Children and the Media: Two Views

Abstract

Children and the Media:Two Views Anne Morey (bio) Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe , eds., Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997. $19 sc, pp. x + 270. Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller , Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. $59.95 hc, pp. xxiv + 414. The relationship between children and media is often vexed; both popular accounts and critical analyses tend toward polemical representations of an evil industry. From the agitation of Postmaster General Anthony Comstock, who found the rise of the dime novel in the 1870s the most frightening imaginable assault on the purity of America's children, to our present concerns about violence on television or in interactive computer games, informed criticism is often lost in a maelstrom of claims, calls for legislation, and the recommendations of various lobbies, think tanks, and other organizations. Competing methods of framing the important questions of media effects on children and how children generate meaning from media have also divided scholars, with the social science paradigm more typically employed than methods derived from the humanities. Nevertheless, the study of popular culture (including recent children's media) has gained new credibility within the humanities with the increasing prominence of such critical methodologies as ideological analysis, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Cultural studies, if we take the work of Stuart Hall and John Fiske as emblematic, is concerned with the study of power relations with reference to cultural artifacts. It assumes that our various cultural productions are vectors of ideology but not necessarily consistent or univocal in that regard. Hall, in particular, suggests that consumers of culture have a degree of autonomy in receiving the ideological messages disseminated by cultural production; he argues that there are degrees of cooperation with the text, not only in terms of reception but also in terms of the possibility of perverting the mass culture of the day to individual ends. In short, cultural studies appears to be the methodology best suited to an understanding of how, for example, fans of Star Trek use the series as the merest suggestive starting point for a radical rewriting of the show. Given the variety of responses that—as Star Trek reception illustrates—are available to consumers of popular culture, anthologies such as Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe's Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood, whose contributors generally take cultural studies merely as the occasion to assert that popular culture is political and that we are raising a generation of "cultural dupes," are disappointing. The Kinderculture essays rarely examine the social or institutional dynamics of cultural production with any subdety and, by and large, cannot imagine the possibility of resistance to cultural messages. While few scholars would dispute the necessity of examining the institutional matrices of the production of children's culture in the modern marketplace, the essays contained in this anthology, with certain notable exceptions, are generally too lacking in rigor, too self-indulgent, and too polemical to advance our understanding of the subject. This failure is attributable to two factors that govern not only the introduction but also a number of the fourteen essays, four of which are contributed by the two editors. The first factor is the frequent assumption that children's media have never before met with any sustained analysis on the part of scholars interested in using cultural studies as their methodology. While much work remains to be done in this area, a number of extremely important texts, such as Ellen Seiter's Sold Separately (1993), Marsha Kinder's Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games (1991), and Stephen Kline's Out of the Garden (1993), should have made Kinderculture's task much easier. While the editors seem aware of them, the findings and paradigms for rigorous analysis that could have been derived from these admirable predecessor volumes are never deployed here. Many essays imply that no one has given the corporate underpinnings, or persuasive educational force, of children's media any thought heretofore, infusing the volume with an unjustifiable complacency that comes across as simply ill-informed. The second factor, which tends to increase the...