Our Generation and the Privatization of Media Usage

Understanding Livingstone's concept of Bedroom Culture, and how we have shifted "from the family television, to media consumption in the safety of one's own room."

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Media inevitably integrates with our environment. With the trajectory of our media-driven society, technology overlaps and seeps its way into our everyday routines. Current generations have been pushed to the confines of their safe spaces (rooms), as opposed to the usual shared living room. What defines leisure space now teeters on a fine line.

The "risk society” concept: connotations of danger and threat were attached to the notion of children playing outdoors in the ‘outside world’. Thus, encouraging electronic usage like iPads as distractions allowed for parents to have a security in knowing their children were shielded, distracted, and most significantly: indoors. The notion is jarring: for media has influenced the progression from outwardly open lives, to safety nets, and socially-acceptable isolation. People bathed in privacy and in turn, safety, all the while consuming media on their own. It became an individual experience, without the necessity of sharing the same media channels and entertainment as a family. Essentially, each person in a house lived separate lives at varying paces.

Children grew notably more distant from the (very human) judgement of people, friends, and strangers. Scholars and researchers pinpoint this separation as being the root of, on the one hand, detrimental lack of social connection, and on the other, some arguably positive elements. The latter includes the growth of one's identity. Individualization springs to mind when considering the positives of the surge in so-called Bedroom culture, for it fostered the private growth of a person. The largest argument against the trajectory of our society involves the undeniable magic of communal spaces like the living-room. Home to the family TV, old sofa, and a shared sense of belonging. Nowadays, home is reduced to a set of merely walls, whilst its members go about their days existing as individuals, privately, and not exactly in the way that family used to.