FTVMS 211 - Week 11

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quotations used in lecture 11

 “Children under 2 years old should not watch television, older children should not have television sets in their bedrooms and pediatricians should have parents fill out a "media history," along with a medical history, on office visits, according to recommendations by the American Academy of Pediatrics.”

• Lawrie Mifflin, “Pediatrics Group Offers Tough Rules for Television,” The New York Times, August 4, 1999.

 

 “The Simpsons...became a convenient point of articulation for a larger network of discourses and anxieties. Numerous commentators expressed fear that the dissemination of animated narratives constructed from the perspective of the fourth grade hellion Bart was sure to produce a new generation of underachievers who are ‘proud of it, man,’ and not about to back down in the face of proper authority.” 

• Kevin Glynn, “Bartmania: The Social Reception of an Unruly Image,” camera obscura 38 (1998): 63.

 

"Childhood, the invention of adults, reflects adult needs and adult fears quite as much as it signifies the absence of adulthood. In the course of modern history children have been glorified, patronised, ignored, or held in contempt, depending upon the cultural assumptions and needs of adults....The category of the child has developed to become one of the most potent repositories for a range of cultural beliefs and ideologies."

• Phillipe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (Yale University Press: 1986), p.184.

 

• Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York : Vintage Books, 1994.)

 

“The politics of childhood are a touchy subject. The ideal of childhood innocence is so sacred, it is very to even question the political use-value it has for adults.”

• Heather Hendershot, Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 217.

 

“Children's culture is not ‘innocent’ of adult political, economic, moral or sexual concerns. Rather, the creation of children's culture represents the central arena through which we construct our fantasies about the future and a battleground through which we struggle to express competing ideological agendas.”

• Henry Jenkins, “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths,” in  The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

 

“Like children’s literature, children’s television is not produced by children but for them. As such, it should be read as a reflection not so much of children’s interests or fantasies or desires but of adults’.”

• David Buckingham, “On the Impossibility of Children’s Television” in In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences, ed. Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham (London: BFI, 1995), p. 47.

 

“Debates on children and television are then essentially about how adults understand children and how they want them to be. They are also debates about how adults fear children and what they might become.”

• Brian Simpson, Children and Television (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 11.

 

 “The texts of South Park are among the range of sites in which the social construction of contemporary childhood is played out. In their contestation and critique of accepted social expectations of childhood they can be at times shocking and funny and poignant. However, they may also provide some contemporary children and teenagers with material against which they can define and assert their identities, and with which they are able to negotiate changing social relations with their peers and with adults.”

• Helen Nixon, “South Park: Not in front of the Children,” in Small Screens: Television for Children, ed. David Buckingham (London: Leicester University Press, 2002), pp.117-18.

 

“Children are seen here, not as confident adventurers in an age of new challenges and possibilities, but as passive victims of media manipulation…[They] are unable to help themselves; and it is our responsibility as adults to prevent them from gaining access to that which would harm and corrupt them…Vulnerability, ignorance, and irrationality are regarded as part of the inherent condition of childhood.”

• David Buckingham, “Electronic Child Abuse? Rethinking the Media's Effects on Children” in Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate, ed. Martin Barker and Julian Petley (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 32-33.

 

“Violence should not be treated as a singular category that can be seen to have singular effects. A great deal depends upon the nature and the context of violence; and upon children's existing expectations and knowledge of the genre and the medium....Rather than simply condemning such material, it makes sense to begin by asking why people - and children, in particular - actively choose to watch it. Horror films [for example] do frighten most children, in some cases quite severely - but they also give many of them considerable pleasure. Yet the failure to recognise the ambivalence of this experience, the complex relationship between 'distress and delight', is characteristic of much of the research and debate on these issues.”

• David Buckingham, “Electronic Child Abuse?” p. 41.