International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture

Kirsten Drotner, Sonia Livingstone

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781473971752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This essential volume brings together the work of internationally-renowned researchers, each experts in their field, in order to capture the diversity of children and young people?s media cultures around the world.

Why are the media such a crucial part of children?s daily lives? Are they becoming more important, more influential, and in what ways? Or does a historical perspective reveal how past media have long framed children?s cultural horizons or, perhaps, how families - however constituted - have long shaped the ways children relate to media?

In addressing such questions, the contributors present detailed empirical cases to uncover how children weave together diverse forms and technologies to create a rich symbolic tapestry which, in turn, shapes their social relationships. At the same time, many concerns - even public panics - arise regarding children?s engagement with media, leading the contributors also to inquire into the risky or problematic aspects of today?s highly mediated world.

Deliberately selected to represent as many parts of the globe as possible, and with a commitment to recognizing both the similarities and differences in children and young people?s lives - from China to Denmark, from Canada to India, from Japan to Iceland, from - the authors offer a rich contextualization of children?s engagement with their particular media and communication environment, while also pursuing cross-cutting themes in terms of comparative and global trends.

Each chapter provides a clear orientation for new readers to the main debates and core issues addressed, combined with a depth of analysis and argumentation to stimulate the thinking of advanced students and established scholars. Since children and young people are a focus of study across different disciplines, the volume is thoroughly multi-disciplinary. Yet since children and young people are all too easily neglected by these same disciplines, this volume hopes to accord their interests and concerns they surely merit.

PART 1

Continuities and Change

Children are often thought of in terms of change, representing the future. Indeed, this is one of the stable features of modern discourses on childhood. In a similar manner, since the early days of print, media have been defined and debated in terms of innovation. These continual mappings of change are themselves indications of the dilemmas and challenges which are taken up and analysed in this first part of the Handbook. The contributors set children’s media culture within a historical perspective in order to trace the continuities and possible changes in the ways in which these cultures have been positioned by adults and practised by children. In so doing, they stress that historical analysis is a necessary antidote to any simple accounts of the relations between children and media, balancing the often grand claims made regarding the beneficial or detrimental implications for children. In pursuing this main argument, the authors range widely across theoretical conceptions, from a mainly deconstructionist focus on discourses on childhood (Prout) to a mainly socio-cultural focus on practices of appropriation (Fleming). These four chapters were selected in order to display some of these key conceptual approaches and to represent some of the main fields pursuing historical studies of the relations between childhood and media culture (sociology, visual culture, literary criticism, film studies). In their differing accounts, the authors take up a number of key questions and debates of significance for anyone wishing to engage with children’s media culture from a time-based perspective. This introduction maps out some of the questions and debates that underpin most historical studies of children’s media culture in order to clarify the theoretical and empirical landscape and draw out some of the main implications for future research.

The first argument concerns the very notion of historical enquiry itself. A popular claim is that we need systematic studies of the past in order to understand the present better, and even be in a position to predict the future. Historical studies are based on an underlying understanding of research in which comparisons across time appear valid, and so a salient issue is on what grounds such comparisons may be made. Most prevalent through much of the past two centuries has been a teleological view of history whereby historical development is understood as new events adding to existing states of affairs like pearls on a string. Such a view frames standard histories of childhood (Aries, 1973; Walvin, 1982) as well as most media histories (Briggs and Burke, 2002). Inspired by philosophers such as Nietzsche and Foucault, historical scholarship from the 1980s onwards began to argue for the adoption of an archaeological view of history. Here, the focus is on deconstruction rather than construction, on detecting possible sediments of practices and excavating conflicting claims to power, with the present operating as the starting and end point of enquiry. This change of focus is part of a wider scholarly reorientation in the history of science towards shifting ramifications of power and claims-making, and it surfaces, for example, in new histories of women (Offen et al., 1991), children (Stearns, 2006) and ethnic minorities (Gilroy, 1993). In media studies, the clearest examples of this more deconstructionist approach appear in histories of technology and new media (Marvin, 1988; Winston, 1998).

The archaeological approach to history has served to undermine a determinist view of both childhood and media, and it has offered a welcome reflexive component to historical scholarship by insisting that analytical complexity is no less when studying the past than in understanding the present. In so doing, histories of childhood, for example, have gained in analytical insight by tracing commonalities across generations and by highlighting shifting definitions. For example, the pre-modern definition of youth according to social status may be resurfacing in late-modern societies permeated by discourses of youthfulness to a degree that it becomes less relevant to define youth in terms of age, as has been common in modern, industrialized societies.

The archaeological approach to history tends to offer fairly abstract, macro-level forms of analysis. Its popularity over the past two decades has meant that academic attention has moved away from studying children’s media and their social uses in a historical context towards critiquing discursive constructions of childhood and media culture. This shifting focus brings into view another key question in historical scholarship. Is it at all possible to make distinctions between historical discourses and practices, or, as Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren terms it, Sunday culture and everyday culture (Löfgren, 2001)? The authors in this part of the Handbook offer differing answers, ranging from Prout’s meta-discursive stand in deconstructing historical notions of childhood as varying inflections of a dichotomous discourse of modernity to Reid-Walsh’s incisive and eye-opening empirical study of analogies of interactivity in children’s media since the advent of moveable books in the eighteenth century.

If it is, indeed, possible to conduct historical studies of children’s media and their social uses, then we may begin to ask more pragmatic questions about what it is we may learn about today’s media (and even tomorrow’s) by investigating media in the past. How have media operated in children’s everyday lives in the past, and may we identify similar functions today? Which aspects of children’s relation to media have changed and for what reasons? Comparing media cultures across time is to begin asking questions about the grounds on which we may study empirical continuities and changes. The possible correlations between continuity and change remain among the most vexed debates in historiography; this is perhaps the historians’ equivalent of social science debates about structure and agency. As Prout (this volume) cogently states, these very oppositions are not neutral conceptualizations, but are modern constructions. He links the discussion of continuity and change to a wider epistemological debate on universalism and particularism in which universalism is linked to biological laws and particularism is linked to socio-cultural factors; and he argues for an inclusive understanding of childhood as ‘a heterogeneous biological-discursive-social-technological ensemble’.

This inclusiveness is productive, in that it stresses the value of conceptual complexity in understanding childhood. Still, in terms of empirical analysis, it leaves the problematic of development, or formative change, unresolved; or, rather, it transports it into a discussion of universalism and particularism which may be helpful in framing research questions but which is less felicitous in seeking to unpack more mundane dimensions of empirical analysis. So, the question of continuity and change raises fundamental epistemological issues about the knowledge claims made within different scientific paradigms (Danermark et al., 2002; Schrøder et al., 2003); and it points to the necessity of defining which dimensions of analysis are appropriate for conducting particular types of research. The contributions to this part of the Handbook represent forms of analysis ranging from macro-level (Prout, Holland) to meso-level (Fleming) and microlevel (Reid-Walsh).

All contributors to this part of the Handbook endorse the formative role played by media in children’s lives both today and in the past. Prout emphasizes the conceptual importance played by Vygotsky’s notion of material and symbolic technologies, including language, text and images, mediating between inner and outer realities through joint practices. Fleming and Reid-Walsh both note how technologies of play, such as toys, help constitute modern, Westernized definitions of childhood as an age-bound phase of life defined by the removal from economic production, yet preparing for its gendered realities; and they both offer insightful examples of the conflation of toys as objects of play and media as symbolic resources for play. The insistence on (mediatized) play as a defining feature of modern childhood is specifically linked by Holland to the visual representation of children as playful innocents set in the midst of nature, supposedly untainted by civilization and its perceived discontents. Speaking about ‘the marketing of sentiment’, she notes how this imagery has been reappropriated by media corporations for posters, press footage, and film, offering contemporary audiences a mental map against which other images may be set: of the deviant, the rebellious, the promiscuous, the victim.

When conducting empirical historical studies, the opposition between continuity and change quickly transforms into a more mundane question of defining and understanding the relations between differences and commonalities. Moveable books of the early eighteenth century display ‘strange’ characters such as Clown and Columbine; dolls dating from the 1920s seem oddly lifeless to an untrained eye; while images of teenagers from the 1950s look exotic with ‘strange’ postures and hair style. Historical scholarship immediately prompts discussions, not only of empirical contextualization and its limits, but of analytical contextualization and its possibilities. How much does the researcher need to know about which contextual aspects in order to make a valid analysis of, for example, children’s film of the 1920s? Knowing very little, one detects only difference; knowing too much, one may recognize only commonalities. There is room for reflection on these demarcations in the following chapters, since they illuminate various historical moments in children’s culture and offer analytical insights about childhood across a wide temporal and spatial spectrum.

The authors in this first part of the Handbook make a claim for the usefulness of historical studies in understanding the complexity of children’s mediatized cultures of today. In doing so, they also illustrate important debates for future study. First, all the accounts are by adults and are framed by adult eyes and experiences, while children’s own voices are absent. Attempts have been made by oral historians and others to collect interviews with children, their diaries and autobiographies (Stickland, 1973; Burnett, 1982) and this material, though piecemeal and partial, may operate as a contextual frame for more child-centred histories of children’s culture, including irreverent or subversive uses of official cultural forms handed down to the young. When it comes to historical takes on children’s media cultures, children’s own accounts are even sparser, and historical audience studies focusing on children are few and far between (Drotner, 1988).

The bias of sources may become even more difficult to tackle in future. For while many children around the world produce an abundance of mediatized communication today, just how many text messages or chat strings are stored, and by which criteria? How will we know about the significance young people pay to being offline or online, if studying their social uses is decoupled from their textual practices? The current focus in internet and mobile research on political and economic implications of new media and on the more spectacular cultural practices may easily result in a research perspective where children’s own voices figure just as partially as in research on children’s cultures of the past.

The chapters in this first part of the Handbook attempt to convey a holistic research perspective in studying children’s media cultures. Such an ideal prompts discussions over social context and its limits, as we have noted. It equally prompts discussions on textual boundaries. While it is widely recognized that today’s complex empirical media landscape requires equally complex theoretical approaches (Drotner, 2002), it is less debated what this entails for studies of children’s media cultures in the past. Can we speak about a simpler media landscape in, for example, the 1920s than the 1960s; and, if so, does this make it more valid to select a single medium or genre when studying the 1920s? Questions such as these beg us to reflect on the interlocking and transmuting processes of mediatized meaning-making, on the ways in which textual practices have been interlaced also in the past (Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Peters, 1999). Evidently, the challenges are no less when studying children’s media practices. As Fleming notes, reflecting on his own reminiscences of a favourite toy, to articulate the child’s perspective at the time would not be accessible to any research technique in the methodological toolkit.

In this introduction we have mapped out some of the main challenges that are involved when approaching the relations between children and media from a historical perspective. A number of these issues tread on ground familiar to media studies and historiography in general. Others are more specifically linked to the particular socio-cultural position of children in modern, Westernized societies. This demonstrates that the research agenda that the authors of this first part draw up has much to offer major research traditions, just as it feeds on their conceptual advances. Children’s media culture, now, as in the past, cannot feasibly be understood in splendid isolation from other scholarly insights and interventions.

REFERENCES

Aries, P. (1973) Centuries of Childhood. Harmonds-worth: Penguin. (Orig. 1960.)

Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Briggs, A. and Burke, P. (2002) A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet Cambridge: Polity.

Burnett, J. (ed.) (1982) Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s. London: Allen Lane.

Danermark, B., Ekstrom, M., Jokobsen, L. and Karlsson, J.C. (2002). Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences. London: Routledge.

Drotner, K. (1988) English Children and Their Magazines, 1751–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Orig. 1985.)

Drotner, K. (2002) ‘New media, new options, new communities? Towards a convergent media and ICT research’. Nordicom, 24(2–3): 11–22 (rpt. in Nordicom Review, 23(1–2) (2002): 11–22).

Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Löfgren, O. (2001) ‘The nation as home or motel? Metaphors and media of belonging’. Yearbook of Sociology, 2001: 1–34.

Marvin, C. (1988) When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electronic Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Offen, K., Roach Pierson, R. and Rendall, J. (eds) (1991) Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Peters, J.D. (1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Schrøder, K.C., Drotner, K., Kline, S. and Murray, C. (2003) Researching Audiences. London: Edward Arnold.

Stearns, P.N. (2006) Childhood in World History. New York: Routledge.

Stickland, I. (1982). The Voices of Children, 1700–1914. Oxford: Blackwell.

Walvin, J. (1982). A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood, 1800–1914. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Winston, B. (1998) Media, Technology and Society: a History. From the Telegraph to the Internet London: Routledge.

1

Culture–Nature and the Construction of Childhood

Alan Prout

… simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse and collective, like society (Latour, 1993: 6).

INTRODUCTION

How childhood has been constructed and understood, both contemporaneously and in the past, is a key concern for scholars of children and the mass media. Changing childh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• International Advisory Board
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Editors
• List of Contributors
• EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
• PART 1 CONTINUITIES AND CHANGE
• PART 2 PROBLEMATICS
• PART 3 CULTURES AND CONTEXTS
• PART 4 PERSPECTIVES
• Index