Effects of technology are crucial to understand the media.
Gutenberg's printing press facilitated increased literacy and individual interpretation (Protestantism, the Bible).
Transportation technologies delivered goods and sped up industrialization.
Telegraph (1850-1900): Communication no longer linked to the physical transportation of messages, enabling rapid information transmission.
Electricity: Shifted work and planning away from sunrise/sunset dependence, extending work hours (capitalism).
Light: New medium, affecting uses, spotlight effect, illumination with flashlights, phones.
Media as deprivation: Keeps people awake and productive.
Any media device must pass through culture, and any element of culture must pass through media forms.
Case Study: Television
Technical Perspective: Image transforms into electronic signals.
Economic/Social Factors: Available in late 1920s but gained popularity in the 1950s due to radio/film industries, news, entertainment, and the Great Depression (limiting consumer income).
Experiments: TV in cinemas failed; TV in bars was not primary.
1950s: National domesticity and suburbanization, highway systems, decongestion of cities, nuclear families.
TV became a new radio, connecting people to the outside world.
Sitcoms: Centered on family/domestic spaces, boxing matches, variety shows, series of programs and stories.
Object meanings: Luxury, hiding (cabinets).
Media does not directly cause but shapes and is shaped by culture and society.
To study media is to study forms, forces, and fights and the history of those mediations.
Mediating Childhood and Youth
Themes and tensions: Children's association with innocence is recent; problematic elements in children's media (gender, race); exploitation of youth and teen media.
History of childhood as a concept, media dividing and uniting children.
Adults/children theme: Blurring the separation of adulthood and childhood.
Media for children vs. media about children: Popular imagery is part of adult culture, long history about them, not for them.
Advertising and children: Satisfying needs, putting words into kids' mouths, children used as advise-givers (telling mom to smoke).
Guilt and Fear: Broken mother-child relationships, the Great War, 1930s Great Depression; children as the future -- if the child doesn’t eat this, they wont be strong.
Modern media developed in tandem with modern childhood from the 18th century on.
Media History: Confluence of Actors
Moral crusades, media producers, parents, markets, educators, policy, marketers/government agencies, researchers/children.
Optimism vs. pessimism of media.
Media as connector (children to each other, adults/parents to brands), disconnector (race, gender, class, social divisions).
History of childhood: Not always distinct from adulthood, separation and specialness.
15th/16th century: Children look like children (face, proportions, clothing), memorializing dead children, depictions of Christ as baby, debate if children have souls (early religious intervention).
17th/18th centuries: Moral instruction; safeguard and reform soul, weakness=vulnerability=innocence, susceptible to influence, need conversion, good influence to keep upright (physical and character).
18th-century tension: Rational free like nature, but also Calvinism: sinful and in danger of hell, intervention as protection/early education.
Heavy surveillance and interventions needed to set children on the right path.
Corruption: Early Youth Media
French Revolution culture coming to England, making fun of figures - picked up by young people.
Cheap repository tracts (mass-produced): Evangelical groups mimic popular media as an antidote to French trend, create new training manuals (stories, songbooks, how to), e.g. Jack Chick comics.
Books as instruction: Children's books (Goody Two-Shoes), storybooks read to them by adults, fairy tales, fancy pictures.
Mid 19th century: Victorian commerce and sentimental culture, coddling, feelings of domesticity, shift to priceless love object, romanticized and innocent, floating cherub imagery (result of infant mortality going down).
Late 19th Century: Road to innocence, tension with the frontier child = vulnerable physically, needs to get strong and independent.
Class: Duel concept of childhood. Child as a heart of a consuming well-provided-for home (economic production severed from reproduction, leisure/free time for kids), Street children (urchins) = mischievous yet independent (e.g. Little Rascals).
Early 20th century market: Department stores, clothing, consumerism - tension around sentimental/monetary value.
1927: Chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys in US stores.
Innocence, Race, and Dolls
Why do we do history? Want to show what we think of; past reflects the future - learning major values.
Myth: Transformation of culture into nature = unsettling, disturbing.
Innocence = not natural: Is constructed and historical, seen as a performance.
Childhood is seen as innocence itself (not a symbol, but embodiment).
Religious texts - children free from original sin.
Childhood, innocence has a certain history, not always radically distinct from adulthood.
Innocence works around race.
Innocence Work: Photography
Photographic image = innocence, authenticity, simplicity paralleling the establishment of childhood innocence.
Race: Ability to retain racial meanings but hide them under "holy ignorance".
Images: Early 20th century attempts to take skin off black children, racial binarism - black = dirt, Black and white seen as totally different. Violence of white child seen as 'innocent' (display but disavow).
Cottolene and Child Labor/Gold Dust Twins/Pickaninnies
Cottolene (vegetable oil tied to cotton) - young black girl holding cotton as closest thing to black innocence.
Gold Dust Twins: Image of black kids as happy cleaners.
Pickaninny: Black child who is mischievous, lazy and lusts for watermelon, used to sell almost any product.
being consumed -how often they were shown being eaten and consumed. (ex: licorice drops) + even in trench ads. ( - playful terror -putting the child in danger)
Insensate - impervious to pain ( Children get blown up by a gun ) --> trying to eat phosphate off plants
- White veneer - covering up with white face. (Black child doing it to another child)
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