ABSTRACT
The key claim of the chapter is that Western modernity witnesses an ongoing co-construction of mass media, childhood, and youth that addresses basic dilemmas brought about by the ideological dynamism of modernity. The claim is underpinned by a time-based analysis of two sets of co-construction discourses. The first set homes in on mundane, mediated images of childhood, for example through print news reporting, advertisements, television, film, and social media; and the second set focuses on media panics which are intermittent and short-lived public outbursts of celebration or concern spurred by the uptake of a new medium. The chapter documents that the entanglement of media and childhood indirectly serves to re-imagine dilemmas of Western modernity in three ways: They address similar and fundamental social regulation strategies with respect to shifting power relations of age, gender, class, and ethnicity. They address the same cultural issues to do with changes in taste and quality. Last, but not least, they address the same issues to do with the implications of mediated interaction and its changes.
