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

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.