서강대학교

초록 (요약문)

Alongside Netflix’s tremendous growth, discussions about its growing global influence - as well as other OTTs’ - must arise with relations to its potential social impact on the “global village”. In particular, discussions relating to the depiction of sexuality in video-based media contents. While television has been the focus of many criticisms for its careless and overwhelming display of sex content, OTTs such as Netflix seem to have taken a different approach to this issue. Through Entertainment-Education series, Netflix aspires to reinvent sex content on video-based media : this attempt should be examined both from a pro-social standpoint (to guide other entertainment medias’ initiatives) but also from a public relations’ perspective (to provide insights on how to manage those new platforms’ reputation). Therefore, a qualitative content analysis was conducted in order to identify the amount of comprehensive sex education-related information included in the season 2 of the series and thus, to verify if Sex Education is indeed an E-E program. Results verified that the series covers a substantial amount of the SIECUS guidelines’ content and suggest that the series has an evident objective to provide its viewers with a complementary information source to formal sex education. Besides, one key point highlighted through the study is the social approach of sex education by the series, on the contrary of the traditional physical perspective. Thus, the “Personal Skills”, “Relationships” and “Sexuality and Culture” themes were overwhelmingly showcased and dealt within a wide range of situations while the “Human Development”, “Sexual Behavior” and “Sexual Health” categories are less featured. Nonetheless, important messages about “Sexual Health” were clearly and thoroughly communicated. The study also points out that the two main issues (gender roles and LGBTQIA+) that constitute formal sex education’s hidden curriculum were highlighted by the series. Further research is needed to investigate in more depth the potential application of E-E programs to CSR, the need for CSR strategies to manage OTTs’ reputation, the social role and responsibility of OTTs, the use of E-E programs in a global context and to solve broader social issues, the actual comprehensive sex education-related information transmitted by E- E programs, the balance between entertainment and education achieved by the series, its global characteristics as well as its application of Bandura’s theory and of the Sabido Methodology.