A Public Service Advertisement Response to Parental Phubbing: A Gramscian Hegemony and Good Eye Photography Approach

Abstract

Parental phubbing — a parent’s neglect of direct interaction with a child caused by absorption in a smartphone — has become a form of child neglect that has grown alongside the widening penetration of mobile devices over the past decade. A substantial psychological literature now documents its developmental consequences, yet the visual strategies through which public awareness campaigns represent and contest it remain largely unexamined. This article examines, visually and ideologically, how a photography-based public service campaign addresses parental phubbing. The corpus is the public awareness material of the “Talk to Me, Play with Me, Carry Me” campaign initiated by the Langley Infant Mental Health Collaborative in British Columbia, Canada, examined together with an earlier Indonesian campaign on child neglect arising from transferred caregiving. The design is descriptive qualitative: content, colour, and spatial organisation are analysed within Gillian Rose’s good eye framework, the result is read ideologically through Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between common sense and good sense, and the two campaigns are then compared. The analysis finds that documentary photography builds a realist impression critiquing the habit through the contrast between physical closeness and attentional distance, and that parental authority is eroded here not by an identifiable adversary but by a diffusely naturalised habit that a non-judgmental campaign works to make visible. The article contributes a visual-communication account of a phenomenon studied so far mainly in psychology, and specifies the evidentiary and reflexive limits within which such an account can be made.