ABSTRACT
The hyper-mediatization of children’s lives, at least in afuent parts of the world, and the altered nature of advertising reinvigorate concerns about how children become engaged in consumerism early on in life. Of course, the commercialization of childhood is not a recent development, with its modern beginnings in the 18th century, when industrialization processes enabled the mass production of consumer goods (Murphy 2000; Plumb 1976). The trend accelerated in the 1950s (Wasko 2008), followed by an escalation in the 1980s (Levin and Linn 2004). What makes the issue pressing nowadays is children’s intensifying and increasing media use (see for example Kaiser Family Foundation 2010), for they are continuously exposed to the consumerist attitudes and images the media promote (Hill 2011). The social pleasures, democratic gains, and educational opportunities of contemporary media thus come at a steep price.
