Children as a Special
Audience
Remarks
made at the World Summit on Television and Children, World Congress
Centre
Melbourne, Australia March 12 - 17, 1995
Ellen
Wartella, Ph.D., Dean
College of Communication
The University of Texas at Austin
This
year, 1995, marks the 100th anniversary of the Lumiere brothers' exhibit
of short films to about three dozen people in Paris an event which marked
the first public projection of moving images on the screen. Throughout
France, celebrations are honoring the development of cinema as an art
form. With this marker then, we have now had 100 years of electronic
media in the world--first cinema, and then radio, and of course the
most ubiquitous, television, and now the growing numbers of video and
computer related products. Indeed, while I have been asked to comment
today on children as a special audience for television, I feel compelled
to take a longer view of my task, to try to wrestle with the question
of children as an audience, in general, for the various and quickly
developing media of the last century and to direct my attention to the
current situation of child audiences for television and for future electronic
media. From the vantage of 100 years of electronic media production,
what do we know about children's media and child audiences?
First,
the extent to which children have historically and around the world,
been early and heavy users of mass media is remarkable. This has been
so since the earliest days of film. And perhaps at least partly because
of this, there have been recurring public concerns about the social
effects of media use on children. Throughout the past century, children
have been thought to be particularly susceptible to media technologies,
and film, radio, television, video, have all been criticized for their
abilities to "capture" child audiences. Critics have always
been concerned that young people spend too much time with media products
that are too violent and of inappropriate quality. Indeed, there have
been a number of historical accounts (e.g. Wartella and Reeves, 1982;
Starker, 1989; Luke, 1992) which have detailed the recurring controversies
about media effects on children which have accompanied the development
of each of the mass media in the US I hazard to say they are the same
elsewhere. In particular, the first lesson we have learned about child
audiences is that children's avid use of mass media is thought to be
a social problem. Let me offer just a few examples from the past 100
years:
From
The Journal of Education in 1919: "The tendency of children to
imitate the daring deed seen upon the screen has been illustrated in
nearly every court of the land. Train wrecks, robberies, murders, thefts
runaways and other forms of juvenile delinquency have been traced to
some particular film. The imitation is not confined to young boys and
girls but extends to adolescents and to adults." (Quoted in Starker,
1989).
From
1930 in Christian Century. "The movies are so occupied with crime
and sex stuff and are so saturating the minds of children the world
over with social sewage that they have become a menace to mental and
moral life of the coming generation."
About
radio, Eisenberg wrote in 1936, "The popularity of this new pastime
radio among children has increased rapidly. This new invader of the
privacy of the home has brought many a disturbing influences in its
wake.... Parents have become aware of a puzzling change in the behavior
of their children."
What
are we to make of these recurring concerns about media effects on children?
Some would argue that such concerns about child audiences are misapplied
generalized fears of technology, fear of change and fear of popular
culture (e.g. Starker, 1989). Are such fears, more simply put, fears
about how modern life and child rearing has changed? Are they a displacement
of our real concerns about the loss of parental influence on children,
the extent to which children's culture diverges from that of their parents,
and the ways in which modern life is unkind to children including child
homelessness, poverty, war and child abuse? When we focus our concerns
about the ill effects of media on children, are we displacing our more
"real" concerns about the nature of children's lives in contemporary
society? I think not. A genuine concern for child welfare in fact links
and expresses both root problems and what some may see as more superficial
ones. The mass media, among the panoply of forces affecting children's
lives, appear only the most readily identifiable problems, and one's
which one would think a society could, with sufficient political and
social conscience, do something about.
In
America, for example, violence is a real and serious problem, and the
electronic media have been attacked for their presumed role in fostering
real- world violence. We know that media portrayals are neither the
primary cause, nor perhaps even among the most important causes, of
violence. But we also know they are a contributing agent and that they
are one of the causes we can do something about. Consequently, there
have been, historically and across the globe, attempts at regulation
of media for children (prohibiting importation of certain kinds of violence
films, say), or prohibiting children's access to certain programs (via
ratings systems) or even regulating what media producers do produce
(such as the US's Children's Television Act of 1990 which obligates
American broadcasters to program informational and educational programming
for children). Throughout the world, over the past 1 00 years, we have
seen such attempts at regulation as a political response to perceived
social ills. Focusing on children is one way of casting the issue in
human and humane terms.
Second,
we have accumulated considerable evidence that children are a "special"
audience with special psychological needs and social interests, requiring
that we tailor media production to them. The specialness of the child
audience rests, of course, on the enormous insight into child development
we have gleaned over the past century. While there have been recurring
attempts to proclaim the "death of childhood" in recent years,
there is a more widespread belief, rooted in educational practice and
supported by research, that children are not miniature adults; rather
children acquire cognitive competence, social knowledge and emotional
maturity over the course of childhood. Outcomes of this lesson have
been a demand for, and development of more media programming which address
the special needs of children, in particular, age- graded educational
and informational programming. Aided by the development of international
children's television festivals such as Prix Jeunesse, the Japan Prize
and the American Children's Television Festival, children's television
producers have access to the high quality children's television productions
throughout the world.
Moreover,
there has been a virtual explosion of research studies of children's
reactions to television, both by media producers themselves, such as
Swedish Television's considerable body of research on children's use
of television in that country, and the well-known Children's Television
Workshop model of formative research for developing their educational
programs, and by academics and others who have been studying the effects
of television on children. As this World Summit itself would suggest,
producing media today exists within a global marketplace and a global
understanding of child audiences. Any producer who wants to produce
a high quality educational and informational program for children, is
not lacking information on how to do so and, indeed, increasingly, in
the US at least, television production for children entails ongoing
and considerable research with children.
The
particular elements for creating a given television production may vary
from country to country, but the principle is the same: Create programming
which entertains children while it educates them, which attracts their
attention and engages their minds, which neither ignores their interests
nor speaks down to them. No wonder then, that the best of children's
television, like fairy tales and other enduring children's literature,
often includes humor, suspense, children as protagonists, stories with
simply understood moral lessons. When informational programs are made,
complementary visual and auditory elements reinforce the message, in
a nondidactic manner.
There
is, however a third, and most alarming, lesson I think we have learned
about children's media over the past 100 years: The increasing commercialization
of children's lives. Indeed, global pressures will continue to commercialize
childhood throughout the world. Along with adults, children have accrued
more leisure time in the past century, and globally, media have come
to play an increasing role in that leisure time. More recently, too,
the development of a global media market in which film, television,
video and their attendant spin- off products now ensures that there
is an international marketplace for media products, and children are
a key segment of this market. But the global marketplace for children's
media carries with it special risks, and there are trends in this area
that are disturbing and, I believe, pernicious.
Over
the decades of the Twentieth Century, ever-younger age groups have become
the focus of commercial media attention. During the 1920s American college
students--the flappers--were the darlings of the media of their day.
College youth developed an autonomous peer-oriented youth culture separate
from their parents, arguably the first true youth culture in history.
The image of the short-skirted, bobbed haired flapper smoking a cigarette
and wildly dancing to jazz at the all night party has become synonymous
with youth of the 1920s in Europe and the United States. This sort of
social life, moreover, was portrayed in and encouraged by movies, music,
radio, magazines and popular fiction of the day. These media both reflected
and promoted the 1920s college students mores, in the process turning
the youth culture into a consumer culture. In the process, too, it sparked
considerable outrage and panic on the part of the American public, the
likes of which was not seen again until the late 1940s and 1950s when
the mass media focused their attention downward, to teenagers.
The
teenage culture of the 1950s sparked considerable public outcry and
government investigation in the U.S.: The rise of rock and roll, the
growth of television and the popularity of comic books brought public
attention to the multiple media outlets for teenagers to while away
their time. The mass media catered to and nurtured a commercialized
notion of teenage life: They helped to create standards in dress, language,
values and behavior, a separate teen culture devoted to Elvis or the
Beatles or whatever latest rock and roll or movie star developed. It
too brought with it a public outcry about how teenagers were spending
their time.
The
past 25 years have seen media industries move their target downward
further, first to preadolescents, then to children in elementary school
and younger, and the vehicles for this have been television and videos.
Today young children, even preschoolers, are the target of commercial
messages increasingly around the world. Young children's culture is
a culture dominated by television and toys. Just like earlier generations
of flappers and teenagers were able to develop a separate lifestyle
separated from their parents, today's young children have access via
television's promotion of shows with characters that are related to
toys, to their own culture which can now connect children all over the
world.
The
rise of privatized commercial television in Europe, Latin America, Japan,
Australia and elsewhere, coupled with the growth of satellite and cable
television around the world and the concomitant decline in public broadcasting
systems, is creating a remarkably commercialized media culture for children.
Importantly, it is not just that children are the target of advertising
messages for cereals, toys and snack foods on commercial TV, it is rather
that commercialization dominates a// of their media and toy products.
Children
around the world now have access to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
(or Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles as they are called in Great Britain)
and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers via television, video books, interactive
video games, movies and a whole host of toy products, comic books, clothing
and children's furnishings. Programs which link television characters
to toy products, in the US these are called program length commercials,
are of increasing concern around the globe. The fact that television
program characters are created with an eye towards their marketing potential
as toys is only part of the entire marketing strategy which has developed
over the past decade. Starting from the premise that children like the
familiar and recognizable, the creation of children's programming (which
used to be based on children's books, fairy tales or films such as the
highly successful Disney movies) are an elaborated manifestation of
providing children with something familiar. Now the simultaneous production
of the children's television show and its toy related character is supported
and reinforced via traditional product licensing (such as for backpacks,
sheets, towels, clothing, lunch boxes) cereal and snack products, character
appearances at shopping malls and holiday events, movie appearances;
and of course a host of new technology toys including arcade and home
video games, story tapes, and home computer software. These characters
and products range widely around the world--it is difficult to escape
large purple dinosaurs or talking fire engines anywhere.
What
is developing is something unique to the new electronic age, what Marsha
Kinder in her book on video games calls "a supersystem: a network
of interrelated narrative texts or media products constructed around
a pop cultural figure or group of figures." In addition to the
Turtles, there are such television and film characters as the Simpsons,
the Smurfs, the Moppets of Sesame Street, Batman, and Barney the dinosaur.
Such pop cultural icons can be real people too, such as Madonna, XuXa,
and even the dead Elvis Presley. By intentionally marketing to even
young children, this interrelated network of cultural products based
on pop icons, children's culture has become commercialized in a manner
unseen in the past. Around the world, children are being trained to
become part of an interconnected consumer group, who identify with,
collect, and together can play with Turtles, or Power Rangers, or Barney
toys. Moreover, even educational programs such as Sesame Street, are
utilizing the same marketing notion of developing an interconnected
collection of various media, toy and other products to sustain and support
the television production.
Even
new educational children's television shows in the U.S. today are not
immune to this process. They have a remarkable similarity in their production
approach: The television show is developed with multiple sources of
income (federal funding, foundation support, and corporate underwriting),
and simultaneous to the production of the program, spin-offs such as
in-school curricular guides, books, magazines, perhaps museum displays,
and even fast food collectible tie-ins, are planned. Later, video games,
computer games and even movies can be spun off. All of the ancillary
products are important in both providing income to support the television
production as well as to provide an overall marketing strategy to first
pique, sustain and then satisfy the interests of child viewers of the
television show. This model for funding children's programming is being
carried to an international marketplace.
And
this is a worldwide trend necessitated by several factors: First, there
is the increasingly interlinked global media networks dominated by many
of the same transnational corporations (Bertelsmann, Murdock, RAI, MCA,
Time- Warner) who now are interested in media products which indeed
can transcend the globe. Television is no longer a local , regional,
or national media system. It is a global medium and increasingly it
is part of a multifaceted transnational media industry which can produce
cultural products in a variety of media simultaneously and reach a global
market.
Second,
even in the case of educationally sound and felicitous programs, there
is a need to raise capital for such productions, which by the way, are
most often made by smaller productions companies outside of the global
multinational producers. The need to raise capital for increasingly
sophisticated and high production value children's television requires
either international partnerships, product licensing arrangements, or
both.
Third,
the expanding number of media outlets which now need and want children's
product, such as video games, home video production, CD-ROM computer
products and other computer games, means that there is a voracious appetite
for any children's product which has been shown to appeal to children.
(As I have argued elsewhere, moreover, almost all successful electronic
media technologies become successful through attracting child audiences
to "sell" parents on investing in the technology.) Thus, there
is inherent appeal of media products based on the same cultural icon
or character.
Finally,
throughout the world, middle class families have ceded to their children
unprecedented economic influence-- children beg for the toys, games
and attendant products sold via the television shows, and parents acquiesce
and buy them. Indeed there is enough culpability to go around, as parents,
media producers and policymakers around the globe, have allowed this
unprecedented commercialization of children's lives. No matter how we
try to justify it by distinguishing "educational" content
from "low level merely entertaining " content, the same interaction
is taking place. The international television marketplace is at the
center of the commercialization of the child audience. And the consequences
of this commercialization are not at all well understood.
A variety
of concerns must be raised about commercialization of children's media:
How does the need for attractive products for marketing constrain the
quality of the television shows now being produced? Will marketing issues
overwhelm any concern with education or aesthetics? And importantly,
will the need to make programming which appeals to a global marketplace
of children, reduce the likelihood of creating children's programs expressive
of different languages, cultures, and ethnic groups. To what extent
are we homogenizing children's television for the sake of the marketplace?
Several
recent studies suggest that the world consumer culture for children
has inherent biases toward middle class boys. For instance, in a study
in Norway comparing the social life of preschool children living in
a communities with and without commercial television, Ragnhild Bjonebekk
(1992) recently uncovered several marked differences in children's choice
of play items, drawings and choice of play friends. Parent's especially
of boys in the commercial television community reported not only that
the boys pressured them to buy the toys (which they reported relenting
to), but that these boys also preferred to choose friends who collected
the same TV related toys they liked, such as the Turtles. Accordingly,
these children's game playing and drawings also were dominated by the
toy characters. In contrast, the children in the town without commercial
television did not report wanting the television toys even though they
were readily available to them, and were quite happy with drawing, walking,
riding bicycles etc. as pastimes. Lastly, the influence of the commercial
television seemed stronger for boys than for girls in this study.
Indeed,
the ways in which the commercialized world of children's culture has
marked gender, and class and ethnic differences has been recently commented
upon by Ellen Seiter in her book Sold Separately. Seiter's position,
much like that argued here, is that young children's culture, centering
as it does on television and toys, is a very commercialized one. Even
for American middle class parents who try to restrict their children
to so-called "educational programs" and educational toys,
these too are part of an interrelated marketing system , albeit one
that can be found in parent's magazines, in trendy shopping catalogues
and on public television. Nonetheless, the system is remarkably similar
to the commercialized television programs and toy products found at
mega stores such as Toys R Us. Seiter is less concerned with the fact
that children are developing a separate market driven culture than she
is concerned with the particular cultural messages that are marketed
to the children. She notes that TV and toys are predominantly oriented
to middle class Anglo boys. Girls and children of other ethnicities
are marginalized. Action, and often violence, good vs. evil, heroic
feats, technical wizardry, and male dominated characters are all marks
of the boys' television best typified by the Turtles successes. In contrast,
girl children's programs are dominated by cute doll-like characters
who are sugary sweet and who demonstrate positive qualities of caring
and helpfulness (such as Ariel in Disney's The Little Mermaid). And
these differences between action and super heroes for boys has been
carried over into toys and other video and video games. Children's commercial
culture is not known for its equality.
My
point here is not just that transnational capitalism in the culture
industries is aggressively and successfully selling gender-, class-
and ethnically- stereotyped toys to tots. It is rather that the logic
of this form of marketing, treating children almost exclusively as a
commodity market, is, virtually before our eyes, erasing any other more
beneficent model of how we should approach the child audience, and why.
Can
we begin to think of children, not as an audience segment, not as a
market whose interests need to be gauged and then sold product to? Rather,
what if, we rethought this notion of the child audience as a market
for television and began to think of children as a "public"
for television. As a public, children then become an important collection
of world citizens (to quote Ian Ang) "who must be reformed, educated,
informed, as well as entertained--in short, "served." (Ang,
1991, pp. 28-29). This notion of an audience as public is invoked by
Ang in her study of television audiences to suggest that we can conjure
up an image of audiences, in this case, of a children's audience, which
requires that we affirmatively conceive of children's needs for diverse
programming of aesthetic merit and of educational benefit. Moreover,
when we think of the child public, perhaps we can open up a space in
the current and future discussions about the emerging new electronic
media systems of the information superhighway where children and the
institutions which support them such as school systems will have access
to information in a non-commercialized digital environment.
To
the extent that we treat children only as a market we rob them of an
opportunity to develop their own sense of being in the public and to
develop their own public consciences. One hundred years ago when the
Lumiere brothers films first flickered onto the stage, children may
have been in the theater, but their presence was not marked with noted
attention. Children were early users of film but not necessarily coveted.
Much has changed in the ensuing years -- we have learned several important
lessons about children as "special" audiences. But, are we
really better off a century later, now that children are exploited as
an audience?
