Studying Children’s Media Cultures:
A New Agenda for Cultural Studies
by
David Buckingham
Institute of Education, University of London
Children’s Media Culture: An Orphan in the Academy?
The study of children’s relationships with media occupies a strange and uneasy
position, both within the academy and within the wider world of public debate. At
least in the field of sociology, it is very much a marginal pursuit. Broadly sociological
approaches to the media are now quite academically respectable in many countries;
and the sociological study of childhood has also become a rapidly expanding area.
And yet - perhaps surprisingly - there appears to be very little dialogue between
researchers in these fields.
Thus, the sociology of childhood has largely neglected the role of the media in
children’s lives - and by extension, the role of other forms of commercial culture. In
practice, it has been dominated by a comparatively conventional sociological - even
‘welfarist’ - agenda. That neglect is perhaps partly informed by a vestigial sense of
popular culture as somehow inauthentic - as lacking in cultural or ideological value,
or as merely a further imposition of ‘adult’ culture on children. As Sonia Livingstone
(1998) has recently argued, the new sociological child appears to live a nonmediated childhood: this is ‘a carefree child playing hopscotch with friends in a
nearby park, not a child with music on the headphones watching television in her
bedroom’. Whatever the reasons for it, this approach results in a neglect of what is
by any estimate a significant aspect of children’s social experience.
At the same time, childhood has also been conspicuous by its absence in academic
Media and Cultural Studies. Cultural Studies routinely intones its familiar mantra of
differences - class, race, gender, sexuality, age - but in practice it has seriously
neglected the social and cultural significance of age differences. Of course, there
has been an intermittent concern with youth culture, although this has often been
merely a coded way of addressing issues of social class and gender. Childhood has
only just begun to feature as a minor - and still very marginal - concern. Again, the
reasons for this are not easy to identify: it may well be that the kind of identity
politics that has informed Cultural Studies over the past twenty years does not easily
recognise childhood as a legitimate concern. There is also still an implicit sense in
which childhood is seen to be an issue for psychology; and as Michael Billig (1997)
has pointed out, Cultural Studies regularly stops short of an engagement with
psychology, even though it has an implicit psychology (or psychologies) of its own.
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Perhaps even more surprisingly, the study of children’s relationships with media is
also completely marginal to the discipline of education. I work in a graduate school
of education, and my interest in this field is primarily motivated by an interest in
learning and in educational practice. Yet I have grown rather weary of insisting in
this context that the media are the most significant educational, or socialising,
influences in contemporary society; or that the sites and forms of education are
changing, and that the old boundaries between school cultures and out-of-school
cultures, or between ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’, are no longer relevant. For
most people within the discipline of education, even self-professed educational
radicals, the school (or indeed, the school classroom) still seems to be considered
as the only legitimate domain of study.
On the other hand, of course, there is a massive proliferation of psychological
research about the effects of the media on children - although much of it is viewed
with considerable suspicion by sociologists of childhood and by Cultural Studies
academics. The media effects industry is, of course, largely driven by moral and
political panics about the harmful influence of media on children. Within Cultural
Studies, there is a long tradition of damning this work, not just as positivist and
empiricist, but also for conceiving of children (and audiences generally) as merely
passive victims of the media (e.g. Barker and Petley, 1997). Ultimately, there is a
denial of children’s agency at the heart of this approach; and these criticisms apply
just as much to more apparently ‘critical’ research about the effects of advertising or
consumer culture as they do to research about media violence.
It would be comforting to subscribe to the argument, which some media researchers
have been making recently, that there could be a rapprochement between these
approaches (see, for example, Ferguson and Golding, 1997). There is certainly
room for further debate about the rather misleading notion of ‘moral panics’, and
indeed about the notion of media ‘effects’ (and of course, Cultural Studies also
frequently relies on unstated assumptions about effects). But ultimately the political
context and political uses of this kind of research - particularly in debates about
violence - make that kind of rapprochement very difficult. If we are to look for some
kind of shared ground here, we will need to move away from simplistic notions of
‘effects’, and to pay much closer attention to the processes by which children make
sense of media. Broadly constructivist psychological approaches in fact have much
in common with the more interpretivist approach to audiences that has emerged in
Media Studies over the past twenty years - even though, here again, there has been
very little dialogue between them.
The other area of research in this field that should be mentioned here is research
conducted by the media industries themselves. Research has become significantly
more important for producers, broadcasters and policy-makers than was the case
even ten years ago (see Buckingham et al, 1999: Chapter Four). The move towards
a much more competitive, multi-channel environment has led to a growing
uncertainty about the audience. At least at the level of official rhetoric, there is a
sense that children are now very far from a captive audience: on the contrary, they
are seen as unpredictable, discriminating and demanding - and therefore much
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more difficult to reach. As a result, research has become a very valuable form of
currency within the industry - and researchers themselves are increasingly using
innovative, qualitative approaches that have much in common with those of Cultural
Studies.
Again, it would be reassuring to hope that a dialogue could be generated here
between academics and industry researchers. While they are guided by different
imperatives, the media industries have the resources to gather information about
children to which academics are unlikely ever to gain access. Nevertheless, there
are reasons why this dialogue is problematic, not the least of which is that all
industry research is ultimately a form of market research. The media industries are
interested - obsessively and intrusively interested - in finding out about children, but
only to the extent that this will help them to sell their products more effectively.
Ultimately, therefore, the study of children’s relationships with media is somewhat of
an orphan in the academy. It lacks a secure home, and it is in danger of
disappearing in the gaps between the disciplines. While different disciplines and
research paradigms have historically laid claim to different aspects of the field, there
has been a disappointing lack of dialogue between them.
My aim in this paper is not to lay claim to the field, but simply to argue that Cultural
Studies may have something unique to offer the study of children’s media cultures.
This is an argument that might be received with a certain justifiable suspicion.
Certainly, there are many pertinent criticisms to be made of Cultural Studies, and
perhaps particularly of the form in which it has become institutionalised in the United
States: its tendency to degenerate into a form of academic journalism; its
preoccupation with cultural theory at the expense of empirical analysis; and its
increasing obsession with academic self-critique. By contrast, what I intend to
propose here is a return to the positive dimensions of the Birmingham tradition. In
particular, I want to discuss some of the possibilities and limitations of an emphasis
on children’s agency and lived experience in this field; and then to argue that the
analysis of children’s media cultures needs to look more broadly, to re-locate its
account of children as an audience in the context of a more comprehensive analysis
of the relationships between cultural institutions, texts and audiences.
In a sense, I want to argue that the study of children’s media culture must
necessarily be inter-disciplinary; and that it must therefore involve a dialogue
between approaches that have hitherto remained largely separate. The crucial
emphasis, however, is on the relationships between these different forms of study on inter-disciplinarity, rather than just multi-disciplinarity. Cultural Studies certainly
claims to be an inter-disciplinary field; yet it remains to be seen whether it will enable
us to understand and theorise these relationships adequately, and hence provide a
useful site for dialogue.
Beyond the ‘Media-competent’ Child
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I came to audience research through an involvement in education, and specifically in
media education - an area of the curriculum that is probably more established in the
UK than in many other countries. What motivated me to start looking at children’s
relationships with media was a sense that media teachers were not taking sufficient
account of what children already know about media. The books on media education
were very keen to lay out what children ought to know, but they often implicitly
assumed that they knew nothing, or that what they knew was somehow invalid or
merely ‘ideological’. There was a kind of cultural deficit model here: it was implicitly
assumed that children are passive and they need to be made active; that they are
uncritical and they need to be made critical; that they are mystified and that we (the
teachers) need to demystify them. Beginning to look at the child audience was
therefore part of a broader move in the development of pedagogy in this field: it
represented an argument for starting with where students were at, with what was
important for students, and according it a kind of respect, rather than starting with
where teachers were at or where they thought their students ought to be (see
Buckingham, 1990, 1998).
This work was part of a broader shift in thinking about the child audience, not only
among educationalists but also among more strictly academic researchers. Within
Cultural Studies and to some extent within psychology, there was a move away from
the ‘effects’ model, and a growing recognition of children’s agency and competency
in their relations with media (see Buckingham, 2000a). This new research is fond of
emphasising that children are 'active' participants in the process of making meaning.
They are seen as sophisticated, discriminating and ‘media-wise’ - as competent
social actors, rather than as passive victims of the media. This argument is still, in
my view, an important and necessary challenge to many of the assumptions that
typically circulate in public debate - particularly in the face of increasingly simplistic
and hysterical assertions about the impact of ‘media violence’.
Nevertheless, I have some concerns about where this argument leads; and there
are some significant parallels in this respect between the development of this
research in Cultural Studies and work in the sociology of childhood. In some
respects, this research has been rather over-determined by its reaction against
popular anxieties about the negative effects of the media, and against the ways in
which these have been incorporated into psychological ‘effects’ research. This has
led to a rather simplistic ‘child-centred’ approach, which seeks to celebrate the
sophistication of the ‘media-wise’ child, and to prove (endlessly) that children are not
as gullible or as passive as they are often made out to be. At its worst, this can lead
to precisely the kind of ‘banality’ that critics of Cultural Studies have been so eager
to condemn (Morris, 1988). There is a significant danger here of simply replacing a
view of children as easily impressionable and vulnerable to influence with an
opposite view of them as somehow naturally autonomous and competent - as
spontaneously ‘media-literate’. Both positions are equally sentimental - and indeed,
equally patronising.
Ultimately, there is a danger that the argument about children's high levels of 'media
literacy' will become a kind of rhetorical platitude. In our recent research, we found
that media producers very often made the same kinds of arguments (Buckingham et
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al., 1999: Chapter Five): they too were keen to promote the view that children are
sophisticated, discriminating and ‘powerful’ in their dealings with media. Yet in
asserting that children are indeed very ‘media literate’, producers often appear to
mean simply that children are very quick to change channels when they see
something they don't like. In the increasingly commercial environment of
contemporary media, the argument for media literacy easily becomes confused with
arguments about consumer sovereignty - as though children's rights as media users
were simply a matter of their right to consume more of what adults have to offer. Of
course, it is not necessarily a problem for researchers and broadcasters to be in
agreement on such matters; although there is a genuine risk that researchers who
take this point of view will end up merely becoming apologists for the media
industries.
As in other areas of social research, this kind of theoretical and political romanticism
is often tied to a methodological and epistemological realism. Thus, it is frequently
claimed that this kind of research can adopt or represent the child’s point of view.
This approach often entails the assumption that our data somehow speak for
themselves - and that all we are doing is providing a forum in which children’s voices
can be heard, and thereby encouraging our readers to ‘listen to children’. The
dangers here are fairly self-evident. Politically, there is a risk of assuming that as
adults we can speak or act on behalf of children. In terms of research, there is also
a methodological danger in assuming that we can ever take the child’s perspective or that this perspective is something which will simply be revealed to us if we ask the
right kinds of questions.
As I have implied, one can detect echoes of these dangers in the contemporary
sociology of childhood. There is a similar risk here in simply replacing the notion of
children as incompetent with the opposite notion of children as innately competent.
Ultimately, this can amount to little more than a new form of romanticism - or indeed
sentimentality; and if taken too far, it can mean that adults’ responsibilities to
children are actively neglected. From this perspective, protecting children can come
to seem like just another way of oppressing them; and celebrating children’s
competence can provide a useful alibi for avoiding our obligation to care for them.
Nevertheless, the sociology of childhood does have some important lessons for
media researchers. In particular, it challenges us to practice what we preach: to look
more closely at children’s social uses and interpretations of the media, and to see
these as embedded within their everyday lives and social relationships. This may
mean that we need to make a more radical break with the traditional focus on texts
and readers, and the persistent notion of the media as simply vehicles for delivering
'messages' to audiences. It certainly means that we need media research that is
genuinely ethnographic, rather than research that uses ethnographic methods in a
rather fortuitous - and occasionally rather superficial - way.
At the same time, there is a deconstructionist impulse in the sociology of childhood
which has considerable relevance to media researchers in this field. It implies that,
rather than simply interpreting children’s experiences with media, researchers
should be questioning the terms through which those experiences come to be
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defined. In particular, we should be self-critically examining the ways in which the
notion of ‘childhood’ and the category of ‘the child’ are constructed in relation to
media - by media producers, by children and parents, and (by extension) by media
researchers themselves. Rather than seeing the child audience as something that
exists as given - and our task as simply one of gaining access to it - we need to see
the audience as something that is relative and provisional, as always and inevitably
‘under construction’. The research I will describe in the following section of this
paper was very much motivated by this deconstructionist impulse.
Re-locating the Audience
The challenge here in terms of media research is to find ways of rebuilding the
connections between audience research and other areas of investigation. Looking
back to the Birmingham version of Cultural Studies, there is a central emphasis on
studying the relationships between institutions, texts and audiences. This is
apparent , for example, in Richard Johnson’s influential model of the circuit of
cultural production (Johnson, 1986/7), or indeed the recent work that has come out
of the Open University’s Cultural Studies course (du Gay et al., 1998). In both
cases, the model is more complicated than I am implying; but over the past twenty
years, these different areas have become unhinged from each other, and even
come to be seen as opposed. There has undeniably been a degree of mutual
caricature, and a certain amount of self-caricature too. Researchers who look at the
media industries are automatically cast as crude economic determinists or gloomy
cultural pessimists; whereas audience researchers are routinely condemned as
optimistic populists, wildly celebrating the autonomy and resistance of ‘the people’.
In general, there is a very irritating tendency in public and academic debates to
reduce these questions about the 'power' of the media - and the 'power' of
audiences - to an either/or debate.
In offering a potential alternative to this situation, I would like to provide a brief
outline of a recent research project that tried to rebuild these connections; and to
discuss some of the problems that this entailed. The project was entitled ‘Children’s
Media Culture’, although in practice it was largely confined to looking at children’s
relationship with television, rather than the media more broadly. (More details of the
project can be found in the publications listed in the bibliography.)
Our starting point with this project was to challenge this category of ‘the child’ and
particularly ‘the child audience’. We wanted to make explicit and to deconstruct the
assumptions which are made about children - about who children are, about what
they need, about what they should and should not see - assumptions which derive in
turn from a whole range of institutional discourses. We wanted to examine these
different (and often contradictory) discourses, and the moral, political, economic,
psychological and educational theories on which they are based. Our basic research
question, therefore, was: How do the media (particularly television) construct the
child audience? And how do children negotiate with these constructions - how do
they define themselves and their needs as an audience? We also wanted to take an
historical perspective, to consider how those definitions and constructions have
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changed historically - and how they do or do not reflect changing social
constructions of childhood more broadly.
The key point in terms of my argument here is that these kinds of questions cannot
be answered by looking at only one aspect of the picture - for example, just by
looking at television itself, or just by looking at the audience. On the contrary, we
need to look at the relationships between audiences, texts and institutions. We need
to analyse how these different discourses circulate and are manifested at these
different levels - in policy, in production, in regulation, in the practice of research, in
scheduling, in choices about content, in textual form, in children’s own perspectives
on and uses of media, and in how those uses are regulated and mediated within the
home.
It is also vital to emphasise that none of these levels is determining: on the contrary,
there is an ongoing interaction between them. Each of these relationships involves a
form of negotiation, a struggle over meaning, a struggle for fixity and control. Texts
position readers; but readers also make meanings from texts. Institutions create
policies which are manifested in texts; but policies aren’t simply implemented, since
producers exercise their own kinds of creativity and professional judgment. Likewise,
institutions imagine and target audiences; but audiences are elusive - as Ien Ang
(1991) describes them, they are ‘wild savages’ who cannot be definitively known or
controlled - and the changing behaviour of audiences in turn produces changes in
institutions.
Furthermore, all these relationships evolve over time: policies and institutions evolve
historically, in response to other forces; texts also bear histories of intertextual or
generic relations with other texts, which change; and readers do not come to texts
either as blank slates or as wised-up critical viewers - they also have reading
histories, histories of engagements with other texts which have enabled them to
develop certain kinds of competencies as readers.
Changing Constructions of Childhood: Institutions, Texts and Audiences
So how did we analyse these relationships at each of these levels? In terms of
institutions, the production of children’s media, we looked at three main areas. We
looked historically at the evolution of children’s television, and the kinds of
institutional struggles that went on in attempting to claim and preserve a specific
place for children in the schedules; we looked at the contemporary political economy
of children’s television, and particularly at the fate of public service television in the
light of the move towards a more commercial, multi-channel, global system; and we
gathered and analysed instances of policy discourse, in the form of official reports
and interviews with policy-makers, broadcasters, regulators, lobbyists and others.
In very broad terms, what we find here is a complex balance between the fear of
doing harm (a protectionist discourse) and the attempt to do children good (a
pedagogical discourse); and these are discourses which in each case draw on
broader discourses about childhood. There are also, obviously, some significant
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historical shifts, as established traditions and philosophies come under pressure in
the changing media environment. At present, for example, older philosophies of
child-centredness, which were very dominant in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, are
rearticulated through their encounter with more consumerist notions of childhood,
and simultaneously with notions of children’s rights, which have become a key part
of the rhetoric of children’s producers over the past ten years or so.
Yet far from enjoying an overweening power to define the child audience, producers
and policy-makers in fact display a considerable degree of uncertainty about it.
Changing economic conditions often appear to have precipitated a much broader
set of doubts about the changing nature of childhood. In the 1950s, for instance, the
advent of commercial television, and the subsequent dramatic decline in the ratings
of the BBC (the public service channel), led to a thoroughgoing process of soulsearching. Those responsible for children’s programmes were dismayed by their
loss of the child audience, and increasingly came to doubt the somewhat middleclass, paternalistic approach they had been adopting. Ultimately, after a period of
internal crisis, the BBC’s Children’s Department was effectively abolished in the
early 1960s: it was subsumed by a new Family Department, and when it re-emerged
later in the decade, it did so with a much less paternalistic view of its audience.
Similar doubts and uncertainties are apparent in the present situation, as terrestrial
broadcasters try to come to terms with the threat of competition from new cable and
satellite providers, and (more broadly) with the challenges of globalisation and
commercialisation. In the late 1990s, children in Britain (or at least those whose
parents subscribed to pay-TV) suddenly gained access to a whole series of new
specialist channels; and while the generic range of new programming was
comparatively narrow, much of it appeared distinctly fresh and innovative, and there
was a great deal more to choose from. As in the 1950s, those children who had the
option began to abandon terrestrial television in favour of something that appeared
to speak to them more directly, without the patronising or didactic overtones that still
characterise a good deal of British children’s television.
Contrasting the publicity material produced by the BBC with that produced by the
US-based specialist channel Nickelodeon provides a symptomatic indication of the
different definitions of childhood that are at stake here. The BBC still tends to hark
back to the past, invoking (or indeed re-inventing) tradition - and in the process,
playing to parents’ nostalgia for the television of their own childhoods. By contrast,
Nickelodeon does not have to achieve legitimacy with parents (and hence secure
their continued assent for the compulsory licence fee): it can address children
directly, and it does so in ways that emphasise their anarchic humour and their
sensuality. What we find here, and in the statements of its executives, is a rhetoric
of empowerment - a notion of the channel as giving voice to kids, taking the kids’
point of view, as the friend of kids. Significantly, children seem to be defined here
primarily in terms of being not adults. Adults are boring; kids are fun. Adults are
conservative; kids are fresh and innovative. Adults will never understand; kids
intuitively know. This is a very powerful rhetoric that astutely combines an appeal to
children’s rights with an assertion of consumer power; and its growing popularity
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suggests that terrestrial broadcasters urgently need to re-adjust their conceptions of
childhood, at least if they wish to survive.
In terms of texts, we were interested in how these assumptions and ideologies of
childhood are manifested or negotiated in the practices of producers, and in the
form of texts themselves. There were two aspects here. Firstly, we tried to develop a
broad view of the range of material which has been offered to children over time,
through an audit both of the children’s television schedules over the past four
decades and of the programmes which are most popular with children. The
schedules for children’s TV in the 1950s obviously embody a very different
construction of the space of childhood, and of the nature of children’s viewing, as
compared with the diversity of material which is on offer today. Our analysis also
questions some of the myths of cultural decline that often characterise discussions
of children’s television: the notion that we once lived in a kind of golden age of
quality, and that we are now being swamped by trashy American programming,
simply does not hold up in the face of the evidence.
Secondly, we undertook a series of qualitative case studies of particular texts or
genres, as well as talking to their producers. We were particularly interested in texts
or areas of programming which have a long history, where we can see clear
indications of historical change. We looked at how texts address and construct the
child viewer - for example, the various ways in which the viewer is spoken to; how
the viewer is or is not invited to be involved; the function of children within the
programmes; how adult/child relations are represented or enacted; and more formal
devices - how the visual design of the studio, the camerawork, graphics and music
imply assumptions about who children are, and what they are (or should be)
interested in. This analysis is also, of course, about content - about which topics are
seen to be appropriate for this audience, and how the perceived interests of the
child audience are demarcated from or overlap with those of the adult audience.
The BBC preschool series Teletubbies, and the debates that have surrounded it,
provide an interesting case study of some of these changes. Teletubbies, which
began broadcasting in 1997, is an ‘outsourced’, independent production, which has
generated strong overseas sales and a vast range of ancillary merchandising. It has
been accused of abandoning the ‘great tradition’ of educative programming, and
thereby ‘dumbing down’ its audience; of commercially exploiting children; and (by
some overseas critics) of cultural imperialism, in terms of pedagogy and social
representation. The controversy it has aroused can be seen as a highly symptomatic
reflection of the BBC’s current dilemmas, as it attempts to sustain national public
service traditions while simultaneously depending on commercial activities and
global sales.
In terms of both form and content, Teletubbies is an amalgam of two historical
traditions within children’s television – the more didactic (albeit play-oriented),
‘realist’, adult-centred approach of Playdays and its predecessor Playschool on the
one hand, and the more surrealistic, entertaining tradition of many animation and
puppet shows on the other. While it is the latter that immediately confounds and
surprises many adult critics, it is important to recognise the particular forms of
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education that are being offered here, and the different ways in which they construct
the child viewer. Thus, the ‘child-centred’ pedagogic approach is manifested in
documentary inserts shot and narrated from the child’s point of view; in the
manipulation of knowledge via narrative; and in the slow pace and ‘parental’ mode
of address. This contrasts with the more didactic elements, relating to pre-reading
and counting skills and the modelling of daily routines.
Teletubbies is extremely popular with its immediate target audience of 2-3-yearolds; but it has also attained a kind of cult status among older children and among
some adults. The programme was a frequent topic of conversation in our audience
research, although our sample was much older than the target audience. The 6-7year-olds were often keen to disavow any interest in the programme, while the 1011-year-olds seemed to relate to it with a kind of subversive irony - although it was
often passionately rejected by those with younger siblings. As this implies, the
children’s judgments about the programme reflected their attempts to project
themselves as more or less ‘adult’. Combined with more anecdotal information
about the programme’s popularity with older children and young adults, this
suggests that its cult popularity may be symptomatic of a broader sense of irony that
suffuses contemporary television culture – and one that reflects ambivalent
investments in the idea of ‘childishness’. (For further discussion, see Buckingham,
2000b).
What we find at the level of institutions and texts, then, are some very powerful
definitions of the child - definitions which are partly coercive, but also partly very
pleasurable, and often quite awkward and contradictory. The obvious question here
is how children negotiate with these definitions: that is, how they define themselves
as an audience. This was the third dimension of the project, and again there was a
quantitative and a qualitative dimension.
Audience ratings can clearly tell us a fair amount about how children define
themselves as an audience; and however unreliable or superficial they may be, they
clearly show (for example) that children are increasingly opting to watch adult
programmes and not children’s programmes. At the same time, they do choose to
watch particular kinds of adult programmes; and it is interesting to look at the
versions or aspects of ‘adulthood’ that they choose to buy into, and those they reject
or resist.
These kinds of questions were very much the focus of our more qualitative
investigations of the child audience, which focused on children aged 6-7 and 10-11.
Through a series of focus group discussions and activities, we investigated how
children negotiate with these adult definitions of childhood, how they define
themselves as children, as young people, and as children of a particular age - and
how they do this in different ways in different contexts and for different purposes. In
a sense, we were looking again at how ‘childhood’ is defined, at how children
collectively and discursively construct the meaning of childhood (and by implication
of adulthood). The category ‘child’ and its defining opposite ‘adult’ are thus highly
flexible, and also highly charged, parameters of self-definition, of identity formation.
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In the children’s exploration of what makes a programme ‘appropriate’ for children,
the strongest arguments were negative ones. Programmes featuring sex, violence
and ‘swearing’ were singled out by both groups as being particularly ‘grown-up’.
Likewise, children's programmes were predominantly defined in terms of absences that is, in terms of what they do not include. One area of our analysis here
concerned children’s discussions of sex and sexuality on television. On one level, it
was clear that ‘adult’ material on television could function as a kind of ‘forbidden
fruit’. In discussing this kind of material, the children displayed a complex mixture of
embarrassment, bravado and moral disapproval. Discussions of sex and romance in
genres such as dating game shows, soap operas and sitcoms often served as a
rehearsal of projected future (hetero-)sexual identities, particularly among girls. Boys
were less comfortable here, with the younger ones more inclined to display disgust
than fascination; although the older ones were more voyeuristic. Discussion of
sexuality was often the vehicle for interpersonal policing, in which girls seemed to
enjoy the upper hand.
The children were very familiar with adult definitions of appropriateness, although
they were inclined to displace any negative ‘effects’ of television onto those younger
than themselves, or onto ‘children’ in general. While some of the youngest children
expressed a more censorious rejection of ‘adult’ material, this was much less
common among the older children, who aspired to the freedom they associated with
the category of the ‘teenager’. Here again, these discussions could serve as a form
of mutual policing, particularly among boys. Overall, the analysis here suggests that
in discussing their responses to television, the children are performing a kind of
‘identity work’, particularly via claims about their own ‘maturity’. In the process, these
discussions serve largely to reinforce normative definitions both of ‘childhood’ and of
gender identity (for a fuller discussion, see Kelley, Buckingham and Davies, 1999).
Another aspect of our investigation here concerned the issue of children’s tastes.
We were interested to discover whether children have distinctive tastes as an
audience, and how these tastes are articulated and negotiated in the context of peer
group discussion. We analysed the social functions and characteristics of children’s
expressions of their tastes using a set of overlapping paradigmatic oppositions:
parents::children; grannies::teenagers; boring::funny; and talk::action. In each case,
the children generally favoured the former element (associated with children) and
disavowed the latter (associated with adults). However, they frequently distinguished
here between the tastes attributed to parents in general and those they observed in
the case of their own parents. The older children were inclined to aspire to the
identity of the ‘teenager’, via the display of particular tastes, notably in comedy. By
contrast, the tastes of some adults were dismissed as belonging to ‘grannies’, who
were parodied as hopelessly ‘old fashioned’ and ‘uncool’. The children were highly
dismissive of programmes featuring ‘talk’ and enthusiastic about those featuring
action – not least action of a violent or otherwise spectacular nature. As this implies,
they frequently inverted cultural hierarchies and resisted adult notions of ‘good
taste’.
Contemporary debates about children’s television have emphasised the need for
factual programmes, literary adaptations and socially responsible contemporary
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drama. Without disputing this, our analysis suggests that there is also a need for
entertainment programming – and indeed for programmes that a majority of adults
would consider ‘infantile’, ‘puerile’ or otherwise ‘in bad taste’. The complex and
playful nature of children’s judgments of taste and their understanding of taste as
‘cultural capital’ is certainly apparent in the popularity of such self-consciously ironic
texts as South Park and Beavis and Butthead. Nevertheless, children’s tastes
cannot be defined in an essentialist way, any more than adults’ can: both groups are
more heterogeneous than is typically assumed (see Davies, Buckingham and
Kelley, 2000).
Research in Context
This was a wide-ranging and in many ways successful project; but it leaves me with
some questions with which I would like to conclude. These are dilemmas that are as
much to do with the writing and dissemination of research as they are to do with its
theoretical or methodological dimensions.
I have argued in broad terms that we need to be rebuilding the connections between
different elements of media research, and thereby developing a genuinely interdisciplinary approach. Nevertheless, it is much harder to see how this might be
achieved in practice. In fact, our publications from this project fall fairly neatly into
three categories: the work on institutions (which is mostly contained in the book
Children’s Television in Britain), the work on texts (much of which will appear in a
forthcoming edited book called Small Screens) and the work on audiences (which
has appeared as a series of journal articles). There is not much overlap between
these in terms of the empirical material that is presented, although each tends to
invoke the other, at least by way of background.
Clearly, there is potential for more developed connections here. Some of our
audience-focused pieces attempt to take up themes that cross these boundaries.
The regulation of children’s time, for example, and what is seen as a productive or
unproductive way for children to spend their time, is an issue that connects parental
regulation in the domestic context with questions about the role of scheduling in
television and questions about regulatory policy (see Davies, Buckingham and
Kelley, 1999). Likewise, we need to understand children’s tastes, not as an
expression of their innate characteristics and desires, but (at least in part) as a
function of how ‘childishness’ is defined by the media themselves (Davies,
Buckingham and Kelley, 2000). Yet in practice, it is difficult to take account of this
‘balance of forces’ without lapsing into one or other of the two opposing positions
outlined earlier. On the one hand, there is a view of childhood (and by extension, of
the subjectivity of children) as somehow inexorably produced by powerful
institutional discourses; while on the other is the view that real children somehow
automatically and inevitably evade those constructions. Accounting for the real
slippages and inconsistencies here - and doing so in empirical terms, rather than
simply through recourse to a series of ‘in principle’ theoretical qualifications - is not
easy.
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This is also a question of striking a balance in the writing of research. In my
experience, focusing on these kinds of micro-macro connections tends to reduce the
data to a rather anecdotal status. The more time you spend drawing out the
connections, the more you lose the complexity of the empirical material. There is a
particular temptation to ‘iron out’ the inconsistencies and seemingly haphazard
occurrences of audience research, in favour of neat generalisations about children
whom you barely know, or indeed about children in general. However, this issue
also relates to the changing nature of academic publishing. In my experience,
publishers seem less and less interested in empirically-based studies, at least if they
are not based in the United States. The emphasis is primarily on so-called
‘textbooks’ and on works of theory which are somehow assumed to transcend
national boundaries. Doing justice to the complexity of the data needs to be set
against the requirement to write in a form that somebody might eventually have the
chance to read.
Finally, there is the question of how any of this relates back to broader public
debates about children and media, and to the making of policy. Policy has become a
fashionable term in Cultural Studies in recent years; but in practice Cultural Studies
academics are much better at analysing policy than they are at actually intervening
in it. As I have implied at several points, public debates about children and media
overdetermine and dramatically constrain what we are able to do in this field;
although on the other hand, they also mean that what we do is of some interest to
the wider world. How we deal with the media coverage of these issues - and indeed
of our own work - is thus a continuing dilemma for many researchers in the field.
On the other hand, children’s media could be an area in which there is more
common ground between researchers and practitioners (that is, producers and
policy-makers) than in other areas of the media. The mutual hostility that often
seems to characterise encounters between these groups in debates about news or
advertising, for example, is much less acute here, although I have certainly
encountered it . As I have implied, there are some dangers in developing a rather
cosy relationship here; and there is also a risk that researchers can provide a cloak
of academic respectability for some of the rather more dubious practices of the
media industries. Nevertheless, we need to consider how research might engage
more directly with the concerns of policy-makers in this field, without (of course)
becoming wholly driven by them. In doing so, we need to recognise that researchers
(like media producers) cannot always control the means by which their work is
disseminated, interpreted and used.
NOTE
The project 'Children's Media Culture: Education, Entertainment and the Public
Sphere' was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council UK (ref:
L126251026). I would like to thank my colleagues Hannah Davies, Ken Jones, Peter
Kelley and Gunther Kress for their contributions.
REFERENCES
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Ang, I. (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience London, Routledge
Barker, M. and Petley, J. (eds.) (1997) Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate
London, Routledge
Billig, M. (1997) ‘From codes to utterances: Cultural Studies, discourse and
psychology’, in Ferguson, M. and Golding, P. (eds.) Cultural Studies in Question
London, Sage
Buckingham, D. (ed.) (1990) Watching Media Learning: Making Sense of Media
Education London, Falmer
Buckingham, D. (ed.) (1998) Teaching Popular Culture: Beyond Radical Pedagogy
London, University College London Press
Buckingham, D., Davies, H., Jones, K. and Kelley, P. (1999) Children’s Television in
Britain: History, Discourse and Policy London, British Film Institute
Buckingham, D. (2000a) After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of
Electronic Media Cambridge, Polity
Buckingham, D. (2000b) ‘Blurring the boundaries: Teletubbies and children’s media
today’, TelevIZIon forthcoming
Davies, H., Buckingham, D. and Kelley, P. (1999) ‘Kids’ time: television, childhood
and the regulation of time’, Journal of Educational Media, 24(1)
Davies, H., Buckingham, D. and Kelley, P. (2000) ‘In the worst possible taste:
children, television and cultural value’, European Journal of Cultural Studies
forthcoming
Du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H. and Negus, K. (1997) Doing Cultural
Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman London, Sage
Ferguson, M. and Golding, P. (eds.) (1997) Cultural Studies in Question London,
Sage
Johnson, R. (1986/7) ‘What is Cultural Studies anyway?’ Social Text 16, 38-80
Kelley, P., Buckingham, D. and Davies, H. (1999) ‘Talking dirty: childhood, television
and sexual knowledge’, Childhood 6(2), 221-242
Livingstone, S. (1998) ‘Mediated childhoods; a comparative approach to young
people’s changing media environment in Europe’, European Journal of
Communication 13(4), 435-456
Morris, M. (1988) ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’, in P. Mellencamp (ed.) Logics of
Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism London, British Film Institute
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. David Buckingham is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education,
University of London, England, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Children,
Youth and Media. He has directed several major research projects on young
people's relationships with the media, and on media education, funded by
organisations such as the Economic and Social Research Council, the Broadcasting
Standards Council, the Arts Council of England, and the Spencer, Nuffield and
Gulbenkian Foundations. He is the author of numerous books and articles in these
fields, including Children Talking Television (1993), Moving Images (1996), The
Making of Citizens (2000) and After the Death of Childhood (2000). He has been a
visiting professor at the Annenberg School of Communication in Philadelphia and at
New York University, and has lectured around the world.
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