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Chapter 1: Cradle to Grave: Children’s Marketing and the Deconstruction of Childhood
- Rutgers University Press
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20 C O I N I N G F O R C A P I TA L In a print advertisement for a wireless home network sold by Symphony, we see a family engaged in a tug-of-war over their single computer. “Stop the war, cut the cord,” advises the copy, asking parents to buy the wireless service so as to have several connections at the same time and end the family tussles over access to the Internet. The choice of words is tongue-in-cheek, speaking of a new and changed family environment in which family peace is established by freeing children from parental control. The cord is not umbilical but technological and the child’s autonomy achieved by buying another new market-produced commodity. This promise of independence, of course, is also at the root of the widespread alarm that new media technologies are stealing children away from the family, exposing them to adult secrets of sex, violence, and commerce, and destroying childhood. One technical fix to this concern was the V-chip. In 1995 the U.S. Congress legislated that television sets should come equipped with a computer chip that would allow parents to block programming they considered unsuitable for their children. This is as logical as calling in the television repair person to fix the content on television, repeating a pattern in the battle with media makers that is by now well established . First, television broadcasters were freed from the demands to do something about what passes for children’s television. Second, the Cradle to Grave Children’s Marketing and the Deconstruction of Childhood 1 C R A D L E T O G R AV E 21 costs of installing the V-chip were passed on to us, the consumers, as manufacturers built them into the price of television sets. Third, parents , particularly mothers, were once again enlisted as their children’s enemy or drill sergeant, asked to carry out the orders of the experts to control children and protect them from television. Underlying the V-chip solution is the assumption that television is the main culprit in children’s loss of innocence and that its power can be restrained by a reinstatement of parental authority. One major impasse in the debate on children and television is that it has continued to be embedded within arguments centered on the “effects” of television on children. On one side are critics in the tradition of the Frankfurt school, such as Marie Winn, Neil Postman, and Steven Kline, who argue that television kills children’s imaginations with limited colonizing narratives, violates their innocence in relation to sex, violence, and commerce, and, like a narcotic, numbs their innate curiosity about the world.1 Basic to these claims is the assumption that children will mimic what they see—upon seeing violence, they will act violently. On the other side, cultural studies has drawn attention to the varied ways in which audiences negotiate with, resist, or are co-opted by mass culture. Ellen Seiter and David Buckingham have emphasized that children do not inevitably absorb all the meanings and purposes of media content.2 For instance, as Buckingham points out in his study of children’s responses to television violence, although children may find certain scenes worrying or frightening, they develop ways of coping with them, such as changing channels, fast-forwarding, watching with others, and so on. The assertion here is that children are not cultural dupes, but discriminating and imaginative audiences. Of course, no one disputes that children’s television is filled with themes and narratives that reflect and reinforce the inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Rather, the difference between the two positions is that while the latter favors critical engagement with television , the former can lend itself to a ban on television viewing for children. However, the approaches are similar in that they have neglected the social history of childhood and assume childhood to be more or less a natural category simply discovered, and not invented, by television. This view leads to rehashing old arguments about the extent to which children’s imaginations are co-opted by television (the same arguments were applied to comic books, cinema, and now the [44.221.46.132] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:13 GMT) 22 C O I N I N G F O R C A P I TA L Internet) and ignores the widespread social belief and experience that at the end of the twentieth...