ABSTRACT
Charting ways in which mass media represent children and ways in which the media orchestrate claims about children’s uses of new media offers analytical prisms through which we may address wider societal discourses of, and contestations over, what counts as proper media and proper childhood and youth. Such discourses are powerful frames within which children’s actual media practices play out, and the discourses are therefore important to understand if we want a full insight into children’s relations to media. My main claim, which I will substantiate in the following, is that modernity witnesses an ongoing co-construction of mass media, childhood and youth. Media are at once material and symbolic social resources (Carey, [1989]1992) whose main characteristic is their semiotic properties. So, media are not merely conduits for the transmission of information, they are institutionally embedded meaning-making tools that connect people across time and space (Thompson, 1995). The nexus between media and childhood may be seen to operate along a continuum of
positions. The chapter will focus on two poles in that continuum. First, on a day-to-day basis media serve as an important public means of articulating selective images of childhood, for example through print news reporting, advertisements, television and film. I will discuss how these popular mediated perceptions are articulated and may be understood. Second, notably with the uptake of a new medium, media may concentrate on certain aspects of children’s media uses, and such interest may develop into what may be termed a media panic (Drotner, 1992). Positions within the two poles shift over time as the empirical contexts within which they operate change. But the two poles also share important similarities to do with the structural issues they tackle, issues that the chapter will spell out. My focus will be on media discourses that are both public and popular by which I mean dis-
courses promulgated through media that are publicly accessible and have a wide circulation and use. Conversely, I have nothing to say about children’s responses to media nor their actual media practices. Since demarcations between childhood and youth change over time, I include examples of adolescence or youth when they are deemed relevant, although my main interest is with articulations of childhood; and while media serve as public arenas of debates on childhood in relation to, for example, education, work and leisure, I focus my analysis on those aspects of the nexus where the media operate directly as means or ends of childhood perceptions. Last, but not least, my account is a partial one, limited to the global North and its specific empirical constellations between media and childhood development that may have little relevance to other parts of the world.
Art historians, literary historians and cultural historians have a long tradition of using representations of children in books and paintings as sources documenting historical change (Coveny, 1967; McGraw, 1941). Indeed, the main proponent of the invention of childhood thesis, the French historian Philippe Ariès, uses painted portraits of children to claim that in premodern times children were socially marked as adults writ small, dressed out in robes and with adornments in the same manner as adults (Ariès, 1962). This claim has been contested. For example, the British art critic Peter Fuller argues that many child portraits produced in Europe’s courts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were tokens in negotiations of political marriages. So the images projected potentials of future beauty and wealth in order to literally optimise the purchasing power of the portrait (Fuller, 1979, p. 78). Apart from the validity of the empirical evidence, the analytical differences testify to two markedly different approaches to understanding the relation between childhood and representation. While Ariès largely uses paintings as documentation about which adult perceptions held sway at particular times, Fuller and others are at pains to illuminate how adult perceptions are constructed, circulated and socially embedded (Brown, 2002; Higgonet, 1998). While Western art and literature have offered a rich source in charting shifting modes of
child representation through the history of childhood, much less is made of the ways in which popular mass media as meaning-making technologies serve to advance shifting perceptions of childhood. To chart these perceptions, we need to look into the historical situatedness of the earliest forms of mass media, namely print. Books together with periodicals, prints, posters and postcards offer the earliest form of popular and publicly available media. Many forms of print include images as illustrations and embellishments, yet most rely on text. So, the uptake and use of print media is dependent on and serves to advance an ability to read if not to write. While many people have learned literacy and numeracy through family members or peers, the modern notion of childhood is closely related to training of literacy and numeracy during a sphere of life separated from adult affairs, and requiring institutional spaces of development such as home, school, playground and clubs, yet nevertheless preparing for the child’s future functions with the family as an unquestioned base. The co-construction of early mass media and literate child audiences at a remove from the adult (male) world of work is key to the shaping of modern perceptions of childhood. So, for example the American cultural critic Neil Postman has suggested that in Western
Europe the spread of literacy through the invention of the printing press has been the principal force in shaping a widely accepted consensus around the meaning of childhood. Mastering book reading became a sign of maturity toward which the young must be trained (Postman, 1982). According to the historian John Gillis (1996), it was primarily the advent of hugely popular media in the nineteenth century – greeting cards, postcards, calendars and family magazines – that helped disseminate an idealised image of childhood as a domestic phase of innocent bliss, an image that became a constant source of identity for adults to the extent that it overshadowed the reality of children’s lives. This childhood image of domesticated innocence resonates with us today. It is perhaps
most widely seen with babies and small children and most strikingly appropriated by advertising – from nappies and food to toys and cars. Many commercial TV serials and family films equally subscribe to the ideal in the sense that its aberrations act as dramaturgical drivers which the plot ultimately sets straight: wild or unruly children are tamed and socialised into “proper” behaviour, and childlike adults end up by shouldering the responsibilities of “proper” parenting.
