After the Death of Childhood E-Book

David Buckingham

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 484

Beschreibung

What will be the fate of childhood in the twenty-first century? Will children increasingly be living 'media childhoods', dominated by the electronic screen? Will their growing access to adult media help to abolish the distinctions between childhood and adulthood? Or will the advent of new media technologies widen the gaps between the generations still further? In this book, David Buckingham provides a lucid and accessible overview of recent changes both in childhood and in the media environment. He refutes simplistic moral panics about the negative influence of the media, and the exaggerated optimism about the 'electronic generation'. In the process, he points to the challenges that are posed by the proliferation of new technologies, the privatization of the media and of public space, and the polarization between media-rich and media-poor. He argues that children can no longer be excluded or protected from the adult world of violence, commercialism and politics; and that new strategies and policies are needed in order to protect their rights as citizens and as consumers. Based on extensive research, After the Death of Childhood takes a fresh look at well-established concerns about the effects of the media on children. It offers a challenging and refreshing approach to the perennial concerns of researchers, parents, educators, media producers and policy-makers.

Leseprobe

After the Death of Childhood

Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media

David Buckingham

polity

Copyright © David Buckingham 2000

The right of David Buckingham to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2000 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Reprinted 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006 (twice), 2007 (twice), 2010, 2011, 2012

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-0-7456-1932-3

ISBN 978-0-7456-1933-0 (pbk)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buckingham, David, 1954–

After the death of childhood : growing up in the age of electronic media / David Buckingham.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7456-1932-3 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7456-1933-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Mass media and children. 2. Digital media—Social aspects. 3. Children—Social conditions. 4. Children’s rights. I. Title.

HQ784.M3 B83 2000

302.23—dc21

99-047595

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Palatino

by Ace Filmsetting Ltd, Frome, Somerset

Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King s Lynn

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

For more information on polity, please visit our website: http://www.politybooks.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1   In Search of the Child

Part I

2   The Death of Childhood

3   The Electronic Generation

Part II

4   Changing Childhoods

5   Changing Media

6   Changing Paradigms

Part III

7   Children Viewing Violence

8   Children as Consumers

9   Children as Citizens

Conclusion

10   Children’s Media Rights

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgements

This book is in many respects a summation – or at least a provisional summation – of an area of research that has preoccupied me for more than fifteen years. As such, it draws upon work that has been published elsewhere, and in some places directly reworks and incorporates material from earlier books and articles. Nevertheless, the book was conceived as a coherent project from the start, and it includes a substantial amount of new material.

I would like to thank the many people who have worked with me on the numerous empirical research projects on which this book is based, notably Mark Allerton, Sara Bragg, Hannah Davies, Valerie Hey, Sue Howard, Ken Jones, Peter Kelley, Gunther Kress, Gemma Moss and Julian Sefton-Green. Particular thanks are due to Peter Kelley for his work on the statistical data presented in chapter 4. I would also like to thank the many organizations that have funded these projects: the Economic and Social Research Council, the Broadcasting Standards Council, the Nuffield Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the Arts Council of England.

I owe a special debt to Professor Elihu Katz and the Annenberg School for Communication in Philadelphia for awarding me a fellowship that enabled me to begin working on the book; and to the Institute of Education for providing a supportive working environment. I would also like to thank other international colleagues with whom I have debated these issues, or whose research has informed and supported my own, particularly Elisabeth Auclaire, Kirsten Drotner, JoEllen Fisherkeller, Horst Niesyto, Geoff Lealand and Joe Tobin. Thanks also to the many groups of students, academics and teachers who have been on the receiving end of some of these arguments over the past few years, and have helped me to reformulate and develop my ideas: these include my M.A. students on the Children’s Media Culture course at the Institute of Education, as well as audiences in France, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Canada, Australia, the United States and Britain.

Finally, fond thanks to Celia Greenwood, Clemency Ngayah-Otto and Julian Sefton-Green for their careful reading of the manuscript; and to my junior research assistants Nathan and Louis Greenwood, who have always displayed a healthy independence from their father’s ideas. This book is dedicated to them.

Introduction

1

In Search of the Child

The claim that childhood has been lost has been one of the most popular laments of the closing years of the twentieth century. It is a lament that has echoed across a whole range of social domains – in the family, in the school, in politics, and perhaps above all in the media. Of course, the figure of the child has always been the focus of adult fears, desires and fantasies. Yet in recent years, debates about childhood have become invested with a growing sense of anxiety and panic. Traditional certainties about the meaning and status of childhood have been steadily eroded and undermined. We no longer seem to know where childhood can be found.

The place of the child in these debates is profoundly ambiguous, however. On the one hand, children are increasingly seen as threatened and endangered. Thus, we have seen a succession of high-profile investigations into child abuse, both in families and in schools and children’s homes. There are frequent press reports about child murders and the scandal of neglected ‘home alone kids’; and public hysteria about the risk of random abduction by paedophiles has steadily intensified. Meanwhile, our newspapers and television screens show scenes of the very different childhoods of children in developing countries: the street children of Latin America, the child soldiers in Africa and the victims of sex tourism in Asia.

On the other hand, children are also increasingly perceived as a threat to the rest of us – as violent, anti-social and sexually precocious. There has been growing concern about the apparent collapse of discipline in schools, and the rise in child crime, drug-taking and teenage pregnancy. As in the 1970s, the threat of an uncontrollable underclass of young people, caught in the liminal space between school and work, has begun to loom large – although this time around, the delinquents are even younger. The sacred garden of childhood has increasingly been violated; and yet children themselves seem ever more reluctant to remain confined within it.

The media are implicated here in contradictory ways. On the one hand, they serve as the primary vehicle for these ongoing debates about the changing nature of childhood – and in the process, they undoubtedly contribute to the growing sense of fear and panic. Yet on the other hand, the media are frequently blamed for causing those problems in the first place – for provoking indiscipline and aggressive behaviour, for inflaming precocious sexuality, and for destroying the healthy social bonds which might prevent them from arising in the first place. Journalists, media pundits, self-appointed guardians of public morality – and increasingly academics and politicians – are incessantly called on to pronounce on the dangers of the media for children: the influence of violent ‘video nasties’, the ‘dumbing down’ of children’s television, the explicit sexuality of teenage magazines and the easy availability of pornography via the internet. And the media are now routinely condemned for ‘commercializing’ childhood – for transforming children into rapacious consumers, seduced by the deceptive wiles of advertisers into wanting what they do not need.

Meanwhile, the media themselves display an ambivalent fascination with the very idea of childhood. Hollywood movies have become preoccupied with the figure of the child-like adult (Forest Gump, Toys, Dumb and Dumber) and the adult-like child (Jack, Little Man Tate, Big). Advertising images display a similar ambivalence, from the notorious black devil/white angel of the campaign for Benetton clothing to the waif-like supermodels of the Calvin Kline ads. Meanwhile, the resurgence of the Disney Corporation points to the global marketability of conventional ‘children’s culture’ to both adults and children – although, ironically, Kids, Larry Clark’s controversial documentary-style film of casual sex and drugs among younger teenagers in New York, is also owned by a Disney subsidiary.

And then there is the figure of Michael Jackson – in the words of his biographer, ‘the man who was never a child and the child who never grew up’.1 From the children’s crusade represented in his ‘Heal the World’ video, through his obsession with the imagery of Disney and Peter Pan, to the scandals surrounding allegations about his sexual abuse of children, Jackson epitomizes the intense uncertainty and discomfort that has come to surround the notion of childhood in the late modern era.