but one would assume that these are not considered “kids” by the Netflix interface and would include titles that could also be in adult profiles. Title Restrictions as a choice apply to shows that parents want to exclude in the profile regardless of the rating. Viewing Activity will show the parent what shows have been watched in this Kids profile in case the parents were wanting to see what their children had been watching. Playback Settings allow parents to decide the data usage per screen, which is not helpful for controlling the algorithms of what is seen in the shows. This setting also allows the parents to control two features of autoplay: Autoplaying the next episode on all devices, and autoplaying (or not) the previews on all devices while browsing the titles. The main part that parents can “control,” is the ratings, but what is interesting about these is that they are determined by Netflix itself. What makes a show fit into the different ratings is not something the parents determine, so it’s mostly the best guess at the range of shows that might be available in each rating and one puts faith in the Netflix company to put the right shows in the right places. Another way that one can glance at how the algorithms are governing what is possible is through what is available in the rows themselves. Of the 42 different rows (on the computer interface of Netflix), only three of the rows are customizable by children and teens themselves: My list, Continue watching for Kids, and Watch Again. These rows include shows that the children and teens have liked or that they have watched before. The remaining rows have content determined by the algorithms. Some of the rows are supposedly based on what the kids have already chosen. For instance, if children watch a show with dinosaurs, they might get a row called “Dinosaur TV.” Or, if they watch Barbie shows, they might get a row called “Fashion Frenzy” that includes similarly themed shows. Most of the rows, though, are determined by the algorithms. Some are essentially advertising other shows, such as “Recently Added,” “Popular,” and “Everyone’s Watching.” Some are general categories, such as “Action,” “Sci-Fi,” and “Cartoons,” while others are affective categories, such as “Dealing with Feelings” and “Sibling Ties.” There is also one category that is image only, showing the main characters of popular shows, which is especially useful for youth who are very young but who read the images of the characters to choose their shows. These algorithmic choices tie into chronotope. This is where chronotope comes together as timespace in the world of Netflix in terms of indexicality:

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Specific timespace configurations enable, allow, and sanction specific modes of behavior as positive, desired, or compulsory (and disqualify deviations from that order in negative terms) and this happens through the deployment and appraisal of chronologically relevant indexials—indexicals that acquire a certain recognizable value when deployed within a particular timespace configuration. (Blommaert & De Fina, 2017, p. 3; see also, Blommaert, 2015) Similarly, streaming media children’s experiences of watching shows is chronotopic. Children may choose the shows they want to watch by navigating the interface, but the algorithms are determining what they see to choose from and the structure of the interface sets up boundaries for those choices. At the very least Netflix’s interface sets up a dynamic where children become comfortable with big data if they have even a modicum of choice. As long as children can interact with what is visible in the interface, even if they can only choose what goes in a few rows, they trust in the choices that Netflix provides for the other 40-plus rows of content. Parents, too, have a certain amount of trust in the content being offered. Even I was surprised in my analysis that the only visible part that parents can control is what their children see based on Netflix’s ratings and whether the shows auto-play. Of course, Netflix is not the only online media to lull its consumers into a trusting relationship with the algorithms with the promise of a variety of content. But, the idea that we are starting with our youngest and continuing through to their adulthood is something to take notice of for the adults in their lives.

Reflections and Connections As a parent of young children, I am well aware of how tantalizing videos such as Little Baby Bum and CoComelon are for toddlers and preschoolers, so it came as no surprise to me that the company that creates these videos do research on their programming using reactions from actual 2-year-olds in their London office (Segal, 2022). Founded by former Disney executives, Candle Media uses a combination of this “real-world” research and complicated analytics of YouTube’s algorithms as they create their programming. Along with the number of views of each video and other data, apparently, company researchers conduct parent-supervised observations of children watching their videos alongside a screen that shows boring, mundane pictures that they call a Distractatron. If the baby’s attention shifts away for any reason, then that shift is recorded. The results determine what is shown in videos, such as the color of buses (children across the world prefer yellow buses, even in countries where yellow buses are used for transporting prisoners) or the use of compelling conflicts, such as having a minor “boo-boo” or slightly muddy clothes. The planned addictiveness of these videos is well-proven as these videos are wildly popular with young children.

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According to Maurice Wheeler, the head researcher at the company that makes CoComelon and other preschooler shows, “Ninety-nine percent of kids, … if they’re having issues when they get here, once that CoComelon song comes on, [the kids are] like, ‘Ah, life is OK. All is good with the world’” (qtd in Segal, 2022). As the New York Times article laments, “…parents are doomed to fail” with such attention to programming for their children, even if they are the ones hitting play.” While that may or may not be true, what this example does show is the power of media, even for our youngest children, especially when there is a massive amount of data used to appeal to them specifically. While Netflix doesn’t appear to have the same type of screen testing, Netflix is gesturing toward children in similar ways. If Netflix’s interface gestures to young people, it’s the algorithms that add to the body that Netflix gestures with and the titles that the interface gestures toward. In this way, the algorithms become a key player in determining what the children can watch (see Figure 3.4). Returning to Barad (2007) informs the conversation here: Within a specific apparatus —a set of material discursive practices where users enact their identity on social media—the emergent properties of a particular materiality (e.g., a social media platform, or a device) creates meanings - for instance, associated with a constraint of a platform, related to its functionalities - which affect subsequent (online and offline) practices…” . (Barad, 2007, p. 232) Within the apparatus of Netflix’s algorithmic structure, the kids interact with and add to the big data of the algorithms when they navigate the interface as they move along, clicking on different previews and episodes, and watching and re-watching shows (see Figure 3.4). The algorithms generate suggestions of shows that provide the content that the children choose from as they navigate the interface. There is a cyclical nature to this dynamic, but children are only aware of what is happening on the surface. They see the meaning created, in other words, but not how, or rather only a small part of how it is co-created with the algorithms; this is the “constraint of the platform.” Kids are choosing some of what is displayed for them by the code, but most of what is present for them is provided by the apparatus of Netflix’s algorithms. As scholars, a guiding question could be: How is Big Data changing the spatial and cultural landscape for all of us, and what will this changing mediascape mean for our youngest members as they grow up in this evolving media? As discussed in Fisher (2022), are we pushing against a modernist sense of self toward a world in which we are no longer self-reflective and, then, no longer free in a world of algorithms? I’d like to think that literacies engender a more robust response to these interactions. Pahl & Rowsell’s (2020) concept of living literacies

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FIGURE 3.4 

Intra-action between kids, Netflix’s algorithms, and Netflix’s interface

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could be helpful. In this framework, literacies are “an active space” with the key lens of “seeing, disrupting, hoping, knowing, creating, and making” (p. 18). In this sense, Netflix is only one part of a child’s literacy landscape, and one could hope that when children and teens move beyond the consumption of media toward other activites, such as media production, offline activities, etc., that this pull from algorithms lessens, allowing a wider sense of selfhood. That said, it’s vital that we begin truly to think through how young people’s sense of self is molded by their interactions with media and technologies in streaming media spaces, and it is worth exploring how they begin to shape that self in response. Educators can ask themselves, “What do students need to learn about algorithms in order to thrive within a world saturated with algorithms, and how can Netflix be a good case study of such interactions?” In one of my Media Studies courses, my students analyze how Netflix is representing different, specific identities in its programming. Though at the higher education level, my students are not too far removed from their adolescence, and they often choose the same shows that teens are watching now, which is enlightening to me as a media educator. As we examine identities, it’s clear that there are pathways toward helping students to understand how media companies are using not only the content of their shows but also their algorithms to appeal to different audiences. Media literacy could be very helpful to lead students into deeper thinking about their own place within these larger dynamics. Parents can ask themselves, “What can I do to empower my children around Big Data and algorithms in their everyday lives?” Even very young children can have conversations about how Netflix and other streaming media, especially YouTube Kids, are choosing different media for them and what that could mean for what choices they do or do not have. There are even starting to be picture books exploring Big Data, such as Cogan’s (2022) Data Science for Babies, while older children and teens (and parents) could read Newport’s (2019) Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Nosy World. Choosing with one’s children could also be a good space for opening up dialogue about choices. Showing children how different the profiles are even just in a household can be illustrative of how the algorithms are operating. For instance, my husband’s profile is chock full of comics and other similar content, while mine has a lot of kdrama and light comedies. Each of our three kids has a different profile as well. Though there are fewer differences between those given how similar their tastes are, the profiles do actually show differences. Given that the selections still vary, it’s worth a conversation about how algorithms work and what they do and do not represent about who we are in our real, everyday lives.

Summing Up The key themes in this chapter revolve around how children and teens must navigate different types of spaces in the Netflix interface in order to watch the

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streaming media content available there. In this sense, young people are engaging in a throwntogetherness (Massey, 2005) as they learn how to interact with Netflix’s platform. I assert that there are two types of spaces in Netflix’s Kids programming: Visible and Invisible Space. In Netflix’s Visible Space, children and teens must learn to recognize a layering of different modes, namely image and print, through an array of different menus, all of which are slightly different depending on how the children are accessing Netflix. In this way, the functional load (Burn & Parker, 2003), or the mode that carries the most meaning, shifts as well, which means that children must learn to attend to this shift in meaning as they choose which shows or movies to watch. In Netflix’s Invisible Space, children are interacting with the algorithmic underpinnings of the Netflix interface. Algorithms are small pieces of code that organize data in any computer, smartphone, etc. Though many believe that algorithms are neutral, in fact, their (mis)use is actually socially constructed. Though there are a limited number of choices that parents can make when setting up their children’s profiles, essentially setting up age limits and whether the content will auto-play, overall, almost all of the choices that are presented to children and teens are controlled by Netflix’s algorithms. Given that these algorithms are not shared publicly, yet they dominate what is possible, it’s worth asking ourselves what the algorithms are showing or not showing children and whether yielding control over to algorithms or Big Data for young children as they grow is problematic in their development.

Note 1 Jen has gone on to adventures of her own and some wonderful scholarship (https:// www.jenscottcurwood.com/).

References Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M.Bakhtin. In M. Holquist (Ed.), C. Emerson, M. Holquist (Trans.) Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. University of Texas Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Blommaert, J. (2015). Chronotopes, scale and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44: 105–116. Blommaert, J. & De Fina, A. (2017). Chronotopic identities: On the timespace organization of who we are. In A. De Fina, J. Wegner, & D. Ikizoglu (Eds.) Diversity and super-diversity. Sociocultural linguistic perspectives (pp.1–15). Georgetown University Press. Burn, A. (2009). Making new media: Creative production and digital literacies. Peter Lang Publishing. Burn, A. & Parker, D. (2001). Making your mark: Digital inscription, animation, and a new visual semiotic. Education, Communication, & Information, 1(2): 155–179. Burn, A. & Parker, D. (2003). Analysing media texts. Continuum International Publishing Group.

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Domingo, M. (2011). Analyzing layering in textual design: A multimodal approach for examining cultural, linguistic, and social migrations in digital video. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14(3): 219–230. Domingo, M. (2012). Linguistic layering: Social language development in the context of multimodal design and digital technologies. Learning, Media, and Technology, 37(2): 177–197. Erwig, M. (2017). Once upon an algorithm: How stories explain computing. The MIT Press. Fisher, E. (2022). Algorithms and subjectivity: Subversion of critical knowledge. Routledge. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). Routledge. Lafrance, A. (25 July, 2017). The algorithm that makes preschoolers obsessed with YouTube. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ archive/2017/07/what-youtube-reveals-about-the-toddler-mind/534765/ Livingstone, S. & Sefton-Green, J. (2016). The class: Living and learning in the digital age. NYU Press. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18040ft Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage Publications Ltd. Massey, D. (2013). Doreen massey on space. Social Science Bites. Retrieved from https:// www.socialsciencespace.com/2013/02/podcastdoreen-massey-on-space/ Newport, C. (2019). Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life. Portfolio. Noble, S. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press. The MIT Press. Pahl, K. & Rowsell, J. (2020). Living literacies: Literacy for social change. Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography. (2nd ed.) Sage Publications, Ltd. Segal, D. (2022, May 5). A Kid’s show juggernaut that leaves nothing to chance. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelonmoonbug-entertainment.html Steinkeuhler, C. (2015). Parenting and video games. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59: 1–5. Williamson, D.P. & Schmoys, D.B. (2011). The design of approximation algorithms. Cambridge University Press.

4 INTERACTIVE DIALOGIC PLAY Interactive Streaming Media on Netflix

As a child in the 1980s, I read voraciously, and I absolutely loved book series. I raced through series after series from the Little House on a Prairie books to Nancy Drew to Black Stallion to the Anne of Green Gables series. Even as an adult, I tore through Harry Potter just like people still do, young and old alike, eagerly awaiting the next book and later, the next movie, through the whole series. But, I also had a special place in my heart for another genre: Choose Your Own Adventure books (Bantam Books, 1979–1999). In these books, children would take on the identity of the central character, and every few pages, there was a choice of options for how to continue the story. Once a choice was made, the child could flip to that page to see what happened in the story, leading to more choices, and so on. Some options led to good endings, some to bad endings, which only was part of the fun of these books. Though I loved following characters through their lives, there was also a special power to being able to choose the character’s way through the storyline in book after book. Now, children have choices even in their streaming media. On Netflix now, youth have multimodal, digital choices for their versions of interactive stories in Netflix’s new interactive streaming media. Most of the shows are adaptations of Netflix’s original programming for youth, which for the most part are adaptations themselves of other texts, such as movies, books, or video games. Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale1 adapts the characterization and storylines from the Shrek franchise, which itself was loosely based on the fairytales. Captain Underpants: Epic Choice-o-Rama2 is an adaptation of The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants,3 the Netflix show, itself adapted from the Captain Underpants book series.4 Boss Baby: Get That Baby!5 is adapted from Boss Baby: Back in Business,6 which was adapted from Boss Baby7 the movie, itself adapted from the book The Boss Baby.8 Carmen Sandiego: To Steal or Not to Steal9 is adapted from the DOI: 10.4324/9781003176992-4

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Netflix Original Carmen Sandiego, itself an adaptation from the popular video game series Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?,10 which began in the 1980s. There are even adaptations of entertainment celebrities’ brands with the show You vs. Wild,11 based around the adventures of Bear Grylls in a different type of interactive and live-action show in which the youth can choose what he does on his fictionalized adventures in the jungle, e.g., to save a kidnapped doctor, to deliver medicine to a remote village of people, and so on. When youth interact with the Netflix platform to watch shows, they are engaging with what Rowsell & Wohlwend (2016) call “printless literacies,” which are practices that children learn to interact with and read or watch media texts, such as apps. In these types of literacies, children often interact with texts following key strands. Children engage in multiplayer environments in which they work together to achieve goals in the games or apps. Children are productive in that they create their own media within the apps. This literacy is multimodal in that children are immersed in multiple modes in the apps. Most of the apps are open-ended, which means that children can interact with the worlds of the apps with no set ending in sight, giving them a “DYI quality” (p. 199). Moreover, these apps are pleasurable for children as they continue to engage with them, and they create a sense of being connected, especially within online or digital networks. In these literacies, social context is paramount as “[l]earning to belong and contribute to participatory cultures requires understanding the social practices or the way things are done in a given context” (p. 197). As discussed in Chapter 3 of this book, youth learn to engage with the multimodal interface to scroll through the rows of choices, to click on their shows, to skip intros, etc., as they watch shows and movies on Netflix. Building from Bakhtinian theory, namely the concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism and stemming from both adaptation theory and literacies work, I will explore how Netflix’s new genre of interactive streaming media is what I term interactive dialogic play, and what this might mean for how youth engage with this type of media. As youth engage with Netflix’s interactive media, they play with the narrative and characters in interesting ways that not only set up complex multimodal possibilities with this media but also encourage or allow youth to play with different identities both within and outside of the interactive media (Moje, 2002). What I would like to focus on in this chapter is how the Netflix interface is fostering a kind of “participatory literacies” that becomes even more apparent in their interactive programming. Youth have learned how to navigate the Netflix interface to watch their shows. Yet, interactive programming offers its own set of literacies practices that children must learn, and the children learn to navigate through the various modes to make their narrative choices.

Background One of Bakhtin’s key concepts is the idea of texts being heteroglossic. Essentially, texts being heteroglossic means that there are multiple voices that flow into,

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through, and out of any given text. With this concept, Bakhtin tries to make a place for analyzing the stylistics of novels, in particular, by broadening the scope of analysis beyond simply authorial intention, or what the author intended the text to mean. Instead, he asserts that [a]uthorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely that fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznoreĉie] can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). (Bakhtin, 2004, p. 262–263) What this means for Netflix shows is that one can ask more than “What did Netflix producers intend to create?” to more nuanced questions around what voices flow in and out of the shows. Each streaming show or movie has voices within the show that are expressed by the various characters, but they also have the social influences that surround the show, which can lead to new questions, such as “What are the ‘multiplicity of social voices” in these shows and what flows into and out of the shows?” and “Whose voices are included, and whose are excluded?” The way that these voices interrelate within the shows and outside of the streaming service to the youth and their parents is dialogic—always social, always relational. While relationality is true for all texts in Netflix’s streaming programming, it is a vital concept for interactive shows as the digital texts that children watch or use for this play are also in relationship with one another in a complex semiotic system. Previous technologies have set the stage for this type of semiotic interactions as “[t]television has become increasingly integrated into a narrative-based semiotic system in which televisions programmes relate to books, toys, and so on” (Marsh, 2014, p. 409). Though this semiotic system often includes media outside of the digital media, in the case of Netflix’s original programming, the interplay is often between its own shows, though these shows are primarily based on media that existed before the shows. These relationships within and between shows create new media assemblages, or sets of modes and/or media that are creating meaning together, that engage semiotically with all that preceded and that follow in what Carrington (2013) calls a narrative-based semiotic system. To engage in this media assemblages, the youth who are watching streaming media, especially the interactive shows on Netflix are engaging with a kind of “active fiction” (Mustola, Koivula, Turja, & Laakso, 2018, p. 245). As the children make choices in the show’s narrative, they play with that narrative and with the characters in the semiotic discourses in these media assemblages. The most prominent form of media assemblages that youth engage with in this new form of programming is adaptation. When the youth are watching and engaging with the interactive shows, they are engaging with adaptations of

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popular shows and characters based off of shows they have already been watching on Netflix (see Chapter 3, this volume). With Hutcheon’s (2013) work as a foundation, Adaptation studies scholars have interrogated what it means to adapt a text, sometimes shifting its form into another genre, e.g., from book to film or film to video game, and sometimes keeping to the genre but shifting its content. Adaptation theory is similar to transmedia (Jenkins, 2006) in its shifting genres and, at times, media. The concept of “fluid text” (Bryant, 2013) is particularly applicable to Netflix’s original programming, especially its interactive shows. Bryant (2013) theorizes that adaptation works across texts as all works are “fluid texts” (p. 48) in which revisions can be made by originating authors to their own words and by others outside of the text, such as publishers, readers, and adaptors. If texts are fluid, then, in their construction, they are opened up to new cultural possibilities as their adaptations often serve to fit the original text into a new cultural context with the adapted text. In adaptation, readers and writers work in collaboration to create a text in multiple ways “[a]s revising readers, adaptors of the originating version of a work are collaborators in the making of the work in its totality” (Bryant, 2013, p. 48, author’s italics). There are two types of adaptation. “Announced retelling” is an adaptation of the entire original text, while “adaptive revision,” is a borrowing from the original, e.g., through quotations or other small parts, which essentially revises and adapts the original text. Netflix adapts in both of these ways in the interactive media. Netflix often recreates or adapts entire series or books as announced retelling, such as Carmen Santiego: To Steal or Not to Steal,12 a new animated version of the original video game. But, with Netflix’s interactive shows, the adaptation is, in part, completed by the youth themselves as they make choices about parts of the story. The youth are revising the story, bit-bybit, as they make the story, which is a form of adaptive revision. In literacies research, we are well aware that meaning that is made with texts is made socially, culturally, and materially. In this sense, adaptation is not only present, it’s a normal expectation that the meanings of texts will change depending on the social and cultural climate in which they are being read, watched, played, and so on (Buckingham, 2021; Burn, 2009; Gee, 2004; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). Even when children are learning to express themselves through drawing as early learners, they are adapting the text as they draw, even as they are “copying” an image from the teacher (Mavers, 2013). As children grow, they learn how to adapt and create texts in various media and in various spaces (Burn & Parker, 2003; Potter, 2010). As people engage with digital texts as well in their everyday lives, though, this can become even more complicated. Burnett & Merchant (2020) argue for a sociomaterial approach that foregrounds texts without discounting theories of affect. Their theory comes to four interrelated ideas that are helpful to thinking through how adaptation is working in Netflix. They find that texts are relational, ephemeral, and mutable, and that textual meanings are unstable. In other

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words, texts’ meanings are co-created with other texts, people, and, in the case of Netflix, with algorithms as changeable meanings circulate around with other co-created meanings and texts. These understandings that are created can change depending on what environments they are in, e.g., the fast-paced social media landscape, the school hallway, etc. But, the text is a key player in the meaningmaking that is happening. What appears on-screen is both more ephemeral and more durable: lost in a morass of other online activity but also, to all intents and purposes, indelible. Our sociomaterial take on affect and text provides a way of accounting for this permeability, not least because it offers us an account of affect that includes machine-machine relations, one that is not exclusively rooted in embodied human subjects. (Burnett & Merchant, 2020, p. 364) When children and teens are interacting with the Netflix interface, not only to choose their shows but also to navigate the plot and characters, they are entering into an “entanglement” on-screen with the media text itself (Barad, 2007) in that the children are engaging in a relationship with the screen and vice versa; they are entangled together in making meaning. The children are human agents cocreating meaning, literally, with a non-human participant. Widening out what we mean by literacies to include the effect of this dynamic is important to understand how it is working and what that means. Moreover, this adaptation as a literacy practice is dialogic (Bakhtin, 2004). The heteroglossic voices in Netflix’s original programming include not only the different voices within each show, but especially with the interactive media, they include the voices that come from the original texts. As children play with the interactive shows, their choices add yet another voice to this heteroglossic mix. This creates a layering of voices that is similar to the sedimentation of identities that can happen with multimodal texts and children’s identities (Rowsell & Pahl, 2007). The different media practices allow for different types of interactions with the children and teens, each allowing for various identity possibilities. The interactivity of Netflix interactive shows makes them more like children’s play than passive media consumption. Moreover, this play is value-laden. Though how children’s play has been explored (Sutton-Smith, 2004), there has been an increasing recognition over the past several years that how children and teens engage in digital technologies can itself be considered a type of play. Marsh, Plowman, Yamada-Rise, Bishop, & Scott (2016) begin their exploration of digital play with apps geared toward children with the recognition that while screen time for youth has not decreased, the types of screen options have increased significantly. Drawing from a robust literature review of different play types, these scholars have expanded Hughes (2002) play types to include those salient to digital play with apps (p. 247). For the purposes of this analysis of Netflix interactive

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programming on Netflix, out of the 16 play types they discuss, the play types that focus on playing with words (communication play), taking on different roles using digital tools (fantasy play), “play[ing] in a digital context in which children pretend that things are otherwise” (imaginative play), and taking on roles using an avatar or other digital tools (role play) (Marsh, Plowman, Yamada-Rise, Bishop, & Scott, 2016, p. 247) are the most salient for how youth interact with the Netflix original programming, which I will discuss in the analysis.

Interactive Dialogic Play in Netflix’s Interactive Shows Youth who watch interactive programming on Netflix are engaging in what I would call interactive dialogic play. This interactive dialogic play has four main components: Constrained choices, multimodal immersiveness, heteroglossic narrative and identities, and transgressive possibilities.

Constrained Choices The key determining factor of interactivity in Netflix’s interactive shows is the ability to make choices in how the plot moves forward (or back) and how that impacts both the narrative and characterization. These choices, however, are not boundless; the choices within Netflix’s interactive shows are structured and controlled by the way the shows are coded algorithmically. Repetition in Netflix’s interactive shows serves a social and a semiotic purpose. When the youth can recognize the characters, then they know how the characters normally react and in what situations the characters normally find themselves in. For instance, in the first interactive show on Netflix, Puss in Book,13 the youth interact with Puss in Boots, a character from both the fairy tales and more specifically, the depiction in the Shrek14 movie. Puss in Boots is trapped within the book, being controlled by a narrator called The Storyteller. The youth must make choices that will free Puss in Boots from the story itself, and Puss often tells the readers what he prefers, such as a choice in which he can be a pirate, which he tells the viewer he would love to do as a pirate. The choices involve Puss interacting with different stories from fairy tales, e.g., the bears from Goldilocks, and from the Netflix original series version, such as the child animals that Puss encounters when he enters into the pirate choice. This repetition saves a lot of time and energy in terms of what needs to be explained or represented about the characters and their narrative worlds. At times, this is pointed out, such as when the character of Golam shows up in a choice in Puss in Book as a bad guy. When Puss asks him why he is no longer good now, Golam states, “This story is not part of standard continuity.” Though youth watching might not catch the joke, this one line is a signal that this version of Puss in Book is an adaptation that is not bound to the other versions. This fluid text is being constructed anew in some ways, too.

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The tutorials are markers of a fluid text. Each interactive show begins with a tutorial, or a short video segment, whose purpose is to explain the interface and how it works to the viewers. These short segments involve a character, usually a secondary character, addressing the viewer directly as she or he explains how to click on the interface to make choices as the viewer watches the show. The interface sets the groundwork for the choices, then within the show itself, anytime there is a choice, the characters explain again how to make the choice using the technologies, e.g., remote, mouse, etc. After the child understands the interface, the tutorial can be skipped (or at times with repeat viewings, the tutorial disappears completely as is the case in the Carmen Sandiego interactive show). The tutorials set the tone for the characterization and aesthetics, and they explain the basic plotline. Moreover, the tutorials teach the youth “the social practices or the way things are done in a given context” (Rowsell & Wohlwend, 2016, p. 197) as they serve to explain the interface itself to the youth. It’s interesting to note that there are different versions of the tutorial depending on what platform the viewers are using to access the interactive show. The way that youth make their choices changes, though, depending on what device they are using to access the show, and the tutorial modifies its tutorial depending on what the device is, e.g., telling the viewer to use a game controller, if accessed by a game system, a remote with a TV, or by touching the choice on a handheld device. The tutorial will only mention one way that the viewer can access the choices based on that platform. Even the way that the youth are told to access their choices is predetermined at the tutorial stage based on the device. Multimodally, the tutorials literally point out how the youth can use the mode of gesture within the visual interface of the show by telling the youth when to recognize a signal to click with their remote, game controller, or touchscreen on one of the choices they are given. For instance, in the Carmen Santiego interactive show entitled Carmen Santiego: To Steal or Not to Steal,15 the tutorial begins with the main character, Carmen, swinging through the air using a specially designed hang glider above a cityscape, dressed in her characteristic long red trench coat and red hat, and her long hair flowing around her as she soars through the air, seemingly coming right to the screen. The image pauses, and the scene switches to the ACME headquarters, where the character of the chief addresses the viewers telling them: “While ACME’s most wanted thief embarks on her boldest caper yet, you will be faced with decisions to make. Your choices will change the story. You are in control.” Then, the character continues by explaining how the interface will work. Overlaid over the character speaking, there are two buttons, labeled “1” and “2” and a bar beneath them that is the timer. She explains how the viewer must click on one button or the other before the timer runs out. There are usually only two choices presented at any one time, though, at times there are as many as four, and viewers can go back to the previous choice, if they choose to do so, but the amount of choices are limited and controllable.

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No matter the device, though, in any given interactive show, the viewers can choose from several options that determine either plot or characterization. Each choice is usually between two options, but the options themselves build on one another to create a multiplicity of choices throughout the entire episode. Repetition in the interface in these interactive shows is key, and repetition serves a purpose. First, the repetition of the same interface for choosing spans across all of Netflix’s interactive shows. Aside from making sense from a programming perspective for Netflix as a company, it also makes sound sense from the viewers’ perspective. No matter which shows the youth watch, they will be able to interact with the show in the same way. The repetition is developmentally appropriate for young children, and it takes any guesswork out of interacting with the interface itself. For instance, in Boss Baby: Get That Baby!,16 the premise is that the viewer makes the right choices to become an employee at Baby Corp, the fictional company in the series. The top employee that the youth are encouraged to become is the CEO, which is also the goal of the main protagonist, Boss Baby. This quickly becomes complex as there are 16 possible positions that the viewer can wind up with given his/her/their choices (see Figure 4.1) My own kids have watched this episode many times, but as my youngest lamented in the car one day, “No matter what I choose, I can’t be CEO of Baby Corps.” He had taken this interactive show seriously and had tried as many variations as a then-6-year-old could try. It is not that the show is tricking him, but rather, the choices within Netflix’s interactive shows are constrained. One choice leads to another path, one that might diverge from the path one hopes to be on. Given that the viewers have no map and are not privy to the overarching storyline structure, finding the path is part of the challenge. And, it keeps the youth watching over and over.

Multimodal Immersiveness Discursively, though, what is happening in these shows is a dialogic interaction between the youth and the voices in the shows. The original books or series could be considered “authoritative discourse” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342) or double-voiced speech. However, this becomes highly complicated quickly. Youth know these characters because they’ve watched the shows for several hours (see Chapter 2, this volume). So when they are presented with a choice, they can act like the character in a recognizable situation for the genre of that particular show. What this also means is that these shows are bursting with heteroglossia. There are voices from original stories through their non-Netflix affiliated adaptations through to the Netflix adaptations, especially Netflix’s interactive versions. There are also real expectations for adaptation in terms of genre, characterization, and style. In other words, in this “fluid text” (Bryant, 2013), the interactive show itself is in dialogic conversation with the other versions of the

Candy

Open Field Capture

Right Fist

Maximum Security Prison

Let Happy Make First Offer

Happy Sedengry Plan

Little Jimbo

Dark Tunnel

Open Field

Call Partner

Flattery

Negotiation Ledger

Lemon & Swab

Bootsy Calico Plan

Toothbrush

Mom

Dark Tunnel Accountant

Stop Estes

Focus on Games

Nicey Meanie

Aggressive Opening

Probing Question

Open Field Business Affairs Job

Confusion

Capture

Last Baby Standing Threaten to Walk Out

Go to “Last Baby Standing” tile

Go to “Babysitter” tile

Staci’s Assault

Jimbo’s Hug

Tim’sDecoy

Boss Runs

Marketing Job

Go to “Babysitter” tile

Dad Scratching Post

Romantic Date Boss Baby: Get That Baby!

Go to “Last Baby Standing” tile

Catch That Baby Rematch

Baby Maker Job

Babysitter

R&D Dept

Trust Marisol

Mr. Pineapple

Early Bedtime

Bubeezee HQ

Senior Center

Seashell Game

Logic Puzzle

Go to “Babysitter” tile Logic Puzzle Anytime there is a story that ends in a job tile, you can either go back a step and chose one of those options, or restart the whole storyline

Red Kitten

Speak Cat

Fight

Distract Baddies

Union Rep Job

Security Job

Help Happy

PR Job

FIGURE 4.1 

Blue Kitten

Green Kitten

Dog

Blue Cup

Yellow Cup

Red Cup

Green Cup

Player 1

Player 2

Player 3

Player 4

Find Lair

Story Map of Boss Baby: Get That Baby!

Mailroom Job

Call Police

Don’t Help Happy

Pen

4 Rattles

Formula Bottle

Nothing

Recruiter

Field Team Member

Middle Management

Boss!

Choose Different Location (If you get it wrong all three times it lets you skip to “Find Lair” tile. BUT if you pick the obviously wrong choice all three times, you push buttons...

Green Button Gret to try one or more puzzles again

Red Button

ARCH NEMESIS

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Job Interview

Left Fist

Frederic Estes Plan Dark Tunnel

Interactive Dialogic Play  57

show be it a book, a brand, another Netflix version, etc. The shows have many voices running through them from these other versions of the characters, plots, aesthetics of their previous versions. The voices from previous versions allow the young people to feel familiar with the characters and how the characters feel and act in different situations and with different characters. The youth are in on the jokes and are easily part of the conversation. The new voices add an element of freshness and vibrancy to these interactions the youth have with their familiar plots and characters, making the show feel new each time. In particular, the dialogic interaction of how the youth’ play with the modes within Netflix’s interactive shows to change the shows’ narratives creates an environment for play that is highly immersive. On the other hand, there is a dialogic interaction between the youth and the characters within the show. In Netflix’s interactive programming for youth, heteroglossia is represented through multimodality, which is the way that a text conveys meaning socially through different modes, namely image, print, and gesture (Burn & Parker, 2003, Domingo, 2011, 2012; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). The multimodality makes these interactive shows highly immersive. For instance, in You vs. Wild’s17 “Lost on Snow Mountain,” the episode begins with a b-roll shot of a snowy mountain peak. The shot changes to a mid-range, almost close-up, of Bear Grylls, the adventurer/entertainer, in a helicopter flying over what appears to be snow-covered mountain peaks in the near distance. Immediately, the modes of sound and image are dominant as the sound of the helicopter propellers mixes in with the dramatic voice of Grylls as he describes what this episode’s adventure will be. The shot changes to show a snowy mountain pass as Grylls’ voice over tells the viewer that this one of “the longest, highest most remote mountain passes in all of Europe,” before he discusses how dangerous the terrain is and urging the viewer, “It’s going to be up to you to help me make it through this adventure,” as he puts on his helmet and jumps out of the helicopter. The footage alternates between long range shots of Grylls gliding to a Go-Pro shot from Grylls’ perspective, which can almost make the viewers feel like they are actually paragliding herself. The sound of wind whooshing past and dramatic music heightens this feeling. Immediately, the modes are immersing the viewer into the show. After describing the adventure goal, which is to survive this mountain pass and its extreme weather for 24 hours and put out a signal for the rescue helicopter to rescue Grylls, the modes shift again as Grylls’ voiceover explains the first choice over a simulated, semi-real, semi-animated simulation of the area (see Figure 4.2). As Grylls describes the first option, “static survival,” the camera angle zooms in to a simulated clearing, complete with a fire and shelter, moving to a simulated stream, and ending with a simulated signal to a helicopter flying above. The second choice of “dynamic survival,” is depicted similarly with a zooming and moving view of a simulated trek across the pass. What these simulations

Signal Choice

Goes to Rock Shelter no matter what

Static Survival

Fom Signal Fire

Set Trap

Igloo

Ending: Failure, SOS blown away

S.O.S.

Fishing

Rock Shelter

Ending: Success!

Intro

Fishing Climb Tree

Mushroom Set Trap

End up looking for clues anyway

Dynamic Survival

Failure: Mushroom makes you sick

Sharp Rock

Fishing Look for clues

Tree Buds

Snow Trench Set Trap

FIGURE 4.2 

Story Map of You vs. Wild's “Lost on Snow Mountain”

Flask Anchor

Ending: Success! But you get scolded if you chose sharp rock

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You vs Wild: Lost on Snow Mountain

Interactive Dialogic Play  59

do is explain the choices to the viewers before ending with Bear Grylls asking the viewers they want to make. Once a choice is made, then Grylls himself is shown in the environment doing the actual adventure part. For instance, if one chooses “static survival,” then Grylls commends them on that smart choice, and he is shown starting to search the immediate area for resources in what feels like real-time video, though of course it is previously recorded and carefully scripted. The kineikonic mode (Burn & Parker, 2003), or the mode of the moving image, combines the images and the sounds of him in the environment to make it feel more real. When an image is static, one can analyze how its parts function, or work together, to create meaning (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). For instance, in a still frame one could see Bear Grylls standing in a snow drift next to a tree or a set of large rocks. One could analyze how this mid-range shot shows the environment while still showing Grylls’ animated look on his face. The framing situates Grylls in the environment. The kineikonic mode, however, shows the combination of modes coming and going in concert together with the salient mode being the mid-range image. This dovetails nicely with Bahktin’s chronotope. Video is a set of still images that are put together over a short time, e.g., usually 30 frames per second. Of course, film used to be tangible as one could hold it in her hand, but now video is made up of algorithmic units. In essence, streaming media is a collection of modes, usually image and sound, running through time and space algorithmically. With kineikonic mode, we can attend to the modes that are the most salient at any one time, the modes that make the meaning most strongly. In the case of You v. Wild, image and movement itself add to the realism, e.g., we are swept along with Grylls as he is shown gliding through the air, the sound of the wind adding to the realism. And, with the interactive shows, the youth can choose how to manipulate the character and the plot line, in essence, pausing the modes to move the pieces around as they make their choices using the visual on the screen and the gesture of their hands to click the remote or move the mouse. This pattern continues until either a choice fails and the viewer starts again, or until the adventure ends successfully. This multimodality lends itself to children’s play in these shows. For instance, at one point in this episode, the choice is for Bear Grylls to try to make an igloo out of snow or to create a rock shelter, to either climb a giant tree to look around to or to look for other clues in the environment on the ground, while another choices are to eat either tree buds or a mushroom he isn’t familiar with. These three choices are appealing to youth as the modes help to create an environment where the youth can feel as though they can play around in the outdoors or climb high trees or eat gross stuff without actually having to do so. What is happening is that You vs. Wild setting up the youth semiotically as being “in control” via the staging of the plot and its drama, the animated modeling of the conflict and possible solutions, the actor facing the camera and using gesture and spoken dialogue, and the visuals of the consequences make it seem real.

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Heteroglossic Narrative and Identities The youth can determine what happens next within the constrained choices offered by the shows, which can have real consequences for narrative. But, what is also happening in this choice-taking is that as children are choosing options in the shows, they are trying different narrative roles. In essence, children are doing pretend play with the Netflix interactive shows themselves. As Cohen (2009) discusses how preschoolers use the push-pull of dialogic language in their pretend play on the playground to try on different roles, they also are working within the rules and boundaries of certain discourses. Something similar is working with these shows. The interactive shows set up some boundaries and rules of engagement, usually articulated most clearly in the tutorial that begins each show, and the children can “tak[e] on roles using an avatar or other digital tools (role play)” (Marsh, Plowman, Yamada-Rise, Bishop, & Scott, 2016, p. 247). In this interactive dialogic play, though, youth then interact with or against those rules in their choices in a dialogic relationship with the interface and the narrative at the same time. In these shows, the choices the youth make often further the plot. For instance, in Captain Underpants: Epic Choice-o-Rama,18 Harold and George must stop Mr. Krupp, their enemy from both the books and the Netflix original show, from stealing their treehouse. Different from becoming an adventurer in You vs. Wild, this interactive show encourages youth to be young boys who like stereotypically “boy” pursuits, such as writing comics, hanging out with their best friends, and playing with toys, though the environment is unashamedly fantastical (See Figure 4.3). Some of these choices are about making money to buy their treehouse, such as search for treasure/apple core, while other choices are about character development, such as the choices of making Mr. Cleveland laugh vs finding Mr. Cleveland love. These open up into more choices once the first choice is made that to varying degrees move the plot to the next point, but they also point to how the children are fighting against neo-liberal tactics that use money to wield power, e.g., Mr. Krupp attempting to destroy the boy’s treehouse through economic means, and how the boys have to fight back with very limited resources since they have no money to fight this economic move. Beyond moving the plot, though, the choices youth make also have implications for the characters. Several choices into the Captain Underpants episode, viewers are tasked with creating a hit TV show as a way to further the plot, which leads to a subplot in which a series of different shows are suggested. These subplots are common to the animated shows, and it involve four choices featuring side characters fans would recognize from the Netflix Original Captain Underpants show19: Independence Clay; Rock MD; Oh Gar I Love my Har; and Gizmos, Gadgets, and Geehaws. All of the choices are moot, though, as they all lead to Harold and George making their own show, which turns out to be an interactive show called The Captain Underpants show where they “escape the

Captain Underpants Epic Choice-o-Rama Search for Treasure

Fish Bone

Meet Harold/George Choose Harold’s Comic

Apple Core

Fight

Run

Sinkhole Destroys Treehouse

Meteor Destroys Treehouse

Rock MD

Oh My Gar I love Your Har

Choose any that you want, you will have to make a new shoe

Harold’s Viper Chai Story

Gizmos, Gadget, Geehaws

Zip Line Make Mr. Cleveland Laugh

Make Some Money

George’s Viper Chai Story

Lip Rip

Can’t Lip Read

Finds Love, Treehouse Saved, makes you do it over.

Ice Cream Musical

Watch Krupp

Help the Boys

Golf Jackpot Start Over Time Toad, go back to random point in storv

FIGURE 4.3 

Story Map of Captain Underpants Epic Choice-Rama

Help Mr. Cleveland Find Love

Miss Hole

Try Again

Try Again

Miss Again

END!

Interactive Dialogic Play  61

Watch Advancimals

Use Zoning Laws to Tear Down Treehouse

Go Through Options Until Zoning Laws Plan is selected

Create Hit TV Show

Independence Clay

Choose George’ Comic

62  Interactive Dialogic Play

confines of the old-school paradigms and explore new territory.” In this case, the narrative did not progress, but the characterization was explored, repeating characters from previous versions of Captain Underpants and including gag jokes, essentially, that appeal to fans of the show who recognize not only the characters but also how they normally function within the fluid text of the Netflix adaptation of this book and movie. Other interactive shows have more complex narrative structures because they are doing more with identities. For example, in Boss Baby: Get that Baby!,20 the initial choices are simple in that the viewer chooses which of the three bad guys’ plans to follow. But, then the choices within each plan grow in complexity until the last one has nearly a dozen different sets of choices (see Figure 4.1). These choices end in different jobs that the viewer earns, such as recruiter, field team member, baby maker, etc. In looking at the story map, it looks like there are only about 8 choices that have to be chosen in the right order for the child to earn the position of CEO, and this is out of over 50 other possibilities that lead to other identity outcomes. But, even if a viewer doesn’t become the boss, he, she, or they are playing along as a possible recruit who gets to engage in the interview process time and again for different outcomes. The way that the interactive shows are in dialogic play with the viewers points toward Bakhtin’s hidden dialogicality (Bakhtin, 2004, p. 197). In this sense, there are voices that are present in any dialogic interaction, even if they are not visible in the conversation. For instance, “in the context of pretend play, linguistic interactions can occur with self, self and another player, and self and many players. Children appropriate the words of friends and actively respond through external social speech as they engage in a dialogue or use private speech as they self-verbalize. (Cohen, 2009, p. 336). In the case of Netflix’s interactive programming, hidden dialogicality is happening in how the characters in the show are prompting choices, the children communicate back with their choices, and the storyline or character development follows. This back-and-forth exchange of asking and answering becomes complicated, though, by the other voices present. For instance, if the child really wants to become CEO, then he will make certain choices that he thinks will lead to this outcome. But sometimes, a child just wants to play all of the different “games” that are parts of the Happy Sedengry plan, such as the logic puzzle or seashell game, and she doesn’t care what position in Baby Corp that would lead to. The voices that are added to the dialogic relationship shift depending on how the child wants to play with the interactive show at that moment.

Transgressive Possibilities There are also the voices of choices not taken that come into the interactive shows. Youth make choices for the characters or for a projection of themselves in some shows, and they know that they can make another choice.

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Role play provides children with learning strategies for finding voices in constantly shifting situations. Players are learning to manage the tensions of creating the play world and storylines, sustain multiple identities, and strive to find a voice and make it heard…Applying Bakhtin’s theory to play, children learn perspective taking as they shift from monologic positions to dialogic positions. (Edmiston, 2008). (Cohen, 2009, p. 340) When youth are engaging with interactive media on Netflix’s interactive shows, they are shifting between the monologic text of the show and the dialogic positioning that makes the shows interactive. As the children gesture to the interface what choice they want using their device using a remote, mousepad, or fingertip, the children choose an option from the two (or more) choices. Then the screen will shift to more video and sound to put that choice into action. What also shifts, though, is the dialogic possibilities. Youth can shift between passively engaging with the shows they normally watch to dialogically responding to the interactive versions to adapt it. They play with making the stories their own through the identity of the one who chooses the options. Sometimes in these interactive shows, youth are invited and encouraged to break from repetition, and therein lies some power as they make new choices for old characters or plotlines. In the Netflix Original The Adventures of Puss in Boots,21 Señora Zapata, one of the side characters who doesn’t like Puss, is featured as a princess who must be saved by a kiss. In Puss in Book, the youth can choose to have Puss in Boots kiss her even though the character, Puss, is urgently asking in the dialogue for the viewers to make a different choice so that he doesn’t have to kiss her. I’ve seen my kids choose this choice every time. The youth laugh at Puss’ predicament, Puss in Boots acknowledges this as a joke, and the narrative moves on. This deviation from what is expected allows the youth to do what Marsh, Plowman, Yamada-Rise, Bishop, & Scott (2016) call imaginative play. The deviation from what is expected adds to the fun and by defying expectations set by the previous version and by the character in this version adds the feeling of control to this play. In this case, the rules are only broken in jest, and the story continues. Some choices are more transgressive and have more potential power for youth. In Captain Underpants,22 for instance, the protagonists have an ongoing conflict with an unlikeable adult named Mr. Krupps, who has more power than the youth, one would assume. But, the viewers have choices in how to get around Mr. Krupp’s plot to steal the treehouse, the main conflict in this interactive episode, and many of these choices flaunt authority in transgressive ways. For instance, in the beginning of the episode, the viewers’ first choice leads to a comic in which the character of Mr. Krupp in the comic is picked up by what they call a Trashtruckula and slammed into dumpster after dumpster repeatedly, each grosser than the previous. The other comic choice is equally gross, which adds to the appeal of the show. Either way, the choice of the comic is moot, as

64  Interactive Dialogic Play

both lead to the next step, starting off the conflict. But in terms of how the youth could feel empowered through the choice, it could have a real impact as youth can defeat the bad guy over and over with each choice.

Reflections and Connections In previous chapters, I’ve discussed how Bakhtin’s chronotope is at play in Netflix’s original programming. Essentially, the way that the programming is working is that youth are spending large amounts of time-consuming Netflix’s content, generally the same shows over and over, while at the same time, the Netflix algorithms are filtering through its programming options to suggest only certain titles to the youth at any given time. Though it might seem like endless choices, what a kid can choose from is limited at any given time. Something similar is happening with Netflix’s interactive media. While on the surface, the youth can control what is happening in the shows, they are choosing from a range of predetermined and limited options. Even so, the way that youth can play with those options opens up identity possibilities in meaningful ways in determining what play means when interacting with these shows. The hybrid mix of digital and nondigital and of real and virtual worlds may shape both the developmental and the cultural nature of play. The tangible nature of some of these technologies and the multimodal nature of the feedback maybe have some impact on children’s movement, cognition, and emotions; at the same time cultural and social change within the family and the wider community will influence not only what children play with but also who they play with, for what purpose, and where. (Stephen & Plowman, 2014) As youth make choices in Netflix’s interactive media, they are telling and retelling the story; they are empowered to adapt the story as their own. They are emboldened to play with narrative and characterization. The youth can choose to go against a character’s expressed wishes, for instance, by choosing an option the character doesn’t want. They can choose options simply for their own enjoyment, such as having Bear Grylls eat something disgusting, just to see it, or they can go along with a narrative to see how it really plays out, such as finding a way to get Puss in Boots out of the storybook to end the narrative. The youth can make choices, and in this way, they are set up to feel powerful in making those choices. Every Netflix interactive show repeats the mantra “You are in control,” in various forms throughout the show, and this is something that is true, to some extent. Yes, the choices are constrained, but each choice is new, and the kid is the one to make it. This puts the youth in a power position, and it is a big part of the appeal of these shows for the youth to be able to play not only with the content of the shows but also with their own relationship to viewing Netflix’s programming itself.

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Burnett & Merchant (2020) urge scholars not to lose sight of the text when we analyze how people and texts become entangled in everyday interactions but instead that “…we need literacy more than ever before to understand how texts come to matter, how meanings are held in place, how those same meanings can dissipate, and how new meanings take shape” (p. 365). I couldn’t agree more. When analyzing streaming media, such as Netflix, scholars have an opportunity to explore how meanings are being shaped in everyday spaces, often with children making their own choices as they engage with the media. But, the choices that the children are able to make are constrained by the algorithmic structuring of the stories—there are predetermined choices available to the child. Scholars might ask themselves, “What agency do streaming media have within the interactive media entanglements?” Though constrained, the streaming media child expects some agency in navigating through the choices. It is similar to other media spaces, such as open-world or sandbox games like Minecraft, which has free play within constraints of the block structures, the game dynamics, and so on. This type of constrained play is recognizable to children as a text, but what they do with those narrative and character choices can be insightful into how they are viewing themselves as storytellers within the dynamic of this particular interactive media. It would be interesting to co-watch with children to see how they made their choices and why in future work. As educators, we have a lot that can be learned from these types of interactive stories. Many years ago when I taught in English, I taught my students using the traditional plot diagram. Granted, I used a Spongebob Squarepants episode to do so, sometimes, but nonetheless, the plot diagram remained the same with its main elements of exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. But, with interactive media, the plot diagramming becomes necessarily more complex. This is in keeping with how new media works, though, so equipping our students with more complicated understandings could be helpful. Using print texts, such as Jason Shiga’s (2010) Meanwhile, which is a graphic novel in which students can choose multiple storylines throughout the entire text, could be helpful to bring this idea into the classroom. Asking ourselves how we can encourage students to play with narrative in new ways could foster strong literacy skills in any classroom setting. For some parents reading this chapter, it might be cause for some concern to think that their children are making what I call transgressive choices, but in reality, it’s all in good fun. These shows are meant to be entertainment; they are meant to be played. Also, the way that children engage with these interactive shows on Netflix shows a high level of semiotic complexities. As a literacy practice, the children are building their own narratives, creating, forming, and breaking relationships among characters, and shaping stories in their own ways. This is the type of thinking that can be encouraged in other spaces as well, such as in other literacy practices, especially those that capitalize on children’s natural

66  Interactive Dialogic Play

curiosity and ability to build complex fantasy worlds. This contributes to the development of more “dynamic literacies” (Potter & McDougall, 2017) as children and teens grow up in digital worlds. Streaming media children love to play with interactive media, and they are adept at adapting texts to serve that play. They are comfortable consuming different versions of media texts as they’ve grown up with transmedia spaces their entire lives. Adding interactive media to that mix makes perfect sense to the streaming media child, and the option to participate in that story-making is a welcome addition. So too are streaming media children comfortable with the constraints provided by the algorithms. They might grumble that the choices all lead to the same conclusion once they figure it out, but overall, they are fine with choosing from different options along the way. Interactivity, even though constrained, is still fun and engaging. And, even if they don’t like one particular version, they know that there are others for them to choose from. What the shows themselves have to teach young people is what I move to in the next section of the book as I explore the stories that Netflix tells in its content.

Summing Up In this chapter, I analyze Netflix’s new genre of streaming media: Interactive shows. Netflix’s original programming for children is heavily dominated by adaptation, taking other media’s storylines and characters from books, video games, and other media, to create new shows and movies. This is a smart move on Netflix’s part because children often find familiar stories and characters comforting and appealing. Adaptation is an interesting literacy act, though, as it creates dynamics in which the texts become more fluid (Bryant, 2013) and in which multiple voices enter into the text, including the reader or viewer, in a way that is heteroglossic (Bakhtin, 1981). I found that as children engage with Netflix’s interactive media, they are doing what I call interactive dialogic play. They make choices from a set of possibilities (constrained choices). The multiple modes and the way they are assembled make the show feel real, as though the children are in the show (multimodal immersiveness). There are multiple voices flowing into, through, and out of the show, and the children’s voices are added to that mix (heteroglossic narrative and identities). And, the children are able to make choices that play with the characterization or plotline in ways that are “just for fun” or “silly,” which is part of the way these interactive shows are structured, which adds to the engagement for children as they try out new identities or ways of being with familiar plots or characters. This interactive dialogic play opens up possibilities for children to engage with streaming media in ways that feel empowering to the children, even if it is constrained by the algorithmic coding of the show’s choices. They still have more room to play in these shows than in other streaming media, and this gives them more opportunities for expression in their viewing.

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Notes 1 Langdale, 2017 2 Grimes & Banker, 2020 3 Grimes & Hastings, 2018–2022 4 Pilkey, 1997–2015 5 McLean, 2020 6 Sawyer, 2018–2022 7 Frazee, Zimmer, Mazzarro, Maguire, Bakshi, Baldwin, & McGrath, 2017 8 Frazee, 2010 9 Hulme & Nissan, 2020 10 Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, 1985 11 Grylls, 2019 12 Fraser, 2019 13 Langdale, 2017 14 Adamson & Jenson, 2001 15 Fraser, 2019 16 McLean, 2020 17 Grylls, 2019 18 Grimes & Banker, 2020 19 Grimes & Hastings, 2018–2020 20 McLean, 2020 21 Abrahams, Dougherty, Langdale, & Lueras, 2015–2018 22 Grimes & Hastings, 2018–2020

References Abrahams, N., Dougherty, M., Langdale, D., & Lueras, L. (Executive Producers). (20152018). The adventures of puss in boots. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Adamson, A. & Jenson, V. (2001). Shrek. DreamWorks Distribution. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Bryant, J. (2013). Textual identity and adaptive regions: Editing adaptation as a fluid text. In J. Bruh, A. Gjelsvik, & E. F. Hanssen (Eds.) Adaptation studies: New challenges, new directions. 47–68. Bloomsbury. Buckingham, D. (2021). Youth on screen: Representing young people on film and television. Wiley. Burn, A. (2009). Making new media. Peter Lang. Burn, A. & Parker, D. (2003). Analysing media texts. Continuum. Burnett, C. & Merchant, G. (2020). Returning to text: Affect, meaning making, and literacies. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(2): 355–367. DOI: 10.1002/rrq.303 Carrington, V. (2013). An argument for assemblage theory: Integrated spaces, mobility, and polycentricity. In A. Burke & J. Marsh (Eds.), Children’s virtual play worlds: Culture, learning and participation. Peter Lang. Cohen, L.E. (2009). The heteroglossic world of preschoolers’ pretend play. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 10(4): 331–342. Domingo, M. (2011). Analyzing layering in textual design: A multimodal approach for examining cultural, linguistic, and social migrations in digital video. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14(3): 219–230. Domingo, M. (2012). Linguistic layering: Social language development in the context of multimodal design and digital technologies. Learning, Media, and Technology, 37(2): 177–197.

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Fraser, C. (Executive Producer). (2019). Carmen sandiego. [Streaming media series]. Netflix. Frazee, M. (2010). Boss Baby. Beach Lane Books. Frazee, M., Zimmer, H., Mazzarro, S., Maguire, T., Bakshi, M.C., Baldwin, A., & McGrath, T. (2017). Boss Baby. Fox Home Entertainment. Gee, J.P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. Routledge. Grimes, T. & Banker, M. (Director and Writer). (2020). Captain underpants: Epic choice-orama. [Streaming media episode]. Netflix. Grimes, T. & Hastings, P. (Executive Producers). (2018-Present). Captain underpants. [Streaming media series]. Netflix. Grylls, B. (Creator). (2019). You vs. wild. [Streaming media series]. Netflix. Hughes, B. (2002). A Playworker’s taxonomy of play types (2nd ed.). PlayLink Hulme, B. & Nissan, S. (Producer and Interactive Producer). (2020). Carmen Sandiego: To steal or not to steal. [Streaming media episode]. Netflix. Hutcheon, L. (2013). A theory of adaptation (2nd ed.). Routledge. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press. Katzenberg, J., Warner, A., Williams, H. (2001). Shrek. [Streaming media movie]. Hulu. Langdale, D. (Executive Producer). (2017). Puss in book: Trapped in an epic tale. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Marsh, J. (2014). Media, popular culture and play. In L. Brooker, M. Blaise, & S. Edwards (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of play and learning in early childhood. 403–414. DOI: 10.4135/9781473907850.n34 Marsh, J., Plowman, L., Yamada-Rise, D., Bishop, J., & Scott, F. (2016). Digital play: A new classification. Early Years, 36(3): 242–253. Mavers, D. (2013). Children’s drawing and writing. Routledge. McLean, R. (Producer). (2020). The Boss Baby: Get that baby! [Streaming media episode]. Netflix. Moje, E.B. (2002). Reframing adolescent literacy research for new times: Studying youth as a resource. Literacy Research and Instruction, 41:3: 211–228, DOI: 10.1080/19388070209558367 Mustola, M., Koivula, M., Turja, L., & Laakso, M-L. (2018). Reconsidering passivity and activity in children’s digital play. New Media & Society, 20(1): 237–254. Naito, R. (Producer). (2017). The Boss Baby. [Streaming media movie]. YouTube. Pahl, K. & Rowsell, J. (2010). Artifactual literacies: Every object tells a story. Teachers College Press. Pilkey, D. (1997–2015). The adventures of Captain Underpants. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic Inc. Potter, J. (2010). Digital media and learner identity: The new curatorship (2nd ed.). Palgrave MacMillan. Potter, J. & McDougall, J. (2017). Digital media, culture and education Theorising third space literacies. Palgrave Mcmillan. Rowsell, J. & Pahl, K. (2007). Sedimented identities in texts: Instances of practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(3): 388–404. Rowsell, J. & Wohlwend, K. (2016). Free play or tight spaces? Mapping participatory literacies in apps. The Reading Teacher, 70(2): 197–205. Sawyer, B. (Executive Producer). (2018–2022). Boss Baby: Back in business. [Streaming Media]. Netflix.

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Stephen, C. & Plowman, L. (2014). Digital play. In L. Brooker, M. Blaise, & S. Edwards (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of play and learning in early childhood. 330–341. SAGE Publishing. DOI: 10.4135/9781473907850.n28 Sutton-Smith, B. (2004). The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? (1985). [Video game series]. Developer: Broderbund.

5 GIRLS ARE SNAPPING Feminism in Netflix’s Youth Programming

I was born in the 1970s as Damiana Marie Gonzales, and I was raised in a tiny town in Wyoming by my mother who was a strong, white woman who made us beans and tortillas along with pot roast and potatoes. I had my own struggles, and I saw my mom’s as well. It wasn’t easy being a Chicana girl in a rural, white small town, and for my mom, it wasn’t easy raising two little mixed-race girls on her own. But, my mom was a strong example for us as we all tried to navigate our way through gender, race, and ethnicity in rural America. Even still, the idea of “feminism” itself came after my lived experiences, much later in fact. Feminism, as expressed in real life, wasn’t new to me, but I was given names to it in college, such as “first wave” or “second wave” feminism, so with this new terminology, I would go into my undergrad lit classes asking for more female authors and poets with all the zeal of a newly minted feminist. I was always asking for more women of color, or at least women like me as a biracial woman, even in my classes that read feminist theory. It’s only now that I’m really starting to see intersectionality in feminism in new ways as my own children are growing up in an age of supposed “postfeminism” (Gill, 2007), a backlash against feminism that claims that all women have equality now, rendering feminism unnecessary, which many feminists of color and others rightfully refute (Budgeon, 2001). So, when Netflix started producing more feminist-leaning shows, my interest got piqued. For example, in 2020, Netflix purchased the rights to the film Cuties (Mignonnes)1, a coming-of-age drama centering around a girl with intersecting identities: Tween, immigrant, Muslim, French, girl. Netflix purchasing the rights and rebranding a film as its own is not new, especially one that has garnered so much critical acclaim internationally. But, something happened with this film. Netflix completely botched how it did its marketing campaign for the movie when it put out the initial thumbnail and marketing images. In these images, DOI: 10.4324/9781003176992-5

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Netflix’s marketers took screenshots from the movie scene in which the tween girls were on stage doing their dance routine. It seems innocuous enough, but the framing of the image shows Amy, the young protagonist, dressed provocatively, crouching down with her legs spread, and looking seductively at the camera, while the other girls are dancing behind her, posed equally provocatively. The Netflix poster reduced the gravitas of the film to make the girls look like 11-year-old exotic dancers. This was not the best move on Netflix’s part as there was an immediate backlash with a #cancelNetflix campaign as some people protested the depiction of girls in the film. But, this backlash misses the point. The film is about interrogating the hypersexuality of girls, and in particular, black, Muslim immigrant girls in France. Loosely based on the director’s real life, it is actually a strong, yet sweet, depiction of the complexity of growing up in this digital world that expects and encourages girls to be provocative to fit in, along with the added burden of being a black, immigrant girl in a traditional Muslim family (Doucouré, 2020b). What this controversy does bring to light, though, is how feminism plays out through the voices that run into, through, and out of these films. In this chapter, I analyze how some Netflix movies and shows are attempting to become more of this feminist project as it forays into representing young women in their original programming. These shows can be empowering; yet, they can also be fraught with difficulties. Rather than shy away from these complexities, in this chapter, I will be transitioning from analyzing the mechanics of Netflix as a streaming media platform that I discuss in the first chapters toward the complexities of what is actually produced, especially in terms of representation and gender. In this chapter, I examine how Bakhtin’s (2004) “self ” is broadened by feminism to examine how young feminists are represented in different ways in Netflix’s original programming. I’m especially drawn to Ahmed’s (2017) theories about the feminist snap, especially young feminists of color, and what these representations mean for young feminists and those who are trying to foster feminism with them. What these Netflix original shows illustrate is how third wave feminists are hoping to educate young feminists within the times they are living in in ways that empower the young women. In some ways, these shows can help young people to navigate their current realities, but in other ways, the third wave feminist perspectives miss the mark, especially when it comes to transnationalism and social media influence.

Background Though Bakhtin’s (2004) concepts of chronotope and dialogism are helpful when thinking through how languages and meaning flow in and out of texts as explored in the previous chapters, it is also helpful for this chapter to utilize some of Bakhtin’s concepts around aesthetic seeing as they apply more fully to the expressions of identity that I am exploring in this chapter. With these concepts,

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performativity and lived experience come to the forefront as life itself is constructed as to be a performed act. Bakhtin (2004) states: For my entire life as a whole can be considered as a single complex act or deed that I perform: I act, i.e., perform acts, with my whole life, and every particular act and lived-experience is a constituent moment of my life—of the continuous performing of acts [postuplenie]. (p. 3) In this understanding, identity isn’t inherent or static; identity or life is dynamic and moving. Life itself is performed. This means that these performances change, become different, throughout one’s lived experiences. But, this becomes complicated once expectations are placed upon this Being or the repeated performances that constitute the Being and life; the “ought” must also work within “social validities” (Bakhtin, 2004, p. 5). In Bakhtin’s thinking, there is no one way of being that is recognized as right; people must work within a giveand-take between their own lived experiences and the outside world. In other words, what is expected in the outside world only gains validity if it is integrated within the “the unity of my once-occurring answerable life” (p. 5). This give and take occur through what Bakhtin terms aesthetic seeing or aesthetic contemplation. This is an interaction between the self and others in which someone sees someone else and has a “moment of empathizing” (p. 14). This moment involves both objectifying the other and seeing the other as outside oneself and returning to oneself. For Bakhtin, it is this interplay and the return to oneself that creates individuality. For Bakhtin (2004), when confronted with a literary text, there needs to be a recognition of two relationships. The first is the author’s relationship to what she has created, and the second is the reader’s relationship to what is written. As people in the world, when we are confronted with an object, we use the language and meanings we have already learned in our minds. Bernard-Donals (1994) sums this up nicely: Thus the subject, in examining those previously interiorized signs and coming to terms with which might and which might not consummate the object in question, authors a unique sign for the object. What occurs in an utterance of a sign based on previous encounters with signs that belong to others. What the subject finally consummates the object—when she produces a non-coincident sign for the object—she has reauthored herself as well, since this new sign will in turn be interiorized to form a distinct background for future aesthetic negotiation. (pp. 31–32) We decide what we want to attribute in terms of language to an object by choosing from this interiorized language. The interiorized language, though, belongs

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to others as well because it is something we have learned. The hero in a text is not completed until the reader uses her own interiorized language to consummate the hero, to complete the meaning of the hero in the second relationship between the reader and the hero in the text. When youth are watching Netflix shows, they are making meaning about what is being represented in the shows by using their interiorized language that they have in their own minds. In interacting with the shows, they choose between the different languages and meanings to come to some meaning about what is being represented, thus authoring the text in that relationship to it. This, in turn, adds a new language to their interiorized language. It matters, then, what is happening in the relationship between the young viewers and the streaming texts. I contend that when that relationship is occurring with texts that represent girls, especially girls of color, then the relationship can be fraught with possible misunderstandings. The interiorized language is full of different ways of seeing and understanding girls and people of color, some positive, some negative. And, the Netflix shows themselves are offering complex ways of representing these girls and women. So, attending to the possibilities in these interactions is helpful, which leads me to considering the role that feminist understandings might play in untangling these possibilities.

The Oppositional Gaze So what happens when the Being is a member of a particular identity group? In particular, does this dynamic change or become different when the identities have particular markers, such as “woman,” “girl,” “Black,” “Asian,” etc.? This is where feminism as a construct is helpful. Feminism in its current form has gone through what some people recognize as “waves” (Jackson, 2018). The first wave in the United States is often attributed to the Suffragette movement in the early 20th century, earning women the right to vote, though only if they were white. Second wave feminism pushed for recognition for inequalities around gender and sexuality, though still mostly in heteronormative, middle and upper-class, white perspectives. Third wave feminism in the 1990s stemmed from critiques of second wave feminism as focusing on white, upper and middle-class, heterosexual experiences representing all women, leading to scholars such as bell hooks (2007), asserting that feminism did not represent all women, especially women of color and LGBTQ+ identities. What some claim is emerging now is the fourth wave feminism, which is more focused on intersectionality in terms of race, ethnicity, sexualities, and gender identification and more closely tied to the use of social media and other online technologies (Munro, 2013). In popular culture and media, it is a tough road for underrepresented people, especially girls and women, as they are often either not represented in film, television, and other popular media or they are misrepresented in ways that make it so that they do not recognize themselves and/or they don’t want to identify

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with the representation. In a study of Black female filmmakers in the United Kingdom, Herbert (2018) found that there was pushback on filmmakers who did not have Black main characters or who did not produce films that met white mainstream expectations: “Inclusion is not merely enough, as it does not necessarily involve any fundamental changes in the power relations at play” (p. 195). In fact, Black women, in particular, develop what bell hooks (1993) terms the “oppositional gaze.” She states: Spaces of agency exist for Black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. The “gaze” has been and is a site of resistance for colonized Black people globally… In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating awareness politicizes looking relations—one learns to look a certain way in order to resist. (p. 289) As hooks discusses the concept of oppositional gaze, she asserts that as traditional mainstream media represents Black women in stereotypical ways or ways that Black women find that they cannot identify themselves in the depiction, some Black women look away, namely they no longer watch mainstream cinema. And, when they do watch, they are always watching with a critical stance. Once black female filmmakers started making their own representations, though, there could be more enjoyment of the films as the critical stance could lessen. The oppositional gaze was present, but less so. What this means for Netflix’s representations, then, is that they are likely to be met with an “oppositional gaze” as this is ingrained in Black viewers, even younger women, so the representations must be more on point for the girls and young teens to actually enjoy watching the shows rather than having to resist them. Interestingly, when it comes to South Asian representation, such as Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, the issue becomes even murkier. As Davé (2013) discusses in his analysis of characters such as Apu in The Simpsons and the two main characters in the Harold and Kumar films, South Asian people are not well-represented in the Black-White dichotomy of representations. Historically, there was a time when Indian immigrants were considered white, and though this is not the case, Indian people are not depicted in the same ways as Blacks either in popular media. And, though Davé does a wonderful job exploring representations of Indian men in popular TV and film, when we consider representations of Indian women, there is even less known. As such, there is some freedom in creating Indian characters in media, though they are still significantly underrepresented and/or misrepresented. For instance, Mindy Kaling has been a trailblazer starting with being the first person of color and the first Indian-American writer and producer for her work in The Office and currently with projects, including Never Have I Ever2, which was watched by 40 million households for its first

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season. Kaling openly discusses how difficult it has been to be a South East Asian female writer, producer, and actor in mainstream media, but she also says there is some freedom in her representations. She states, One of the great things about writing comedies with the characters that I have, who are largely women of color, is that the characters are not oppressors. They’re largely people who have been oppressed. So they can say much more. (Dockterman, 2022, para. 20) The way that the oppositional gaze could work with these representations is an intriguing idea. Netflix programming for children and teens often has many races, gender identities, and sexualities in the characters, so their voices do “say much more” in terms of representation. In thinking through even just the main character, though, in Never Have I Ever, as the representation of South Asian girlhood moves away from absence and/or stereotype, how might the girl spectator relate to the representations. Along with the idea of the “oppositional gaze” (hooks, 1993), in this chapter, I also draw from the feminism of Sara Ahmed (2017), a Muslim-British scholar who advocates for a feminism that is both deeply intersectional and intensely personal. As Sara Ahmed relates in a 2017 interview, we need to understand that feminism did not begin in the Western White world and it shouldn’t be solely defined there either. Feminism doesn’t have to be an “imperialist gift” given by white women (para. 16). She also states that “Gayatri Spivak’s diagnosis of the imperial mission [(Spivak, 1988)] as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ is still true today. Additionally, imperial feminism can take the form of ‘white women saving brown women from brown men.’” (Ahmed, qtd. in Mehra, 2017, para. 16). In essence, Ahmed provides both theory and practice in feminism that encompasses more stories from more groups of girls and women, and it is this type of feminism that helps to bridge the intergenerational and interracial gap needed to understand how the programming on Netflix is or is not working in feminist ways. Figuring out one’s place in the world as a (young) feminist is, in large part, about discovering for oneself the words to describe what is happening, especially when confronting racism, homophobia, and sexism. “Feminist and antiracist consciousness involves not just finding the words, but through the words, how they point, realizing how violence is directed: violence is directed toward some bodies more than others” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 34). Bakhtin’s discussion of “being,” is general, probably referring to the white male philosophers before and during his own time in the early 20th century, but how feminism updates this is to name what is happening as specific and particular. The Netflix shows are an attempt to help girls (and boys) to name what is sexist, homophobic, etc., though how this is done and in what capacities varies. There is also a recognition in some

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shows that what can and should be named becomes more problematic when it’s the girls of color who are doing the naming themselves of their own identities.

Feminist Snap In particular, I’d like to attend to what Ahmed (2017) calls the feminist snap. Applying this concept to feminist films from the 1980s, Ahmed articulates a feminist snap is a breakdown of sorts, as a woman reacts to the patriarchal misogynist world around her. It is a type of crisis, but it is also an empowerment, a speaking back, to the injustices in her world. It is a giving way under pressure, sometimes by choice. To help explicate this idea, Ahmed (2017) uses the metaphor of hearing a twig snap: A snap sounds like the start of something, a transformation of something; it is how a twig might end up broken in two pieces. A snap might even seem like a violent moment; the unbecoming of something. But a snap would only be the beginning insofar as we did not notice the pressure on the twig. If the pressure is the action, snap is the reaction. (p. 188–189) Ahmed is careful to assert that feminist snaps are not the starting point. They are not what causes the problems; rather, they are a response to a problem outside of the woman or girl. The world pushes down on women, and the women react, sometimes by accepting the sexism, sometimes by snapping. Ahmed (2017) continues her metaphor, “Snap is only the start of something because of what we do not notice. Can we redescribe the world from the twig’s point of view, that is from the point of view of those who are under pressure?” (p. 189). I contend that the teen shows that have feminist leanings on Netflix’s original programming share a common theme: The teen girls have “snapped.” These shows, especially those that really dig into feminist issues for teen girls (and boys to some extent) are describing feminism from the twig’s, in this case the teen girls,’ perspective, though they do so in varying degrees, especially depending on whether the protagonist is a girl of color. Netflix’s The Baby-Sitters Club3 is a gentle form of feminism that, on its surface seems to be catering more toward white feminism. Based on a popular book series by the same name (Martin, 1986–2000), The Baby-Sitters Club is based on a group of tween girls who start a babysitting business to earn some extra money and to bond as friends. Kristie Thomas is depicted primarily as a white girl whose “take charge attitude” comes off as bossiness. Her only problem seems to be that her mother is getting married to a kind and rich man who wants to welcome all children in the family equally. The show does dip into other issues, though, with its other characters as the other multi-racial characters take center stage more frequently. Claudia Kishi is a Japanese American girl who is prompted

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by a white art critic to figure out a purpose for her art, so she represents her grandmother’s forced internment during World War II. This push toward people of color representing their identities as the sole purpose of their art is problematic, but it does bring in more depth to the show than it had otherwise. Dawn Shafer spends two episodes fighting for the rights of girls at camp who can’t afford extras when they see a little white girl not able to paint on a t-shirt in art class because she couldn’t afford the extras. A more extended example is about Mary Anne Spier, a mixed-race (Black/ white) girl who is depicted as having a father who is overprotective, in part, because Mary Anne’s mother had died in childbirth. Mary Anne is shy and dresses in the hairstyles and clothes of kids younger than her, or at least in different styles than her friends in the babysitter club. But, in one episode, Mary Anne babysits a little girl who identifies as trans, which she accepts without issue. But, when Mary Anne has to take the little girl to the hospital and the doctors and nurses use the “he” pronoun continuously, Mary Anne boldly defends the girl. Her overprotective father witnesses this exchange, helping him to see that his daughter is growing up and doing well. She, then, asks to wear her hair differently and to change her clothes. This may not seem like the strongest feminist move, but it leads to more positive changes by the end of the series when she starts coming out of her shell. These feminist snaps are not prompted by what one could call traumatic events; they are smaller in scale. They are more like microaggressions that even youth of color who live in more privileged socioeconomic conditions still can and do experience. MOXiE!4 is an older teen’s version of The Baby-Sitter’s Club’s type of feminism. Based on a novel called Moxie (Mathieu, 2017), in it, Vivian is a white teen follows the footsteps of Lisa, her white, feminist mother, to lead an underground rebellion against a list sent out by popular boys to rank sexually based on body traits, e.g., “Best Rack,” “Most Bangable.” This list causes Vivian to “snap.” What complicates this snap, though, is why she snaps. Earlier in the film, we are introduced to a new Black student in school named Lucy who confronts a white male teacher’s sexism and racism. Later, Vivian witnesses the football captain spit in Lucy’s pop can after she refuses his sexual advances. Even after witnessing these acts, Vivan tells Lucy that she should just excuse the football captain’s behavior. Lucy, however, doesn’t feel that she has to excuse anything. Vivian’s snap, then, is not over the sexual harassment of Black girls. Though not explicitly mentioned, it is only after a list comes out that includes white girls that Vivian reacts. Though there are girls of color on that list as well, e.g., “Best Booty,” listing a Black girl, and there are some black girls in the small group of groups who discuss their outrage at the list, this film is largely a white feminist movie for white girls. It is possible that everything Vivian had witnessed, including the scene with Lucy, put enough pressure on the twig to finally snap and she decides that the girls should not have to take the sexual harassment any longer. But the characters of color are the ones who stand up to the main bully first,

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inspiring the action of the white girl to stand up later on. The white feminist as savior is not lost on viewers as the characters of color and LGBTQ+ characters are sidelined in this film. The feminist snaps of young girls of color in the Netflix shows are much more explosive and powerful. Cuties (Mignonnes)5 is about a tween girl’s snap as she realizes that she doesn’t fit into her own family, and she doesn’t fit in with the girls at school. As an immigrant from Senegal and a Muslim, Amy tries to find her way in her new country, while, at the same time, figuring out her place within (or against) her family’s cultural expectations. Her identity doesn’t have a place; she is nowhere. As an audience, we witness both her floundering in these places and the ways in which she “snaps.” Amy has several pressures on her that cause her to snap. Mostly, Amy spends much of her time trying to fit in with a clique of French girls. These girls start out bullying her, even one who is an immigrant herself, but as she gradually befriends the leader of the group. Even as Amy becomes more accepted, they still call her the nickname “Homeless.” Amy finally gets her chance to join their dance group, though, when one girl in the clique is kicked out of the group because she turned on the camera when they were video chatting a boy in their class, embarrassing the leader. And as Amy gains access to a smartphone by stealing it, she secretly begins another path of self-expression, namely by watching twerking videos and emulating the moves and by posting selfies on social media, which I will discuss in a later section. The strict gender roles in her home life also cause her to snap, such as the scenes of Amy wearing a veil in the mosque with her mother or the many scenes of her caring for her younger siblings. These family obligations, especially the extensive food preparations for her father’s upcoming wedding to his second wife, cause problems for Amy’s assimilation, including making her miss the first dance competition, jeopardizing her tenuous acceptance by her new friends. Amy’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic as the film goes on as she steals money from her mother to go on a shopping spree with her friends to buy bras, posts provocative poses online, and stabs a boy in the hand with a pencil because he bullies her in class. Finally, Miriam has her own snap in response to Amy’s behavior. Miriam lists all of the ways that Amy has snapped from Miriam’s perspective. She doesn’t even recognize the daughter before her as she asks her more than once, “Who are you?” She doesn’t understand these moves as part of growing up in French schools; instead, she sees Amy’s actions as a way to “humiliate” her. In this scene, we see how Miriam has her own cultural and familial pressures as represented by her stating that Amy’s dad will blame Miriam for all of the trouble that Amy is getting into. Amy’s feminist snap has cultural implications that she could not foresee or fully understand at 11 years old. Finally, Miriam has run out of options, as she sees them, for reigning in Amy’s erratic behaviors, so within her religious traditions, she tries to cleanse herself of these impulses in a type of exorcism ceremony. This scene is one that fully shows Amy’s snap, but it does so with an unexpected positivity and power. In this scene,

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Amy is stripped down to underwear and a tank top, which could be seen as very disempowering, and it feels that way at first. The mother and her aunt sprinkle holy water on Amy. Amy begins thrashing her body around, but this changes as Amy begins to dance. The colors in this scene are vibrant, and the lighting bathes Amy in a soft light. In discussing a different film made by a Black female filmmaker in which Black women are taking control over their own sense of self in private before going into the public sphere, hooks (1993) states that “disrupting conventional, racist and sexist, stereotypical representations of Black female bodies, these scenes invite the audience to look differently. They act to critically intervene and transform conventional filmic practices, changing notions of spectatorship” (p. 302). The way that this scene is framed, Amy is shown as in charge and powerful. As she dances, it’s as though she frees herself from the pull of both her mother’s religion and the girls at school. She uses her newfound awareness of her own body, and she smiles in the face of what could be seen as a controlling, disempowering act. This is a feminist snap as a choice, as empowerment. What makes it so powerful is that it’s a tween Black, Muslim girl who is taking the power back. With Never Have I Ever6, viewers actually see different versions of feminist snaps from different teen girls of color. The central character is Devi Vishwakumar, an Indian American girl, whose father has died at her music recital, and in her grief, Devi suddenly lost the ability to walk. The show begins one year later after she has just as suddenly regained her ability to walk again. Devi has two best friends, both of whom are multiracial: Fabiola Torres, a nerdy girl who is captain of the robotics team, and Eleanor Wong, who is captain of the drama team. Together, they have been coined as “the gently racist nickname, the U.N.” But, Devi has a plan for “rebranding” their uncool images because she says, “We are glamorous women of color who deserve a sexy high school life”7. She has it all sketched out in a three-ring notebook titled New School Year Checklist, in which she has written helpful goals for herself, such as “more social media presence,” “walking,” new hairstyles,” goals for Fabiola, such as “better clothes,” “wear makeup,” “get an Instagram,” and for Eleanor, such as “stop singing” and “less drama.” Step two is to get boyfriends, so that’s the plan that she pushes her friends toward. The problem is that 1) Fabiola is secretly gay, so the boy that Devi sets her up with is not for her, and 2) Eleanor already has a secret boyfriend who accepts her as she is. Devi is the only one who really wants a boyfriend. In fact, Devi’s working through her grief by fixating on having sex with the most popular boy in school, a mixed-race (Japanese/White) teen named Paxton HallYoshida. She discusses this plan with her very woke and awesome therapist, Dr. Ryan, who tries to steer Devi away from this goal to more positive expressions of grief, such as journaling. Instead, the only entry she writes in her journal is how she will have sex with Paxton. Devi pursues her plan, openly asking Paxton to have sex with her, to which he agrees. But, Devi doesn’t go through with it. In fact, she never has sex until the end of the series itself two seasons later, and

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it’s not with Paxton. Actually, the love interest plotline takes a backseat to Devi’s expressions of her snap in all aspects of her life as she becomes increasingly surly and disagreeable, driving away both her best friends and her mother. What changes the most is her relationships with the women in her life, namely with her best friends. Throughout the series, Devi pursues Paxton’s affections rather than being there for her girlfriends, even in times of distress. For instance, when Eleanor’s mother abandons her for a second time, Devi had promised Fabiola that she will meet with them to console Eleanor. Instead, Devi decides to spend time helping out Paxton’s sister to make him like her more. Choices like these, and Devi’s constant outbursts, drive a wedge between her friends and Devi. This comes to a head at a party at Devi’s nemesis-turned-love interest Ben Gross’s house. In an attempt to keep Fabiola from drinking from the punchbowl that another student had earlier put his testicles in, Devi spills the entire punchbowl onto Fabiola. This causes a snap in Fabiola: FABIOLA:  I

don’t want to hear another weak excuse about why you’re acting crazy…I just wanted one night where I wasn’t sucked into your drama, and now I’m drenched in it” [gestures to her ruined outfit]. DEVI:  I’m so sorry that it’s such an inconvenience for you that my dad died. FABIOLA:  Yeah, I know he did, but that doesn’t give you a free pass to treat us like crap…You’ve turned into this fake person who doesn’t give a s--- about her friends, even when Eleanor’s mother abandons her or when I say, “I’m gay.” 8 There’s a collective gasp from the group of teens listening, to which Fabiola exclaims, “Dammit, you just made me come out to our whole class!” In this scene, friendship is the driving factor as Devi is confronted with the consequences of taking her friends for granted and ignoring their problems to focus exclusively on her own issues. Fabiola’s snap is positive in that she finally stands up for herself, though her coming out is an unintended consequence. This does work out for Fabiola, though, as she is finally able to ask out a girl she’s been crushing on. For Devi, however, it only adds to her unhappiness.

Mothers Showing Different Paths Teen feminism is part of a long history of feminism (Dejmanee, 2018; Edell, Brown, & Tolman, 2013; Jackson, 2018). What is most prevalent in the Netflix original programming is the intersection of third wave and fourth wave feminisms. The feminism in these Netflix shows, though, becomes a part of a larger cultural conversation as the streaming media itself puts the experiences and identities of these teen girls at the forefront of the shows. This is an aesthetic and a cultural move.

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In that the problem of aesthetics is largely a problem of how one comes into contact with –how one reads—cultural products, Bakhtin’s (2004) essay is concerned with the way in which the author’s relation to the hero as it appears in literacy works can be made the object of study. (Bernard-Donals, 1994, p. 23) Some of the shows highlight how the girls’ feminist snaps become the object of study very distinctly and openly. A key part of this move, though, is how the relationships the girls have with their mothers become fraught with tension. In these shows, all of the fathers are absent or dead, so the only influences the girls have are their mothers, so it matters how the women in these series show how to be a woman in the modern age as each has her own representation of feminism. In The Baby-Sitters Club and MoXie!, all mothers espouse feminist principles to some extent. The character who is the most openly feminist of these Netflix series is Lisa Robinson. She speaks fondly of her time as a feminist in college, and it’s clearly pointed out that she attempts to raise her daughter with feminist values, even going so far as singing “Hey Girlfriend” by Bikini Kill to her as a baby. Robinson also reminisces about the zines she created, which is part of the impetus for Vivian’s feminist actions, which I will discuss in the next section. Though Lisa acknowledges that they could have done more to be inclusive, the model she portrays is one of third wave feminism, which is portrayed as slightly outdated but still useful, in some ways, in this film. As O’Malley (2021) sums up nicely, “…‘Moxie’ [sic] is both an awkward act of nostalgia for '90s activism and an attempt to push the riot grrrl legacy into the future” (para. 1). Other than not knowing what is wrong with her daughter to cause mood swings at home, Lisa seems to have options as a white feminist, and she can be a role model for the (white) feminism that Vivan exhibits, especially with the riot grrl memorabilia that provides inspiration for Vivian. She even lends her support, though silently, as Vivian gives an impassioned speech at her school in the end. A part of this cultural conversation, though, that is beyond what Bakhtin (2004) could have imagined is how women of color might be included or excluded from these conversations in many ways. Women of color have fewer feminist options in the Netflix films and shows. This doesn’t mean that the women of color are disempowered, though. In The Babysitter’s Club, while the white mothers as represented by Elizabeth Thomas-Brewer mostly give gently worded discussions and permissive allowances for the rants of her daughter, it is actually the Latina mother, Sharon Porter who is most openly feminist. One of the first encounters with this character involves an “all-female cookout,” which turns out to be a Wiccan-type welcoming ceremony, complete with a Tarot card reading and a sharing stick. She is portrayed, though, as overly permissive and flighty, while her daughter, Dawn, is the one who holds everything together with more normalcy.

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A stronger example is Devi’s mother, Dr. Nalini Vishwakumar, in Never Have I Ever, who is portrayed as a strong-willed woman who is very confident in her dermatology practice but who is also dealing with the loss of her husband and the challenges of having a daughter whom she doesn’t understand well. It isn’t that she is not a feminist; she just doesn’t seem to care about advancing feminist agendas. After all, she is a woman who immigrated from India successfully and one who runs her own medical practice. She doesn’t have time or patience for white feminism. When she’s checking in on Devi with Dr. Ryan, she asks why there are so many ceramics in the room, stating that they must be for white people. In fact, Nalini separates herself explicitly from white people in general. In one scene in particular, Dr. Ryan says to Nalini, “I didn’t think you were someone who believed in therapy.” Nalini responds with, “I don’t. It’s for white people. I mean, clearly, there are some exceptions [as she waves her hand to the therapist, who is a Black woman].”9 Nalini often makes these kinds of remarks as she reflects on (white) American culture. These signal her struggles as she herself tries to fit in as an emigrant while still maintaining her own cultural traditions, such as how she has Devi’s math textbook blessed and freaks out when Devi throws it out the window as she’ll have to get it blessed again. As viewers, though, we see a rare glimpse at Nalini’s struggles as she opens up to Dr. Ryan about her struggles relating to her daughter without the support system of her home country. As Dr. Ryan and she start talking, Nalini relates that she decided that she will take Devi back to India because “[they] have to. Devi is out of control and needs to be in an environment that values discipline.” Nalini, then, opens up about how she is trying to cope with the loss of her husband as well as Devi saying to her that she wishes that Nalini were the one who had died, which had happened the night before. She says that Devi doesn’t think that Nalini likes her. When asked why Devi felt that way, Nalini says: NALINI:  Because

I’m tough on her. I am. I know that. But it’s only because I’m scared all the time. Dr. RYAN:  “You don’t always have to be so strong.” NALINI:  “Come on. What good would that do, huh?” Dr. RYAN:  “Have you considered that falling apart might actually be what brings your family back together?” Nalini responds by picking up a piece of ceramic and stating that “[t]hese ceramics are quite comforting,” to which Dr. Ryan quips, “For white people too.”10 In earlier episodes, we see how Nalini is struggling with her own cultural expectations, especially in how the aunties see her negatively. But, by the end of the first season, Nalini decides to spread Mohan’s ashes in the beach where they had visited many times together, and she invites Devi to join her, which she ultimately does. The first season ends with a sense that both of them have found a way to

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navigate their lives without the male support Mohan represented and in a way that they can co-exist together in a supportive way, and though there are struggles in subsequent seasons, Nalini and Devi come to a peace by the last season. The mother who has the least options in terms of feminism is Miriam, Amy’s mother, in Cuties (Mignonnes). In this film, Miriam must cope with the fact that her husband plans to marry a second wife. Though neither the husband and new bride nor the wedding are ever shown in the film, the wedding looms forebodingly as many of the scenes with Miriam are dominated by preparing for this event. The film itself begins with a bedroom door that is locked for a mysterious reason, which is later revealed as the room that the father and his new bride will use, while Miriam is relegated to a second bedroom on her own. The upcoming marriage is revealed in a heartbreaking scene that highlights the option that Amy has, if she chooses to be a woman like her mother. Not wanting her mother to see her rifling through Miriam’s things in her bedroom, Amy hides under the bed, and she overhears a conversation her mother has over the phone as she tells a relative the “happy news” that her husband is getting married to a second wife. The viewer sees this conversation from Amy’s perspective under the bed as she watches her mom’s foot repeatedly and rapidly shake up and down as she reveals the news to someone on the phone. Then, after her mother hangs up, we see Amy’s reaction as she listens to her mother weeping softly. Later on, Amy gets her period—on the dress she’s supposed to wear for the wedding—a symbol of her obligations as a girl in this Muslim world that leads only to familial obedience and, later, marriage and children. Rather than dealing with either of these life-changing circumstances, Amy decides to run away to compete in the twerking competition, and she literally throws one of the girls in the river to take her spot. But, while she is dancing on stage, she thinks about her mother having to cope with it all, and in a turning point, Amy runs home. As Amy hugs her mother tightly, weeping, she asks her mom not to go to the wedding. Standing there in her twerking outfit next to her mother who is dressed in a beautiful yellow dress and a matching elaborate headdress, with fine gold jewelry, Amy watches her mother finish getting ready for the wedding. Miriam gently strokes the side of Amy’s face, and says, “Tu sais…Toi, tu n’es pas obligèe d’y aller. [Know what? It’s fine if you don’t come],” softly smiling at Amy as she steels herself at the door to go down to her husband’s wedding. Miriam may not feel that she can make a different choice for herself, but Miriam does allow a different choice for her daughter.

Technologies and Teen Feminism in Netflix Originals What is apparent, however, in these Netflix shows is that these mothers, as good as they are, do not fully understand the world their daughters have to live in. In particular, these shows highlight the technological and social-media-dominated world that these girls are growing up immersed in. And, as such, technologies

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also have a large part to play in current teen feminism. Third wave feminism in the 1990s utilized webpages and grrl-based zines (self-created, collage-like print magazines that were photocopied and distributed in feminist circles), while contemporary or “fourth wave” feminists use social media and online activism (Jackson, 2018). Often, though, this type of activism remains invisible to many third wave feminists, or they dismiss it as ineffectual compared to in-person protests and petitions, which are deemed more real. Still, though, these types of campaigns can help to shed light on “micro-politics,” or how sexism, racism, hetersexism, etc., can affect girls and teens in their everyday lives (Harris, 2008). I contend that it is in the everyday lived experiences of girls and teens that takes the feminism represented in Netflix shows to a more relatable level for teen girls. Teen feminists are mediated in ways that are different from older generations’ feminists. In some ways, these Netflix shows attempt to work through or represent how to use the media to navigate gender in different ways. Sometimes, this means eschewing media altogether. In The Baby-Sitters Club, the girls are not old enough to legally be on some social media sites, so they advertise their babysitting business using flyers printed on paper and distributed by hand. In MOXiE!, Vivian literally takes a page out of her mother’s scrapbook of riot grrrl photos and other memorabilia, and she creates her own zine that she photocopies and leaves around her school. This is a nod to third wave feminism, for sure, but it also is a direct opposite to the list that ranked girls that was transmitted simultaneously to all the cellphones in her school during a pep rally. The print media could be made in secret and distributed in secret. It was placed in girls bathrooms, and even at one point, Vivian’s love interest smuggled one into the boys bathroom as well, showing that even teen boys can be strong feminists as well. Zines were invented in a time when their use was bound by circumstance as the internet was still new, but this use of the zine over social media was deliberate and purposeful. While Vivian is celebrated for standing up to patriarchy using her zine, it doesn’t work in Cuties due to ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and familial expectations that are made stricter by religion and immigration. Finding the middle ground is something that Amy has difficulty navigating. Amy is coming of age in modern-day France surrounded by kids who rule each other via their social media. The girls she tries to befriend constantly watch twerking and dance videos that depict adult women in hyper sexualized ways, and they spend much of their time and energy trying to emulate what they see on social media sites. Amy has an uphill battle. In one scene, for instance, kids at school bully Amy, pulling down her pants and revealing her underwear. This embarrasses not only Amy but also her friends as Amy’s underwear is considered childish; they fear being seen as children by extension. This prompts Amy’s stealing of her mother’s money to buy bras and underwear, but it also shows the cruelty of both the bullies and her own friends in response to their rules for fitting in.

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The technologies move beyond machines and devices, though, to become part of the identities that teen girls are expected to represent. Missing the competition angers her new friends, and Amy spends the rest of the film trying to get back their good graces with increasingly difficult and daring attempts on social media. In one scene, Amy is forced to return the smartphone she’d stolen as she’s confronted by the man from whom she had stolen it. First she attempts to seduce him, which thankfully, he rebuffs. She barricades herself in the bathroom. In a desperate last attempt to repair the relationship with her friends, Amy takes a picture of her genitalia and posts it online thinking that’s what girls were supposed to post. Amy cracks open the door and throws the phone back to the angry man, shutting the door quickly. Since she doesn’t have the phone anymore, she has no way of changing that post or seeing the effects of it until a boy in her class called Malcolm slaps her buttocks as she walks up to the board one day. When the teacher calls him out, he says, “Elle met des photos à poil sur internet! [She’s the one posting nude photos of herself online]” and calls Amy, “Qui fait la pute, toi o moi?. [Who is the slut, you or me?]”11 to which she responds by stabbing his hand with a pencil. The gaze that Amy is seeking could be seen as male-centered (Edell et al., 2013), but she has no real understanding of this when she’s posting online. Her intent is to have friends and to assimilate into French youth culture not to attract the male gaze, especially not from the boys in her class like Malcolm. But, instead, she alienates the very girls she is trying to befriend. JESSICA:  Avec

ta photo de merde, on a une sale rèputation. T’es contente. [You posted that picture, and now you’ve ruined our image. You happy?] COUMBA:  T’abuses. Si ‘jaurais’ fait ça, ma mère m’aurait direct envoyée au bled. San retour. [You so crossed the line. If I ever did something like that my mother would send my ass back to her village so fast. With no return] AMY:  Ils verront qu’on est des moufs. [We wanna show them we’re not little kids, don’t we?] JESSICA:  Non. On est dans le même sac. [No, we are all lumped together now.] COUMBA:  T’a vu, au moins, les commentaires de ta photo? Y a des gens qui demandant que nous, on se “met” comme toi. On va pas se mettre à poil. On n’est pas toi. [Have you even read the comments your photo got? You got everyone asking us to expose ourselves like that. Dude, we’re not strippers, even if you are.]12 Amy tries to start dancing to connect with them again, but the other girls don’t join in. Jessica takes the cellphone back, turning off the music. Then, Amy loses it. She starts grabbing the other girls trying to get them to practice dancing with her, while they start pushing her away and calling her “crazy.” Amy truly does

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not understand what she has done wrong. She doesn’t understand the complexities around sexuality that the other girls who are more steeped in the social media’s gaze do understand. She did understand that social media had freed her from the bounds she knew from her family, but the intricacies of her relationship to it and what that meant when social media puts her identity, in part, in a complex relationship with others as well as her interiorized language doesn’t match those of the people outside of her. With Cuties (Mignonnes), we see this emerging understanding of how the self is engaged in an interaction with others that becomes heightened with social media, and in a weird way as it distances one from the lived life yet impacts it. Partnering with girls to challenge sexualisation requires that we directly engage the contradiction between girls’ celebration of and confidence in their own “girl powered” autonomy and the realities of a commodified hyper-heterosexual discourse that mediates their choices and shapes their lived experiences. (Edell, Brown, & Tolman, 2013, p. 276) What Bakhtin could not have foreseen in his philosophy, though, and what scholars such as bell hooks might intuitively know is how the internet opens up these dynamics around selfhood and others that also breaks open the relationship in aesthetic seeing in new ways (hooks, 2007), which is made even more true when those Beings are young, black or brown girls. When it comes to teen girls, for instance, this relationship has a real, lived set of identities with complex pressures from outside and internal pressures from the girls’ desires, in this case, Amy’s desire for friendship.

Reflections and Connections Ultimately, though, these shows speak to a larger issue in that the girls in these shows are always striving for happiness, but whatever happiness they achieve is fleeting. This might be my own desire for happiness-binding in fiction, but what is disheartening about these shows, though, is that whatever happiness the girls achieve by the end is so tenuous. In her exploration of the concept of “happiness,” Ahmed (2017) states that “I would abbreviate the status of happiness in philosophy in the following way: happiness is what we want, whatever it is” (p. 15, author’s italics). But, what do I as a third wave feminist with my own children want from these shows? A better question might be, though, what do the girls want from these shows, and are they likely to get it? All of these Netflix shows with feminist leanings have a positive ending, so to speak, but my issue is that these endings become part of the problem. In The Babysitter’s Club and in MOXiE!, the “happy” ending in which the girls are applauded for their feminism essentially says that the problem is over (Budgeon,

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2001). They have post-feminist endings that make it seem like sexism is not happening or that it is easily solved. In The Babysitter’s Club, the last two episodes of the first season revolve around two of the girls fighting for the amenities for the kids who could not pay, in response to witnessing a little blond girl not being able to afford extra art supplies. At the end of this protest, the camp director states that those extra fees will not be charged. It doesn’t change systemic inequalities, but for the world of this show, it is a big win. In MOXiE!, Vivian leads a walk-out in which the girls in the school (and feminist allies like Vivian’s boyfriend) walk out of school in protest to sexual harassment and inequitable policies surrounding the school’s response. Vivian gives a big speech, a blond cheerleader tells how the football captain had date-raped her, and Lucy tells white girls to stop touching Black girls’ hair. All of this is met with outrage or applause, whichever applies. The principal glares at football captain, which hints that he will be punished for the rape that had been revealed, though this is never shown. Presumably, all the students went back to school the next day, and life continued on. In Cuties, the last scene shows Amy, dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, jumping on a trampoline. The scene shows her jumping higher and higher, having fun as a kid, able to leave both her father’s wedding to his second wife and the failed friendships with the circle of girls behind her. What these “happy endings” have in common is that the happiness itself is short-lived, and it comes with the tacit agreement to keep things mostly the way that they are. The babysitter girls will go home to their upper-middle-class lives, presumably to lead the same type of life they had already been leading. Vivian will feel empowered by her feminism, while the other girls will just not have their hair touched. Amy’s dad will still be married to his second wife, and they will still have the main bedroom. Amy will still go to school with the girls who bully her but who also once were her friends. This feminism is short-lived; feminism is not something that will be integral beyond these coming-of-age years. I wonder, though, if the third wave feminists who made these shows just aren’t sure where to take the young feminists. I wonder if in the worldview of these films if these girls are fated to live out a series of feminist snaps. Nothing fundamentally changes, so they are affected again and again by patriarchal (micro)aggressions until they snap. Is this the best we can offer our young girls as a society? What might be the most interesting to scholars is that for the young women in these Netflix shows it isn’t the male gaze that is the main threat. What these girls are most worried about is friendship and acceptance from other girls. The more they are alienated, the more they will do, and have to do, to be accepted, and even that has no guarantee for success for these girls, especially girls of color. These issues are, sadly, mirrored in feminism as a whole right now. Teen feminism is not well-accepted in feminism writ large as it is seen as superficial. The shift from on-the-street protests toward online actvitism, for instance, has caused a disconnect between older and younger feminists at times. But scholars can help

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out these girls by learning more about the worlds they actually live in, especially in the intricacies between social media and lived experiences. This Netflix original programming is a start on that learning for adults and teens alike. Educators in younger grades might be hesitant to bring in these shows and films into their classrooms, but that doesn’t mean that the feminism in these shows cannot be part of the curriculum. Analyzing clips from the shows could be helpful for tweens and teens to discuss issues around gender. There are positive portrayals of both genders, so thinking through how each is portrayed could be engaging for students. Moreover, truly exploring how gender dynamics are playing out in schools is vital. In MoXiE!, for instance, the list was broadcast to mobile and smartphones during a school rally, and it involved the head of the football team. These types of depictions open up room for conversations about power dynamics and gender for teachers and their students in similar ways that popular young adults novels, such as The Hate U Give (Thomas, 2017) and others open up dialogue. Diving into the complexities that students face, especially with social media, could be illuminating in a classroom discussion. As parents, we might want to shy away from the feminist snaps that are happening in these shows. We never want to think about our children suffering, and these snaps are an in-depth exploration of how young girls are suffering at the hands of a patriarchal society in ways that parents might not understand. That said, co-watching with our children might be a good first step, especially if one is prepared to listen to how these programs represent the lived experiences of youth that we might not be privy to or that might differ from our own teenage years. Also, moving beyond the happiness binding toward real change could be important as well, which we could model for our children. With the controversy around Cuties (Mignonnes), it isn’t just that there was hypersexualization of girls; there was also some fear around the power of these young girls taking up their own sexuality, especially for Brown and Black girls, and its commodification into their own hands. Entering into this conversation with one’s own teens might be uncomfortable, but it can be a way to connect for both the adults and children, and it could be a factor in the choices we make as parents. An African-American journalist defends Cuties, for instance, by stating: To fit in with American culture, my mom put me in Dallas Cowboys cheerleader camp as a kid. My younger sister joined a competitive dance studio. She remembers going to competitions where girls as young as 7 were body rolling to the song "Roxanne" by the Police, which is about a sex worker. I don't recall mass movements to have cheerleading, reality shows such as "Dance Moms" or competitive dance troupes canceled for literally making money off American girls and their moms. (Attiah, 2020, para. 6)

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Netflix’s purchasing of Cuties (Mignonnes) is a move in a strong direction as it is a feminist film directed by a feminist of color and starring a young teen of color. The misfire in how this film was rebranded as a Netflix film, though, changed how this film was represented to an American audience as did the misguided MA rating that was put on the film. The way that concepts about feminism from girls of color become clouded over in politics, missing out on the point of the shows, perhaps deliberately so. This amounted to a film that highlighted much of what is missing from feminism in the other Netflix shows being lessened or silenced as there was a campaign to remove the film from Netflix or to ban Netflix because it chose that movie. Rather than moving to silence the film, we might work together as parents to protect all children both in school and out of school. First, comes awareness, though, and this is something that Netflix’s original programming is beginning to raise with adults and teens alike. This complexity is equally important and yet fraught with issues when it comes to race, which I will discuss in the next chapter, especially in terms of Blackness in Netflix’s original programming for youth.

Summing Up Feminism in the United States has a long history, but it is also fraught with complications, especially around race. Women of color have been excluded from the larger feminist conversation in many ways until the 1990s when Black feminist started pushing back. Now young feminists are feeling excluded as the third wave feminists struggle to understand and to embrace these new feminists. Some Netflix original shows and movies attempt to bridge this gap, which they do to some degree. By focusing on Bakhtin’s aesthetic seeing, which is a helpful grounding because it highlights that life itself is a series of performed acts, one can see how teens who watch these shows are key players in understanding how identity is formed in the interaction between the viewer and the performed acts on the screen. Adding hooks’ “oppositional seeing” can help to see these interactions with more nuance. In particular, the main conflict in these shows is an identity conflict that the teen girls have with themselves and the world around them. In this sense, the girls are in the midst of what Sara Ahmed calls a “feminist snap,” which is a breaking point created by and in response to patriarchial pressures. While there are varying degrees of feminist snap, in the Netflix programs featuring girls of color, the snaps are more extreme, in part worsened by the intersectionality of race and gender. The girls’ mothers illustrate a generational divide that teen girls’ experiences, and the way that these women handle their own gendered pressures provides both positive and negative models as they struggle to understand their daughters’ worlds. The girls, however, all have a version of a happy ending, however fleeting, as they work to resolve their struggles.

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Notes 1 Doucouré, 2020a 2 Kaling, Fisher, Klein, Miner, & Shapeero, 2020–2022. 3 Schave, Martin, Friedman, Glazier, & Chipera, 2020–2022 4 Lessing, Sackett, & Poehler, 2021 5 Doucouré, 2020a 6 Kaling, Fisher, Klein, Miner, & Shapeero, 2020 7 Kaling, Fisher, Klein, Miner, & Shapeero, 2020, “Pilot” 7:21 8 Kaling, Fisher, Klein, Miner, & Shapeero, 2020, “…pissed off everyone I know,” 20:39 9 Kaling, Fisher, Klein, Miner, & Shapeero, 2020, …”said I’m sorry,” 8:04 10 Kaling, Fisher, Klein, Miner, & Shapeero, 2020, “…said I’m sorry,” 8:34 11 Doucouré, 2020a, 1:09 12 Doucouré, 2020a, 1:14

References Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press. Attiah, K. (2020, September 16). Don’t fall for the ‘Cuties’ outrage. America loves exploiting Black bodies. Washington Post, NA. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/ A635625760/BIC?u=boon41269&sid=bookmark-BIC&xid=0939f051 Bakhtin, M. (2004). Epic and the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Trans.), The dialogic imagination by M.M. Bakhtin. University of Texas Austin Press. Bernard-Donals, M. (1994). Mikhail Bakhtin: Between phenomenology and marxism. Cambridge University Press. Budgeon, S. (2001). Emergent feminist? Identities: Young women and the practice of micropolitics. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 8(1): 7–28. Davé, S. (2013). Indian accents: Brown voice and racial performance in American television and film. University of Illinois Press. Dejmanee, T. (2018). Popular feminism and teen girl fashion blogs. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 32(3): 345–354. Dockterman, E. (30 March, 2022). What Mindy Kaling has learned about making great TV. Time. Retrieved from https://time.com/collection-post/6159385/ mindy-kaling-production-company-interview/ Doucouré, M. (Director). (2020a). Cuties (Mignonnes). [Streaming video]. Netflix. Doucouré, M. (2020b). Why I made Cuties. [Streaming video]. Netflix. Edell, D., Brown, L.M., & Tolman, D. (2013). Embodying sexualisation: When theory meets practice in intergenerational feminist activism. Feminist Theory, 14(3): 275–284. Gill, R.C. (2007). Critical respect: The difficulties and dilemmas of agency and ‘choice’ for feminism. A reply to Duits and van Zoonen. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 14(1): 69–80. Harris, A. (2008). Young women, late modern politics, and the participatory possibilities of online cultures. Journal of Youth Studies, 11: 481–495. Herbert, E. (2018). Black British filmmakers in the digital era: New production strategies and representations of Black womanhood. Open Cultural Studies, 2(1): 191–202. hooks, b. (2007) Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. South End Press. Jackson, S. (2018). Young feminists, feminism, and digital media. Feminism & Psychology, 28(1): 32–49.

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Kaling, M., Fisher, L., Klein, H., Miner, D., & Shapeero, T. (Producers). (2020). Never have I ever. [Streaming media]. Netflix. http://www.netflix.com Lessing, K., Sackett, M., & Poehler, A. (Producers). (2021). MoXiE!. [Streaming video]. Netflix. http://www.netflix.com Martin, A.B. (1986–2000). The baby-sitters club. [Book series]. Scholastic Inc. Mathieu, J. (2017). Moxie. Roaring Brook Press. Mehra, J. (2017). Sara Ahmed: Notes from a feminist killjoy. Guernica. Retrieved May 30, 2021. https://www.guernicamag.com/sara-ahmed-the-personal-is-institutional/ Munro, E. (2013). Feminism: A fourth wave? Political Insight, 4(2): 22–25. https://doi. org/10.1111/2041-9066.12021 O’Malley, S. (2021). Moxie. [Review]. RobertEbert.com. https://www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/moxie-movie-review-2021 Schave, M., Martin, A.M., Friedman, L., Glazier, A., Chipera, M. (Producers). (2020– 2022). The baby-sitters club. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Spivak, G.C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press. Thomas, A. (2017). The hate u give. Balzer + Bray.

6 WHAT IS BLACKNESS? Netflix’s Representation of African-American Youth

As a child, for some reason, I liked to watch daytime talk shows. Though I watched shows like Donahue, the show I really loved to watch was The Oprah Winfrey Show. Even as a mixed-race girl raised in the rural West, there was something so appealing and truly genuine about Oprah that appealed to me, and I watched her show long into adulthood. As I pursued my Master’s in Literary Studies, later on, I even chose Oprah’s magazine and Oprah’s Book Club as the focus for my thesis. As I learned more about womanism and about Black women throughout history, I began to see where these texts fit into a larger conversation and, honestly, the important struggles that Black women faced in being valued in the world. That said, I found that Oprah took back control both through her magazine in what I termed Oprah’s Panopticon (Gibbons, 2007). Some of the allure faded, to be sure, in knowing so much about what happens behind the scenes, so to speak, and with my own maturation into adulthood, but I still hold my fascination with Oprah as one of the markers of my own identity development. Of course, now, we have so many pressing issues around race in the United States that move beyond celebrity influence. “Black girls’ lives matter, however; the way their lives are represented in media, whether on television, in music, in print, or on the news, sends the message to Black girls and others that they, in fact, do not matter—their lives are not that valuable” (McArthur, 2021, p. 47). But, movements are starting to recognize the importance of those left behind. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter started in 2013 in response to Trayvon Martin’s murder, and it has since grown into a longstanding and important political and social movement. Well-known for its fight against violence toward the Black community, #BLM also has a strong stance that supports all Black people: “We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented DOI: 10.4324/9781003176992-6

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folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. Our network centers those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements” (https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/). The addition of those who have been underrepresented even within the Black movement is a vital addition to this movement, and it is one that is being undertaken in other arenas as well. “For Black girls and women, literacy enactments not only enable learning how to read print but also how to read the social context and environments” (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016), and special attention should be paid to how Black girls, in particular, are affected by literacy and how it can be empowering if fostered and disempowering if denied (Price-Dennis & Muhammad, 2021). In this chapter, I would like to explore how Netflix’s original programming for children and teens is helping to right those wrongs as well, at least to some degree. I am a mixed-race person, but I’m not a Black person. So, to understand what was happening with the influx of Netflix shows around Black (and biracial Black) characters, I turned to Black scholars (Love, 2021; Price-Dennis & Muhammad, 2021; Muhammad, 2021; Thomas, 2019). When it comes to how Black youth see themselves and how others see them in contemporary society, Black literacy scholars have taught me so much. Drawing from overlooked but rich African-American history, Muhammad (2021) illustrates how literacy was a powerful tool for liberation for freed slaves that they cultivated with themselves with literacy was denied them as African-Americans formed literary societies. This history has much to teach us as educators as we shift how we teach Black children in ways that are full of respect in what Muhammed (2020) terms Historically Responsive Literacy. This framework has four parts: 1) Literacy as identity meaning-making, 2) literacy as skills, 3) literacy as intellect, and 4) literacy as criticality (pp. 57-58). While all of these are valuable in the classroom, what is most useful for my purposes are the key parts that focus on, essentially, Black children knowing their own communities’ histories and their own valuable place in society (identity) and Black children having the knowledge and tools to fight for sustainable change when faced with inequality and oppression (criticality). But there is still a lot of work to be done. When it comes to Black youth and media use, in a large-scale study of Black teens and their parents, Rideout, Scott, & Clark, (2016) found that Black teens use their computers and smartphones for a surprising amount of entertainment, but a third often see racist content online, a quarter often see sexist content online, and almost a quarter have been disrespected online for their race (p. 12). These show that it matters how we see Black children, in particular Black girls, as they are at the intersection between both race and gender. In particular, as scholars and educators, it’s necessary to broaden our understanding of Black girls’ literacies. A broader and better way to view these literacies, according to Muhammad & Haddix (2016), is to see how Black girls’ literacies are: 1) Multiple; 2) Tied to identities; 3) Historical; 4) Collaborative; 5) Intellectual; and 6) Political/Critical (p. 325). All of these

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components are underexplored for these girls, but they are also important to understand and foster. Exploring Netflix’s original programming for teens with Black characters, then, could be important to see how this (in)visibility might or might not be happening in this streaming media space.

Background Though Bakhtin’s chronotope was meant to apply to novels, it is also useful in thinking through children’s texts as well. In applying Bakhtin’s chronotope to children’s literature in Australia, Zeegers, Pass, & Jampole (2010) explore how the chronotope in this literature for children is both a place that belongs to children and children alone, as in the identities that are being explored are those of children separate from the interference of adults. She asserts that “the time of this chronotope is the period of change and development associated with maturation from some stage of childhood to some stage closer to adulthood” (p. 20). In Netflix’s original programming for children and teens, the protagonists find themselves through a series of adventures and meetings with others, and their sense of self becomes increasingly complicated and multidimensional as they grow into tweens and teens. Chronotopes can have real consequences, though, for children and teens. Compton Lilly (2013) finds that chronotope is useful in thinking through how children are affected by time in school, as well as she analyzes how time is felt by a young Black man who has been held back in school so much that he is several grade levels behind. In her work, she found that “chronotopes in life operate with the full range of lived complexities, including social, cultural, political, economic, and societal fields” (p. 408). Netflix’s original programming for children falls into this type of chronotopic analysis well. The Netflix shows bring in different voices and perspectives, while at the same time, within the shows, there are a variety of voices from the different worldviews and identity markers from the young characters. Add on top of this the pandemic and the social and economic problems that were prevalent at the time the shows were made, and one can see how the “utterances” can become problematic quickly. These shows, then, must “assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 89) not only what it means to be a young person in the world but also what it means to be particularly young people in our current world. In this sense, attending to emotion in these dynamics could be helpful in understanding how the youth are navigating the media texts along with their own lived experiences. Ahmed (2004) states that “…we need to consider how emotions ‘make’ and ‘shape’ bodies as forms of action, which also involve orientations towards others” (p. 4). Ahmed shifts the question from “‘What are emotions?’” toward “‘What do emotions do?’” (p. 4). Rowsell (2020) explores how young people make a stance as “young people not only turn to the world with definitive stances but also, and importantly, do so through media and modes

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in artful, playful, innovative ways” (p. 628) as they shift from their “sensory, embodied affective experiences to actual designs” that they expressed materially and multimodally (p. 628). Lewis & Tierney (2013) explore how emotion mediates discussion of a film made by an African-American woman in a class with predominantly African-American girls. As the girls respond to the film, the way that emotion is treated by the participants, both the experienced socially just white teacher and the students, determines not only which ideas are discussed at length but also how the identities of the students themselves are determined. For instance, a Black student is treated as aggressive and off-topic, while the ideas of a white student expressing her feelings about being singled out are taken up at length in the discussion. The way that emotion is expressed through language around the media artifact impacts how the identities are formed and reformed in the classroom setting. The emotional response that I’d like to attend to in this chapter is that of being “willful” (Ahmed, 2014). Moreover, I’m wondering if these Netflix shows are, in fact, “willful” in crossing boundaries. In her research around what Ahmed calls the “feminist killjoys,” she came across a Grimm’s story of a willful girl that begins her book, Willful Subjects. In this story, a young girl disobeys her parents, so God strikes her down by giving her an incurable sickness. Even after death, though, her arm is raised defiantly out of the ground until her mother violently breaks it with a rod. Essentially, Ahmed begins with this story to illustrate how will can be externalized (outside of the self), controlled and controllable, and pedagogic, in that stories of willfulness can teach others how to behave or can serve as either an inspiring or a cautionary tale, depending on one’s perspective. The most salient point about willfulness, though, for these Netflix shows is Ahmed’s (2014) conclusion, that [w]ilfulness could be thought of as political art, a practical craft that is acquired through involvement in political struggle, whether that struggle is a struggle to exist or to transform an existence. Willfulness might be thought of as becoming crafty. (p. 133) Though the Black children and teens in the Netflix shows are undoubtedly willful, they must be so simply to learn to exist; they all become “crafty” not only to grow up but also to have the chance to become who they are meant to be. Their will is a deliberate act that is represented throughout each series in different ways. The characters in these Netflix shows have additional burdens to bear as young Black people. To add to this understanding, Thomas’ (2019) conceptual framework in The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games is helpful. Thomas’ work focuses on speculative transmedia with an emphasis on Black girls, in large part because there are not many Black boys, Black nonbinary, or Black trans characters in transmedia right now, but

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her insights are helpful in guiding understanding about how blackness in media operates. In particular, Thomas (2019) asserts that the dark fantastic is this: In the Anglo-American fantastic tradition, the Dark Other is the spectacle, the monstrous Thing that is the root cause of hesitation, ambivalence, and the uncanny. The Dark Other is the presentabsence that lingers at the edges of every fairy tale. (p. 23) As such, the Dark Other can never win and never should win. In fact, the readers who identify with the Dark Other have to subject themselves to watching the Dark Other be slain, “to watch [themselves] be slain–and justifiably so” (p. 23) within the narrative of the plot. It is through this depiction of blackness that whiteness itself is represented and honored. To shed light on how this works, Thomas focuses on the endarkened characters, the dark fantastic, in characters, such as Rue from The Hunger Games films and Bonnie Bennett in The Vampire Diaries, to illustrate how this dynamic is represented in film and television. I’m wondering how the dark fantastic operates in shows that have a mix of races depicted, which I will explore in this chapter, but I also wonder if the dark fantastic operates differently in shows that have a central Black character as the lead. What I found is that most of Netflix’s original shows for children that have race and gender as a component come in what I determine are three different categories. Many of the Netflix original programming for children and teens with Black characters have Blackness as part of the cast but not as part of the story in a substantive way. Another category of Blackness in Netflix’s programming is shows that make Blackness central. In other words, some Netflix shows make Blackness the point of the show or movie. The third category of Netflix shows are programs that have Black or multiracial-Black children or teens as central characters, but Blackness itself is more fluid in a way that complicates what it means in its representation. At the heart of the matter, all Netflix streaming shows with Black female leads are “willful” (Ahmed, 2014), and they all have a relationship with Thomas’ (2019) concept of the dark fantastic in different ways, but there is a continuum of how far these shows are willing to push boundaries and in what ways they are willing to do so.

Blackness as Part of the Story One of the first Black scholars to explore Blackness and film is bell hooks (2009), who discusses how white filmmakers often disregard race in their films, in part because they can, and how black filmmakers are often held to higher standards when it comes to race. Often Black filmmakers’ films are only allowed to matter if they are explicitly political. This is still somewhat true in Netflix shows, especially for younger children. Some of these shows, especially for younger

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ages, have an African-American character as part of a diverse cast. In shows for preschool children, there are different races represented, but they are often not explored. For instance, in Super Monsters,1 one of the main characters is AfricanAmerican, but she has stereotypical powers and appearance. Her powers are reminiscent of voodoo, and she wears long dreads. In the show Action Pack,2 the story revolves around four superhero children who are two Afro- and Afro-Latina girls, a Latino boy, and an East Asian boy. Similar in style to the very popular Canadian cartoon PJ Masks,3 in its plotlines and animation, this show is not as stereotypical as Super Monsters, but it isn’t exploring identities either. In it, the children solve small mysteries together while they build social skills, such as sharing with one another. Other shows have Black characters who play supportive roles to the leading white characters. For instance, in the cartoon Kid Cosmic,4 one of the main characters is a Black girl named Jo. She wants to escape her small town and her job working for her mom in the town’s only café, but instead, she gets an alien ring from the main character, The Kid, a white boy who discovers these superpower rings. She is a strong leader of the group, but she is a side character to Kid Cosmic. In Last Kids on Earth,5 Quint is the best friend of the main protagonist, Jack Sullivan. Though he is portrayed as smart and insightful, especially around engineering and science, he is not the main star of the show. Like the others in the group, he plays a supportive role for Jack. Quint is a solid best friend. Other Black side characters, however, have more development, which makes the shows themselves more willful (Ahmed, 2014). In Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous,6 a tween/early teen show that has a diverse cast trying to escape dinosaurs in the fictionalized world of Jurassic Park, the main character is Darius, a Black teen boy who loves dinosaurs. Rather than being sidelined, however, Darius is the one who knows everything about dinosaurs, and he is the one that all of the other teens look to when they are in danger to figure out a plan of escape. In She-Ra and the Princesses of Power,7 one of the central characters is a Black teen named Bo. Though not the lead character, Bo’s story is a good example of reshaping African-American male identities. Bo comes from a family headed by openly gay Black men, and both of these men are historians. They are loving and kind, and they do not want their son to be a soldier. Though Bo disobeys them to become a soldier, his uniform is slightly feminized as he sports a crop top, which they joke goodnaturedly about at times. More importantly, Bo is also the most emotionally strong character in this series. As the female leads, She-Ra, who is white, and Glimmer, who is mixed race, both struggle with their emotions, it is often Bo who is their support and their guide through tricky relationship issues. Similarly, Benson in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts8 plays a secondary Black male character who breaks the stereotype of a Black male. Benson is one of only two openly gay characters in children’s cartoons, and he is emotionally supportive throughout the series. He is also the only character who forms a loving, romantic relationship with another character in the Netflix program. These moves are similar to Toliver’s (2017) discussion of how Black

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men are repositioned in society in the Netflix series for adults called Luke Cage9 as Luke is positioned as a Black man who is not only powerful but who is deeply and profoundly literate as shown through his literacy practices in the show. This reframing of Black teen boys as empathetic and smart leaders, a trait often seen as feminized, is a willful move in these shows.

Blackness as Central to the Story Other Netflix original programming for children, though, focuses on teaching or expanding cultural norms about race in new ways. For instance, in Motown Magic,10 the central character named Ben is an African-American boy who has adventures in a magical world in a show that teaches about Motown music, a big part of African-American musical history. Though Ben’s best friends are white and Latinx, the central characters are all black children, namely Ben, his sister, mother, and father. The focus is on the music, and Smokey Robinson is even the executive music producer for the show. In each episode, Ben (or another central character) confronts a problem, such as having to share a room with one’s sister. To learn how to navigate through those problems, Ben uses a magic paintbrush to enter a fantasy world where the song’s lyrics help Ben to learn his lesson. Black history helps Ben to find his place in the world now. In another Netflix show created by Ludacris about his daughter called Karma’s World,11 the focus is on storylines around topics central to Black girls. In this show, Karma is a tween Black girl who lives with her mother, father, and younger brother. The community is mixed race but largely Black. In each episode, Karma confronts a problem typical for a tween girl, but there is always a focus on how it affects her as a Black teen. For instance, many plot lines in tween shows focus on appearance, but in Karma’s World, there is an entire episode where Karma struggles with not only accepting her hair but also setting boundaries around who gets to touch it. At a sleepover with her friends, Karma is bombarded with a lot of questions about her curly hair, including requests to touch it, which makes Karma feel uncomfortable about her hair. Afterward, Karma wonders if she should change her hair, but after writing and singing a rap song called “Proud of my Hair,” Karma decides she loves her hair. She even sets boundaries with her best friend, Switch, in a heartfelt discussion. The focus on music is similar to Motown Magic, but the difference in this show is that the focus is not only on issues around a Black girl specifically but also on the self-expression of the girl through the music she creates as a way to cope with life. Most of the Netflix original programming, though, that focuses on Black characters is trying to teach more than cultural components. There are two types of educational programming that focus on Black children. The first uses puppets or animated characters as the main protagonists, with Black (and other) adults as characters who guide these characters. For instance, in the show Waffles + Mochi,12 the protagonists are two puppets who explore different foods. This was the first show produced by Higher Ground Productions, a company founded by Barack

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Obama and Michelle Obama. Mochi is, well, a mochi ball, and Waffles is a mixedrace character: Her father is a frozen waffle and her mother a yeti. Both characters are fantastical, but they are engaging for preschoolers as they learn about food from a variety of special guest stars. The most prominent guest star is Michelle Obama, who produces the show and who plays the character of a story owner who guides Waffles and Mochi on their journeys. Though not explicitly racialized, Ask the StoryBots13 is another show for younger children that features animated characters who answer questions posed by children, most of whom appear as BIPOC children, though this is not mentioned explicitly in the question. In this case, many of the guest stars themselves are Black actors and performers who teach the storybots, and by extension, the children, about scientific concepts. For instance, in one episode exploring how computers function, Snoop Dogg played the operating system. In another episode, Zoe Saldaña plays a professor to explain concepts about space. With these guest appearances, children see a wider representation of people who know about STE(A)M concepts and who can teach them these concepts. Other shows help to teach African-American history. In Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black History,14 the premise is Kevin Hart teaching one of his daughters about Black history through a series of stories about prominent Black people throughout history. The series begins with his daughter becoming angry after watching 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013), and giving her best friend, a white boy named Jeremy, a purple nurple because she’s upset about slavery. This beginning appeals to a young audience by showcasing the identity issues from the daughter’s perspective. It shows the Black girl’s perspective as well as what the white boy’s reaction could and should be in response to these atrocities committed by his race, but it does so by showcasing a friendship. This leads to a show that involves funny live-action re-enactments and one puppet show as Hart narrates stories about the African-American people. For instance, he tells the story of Dr. Mae Jemison becoming the first African-American female astronaut. Throughout the re-enactments, there are actual historical photos of the people to add to the understanding. Will Smith has another movie about history called Amend: The Fight for America15 that explores the central ideas of democracy in America by focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment. This film includes interviews with prominent Black scholars and activists, such as Mary Frances Berry. Often, a voiceover of their words are shown over beautiful illustrations of Black people interspersed with their own interviews set on a black stage. Also included are Black actors reciting words from famous Black writers, such as Frederick Douglass, and photographs and other historical documents to highlight key concepts about Blackness and citizenship. These shows are highly multimodal, using visual images, sound (music or voice), and action to bring Black history to life for Black children and teens. Other Netflix original shows focus on teaching through children’s literature. For instance, Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices16 is a Netflix show that highlights children’s literature that focuses on Black themes and identities and on anti-racist teachings. Marley Dias is a Black teen who is the founder of #1000BlackGirlBooks, a highly successful campaign to have more Black

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representation in children’s literature, which has raised up to 13,000 books to date (https://www.marleydias.com/about/). In collaboration with academic scholars, the books were created “with a social justice framework around Identity, Respect, Justice, and Action” and it comes with an accompanying website with books listed for different ages along with supplementary activities and resources (https://www.netflixbookmarks.com/). As the host of Bookmarks, Dias introduces key figures in popular culture and children’s literature to read the books. These readings can be quite profound. For instance, Lupita Nyong’o, recently famous from the Marvel movie Black Panther, read her book Sulwe (Nyong, 2019) on Bookmarks. In this book, Nyong’o’s central character is Sulwe, which means “star,” who is a dark-skinned girl who wishes she could have lighter skin like her sister and the rest of her family. Throughout this beautifully illustrated book, Sulwe learns to love herself and to see herself as beautiful inside and out. Other guest hosts include Karamo Brown from another Netflix hit, Queer Eye (Collins et al., 2018–2022), along with other prominent actors and authors in the Black community, such as Common reading Let’s Talk About Race (Lester & Barbour, 2005) and Jacqueline Woodson reading her book The Day You Begin (Woodson & López, 2018). In another show produced by the Obamas’ Higher Ground Production company for Netflix is called Ada Twist, Scientist,17 a young Black girl named Ada Twist. Based on a book by the same name (Beaty & Roberts, 2016) and the subsequent series entitled The Questioneers (Beaty & Roberts, 2018), this show is based on the real-life physicist. She solves scientific problems with her white sidekicks, Rosie Revere and Iggy Peck. The fact that Ada is the lead character is present throughout the shows, though the children do solve mysteries collectively using their unique skills: Ada’s scientific knowledge, Rosie’s pluck, and Iggy’s engineering. Ada’s family is present as, well as a strong Black family that includes her mom, dad, and older brother. The goal of this show, though, is not about race at all. The goal is to teach scientific concepts along with basic skills such as getting along and sharing. The choice to have two white children as sidekicks to a Black girl character is deliberate, and I would say it is willful. This highlights the fact that it is an African-American girl who is the star of the show. Most shows will have white characters as the main stars with the African-American characters as the sidekicks, but Ada Twist, Scientist, reverses this dynamic, which makes it deliberately willful.

Blackness as Fluid and Hybrid Raising Dion When it comes to some Netflix shows, however, Blackness becomes much more complicated and fluid. This is due, in large part, to how impactful the streaming media can be for storytelling. As Thomas (2019) asserts:

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I focus on visual narratives (television and movies) because it seems that when the fantastic is transmediated from page to screen, conventions become that much more amplified, especially in the post-Harry Potter age. It is one thing to read and imagine a character who is the site of difference; it is quite another to see that character on the small or large screen. (p. 31) Some of these Netflix shows are based on other media, such as books and music, and it becomes even more interesting when the original texts are visual in nature as well. This is the case with two Netflix shows with central Black characters: Raising Dion18 and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts.19 Both of these shows began as comics, and their Netflix shows provide strong examples of the complexities of the dark fantastic in streaming media for children and teens. Raising Dion is based on a comic and a comic and video by the same name. Written by Dennis Liu, a Taiwanese dual citizen (Canadian/American), and illustrated by Jason Piperberg, the story centers around a young Black boy named Dion and his mother Nicole (https://www.lingthecomic.com/). In the Netflix show, the struggles that both Nicole and Dion face as they learn to cope with and embrace the power of Dion’s superpowers are explored. There is also a prominent plotline in both seasons that focuses on an overarching villain in the form of The Crooked Man who has killed Dion’s father and who is attempting to kill Dion, though this monster figure takes on two different characters in each season. Dion has special powers, such as moving objects with his mind, moving his body from space to space, and shooting electricity out of his hands. Through the first season of Raising Dion, Nicole and Dion must cope with his new powers. They must discover how he got them, what it means for Dion, and how he can be a normal boy with these special powers. What Nicole and Dion discover is that Dion’s father, along with Dion’s father’s best friend Pat, were affected by an anomaly on an expedition that turned Dion’s father into a powered person and Pat into a villain, though this is something that is revealed near the end of the first season. Though powered, Dion wants to be a regular boy who loves comic books, his two best friends, and who has big goals like really wanting to ride his bike to school on his own like a big kid. What is interesting, though, in Raising Dion is how the black women and girl characters are portrayed alongside Dion. This is where we get into the dark fantastic (Thomas, 2019). One of the main characters, of course, is Nicole, Dion’s mother. Nicole begins as a highly emotional character who does not have her life together. After the loss of her husband, Nicole has trouble dealing with the regular basics of life: She loses her job, she has to move, and she is constantly frazzled. On top of her life struggles, now she must deal with a child who can move Legos around the living room with his mind. To top it off, in the first season, Nicole relies heavily on her late husband’s best friend, but he turns out to be the villain, leaving her on her own again.

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What’s interesting about Nicole, however, is that once she does find her way in the second season, she becomes a key player as the connection between Biona, the company that studies the powered people, and the community of parents whose children have powers. As the mother of the first powered child, she has a position of strength. She also runs her own business, and she now has her own life together. Interestingly, though, this is where the dark fantastic comes in as Nicole is infected by a spore from a mysterious plant as she investigates a threat to Dion for Biona. When this spore infects the person fully, the person becomes essentially a walking plant that is controlled by the main villain, another version of the Crooked Man that has infected a child. The infected plant-person becomes dangerous, so throughout the last few episodes of the second season, Nicole is fighting becoming truly monstrous. In a strange twist of fate, Pat helps to develop a vaccine for Biona that helps Nicole have 36 more hours before she turns into the monster. Nicole uses this borrowed time to be a good mother to Dion by letting him ride his bike to school (she follows in her car without him seeing her) and by attending the school play he’s a part of. Nicole wants to be just a normal mother for Dion. Ultimately, Nicole does not become monstrous as the plotline cures all of the plant people after the villain is destroyed. But, the version of the dark fantastic as represented by Nicole is really interesting. She is dangerous, even to her own child, but, different from the examples in Thomas’ (2017) book, she is not a foil for whiteness. She is the foil for Dion, a young Black boy. This complicates matters, and it is mitigated in some ways by her mothering instinct. In fact, she even helps to defeat the villain as she offers sympathy to the child who was possessed by the Crooked Man. As a strong Black mother, with Nicole, love not villainy becomes this dark fantastic’s defining characteristic. As I discuss previously, Muhammad & Haddix assert that black girls’ literacies are: 1) Multiple; 2) Tied to identities; 3) Historical; 4) Collaborative; 5) Intellectual; and 6) Political/Critical (p. 325). In this sense, black womanhood as represented by Nicole falls under these same categories as well. Nicole has multiple ways of being that shift from season to season as she becomes more secure in her role, not only as a mother but also as an advocate for Dion and others like him. She uses both intellect and collaboration with the young people to figure out how to save them from the villains in the series. Nicole becomes a role model for young Black girls watching the show. Another very interesting example of the dark fantastic in this show is a character named Janelle Carr. Janelle Carr is a teenage girl whose power seems to be exploding objects from the inside out. When we first meet her, she has exploded something, scaring her Biona trainer. Janelle is positioned as a problem. In a scene where Janelle’s mother is talking to Nicole, we find out that Janelle had been a straight “A” student and very successful in school. But there was an explosion at school, and she was arrested and treated like a stereotypical troubled black girl (Love, 2021), which had a big influence on the way that the world saw her and the way that Janelle saw herself. It also changed the way that her

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mother saw her; the mother continues to see her as a problem that needs to be solved and that Janelle just needs her power to be taken away from her so that she can become normal. Janelle has become the dark fantastic to her mother and to herself. She’s a monster that needs to be taken care of, not in death, but in destroying her power. This is similar to how educators and parents sometimes see Black girls and how these girls learn to see themselves. As Dunn (2021) points out, there’s a problem in how we see Black girls. On the one hand, Black girls are hypervisible to (white) educators and others; they are seen as “‘acting out’” and “‘being grown.’” (p. 85). On the other hand, especially in classrooms, Black girls are often invisible. She encourages educators and others to “…cultivate a Black girl magic, a Black girl joy, a Black girl pleasure that exists in and out of schools” (p. 95) in ways that really see and understand these girls from their own perspectives. What the viewers find out as the story progresses is that Janelle can integrate and become one with all of the cells in the universe. Janelle’s power actually helps to save them in the end. She helps to create the vaccine that helps Nicole, and she fights in the battle against the Crooked Man alongside Dion and the others (all Black characters). Through embracing her own identity and being collaborative (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016), Janelle saves them all. This portrayal flips the dark fantastic around as it is actually something that can save all characters, black or white. The dark fantastic can be a way to work within a community of blackness to protect the community from what threatens it.

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts Another show that makes the dark fantastic more complex is Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts. The central character is Kipo Oak, a biracial tween girl who comes from both Black and Asian descent. Kipo becomes lost, and she must find her way to her father, Leo Oak, and later to her mother, Song Oak. At twelve going on thirteen, Kipo is alone in a harsh, unknown place. She loses her world, in other words, to find another. In this new world Kipo finds herself in, the animals and plants are gigantic, such as bunnies that are the size of city buildings. These animals are called Mutes, and the humans live in burrows under the ground. All of the Mutes have formed alliances against one another. Each has claimed a part of the land or abandoned cities, and they defend their territories against one another and against humans. In opposition to this mindset, Kipo is shown to have boundless enthusiasm and optimism, which leads her to believe that she can form friendships with any human or mute she comes in contact with, and usually, she’s right. She quickly forms friendships with other teens and one mute, and they go in search of Kipo’s home. One of the most pivotal characters in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is Song Oak, Kipo’s mother. Along with Leo, Kipo’s father, Song is a former scientist who developed technologies that blended Mega Mutes, the giant animals, with

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humans. Leo and Song both believe that blending these two types of species together will create a better future, so they decide to have a child who is both Mute and human. That’s how Kipo got her powers, but it also affected Song herself, turning her into a giant monkey. In fact, the viewers meet the monkey first, and it is only much later that it is revealed that this monkey is, in fact, Song Oak. In this form, Song is a problematic example of the dark fantastic as the monkey is an actual threat to Kipo and her friends. As a monkey, Song is controlled by the villains, including an icy blond woman who threatens all Mutes as well as Kipo, Kipo’s family, and her friends. The teens must overcome the monkey as a monstrous threat, and Kipo must destroy the monkey in order to regain her mother. The idea of a monkey threat is doubly problematic as it calls upon a common trope of being a monkey in the African-American community (Campbell, 2019). Song is Asian, but the trope still remains. It’s a misstep, but one that illustrates how tricky race can be in terms of representation. One of the most interesting characters in Kipo, however, is Wolf. Wolf is a young, seemingly Black girl who wears the cloak of a wolfskin throughout the entire series. She has darker skin, a waifish, and childlike body with beautiful big curly hair. Wolf has survived on her own on the surface, defending herself from the various Mutes who are a threat to her. In this sense, Wolf is the one who has been the most isolated, the most on her own without community. “Wolf, who grew up in the shadow of this hostile world, knows pain, suffering, and survival–essentially, “living on the street” makes her perspective hyper-aware of animosities toward her kind. (The character designs, too, are part of this dichotomy: Kipo’s cut, stylized, processed hair contrasts starkly with Wolf ’s messy, overgrown, nappy hair.)” (Johnson, 2020, para. 5). In this way, Wolf is more of a stereotypical “tough” Black girl figure, and she is treated by others in a way that often limits how her emotions can be expressed (Lewis & Tierney, 2013). The world has done her wrong, and she feels like she must protect herself by herself. Eventually, though, Wolf becomes a part of the group, and she truly loves Kipo and will do anything for her. As the show progresses near the end, Wolf ’s appearance goes through a transformation as Wolf sheds her wolf costume when she realizes that she’s hiding her identity behind it. Though this comic and Netflix series is created by a White male creator, the world that Wolf grows up in is a good example of Afrofuturism, which is “…dedicated to the creation of an egalitarian environment that is accepting of Black female bodies and the diversity they can encompass…” (Toliver, 2021, p. 155). By the end of the series, there’s a flash forward to a picnic where they are older teens, and Wolf is happily wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and a shirt but no wolf cape. She still has beautiful big curls and a happy smile. Wolf is a part of her community, and she stands strongly within that community. She uses her strengths, and she becomes a confident young woman without the fear and anxiety that had been at the core of her interactions in the early days of their friendship.

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Kipo is not only the lead character but also the most hybrid of all of the characters. Kipo is a slender and beautiful girl with light skin, spiky anime-like pink hair, and almond-shaped eyes. She wears black leggings, and an off-the-shoulder t-shirt, and a tank. Not only is Kipo mixed race in terms of her heritage from her father and her mother, but she turns into a giant pink jaguar when threatened. Kipo has this fierceness, she has this power, but it’s something that she doesn’t understand. And so much of the show is trying to come to an understanding of how she got this power, what it means for who she is, and what she can do to save not only herself but her friends and her community. Kipo forms alliances with all of the humans and Mutes she meets in their adventures, and she uses her powers for good. Ultimately, she frees the humans and Mutes, including her own parents, with her powers. As Bettina Love asserts, listening to Black girls will make the world better: I don’t know what that is about but when you listen to Black girls, they are not only going to tell you about what’s going on with them but what’s going on with society…And I think when you live at so many intersections, you just have a really deep understanding of what makes the world better. (Love, 2021, p. 61) With this series, hybridity is the strength. Once Kipo embraces the dark fantastic within her, she saves them all, making the dark fantastic even more complex.

Reflections and Connections When including representation from Black communities and others, it’s not enough just to have a Black character in the show. At best, just the appearance of a Black (or other marginalized) person is tokenism; at worst, it is an example of the dark fantasy where the Black character is used simply as a means to glorify the white lead character. What Netflix is doing with many of its original programming for children and teens, however, is something different. There’s a willfulness to the representation of Black characters, both boys and girls, that moves them beyond token side characters or beyond villains. It’s true that in the shows for preschoolers or younger elementary aged children, some shows are more stereotypical than they ought to be. But, the push toward diversity is somewhat willful even in these representations. The voices that are going into that show, one supposes, are conservative in pushing boundaries, probably because the audience is so young. This is less the case in some shows, such as Bookmarks, but the cartoons for younger children seem to have that issue. That said, there is even some movement toward making the Black characters more fully developed, even if they are side characters. Quint in The Last Days on Earth is the smartest of the bunch of teens, and he is the one who invents tools to save them from the monsters and other threats. In Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, Darius is the leader of the show, and he’s the one whom they all

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look up to for knowledge about the dinosaurs and for plans to keep them safe. He leads the group. And, Bo in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Benson in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts are both the emotional centers of the show, helping the other characters to navigate the social emotional side of relationships. None of these characters lack knowledge or are “thugs” in any sense. In many Netflix shows for children and teens, the foundation of knowledge stems from the Black community. In some, there are Black people educating about their own community, such as Motown Magic’s focus on the rich musical history of Motown or Karma’s own musical expression through the form of rap in Karma’s World. Some are explicitly documentary-style, such as Amend: The Fight for America, while others teach history through comedy, such as Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black HIstory. In other shows, Black people, both adults and youth, are educating others about science or history. Ada Twist solves children’s problems with science, while other shows educate about healthy eating, Waffles + Mochi or about basic science, e.g., Ask the StoryBots. Within the Black community, educating others is not new; there’s a long and varied history of Black people educating each other because they were locked out of other forms of education due to systemic racism (Muhammed, 2020). What is key in these shows, though, is that the speech genres in these shows have a flow from maker to audience in interesting ways. With these education shows with Black leads, then, there is a recognition that there is a strong Black audience as well as there is this history of educating within the communities of Black people. And, if white people are watching the shows, then they will learn both whatever is being taught about physics or food or historical Black figures and they will learn that Black people can teach white people, too. It’s a bold move, but a necessary one, for our society to move beyond racist and sexist stereotyping. Then, there are shows that really do push boundaries further. In these shows, there is a fluidity to race while still focusing on Black tweens and teens, especially girls (and women). In these Netflix shows, Blackness is front-and-center as the lead characters are Black or biracial Black. Setting this up from the get-go sets up a different dynamic for the idea of the dark fantastic as the lead character being highlighted by the inclusion of this force is also Black. It’s a similar move to the #BLM movement openly asserting that its movement is going to focus on the under-represented within its own Black movement. In this way, Dion saves his town (and according to the plot, all of Earth) by using his powers to fight the Crooked Man. Nicole is celebrated not as a threat to her son but as the one whose love saves them all. Janelle Carr is not a Black girl who needs to be arrested, but rather, she’s a girl who can literally become one with the universe. Wolf doesn’t have to hide behind her past to flourish in the future. Song Oak doesn’t have to be a monkey controlled by a white villain. And, Kipo can be all of her identities: Biracial, girl, and Jaguar. The dark fantastic is powerful and strong. And, in these shows, the dark fantastic is life-affirming. This is a truly willful act.

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Some scholars are already working to build up literacies in Black communities, both in print literacies and in media spaces, and expanding outward to research how Black children respond to Netflix’s programming could prove enlightening. In 2015, Gordon, Council, Dukes, & Muhammad (2019) hosted Black Girls Read! African-American Read-In, which was a celebratory event that involved Black girls reading books by African-American women and coming together to celebrate their identities, literacies, and community. Perhaps scholars could organize viewing groups to analyze and celebrate the programming on Netflix (and other streaming platforms) for Black children and teens similar to this event in their own college, university, or local schools. In 2021, I ran a series of conversations online for my university’s faculty, staff, and students called Netflix and Representation Discussion Groups (https://pylesdg.wixsite. com/mysite/discussion-groups-and-workshops), but now that the pandemic is lessening, running in-person events with young people around Netflix’s programming could be very impactful. Unlike the more feminist shows that I discussed in the last chapter, the Netflix original programming that focuses more on race seems to be less transgressive in terms of its themes. Mostly, there is less boundary pushing in terms of language and sexualities. That said, these shows would be able to be shown more readily in school classrooms. If educators can shift their thinking toward Muhammed’s (2020) Historically Responsive Literacy, in which literacy is identity meaningmaking, skillful, intellectual, and critical, then bringing in these Netflix shows as texts that matter for analysis could add much to the pedagogy in the classroom. Not only would it allow for Black children to see themselves in a more positive light (identity meaning-making), the texts themselves have strong themes and storytelling (skillful and intellectual) and push against heteronormative, white, patriarchal perspectives (critical) in ways that are understandable for all children. Given the pushback against anything labeled as CRT (Critical Race Theory) in many states (Schwartz, 2022), focusing on texts that are publicly available to all and that are popular with all children while still having much to teach about Black children could be a way to benefit more children in these difficult times. I would not feel comfortable making recommendations for Black parents around Netflix’s programming, but as a mixed race parent to mostly white children, I can say that I have had to educate myself a lot when it came to Netflix’s programming for Black children. Educating myself has been key to understanding how impactful these shows could be not only for Black children but also for my own children. Beginning with shows, such as Bookmarks and Karma’s World could be a good starting point, as they provide solid history and perspective giving from the Black community as they are an attempt to educate that community about their own culture. But, it’s also helpful not to shy away from narratives that have kids of color in main roles, such as Raising Dion or Kipo, as they have a lot to teach us about what it means to be a young person of color in the world, even if they have fantasy elements. Co-watching with our children can also be a good

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idea. Actually, it’s been my own children who have turned me on to these shows, especially Raising Dion and Camp Cretaceous, so they have a lot to teach us as well about acceptance and understanding, I’ve found. Creating space, though, in our own viewing and in our children’s viewing experiences is important to build understanding and to keep our children from perspective silos that focus only on their own race and identity group. This move away from limiting perspectives toward more inclusivity in understanding will be important as I conclude the book in the last chapter.

Summing Up In this chapter, I am trying to think through how Blackness was being represented to young people in different ways in Netflix’s original programming. What I found was that there were three main ways that Blackness was explored. The first is the more traditional, I would say, way of having a Black character as a friend or companion to a white lead. This is common in Netflix shows, but even in these shows, there is some movement toward creating more dynamic Black characters who are intellectually and emotionally strong rather than simply being tokenized or static representations. The second type of representation are shows that focus on Black youth as the lead characters, including shows that are set in predominantly or all-Black communities. These shows are meant to provide Black children with characters who look and act like they do, and they provide a rich history and set of experiences for those children and an educational experience for children from other groups. The third type of representation are shows with Black (or biracially Black) lead characters who allow for more fluidity in how race is depicted in positive ways. These shows push back against Black characters simply being a foil to help the white characters shine, i.e., the Dark Fantastic (Thomas, 2017); but rather, this fluidity allows for the Black characters to be vulnerable without being inherently flawed, and it allows for the characters to express their identities with more complexity. In this way, the voices that come into and out of the shows (Bakhtin, 2004) have a rich layering, and the Netflix original shows are “willful” in that they represent Blackness as “crafty” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 133).

Notes 1 Arad & Bohbot, 2017–2021 2 Harper, 2022 3 Dumont, Clunie, & Gardiner, 2015-present 4 McCracken, Renzetti, & Cobb, 2021–2022 5 Brallier & Peterson, 2019–2021 6 Lueras, Kreamer, Spielberg, Trevorrow., & Marshall, 2020–2022 7 Stevenson & Austen, 2018–2020 8 Sechrist & Wolkoff, 2020

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9 Croal, Cooper, & Barringer, 2016–2018 10 Wakely, 2018–2019 11 Bridges, Commisso, Gaffney, Harris, O’Connell, Santomero, & Stacey, 2021–2022 12 Thormahlen, Konner, Davis., Swaminathan, Braverman, Obama, & Obama, 2021–2022 13 Spiridellis & Spiridellis, 2016–2019 14 Stern, 2019 15 Green & Leon, 2021 16 Hyman, 2020 17 Nee, 2021–2022 18 Barbee et al., 2019–2022 19 Sechrist & Wolkoff, 2020

References Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. 2004. The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press. Arad, A. & Bohbot, A. (Executive Producers). (2017–2021). Super monsters. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Bakhtin, M. (1986). The problem of speech genres. In C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Eds.), V. W. McGee (Trans.) Speech genres and other late Essays (pp. 60–102). University of Texas Press. Barbee, C. et al. (Executive Producers). (2019–2022). Raising Dion. [Streaming Media]. Netflix. Beaty, A. & Roberts, D. (2016). Ada Twist, Scientist. Abrams Books for Young Readers. Beaty A. & Roberts D. (2018). Rosie Revere and the Raucous Riveters. Amulet Books. Brallier, M. & Peterson, S. (Executive Producers). (2019–2021). The last kids on Earth. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Bridges, C., Commisso, V., Gaffney, C. Harris, W., O’Connell, D., Santomero, A.C., Stacey, J. (Executive Producers). (2021–2022). Karma’s world. [Streaming Media]. Netflix. Campbell, E. (2019, Dec 4). The Problem with picture book monkeys: Racist imagery associating simians with Black people has a long history. School Library Journal. Retrived from https://www.slj.com/story/The-problem-with-picture-book-monkeys-racistimagery-libraries Collins, D., et al. (Executive Producers). (2018–2022). Queer eye. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Compton Lilly, C. (2013). The temporal expectations of schooling and literacy learning: Jermaine’s story. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 56(5): 400–408). Croal, I.M., Cooper, A., & Barringer, G. (Producers). (2016–2018). Luke Cage. [Streaming Media Series]. Netflix. Dumont, O., Clunie, L., Gardiner, B. (Executive Producers). (2015-present). PJ Masks. [Animated series]. Disney Junior. Dunn, D.C. (2021). Black girl to Black girl: Gratitude journaling as an emancipatory practice. In D. Price-Dennis & G. E. Muhammed (Eds.), Black girls’ literacies: Transforming lives and literacy practices (pp. 83–97). Routledge. Gibbons, D. (2007). O: The Oprah Magazine’s contradictory self-help messages. In E. Watson & J. Harris (Eds.), The Oprah Phenomenon (pp. 277–292). University Press of Kentucky.

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Gordon, C.T., Council, T., Dukes, N., & Muhammad, G.E. (2019) Defying the single narrative of black girls’ literacies: A narrative inquiry exploring an African American read-in. Multicultural Perspectives, 211: 3–10, Doi: 10.1080/15210960.2019.1572484 Green, R.M. & Leon, K. (Directors). (2021). Amend: The fight for America. [Streaming Media Series]. Netflix. Harper, W. (Creator). (2022). Action pack. [Streaming Media Series]. Netflix. Hyman, F. (Director). (2020). Bookmarks: Celebrating Black voices. [Streaming Media Series]. Netflix. Johnson, K. (2020, June 24). How Kipo and the age of wonderbeasts codes blackness. Den of Geek. https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/how-kipo-and-the-age-of-wonderbeastscodes-blackness/ Lester J. & Barbour K. (2005). Let’s talk about race. HarperCollins Publishers. Lewis, C. & Tierney, J.D. (2013). Mobilizing emotion in an urban classroom: Producing identities and transforming signs in a race-related discussion. Linguistics and Education, 24: 289–304. Love, B. (2021). Kitchen table talks: Creating spaces for Black girls’ literacies. In D. PriceDennis & G. E. Muhammed (Eds.), Black girls’ literacies: Transforming lives and literacy practices (pp. 44–56). Routledge. Lueras, L., Kreamer, S., Spielberg, S., Trevorrow, C., & Marshall, F. (Executive Producers). (2020-2022). Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous. [Streaming Media]. Netflix. McArthur, S. A. (2021). Black women and girls social activism tradition: Critical media literacy and the Black girls’ literacies framework. In D. Price-Dennis & G. E. Muhammed (Eds.), Black girls’ literacies: Transforming lives and literacy practices (pp. 44–56). Routledge McCracken, C., Renzetti, R., & Cobb, M. (Executive Producers). (2021–2022). [Streaming Media]. Netflix. McQueen, S. (2013). 12 years a slave. [Motion Picture]. Fox Searchlight Pictures. Muhammad, G. (2021). Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Scholastic. Muhammad, G. E., & Haddix, M. (2016). Centering black girls’ literacies: A review of literature on the multiple ways of knowing of black girls. English Education, 48(4), 299–336. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26492572 Nyong, L. (2019). Sulwe. Simon & Schuster. Price-Dennis, D. & Muhammad, G.E. (Eds.) (2021). Black girls’ literacies: Transforming lives and literacy practices. Routledge. Rideout, V., Scott, K., & Clark, K. (2016). The digital lives of African American tweens, teens, and parents: Innovating and learning with technology. Retrieved from https://cgest.asu. edu/digitallives Rowsell, J. (2020). “How emotional do I make it?”: Making a stance in multimodal compositions. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63(6: 627–637. Schwartz, S. (2022, June 11). Map: Where critical race theory is under attack. Education week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/leadership/map-where-critical-racetheory-is-under-attack/2021/06 Sechrist, R. & Wolkoff, B. (Executive Producers). (2020). Kipo and the age of wonderbeasts. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Spiridellis, E. & Spiridellis, G. (Creators). (2016–2019). Ask the storybots. [Streaming Media]. Netflix. Stern, T. (Director). (2019). Kevin hart’s guide to black history. [Streaming Media]. Netflix.

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Stevenson, N.D. & Austen, C. (Executive Producers). (2018–2020). She-Ra and the princesses of power. [Streaming Media]. Netflix. Thomas, E.E. (2019). The dark fantastic: Race and imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press. Toliver, S.R. (2021). Beyond the problem: Afrofuturism as an alternative to realistic fiction about Black girls. In Detra Price-Dennis & Gholnecsar E. Muhammed) (Eds.), Black girls’ literacies: Transforming lives and literacy practices (pp. 153–169. Routledge. Toliver, S.R. (2017). Unlocking the cage: Empowering literacy representations in Netflix’s Luke Cage Series. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61(6): 621–630. Zeegers, M., Pass, C., & Jampole, E. (2010). A class of chronotopes: Adult reading of children’s and young adult literature. The International Journal of the Book, 7(4): 89–96. Wakely, J. (Creator and Director). (2018–2019). Motown magic. [Streaming Media]. Netflix. Woodson, J., & López, R. (2018). The day you begin. Nancy Paulsen Books.

7 THE BENEFITS AND NECESSARY EVILS OF NETFLIX KIDS AND THE STREAMING MEDIA CHILD

Leonardi & Neeley (2022) explore how people can develop what they term a digital mindset in our modern world. They assert that people need to develop three key areas: Collaboration, computation, and change. With collaboration, people learn to interact with AI (artificial intelligence) devices. With computation, people learn how algorithms work and how data is collected, stored, and used, including a section on Netflix itself. And, with change, they examine cybersecurity and experimentation. They claim that people need to understand only 30% of the knowledge in these areas to be effective. What is interesting to think through with this book, though, is how much it applies to what children and teens are already intuitively doing when they stream media on Netflix. Though Netflix is not AI (yet), children are learning to communicate with technological devices as they navigate the platform. They are immersed in algorithms in what Netflix recommends shows on those interfaces. And they experiment along with Netflix on different types of streaming, such as interactive shows and movies. They also unwittingly engage with cybersecurity and data collection, storing, and use as their data is compiled within Netflix’s system. But, if the 30% rule holds, then interacting with and understanding the mechanics of some of the ways that Netflix works is sufficient to work with it as a media streaming service. Yet, I’m interested in more than what use Netflix has for children and teens. I have spent my whole life loving TV shows, and as my children started watching their own shows, I noticed that something was different in their viewing habits. Given my past work on identities, literacies, and media, especially with youth of color and rural communities (Gibbons, 2013; Gibbons, Drift, & Drift, 2011; Gibbons Pyles, 2015, 2016), the wheels in my brain started spinning. When I began DOI: 10.4324/9781003176992-7

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writing Literacy and Identity Through Streaming Media, my intention was to try to understand what the streaming media landscape of Netflix was, especially for young children and teens. I wanted to understand what draws children to stream the media content in this space and what kept them watching. I also really wondered if or how that media landscape matters for (re)forming particular identities in children as streamers of media. What I found was so much more intriguing that I even thought it would be. Netflix Kids fundamentally changes how children and teens interact with streaming content as it creates a streaming media environment, as represented in Figure 7.1. In this streaming media environment, Netflix’s original programming for children and teens fosters new ways of seeing time, new ways of seeing space, and new ways of understanding and fostering identities. In essence, Netflix creates what I call a streaming media child who has a set of expectations of streaming media’s interface and content, as well as a deliberate acceptance of some major drawbacks to the way that they have access, namely a willingness to let algorithms use their data to provide (and limit) their choices. In this figure, one can see how on one side, there is the streaming media interface and the streaming media child. This is how the children and teens access the media content. Children and teens have their own identities, beliefs, and desires that they bring to their viewing, but Netflix also has a set of identities and beliefs that are pressing onto the shows and that work within the shows. As such, Netflix also pushes those to the young viewers as well through the algorithms as the children use the mode of gesture to access the programs through whatever device they are using to watch Netflix. On the other side of this figure is a representation of the streaming media itself. In the streaming media content, there are the streaming media creators, i.e., Netflix as a corporation, the show’s writers, the producers, etc. These creators have the most input on what makes up the show itself in terms of plot, characterization, and themes. These creators, though, have societal expectations that push upon their shows as well. They are, after all, creating shows that are meant to appeal to the audience in order to make money for Netflix. It does appear, though, that there is real care happening on some level about the identities of the audience of the streaming media children as well. Much of the content itself of Netflix’s original programming attempts to be “woke” (Harriott, 2019) in terms of pushing some boundaries for gender and some boundaries for race, especially for the Black community, though it has some work to do for other communities, e.g., LGBTQ+, Asian-American, and Latinx. These identities are represented in a variety of ways, such as through a feminist snap or in other willful ways (Ahmed, 2017). These dynamics provide children a way to engage with identities, some of which they also have and some that are new to them. These interactions show some promise in representing children and teens in positive ways.

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FIGURE 7.1 

Streaming Media Environment in Netflix’s Youth Programming

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Netflix Fosters New Ways of Seeing Time and Space One aspect of Netflix that is notable is just how much choice it offers to children and teens in terms of its content, and the streaming media child expects to have a bounty of shows to choose from in his/her/their streaming media. With over forty rows that each have several shows and movies to choose from, and with a backlog of thousands more, it could seem to children that they could watch Netflix forever before running out of something to see. That impression is deliberate, and it’s intended to keep children coming back for more. But this access also works to change the way that children engage with time and space (Bakhtin, 2004) on Netflix. As children have access to shows at any time, 24/7, this sets up the expectation that a child should be able to watch anything at any time. No longer do children and teens have to wait to see their shows on cable TV; they can turn on the television or other devices and see their shows at any time. Also, it doesn’t matter when a show was created, as Netflix’s original programming is persistent, as the shows are accessible long after they were originally available. Children learn that they can go to Netflix to watch and rewatch their favorite shows over and over, and they come to depend on the choices to find more of what they might like. Not only are there seemingly unlimited choices, but the episodes of shows are streamed at once, turning the streaming media child into a binge-watcher just like adults are. Watching an entire narrative arc changes the way that children and teens engage with the chronotope or timespace (Bakhtin, 2004) of storytelling itself. No longer limited to a 30-minute TV show with interruptions for commercial breaks or even a 2 or 3 hour movie, children and teens can watch episode after episode, completing an entire season at one time or over a short amount of time. Auto-play, which is a regular feature of Netflix, makes the move to the next episode seamless, and children can even skip the credits, so it seems like the narrative just continues from where they left off in the previous episode. This seamless transition makes any narrative break negligible, and the story continues. What this means for the streaming media child, then, is that narratives are very long, sometimes spanning 6 hours or more, depending on how many episodes are in a season. And, given that children will likely rewatch their favorite series, the amount of time that children spend with one narrative can really add up. So, the time of the shows increases while the amount of time between breaks in the narrative decreases, and the space of the narrative increases as well to cover a season or more. Adding in the fact that there are often several versions of the same show, then, one can see how storytelling becomes bigger and bigger in the world of Netflix kids programming. Streaming media children are also given a lot of adapted texts in Netflix’s original programming, and they begin to expect to see adaptations of their favorite books, characters, or shows. Almost all of the shows Netflix creates stem from something else. For instance, True and the Rainbow Kingdom1 is a Netflix

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original program that began from artwork by an art collaborative called Friends With You. Netflix has since created 12 additional shows based on this original series that include not only additional storylines but also holiday specials and singalong shows. Netflix has created a number of shows for teens that are based on books, such as 13 Reasons Why,2 Anne with an E,3 MoXiE!,4 A Series of Unfortunate Events,5 and The Baby-Sitters Club.6 Netflix has even created shows based on videogames, such as Carmen Santiago7 and comics, such as Kipo and the Age of Wonder Beasts8 and Shadow and Bone.9 Not only is it a sound marketing strategy to bring to life what children are already familiar with, it is also a good way to keep children watching. If children and teens know that they will see something new based on something they already like, then they are likely to come to Netflix for their entertainment. But, streaming media children also expect to control aspects of the streaming media themselves now that Netflix has taken this adaptation to a new level with their interactive media. With these streaming media, Netflix allows children and teens a space where they can interact and change the storylines and characterizations themselves. In this way, streaming children play with their media with interactive dialogic play. If they want, they can make choices that run against a character’s goals or main traits, such as having Bear Grylls eat something disgusting or having Puss in Boots kiss his nemesis, or they can use the storylines to achieve their own goals, such as becoming CEO in Boss Baby.10 They know the characters and shows as they are all adaptations of existing Netflix original content, so the children can play using the digital tools of the interactive platforms and their devices to take the narrative in new directions or to follow along familiar story arcs or characterizations with their adaptive revisions (Bryant, 2013). This freedom with the narrative and the characters, even with the constraints, allows for fun interactivity for the streaming media child, and it gives a sense of control over the media that they do not have with other media sources as they merge their own voices in a heteroglossic way (Bakhtin, 1990) with those of the streaming media themselves. Moreover, Netflix Kids requires multimodal complexity, so streaming media children have to develop new skills to interact with its interface as they choose not only which shows to watch but also which episodes to watch. In essence, there is a multimodal assemblage (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) of menus, thumbnails, video previews, written text, and so on. There are even additional features, such as trailers or previews of shows, additional information about the shows, such as starring actors, and Netflix’s own categorization of the show, e.g., kid’s comedy, etc. Children use the mode of gesture to scroll through the choices and to navigate their way through the various aspects of the interface. They use their multimodal skills to glean from the thumbnails which show to watch, especially if they are too young to read print. And they use the mode of image to scroll through the rows themselves, again to find the thumbnails of the shows they want. Print is also strong, especially when navigating through the episodes to

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find the one they want to watch, though there are also reminder thumbnails for each episode as well. There are also multiple menus or screens that open up with even more choices or options that the child must choose from for each Netflix title. In a nutshell, the Netflix interface teaches the streaming media child to use the multiple modes of print, image, and gesture to find what she is looking for, but she has to work through those to get to any given show from among the many choices available. Therefore, Netflix sets up a system where streaming media children can expect unfettered access to shows that they are likely to find appealing as they are often based on what children already know and like. They can access these shows at any time and in perpetuity, or at least until they grow bored and move on to another show. And they can even play with the shows themselves as they mix in new plotlines or new experiences for the characters in the shows that they already love to watch. These expectations for streaming media children add up to new ways to experience the time and space of Netflix’s platform than had been previously available with other forms of television or video viewing. Children become their own curators (Potter, 2012) of the content they’d like to view and/ or experiences they’d like to have with those shows.

Netflix is “woke” …. kind of The second key finding is that there is a good amount of freedom on streaming media services, such as Netflix, to push some boundaries in terms of race and gender, and this freedom is being exercised to some degree. Not having the long-standing confines of mainstream media, Netflix is able to stream movies, such as Cuties (Mignonnes),11 or to create shows, such as Never Have I Ever,12 that would not air on major networks due to how far they dive into teen girl sexuality and other major themes. Netflix’s original programming is able to push boundaries and to show more experiences, and it is making shows and movies that do actually depict different races, ethnicities, genders, and LGBTQ+ people and themes? But does this make Netflix “woke” (Harriott, 2019; McCormack & Legal-Miller, 2019)? If one has an understanding of “wokeness” that is broadly conceptualized, then maybe, to some extent. I know that I’m hedging, but the way that Netflix is “woke” has a double-edge to it. In one sense, Netflix’s original programming is open to representing the messiness of the young (and older) female experience in a patriarchal world. In particular, some Netflix shows place the focus on the feminist snap (Ahmed, 2017), a time when the pressures of patriarchy make a woman or girl push back. Though there is less of a push in some programming, such as The Babysitter’s Club and MoxIe!, there are still instances in which girls are fighting to be heard in their own ways. Other films and series focus solely on the female protagonist, who is snapping as the way to tell her experiences. For example, viewers follow Devi in Never Have I Ever as she tries to find her way after her father dies at one

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of her concerts, especially how she tries and fails and tries again at relationships with her mother, best friends, and romantic interests. Similarly, Amy in Cuties (Mignonnes) tries to find new friendships as a Black, Muslim, immigrant while still trying to exist in her family, especially as her family’s world is turned upside down with her father’s impending wedding to a second bride. Though these girls use sexuality in different ways, both push back against patriarchal demands while still falling prey to some parts of them as well. Viewers watch as they struggle through the complex demands of being a tween and teen girl, especially one of color, in their communities. Often the girls make mistakes in their relationships, but it’s clear the pressures they have to endure and the pressures that break them, even if their snap in response is truly what frees them, or at least provides some respite from the pressures. After all, the girls still live in their patriarchal worlds, but at least they gain some confidence and their own voices, to some extent, as they exist in that world. Netflix’s original programming also has a wide range of different shows that are attempting to represent Black experiences about and for young people. While some of these shows simply include a Black character, usually in a secondary though pivotal role, such as Quinn in The Last Kids on Earth13 or Michelle Obama’s character in Mochi + Waffles,14 some of the shows are attempting to represent black children’s experiences more fully. For the younger set, shows such as Motown Magic15 and Karma’s World16 feature a Black child in the main role, and these shows are explicitly black, set in a Black family and community. Other shows are educational: They teach about black history, such as Kevin Hart’s show Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black History17 and Amend: The Fight for America18 or books about Black kids, some written by and read by Black female authors, such as in Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices.19 These shows are willful in that they are talking about Blackness with Black children as their audience. Both of these acts push back on whiteness as a given in media programming as it has been throughout media history and how it is currently in many ways today. Netflix Kids is doing more than educating children, though, as it is also moving past strict identity boundaries in some shows as well. In some shows, Netflix pushes against boundaries in a way that is political. Ahmed (2014) asserts that “[w]illfulness might be thought of as becoming crafty” (p. 133). With the characterization in these types of shows, the craftiness comes in how Black identity is no longer monolithic; Black identity is fluid. In this way, the shows push back against the idea of the dark fantastic (Thomas, 2019) in which Blackness is used as a foil for whiteness to highlight how Blackness is an evil that must be fought by white children as saviors. In shows such as Raising Dion and Kipo and the Age of Wondrous Beasts, the dark fantastic is made more “crafty” as the Black characters have more nuance. Dion in Raising Dion is a typical Black boy in many ways, but he also has superpowers that make him fight against patriarchal, white bad guys who try to destroy the world. Janelle in Raising Dion should be the dark fantastic as a powerful Black girl, but her powers are actually used as a foil to Dion’s.

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Granted, she does use her powers against a white character, but that white character is the villain, not the protagonist. Also, in Kipo, Wolf is a young Black girl who must find her own identity, not against whiteness but in conjunction with her diverse multiracial community. In fact, she travels with Benson, a gay Black boy, Kipo, a mixed race (Asian/Black) girl, and two Mutes, which are fantastical creatures. She is a foil to Kipo, who is also not white. Kipo also finds herself and her path within this world. Though she does fight a white woman in the last season, she is not depicted as evil. She is fighting evil. This broadens the scope of what Blackness means to include more versions of representation, which is a strength of Netflix’s programming for kids. Netflix, in this sense, is “willful” (Ahmed, 2014) in how it is pushing boundaries, but it could do better. As a huge company intent on gaining and keeping subscribers, Netflix wants to create content that will appeal to the most people while still not offending anyone outright. Sometimes, this gets the company into trouble when identities clash. For instance, recently Netflix ran a comedy special with Dave Chappelle, a prominent Black comedian, which included transphobic jokes (Kreps, 2022). In response, some trans people and those who support them staged a walk-out in protest. Most recently, Netflix has signed a new deal with Chappelle to do another series, which has outraged those who were upset by the previous controversy. This type of problematic issue shows how far Netflix still has to go on some identity representation. But even with their streaming content for children that is positive, they could be more representative. Other than the remake of One Day at a Time,20 which is worth analyzing for its strong LGBTQ+, Latinx, and feminist characters and themes, there are few Latinx shows and movies. There are some queer characters who are positively represented, such as Benson in Kipo and the Age of Wondrous Beasts. Mostly queer characters are secondary, though sometimes really important, characters, such as Fabiola on Never Have I Ever, or the somewhat stereotypical but likable Jonah on that show as well. There are more Asian-American shows, though, and they would be worth analyzing as well, from children’s cartoons, such as Wish Dragon,21 to teen dramas, such as To All the Boys I Loved Before.22 There are even some shows that feature neurodiverse characters, so that’s a plus, but there are few other abilities featured. Overall, in the world of identity politics, Netflix is making some strides, but as with the larger society, there is still some work to be done for our next generation.

Call to Action Overall, there are a lot of positives for streaming media children to engage with Netflix for their viewing entertainment, and Netflix is attempting to be more “woke” in what it creates for children and teens. It does matter, however, about who the children are and how they identify themselves as they watch. So, in essence, while there are so many choices of programs on Netflix Kids that it seems

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endless. In reality, the choices are limited for children who are not straight White, able-bodied children, and teens. It is absolutely possible, given the wide range of content, that white boys and girls might see the mainstream Netflix programming without ever watching the shows that focus on other gender dynamics or racial groups, for instance. It is not that minoritized groups need to educate white children, but it might be enlightening for white children to learn about other groups through watching shows that are not about themselves. They could benefit from the differing worldviews and the shifting, more fluid identity expressions. Am I suggesting that Netflix’s algorithms recommend these shows to children who are choosing shows that might signal that they are white? No, of course not. But, it would be good for parents and caregivers to steer their children toward other content as well to avoid echo chambers of identity connection. Though one might think that the same could be said for children of color or children and teens who are LGBTQ+, there just simply isn’t enough content that is solely for these groups to make it a possibility for a Black child to only watch Black programs or a queer child to only watch LGBTQ+ programs or a child with diverse abilities to watch only shows representing her. Aiming for that goal, though, might not be a bad one as it would raise awareness for all people to have that much to choose from. One call to action would be for allowing or encouraging all children to watch a diversity of programming, and for scholars, parents, and educators to push Netflix to widen their scope even more so in the programs that they are choosing to greenlight. Though algorithms are what make the Netflix interface possible, it is worth noting that the seamlessness of the way algorithms work seems to be designed to make streaming media children comfortable with algorithmic control is something to pay close attention to as scholars, educators, and parents. In fact, the banality and the ubiquity of algorithms in our everyday lives have impacted how people connect with their own identities and with their own sense of self. In this book, I’d like to put forward the idea that the reliance on algorithms is highly problematic, especially as it is becoming central to childhood. Fisher’s (2022) insights about algorithmic knowledge and selfhood are helpful here. According to Fisher, algorithms are gathering information about people that are only able to be seen through their behaviors; they are positivist and behaviorist by nature. Given that algorithms collect these behaviors, that is all that they signal outward as well. The entire process of algorithmic communication reduces people to objects who make choices that algorithms collect and use to predict future behavior. Also, however, algorithms can control what choices people make as they often signal choices that are in the best interest of whoever owns or makes the algorithmic structure. For instance, Amazon’s algorithms might show someone shoes that are similar to ones he’s bought already, but they are also more likely to show him clothes, watches, and other goods that he didn’t even know he wanted in Amazon’s attempt to get the consumer to buy more products. The goal of algorithms, then, is to find patterns in human behaviors, so they strive for humans to be readable, in other words, the algorithms “attempt to imagine

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and mold a human being that is completely transparent and predictable” (Fisher, 2022, p. 39). This becomes problematic, though, when it comes to human agency, as it must be understood that algorithms have: a part they play in helping create a self, which trusts algorithms and the knowledge they reveal about it, and which, in turn, sedates mechanism of self-reflection and self-knowledge, precisely these faculties of the self that are potentially opening up a realm of freedom and make humans unpredictable and able to change. (Fisher, 2022, p. 39) What this means for children is a big issue. Not only does Netflix’s algorithmic structure show children other choices based on what they have clicked on previously, but it also shows what has been chosen based on what others have clicked on before or after those same choices, and so on, to predict what shows a child might click on next. Netflix’s algorithm “reads” children’s responses, then feeds back certain choices back to them. This is the positivist, behaviorist aspect to algorithms. But, as one can see from how Netflix sets up almost no control over the algorithms beyond limited parental options and two rows out of more than 40 rows of content that are children’s curated list, most of what Netflix’s algorithm is showing as options for children and teens are shows and movies that Netflix wants the children to watch. Netflix’s implicit goal is to lull children into the idea that Netflix will choose the best shows for them and that they can trust that their interests, likes, and dislikes are being taken into consideration. In a sense, the idea is that the algorithms know the children enough to recommend shows they would like to watch, but in reality, the children are entered into an algorithmic system that only knows them as a series of clicks within a much wider system of clicks. What is at issue, then, is how the children themselves are not really self-reflecting in order to choose. Children are part of Netflix’s algorithmic system: Predictable and malleable. And this is all happening at a time in people’s lives when we want our young people to be opening up to the world to develop how to be self-reflective, critical thinking individuals. Children growing up within these algorithmic systems will have known nothing else. As adults who care for our children, it’s important for us to really consider what this might mean for young people. Another call to action would be to teach our kids what algorithmic control is and what to do to combat it. This would mean educating ourselves as well and using any means we have at our disposal to avoid this trap. Making the children more self-reflective could help them to develop not only as future consumers but also as future people as well. Streaming media has certainly changed the level of access to and the way that children consume media, and Netflix’s sophisticated system is still considered the best for distributed mainstream media. Netflix’s ubiquity and its ability to stream

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right into the home make it something to pay attention to in the grand scheme of children’s and teens’ media choices. Yet, just because Netflix is attempting to foster a particular way of interacting with its media doesn’t mean that children and teens have to become entitled binge-watchers who crave an endless stream of programming dedicated solely to their own age and interests. After all, Netflix is just part of their lives that one hopes include plenty of reading, activities, family time, and other pursuits. Further research could be enlightening to discover how children actually consume Netflix programming, especially if that research looked at a diverse range of children’s identities. What is clear to me, though, is it is imperative that we have critical conversations about how Netflix operates and what it creates. If we do not interrogate what Netflix is fostering with our children, then Netflix seems to be a neutral media system. However, this is not the case, especially with its algorithmic control and what that could mean for who our children become. Though Netflix is mostly positive for children, engaging critically and doing so through scholarship, education, and at home is the best way to prepare our children for what streaming media offers and what it takes away from them.

Notes 1 Schultz & Williams, 2017–2022 2 Gomez & Laiblin, 2017–2020 3 Bradley, et al., 2017–2019 4 Lessing, Sackett, & Poehler, 2021 5 Holland, et al., 2017–2019 6 Schave, Martin, Friedman, Glazier, & Chipera, 2020–2022 7 Fraser, 2019 8 Sechrist & Wolkoff, 2020–2020 9 Krieger et al., 2021–2022 10 Sawyer, 2018–2022 11 Doucouré, 2020 12 Kaling, Fisher, Klein, Miner, & Shapeero, 2020–2022 13 Brallier & Peterson, 2019–2021 14 Thormahlen, Konner, Davis., Swaminathan, Braverman, Obama, & Obama, 2021–2022 15 Wakely, 2018–2019 16 Bridges, Commisso, Gaffney, Harris, O’Connell, Santomero, & Stacey, 2021–2022 17 Stern, 2019 18 Green & Leon, 2021 19 Hyman, 2020 20 Calderón Kellett, Royce, Lear, Miller, Signer, & Jones, 2017–2020 21 Warner, Bremble, Chan, 2021 22 Levin, Kaplan, Cash, 2018

References Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

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Bakhtin, M. (1990). Art and answerability. In M. Holquist & V. Liapunov (Eds.), V. Liapunov & K. Brostrom (Trans.), Art and answerability: Early philosophical essays. (pp. 1–4). University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (2004). Forms of time and the chronotope in the novel. In M.M. Bakhtin (Ed.), C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Trans.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays (pp. 84–258). University of Texas Press. Bradley, E. et al. (2017–2019). Anne with an E. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Brallier, M. & Peterson, S. (2019–2021). The last kids on Earth. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Bridges, C., Commisso, V., Gaffney, C. Harris, W., O’Connell, D., Santomero, A.C., Stacey, J. (2021–2022). Karma’s world. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Bryant, J. (2013). Textual identity and adaptive regions: Editing adaptation as a fluid text. In J. Bruh, A. Gjelsvik, & E. F. Hanssen (Eds.), Adaptation studies: New challenges, new directions (pp. 47–68). Bloomsbury. Calderón Kellett, C., Royce, M., Lear, N. Miller, B., Signer, D., & Jones, S. (2017–2020). One day at a time. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Doucouré, M. (Director). (2020). Cuties (Mignonnes). [Streaming media]. Netflix. Fisher, E. (2022). Algorithms and subjectivity: Subversion of critical knowledge. Routledge. Fraser, C. (2019). Carmen Sandiego. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Gibbons, D. (2013). Developing an ethics of youth media production using media literacy, identity, & modality. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 4(3): 256–265. Gibbons, D., Drift, T., & Drift, D. (2011). Whose story is it? Being Native and American: Crossing borders, hyphenated selves. In J. Fisherkeller (Ed.), International perspectives on youth media: Cultures of production & education (pp. 172–191). Peter Lang Publishers, Inc. Gibbons Pyles, D. (2015). A social semiotic mapping of voice in youth media: The pitch in youth video production. Learning, Media, & Technology, 42(1): 1–20. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2016.1095209 Gibbons Pyles, D. (2016). Rural media literacy: Rural youth filmmaking as a media literacy practice. Journal of Research on Rural Education, 31(7): 1–15. Gomez, S., et al. (2017–2020). 13 reasons why. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Green, R.M. & Leon, K (2021). Amend: The fight for America. [Streaming Media]. Netflix. Harriott, M. (2019). Weaponizing ‘woke’: A brief history of White definitions. Roots. Retrieved from https://www.theroot.com/weaponizing-woke-an-brief-history-ofwhite-definitions-1848031729 Holland, C., et al. (2017–2019). A series of unfortunate events. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Hyman, F. (2020). Bookmarks: Celebrating Black voices. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Kaling, M., Fisher, L., Klein, H., Miner, D., & Shapeero, T. (2020–2022). Never have I ever. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Kreps, D. (2022, February 18). Dave Chappelle returns to Netflix post-‘Closer’ with new ‘Home Team’ series. Rolling stones. Retrieved from https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/ tv-news/dave-chappelle-netflix-series-home-team-earthquake-1302804/ Krieger, L.T. et al. (2021–2022). Shadow and bone. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). Routledge. Leonardi, P. & Neeley, T. (2022). The digital mindset: What it really takes to thrive in the age of data, algorithms, and AI. Harvard Business Review Press. Lessing, K., Sackett, M., & Poehler, A. (2021). MoXiE!. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Levin, J., Kaplan, M., & Cash, D. (2018). To all the boys I’ve loved before. [Streaming media]. Netflix.

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McCormack, M.B. & Legal-Miller, A. (2019). All over the world like a fever: Martin Luther Kind Jr.’s world house and the movement for Black lives in the United States and United Kingdom. In V.L. Crawford & L.V. Baldwin (Eds.), Reclaiming the great world house: The global vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. (pp. 254–284). University of Georgia Press. Potter, J. (2012). Digital media and learner identity: The new curatorship. Palgrave Macmillan. Sawyer, B. (2018–2022). Boss Baby: Back in business. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Schave, M., Martin, A.M., Friedman, L., Glazier, A., Chipera, M. (2020–2022). The baby-sitters club. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Schultz, B. & Williams, P. (2017-2022). True and the Magic Kingdom. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Sechrist, R. & Wolkoff, B. (2020). Kipo and the age of wonderbeasts. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Stern, T. (Director). (2019). Kevin Hart’s guide to black history. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Thomas, E.E. (2019). The dark fantastic: Race and imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press. Thormahlen, E., Konner, J., Davis, T., Swaminathan, P., Braverman, A., Obama, B., Obama, M. (2021–2022). Waffles + Mochi. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Wakely, J. (2018–2019). Motown magic. [Streaming media]. Netflix. Warner, A., Bremble, C., Chan, J. (2021). Wish Dragon. [Streaming media]. Netflix.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. #1000BlackGirlBooks 99–100 adaptation xiv, 50–52, 66 aesthetic seeing/contemplation xiv, 71–72, 86, 89 Ahmed, Sara 10–11, 71, 75, 76, 86, 89, 94, 118; Willful Subjects 11, 95 algorithmic knowledge 120 algorithms xii, 39–43, 45, 46, 121 Amazon 2 assemblages 50 Attiah, K. 88 Baker, D. 3 Bakhtin, Mikhail xiii, 9–10, 20, 27, 31–32, 49–50, 59, 62, 71–72, 81, 89, 94; Art and Answerability 10; and “being” 75 Barad, K. 35, 43 Bernard-Donals, M. 72, 81 Berry, Mary Frances 99 Big Data 43; empowering children around 45 binge-watching 3, 7 Bishop, J. 52, 63 Black Lives Matter (#BLM) xiii, 92 Blackness 108; as central to story 98–100; as fluid and hybrid 100–105; as part of story 96–98 Blommaert, J. 23, 25, 42

boundary pushing 11 Brown, L.M. 86 Bryant, J. 51 Burnett, C. 51–52, 65 call to action 119–122 Carrington, V. 50 choices 48, 60; constrained 53–55, 66; transgressive 62–65 chronotope(s) xiii, 9, 20, 21, 23, 25–28, 31–32, 59, 94; and algorithmic choices 41–42 Clark, K. 93 codes xii Cohen, L.E. 60, 63 collaboration 112 competence 7 Compton Lilly, C. 94 computation 112 Council, T. 107 critical race theory (CRT) 107 curatorship 5 cybersecurity 112 dark fantastic 11, 95–96, 102–103, 105 Davé, S. 74 De Fina, A. 42 Dias, Marley 99–100 digital mindset 112 digital minimalism 39

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digital play 52 discourses 6; authoritative 55 Domingo, M. 4, 36 double-voiced speech 55 Douglass, Frederick 99 Dukes, N. 107 Dunn, D.C. 103 Edell, D. 86 emotions 94–95 entanglement 52, 65 episodes 22, 23 experimentation 112 feminism xiii, 70, 71; as construct 73; imperial 75; teen 80, 83–87 feminist snap xiii, 10–11, 71, 76–81, 88, 89, 117 Fisher, E. 120 fluid text 51, 54, 55 friendship 87 Gee, J.P. 6 Gordon, C.T. 107 Haddix, M. 93, 102 happiness 86 happy endings 87, 89 Harriott, M. 14 Hart, Kevin 99 Herbert, E. 74 heteroglossia xiii, 9–10, 49–50, 52, 55, 57 hidden dialogicality 62 Higher Ground Productions 98–100 hooks, bell 73, 74, 89, 96 Hughes, B. 52 Hulu 2 Hutcheon, L. 51 hybridity 105 identities 5–7, 72, 73; Black 118; heteroglossic 60, 62, 66; and repetition 8–9 identity kits 6, 7 I/Identity 6 immersiveness, multimodal 55, 57, 59, 66 indexicality 41–42 individuality 72 interaction 4–5 interactive dialogic play 49, 53–66, 116 interactivity xiii, 52, 53 interfaces xii, 5; see also Netflix: interface interiorized language 73

intersectionality 73 intra-action 35, 44 Jaatinen, A.M. 21 Jampole, E. 94 Kaling, Mindy 74–75 kineikonic mode 59 Kumpulainen, K. 21 LBGTQ+ 120 Leonardi, P. 112 Lewis, C. 95 linguistic layering 4 literacies: Black xiii, 11, 93–94, 102; dynamic 66; historically responsive 93, 107; living 43, 45; multimodal 49; participatory 49; printless 49 Liu, Dennis 101 lived experience 72 Livingstone, S. 31 Love, Bettina 105 Marsh, J. 52, 63 Massey, Doreen 31, 34, 40 Merchant, G. 51–52, 65 Mikkola, A. 21 modes xiii; kineikonic 59 mothers 80–83 Muhammad, G.E. 93, 102, 107 multimodality 4–5, 32, 34, 55, 57, 59, 66 narrative 23–24, 50; heteroglossic 60, 62, 66 Neeley, T. 112 Netflix 2; interface 5, 32–42, 33, 37, 38, 39; thumbnails 34, 35 Netflix shows: 13 Reasons Why? 9; Action Pack 97; Ada Twist, Scientist 100, 106; Amend: The Fight for America 99, 106, 118; Anne with an E 9–10; Ask the StoryBots 99, 106; The Baby-Sitters Club 76–77, 81, 84, 86–87, 117; Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices 99–100, 118; Boss Baby: Back in Business 8–9, 24–25; Boss Baby: Get That Baby! 56, 62; Captain Underpants 60–64, 61; Carmen Sandiego: To Steal or Not to Steal 54; Cuties (Mignonnes) 70–71, 78–79, 83, 84–86, 88–89; The Expanding Universe of Ashley Garcia 10; Gentified 10; Jim Henson’s Word Party 22; Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous 97, 105–106, 108;

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Karma’s World 98, 106, 118; Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black History 99, 106, 118; Kid Cosmic 97; Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts 97, 101, 103–106, 119; The Last Kids on Earth 26, 97, 105, 118; Motown Magic 98, 106, 118; MOXiE! 77–78, 84, 86–87, 117; On My Block 10; Never Have I Ever 74–75, 79–80, 82, 117–119; One Day at a Time 10, 119; PJ Masks 97; Puss in Book 53; Raising Dion 100–103, 108, 118–119; She-Ra and the Princesses of Power 97, 106; Super Monsters 8, 22, 97; True and the Rainbow Kingdom 115–116; Waffles + Mochi 98–99, 106, 118; Yoohoo to the Rescue 22; You vs. Wild 57, 58 Noble, S. 39 Nyong’o, Lupita 100 Obama, Michelle 99 O’Malley, S. 81 oppositional gaze 73–76, 89 Pahl, K. 8, 43, 45 Pass, C. 94 performativity 72 play: imaginative 63; pretend 60; types 52–53; see also digital play; interactive dialogic play Plowman, L. 52, 63, 64 postfeminism 70 Potter, J. 5 relationality 50 repetition 8–9, 53 representation: of African-American youth 92–108; of women of color 74, 81–82 Rideout, V. 93 Rowsell, J. 8, 43, 45, 49, 94–95 Scott, E. 52, 63 Scott, K. 93 search engines 39 sedimentation 8 Sefton-Green, J. 31

selfhood 86, 120 semiotic system, narrative-based 50 Smith, Will 99 social validities 72 space: accessible 35–36; algorithmic 40–42; contested 31; invisible 39–40, 46; movable 34–35; multimodal 32, 34; new ways of seeing 115–117; visible 32, 46 spatiality 40 Steinkeuhler, C. 30–31 Stephen, C. 64 streaming media xii; as heteroglossic, chronotopic, and feminist space 9–11; as literacy practice 4–9; why it matters 2–4 streaming media children 15, 26, 28, 66, 112–122 streaming media environment 114 technologies, and teen feminism 83–86 Thomas, E.E. 100–101; The Dark Fantastic 95–96 throwntogetherness 31, 34, 46 Tierney, J.D. 95 time: compressed 23; cyclical 24; marking of 19; new ways of seeing 115–117; playing with 7; on repeat 24–25; spanning 25; staging of 21–23 time-shifting 7, 26 timespace 32, 41–42 timing, of shows 22 Tolman, D. 86 transgressive possibilities 62–64 transmedia 26, 51 watchlists 5 Wheeler, Maurice 43 willfulness xiv, 10–11, 95–96, 108, 118, 119 Wohlwend, K. 49 wokeness xiii, 13–14, 113, 117–119 Yamada-Rise, D. 52, 63 Zeegers, M. 94