Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (review)

This contribution to the growing literature on market-segmented cable TV and children's media revolves around the controversial concept of "consumer citizenship." Sara Banet-Weiser (Communication, USC) "brackets" critics who study the impact of TV violence, sexism, and consumerism on children and who claim consumer values are displacing the participatory and rational values of political citizenship. Instead she endeavors to show how Nickelodeon, dedicated to marketing advertisements to children with programming that delivers an affirmative message of empowerment and entitlement, has made children aware of their "rights" in an environment where kids are denied political citizenship and where political identities are in decline.

She offers an interesting history of Nickelodeon, its embrace of ads for toys and candy, but rejection of program length (toy) commercials, its skillful use of kids' focus groups, and its shift from life child-focused shows to often edgy, ironic cartoons that both drew on Nick's "kids' rule" brand and yet reached an adult audience with layered messages (as in Ren and Stimpy or SpongeBob SquarePants). She offers a balanced analysis of "girl power" programming with its "post-feminist" affirmation of the self-confident female who likes fashion as well as has brains. Similarly racial diversity is treated in Nick shows as natural, even urban and cool, with borrowings from Hip Hop. The message of tolerance and the right to chose (even when parents disapprove or just "don't get it") runs throughout.

She recognizes that Nick offers an "idealistic and inaccurate image of a harmonious 'multicultural' youth" (5) and that Nick has become less adventuresome recently and that this may be due to its commercial success. Still, she insists that when Nick provides kids media visibility and the role of savvy consumers (as children control or influence billions in spending), this constitutes somehow consumer citizenship. Certainly, the affirmative image of Dora the Explorer may inspire girls and minorities to achieve; the mocking of adult authority in many Nick shows may lead to a healthy critical approach to the status quo; and wide-ranging issues addressed on Nick News may reach kids in the way that the nightly news shows don't. Nick may well shape the next generation as did Mad Magazine for boomers and the programming certainly reflects a kind of social libertarian political culture that drives the religious conservatives mad.

But "consumer citizenship"? Do kids really "own" Nick or share in any meaningful way in its decisions as citizens do of their government? Is consumer choice really akin to political choice? I understand the desire to go beyond the cultural laments of the critics of kidvid to explore the possibilities in the present. But this approach often deprives the author of critical distance. Missing, for example, is the context and wider meaning of the rebellious cool (in both the history of the American family and in popular culture). By putting aside the moral panic literature, she misses a lot in what is going on. And she could have explored the likely contradictions between Nick programmers and advertisers. This is an important book, probably the best in, what to my mind, is a flawed school of scholarship.