mass-communication-theory

206 Section 3 From Limited-Effects to Critical Cultural Theories: Ferment in the Field
SUMMARY
Research and theory on administrative issues such as the effects of food advertising
on children’s diets, the link between media violence and aggression, and
media use and learning of gender roles have led logically to larger, critical research
and theory on childhood itself, or more specifically, on the redefinition or loss of
childhood. Sociologist Neil Postman’s argument for “the disappearance of childhood”
rests in large part on the idea of the early window. He wrote: “Unlike
infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category,” one that is “difficult
to sustain and, in fact, irrelevant,” because ubiquitous connection to the media
robs youngsters of “the charm, malleability, innocence, and curiosity” of childhood,
leaving them “degraded and then transmogrified into the lesser features of
pseudo-adulthood” (1994, pp. xi–xii).
Cultural theorists Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe take a similar approach
when describing kinderculture, “the information explosion so characteristic of our
contemporary era [that] has played a central role in undermining traditional notions
of childhood.” They concluded: “Those who have shaped, directed, and used
the information technology of the late twentieth century have played an exaggerated
role in the reformulation of childhood” (1997, p. 1). Psychologist Susan Linn
calls the cultural product of the disappearance of childhood the “adultification of
children,” in which their “physical, psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual
development are all threatened when their value as consumers trumps their value
as people” (2004, p. 10). Social critic Benjamin Barber has called for a truly civil
society that
acknowledges the true delights of childhood, and helps children be children again by
preserving them from the burdens of an exploitative and violent adult world. It refuses
to “empower them” by taking away their dollies and blocks and toy wagons in which
to haul them and replacing them with cell phones and videogames and credit cards
with which to pay for them. It refuses to “free” them from parents and other gatekeepers
in order to turn them over to market-mad pied pipers who lead them over a
commercial precipice down into the mall. Children should play not pay, act not watch,
learn not shop. Where capitalism can, it should help protect the boundaries of childhood
and preserve the guardianship of parents and citizens; otherwise it should get
out of the way. Not everything needs to earn a profit, not everyone needs to be a
shopper—not all the time. (2007, p. 338)
The work of these last few scholars—Postman, Steinberg and Kincheloe, Linn,
and Barber—is not only firmly planted in the critical (rather than administrative)
research tradition, but with its critique of the large-scale social and cultural influence
of capitalism and the market-driven media system that supports it, it also resides
firmly in other approaches to mass communication theory that question
limited-effects assumptions. But you’ll have to wait until the next chapter to read
about these ideas.
New media are always blamed for societal troubles
that happen to occur at the time of their
introduction. Yet most limited-effects research
examining media effects on young people
concluded that media influence was, if not inconsequential,
at least tempered by traditional forces
like church, family, and school. In the 1960s,
however, the mass diffusion of a new powerful
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