Sliding Signifiers and Transmedia Texts: Marsha Kinder's Playing with Power

What are we talking about when we talk about media “effects”? This may be one of the most pressing questions to face those who want to approach the media from an interdisciplinary (and in the case of communications studies one might also say intradisciplinary) perspective. Are we addressing behavior? ideology? psychology? Playing With Power is an ambitious attempt to discuss children’s media use in the broadest possible theoretical, social and economic contexts. Marsha Kinder attempts to connect the behavior effects of these media (absorption in the video game or television program, consumption patterns, eye-hand coordination, etc.) with their ideological effects (consumerism and patriarchy chief among them) by linking both to the psychological and cognitive effects of video on developing children. She does this using an approach which combines consideration of entertainment industry policy and decision-making with the decoding of cultural texts. This is laudable, particularly when the analysis also attempts to take into account consumer interaction with the text as both commodity and symbol system.

The book has five chapters and a substantial appendix detailing two field study/interview situations with children. The subject matter covered in the chapters spirals out from a core of psychoanalytic, cognitive, and cultural theory through increasingly complex media situations to break off with a consideration of global political economics. Its fundamental goal is the exploration of “how television and its narrative conventions affect the construction of the subject” (3). The structure is designed to represent the “strategy of cognitive restructuring” it studies.

This is, to a degree, a personal quest. Kinder uses her son Victor’s development of narrative and involvement with interactive video as the keystone of her study, and includes his friends among her interview subjects in the appendixes. Her son and other “postmodern” children value the interactivity of Saturday morning television and video games, and the commodities associated with them and are bored by the unified subject represented by conventional film. This interests and concerns Kinder. Much of her discussion is implicitly organized around the contrast between “the unified subject, associated with modernism and cinema; and the decentered consumerist subject, associated with postmodernism and television” (40). She weighs each subject in terms of its position relative to this dichotomy. Transmedia intertextuality, for example, “valorizes superprotean flexibility as a substitute for the imaginary uniqueness of the unified subject” (120).

Kinder suggests that “readers who are less interested in theory” skip over the theoretical section of the first chapter. This section is only a scant twenty-three pages as it is. This may represent a bid for a popular audience more interested in reading about the toys which fascinate their children and the industry which produces them than in the differences between Kristeva and Piaget. However, this leaves the reader with a slim foundation for much of the later analysis. For example, the theoretical section states that “intertextual relations across different narrative media” (2) are the primary focus of the book, but the reader is given only one paragraph with quotations from Bakhtin and Robert Stam on intertextuality. There is even less information provided on the meaning of signs, signifiers, and what Kinder calls “sliding signifiers.” There seems to be an implicit assumption that the reader is already familiar with such concepts, and with the work of Beverle Houston and Susan Willis which informs the discussion.

More space is devoted to stitching together Piaget’s theory of genetic epistemology, (6–9) and psychoanalytic theory (9–15). However, Kinder leaves certain key questions unresolved. After pointing out that cognitive theory “does not perceive gender differentiation as the linchpin to subject formation within the patriarchal symbolic order,” and that she believes this “‘naturalizes’ patriarchal assumptions” (9), Kinder states that she will “position this cognitive approach within a larger framework of post- structuralist feminism” (10). How will she do this? By appropriating “from both models . . . ideas particularly useful for theorizing this dual form of gendered spectator/player positioning at this moment in history” (10...