Introduction (1997)

Introduction Anne Morey (bio) Throughout the twentieth century, social critics, scholars, parents, and legislators have worried about the content and structure of children's media other than books. Film, radio, comic books, recordings, television, video games, and, more recently, computer games and online chat sites have each been the object of concern as they have risen to prominence and developed a following among both entrepreneurs and child audiences. Indeed, while the media differ, the objections to them remain surprisingly consistent. Significantly, many of the protests lodged against any given new medium for children stem not only from fears associated with the properties of the medium itself (which vary), but also from more static concerns that the new medium is crassly commercial in ways its predecessors were not and that it will have the effect of separating children from their parents, or will at least succeed in undermining parental authority. One purpose of this special issue, then, is to make an explicit call for the concerted recovery of the historical and institutional contexts for children's media—contexts that have frequently been ignored, as the repetition to be seen in children's-media criticism implies. For instance, a surprising amount of criticism seems directed toward the issue of alternative media's failure to resemble the sanctioned enterprise of reading. Stephen Kline argues that beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing into the present, literacy was the alpha and omega of childhood preparation for adult responsibilities (52), so it seems natural to base critiques of new media on their failure to promote the ability to read. Indeed, many aspects of the new media appear to some researchers to frustrate the development of literacy, which is clearly one of the more trenchant criticisms of television and video games, for example. But even here, we must be alive to historical and institutional context; literacy in children was not always the unalloyed virtue we now tend to view it as being—the penny dreadful, the dime novel, and the comic book were all sources of concern in their heyday, both despite and because of the fact that children read them avidly. Moreover, we are coming to understand that video games, television, and computers appear to promote a new kind of "visual" literacy. Clearly, the relationship between children's media and literacy is a complex one, and too often critiques of media other than books have failed to discriminate between the medium and its messages. But as Kline and others note, our concerns with and for literacy are overlaid by other desires and aims that adults harbor for childhood. Childhood, we have claimed since about the mid-nineteenth century, "should" be a time of play and of unforced (but complete) development. As a consequence of these desires, children's media in all forms have moved far from their ostensibly didactic origins, resulting in some fascinating justifications for the presence of the commercial within or behind children's media and playthings. For example, Richard deCordova notes that Mickey Mouse merchandising was already extremely sophisticated and successful by the early 1930s, with department store tie-ins and clubs designed to coopt the threat to movie attendance represented by outdoor activities ("Mickey" 206-9), to name just a few early facets of the brave new world of commercialized leisure for children as practiced by Disney. More importantly, as deCordova argues, Mickey Mouse dolls, lunch pails, school supplies, and the like did not provoke the outcry that the cartoons themselves occasionally did, even though some reformers had already expressed misgivings about the hectic pace of modern consumption. DeCordova suggests that "having" a mouse, or "being" one, was more sanctioned than not with Disney products because G. Stanley Hall's influential notions of child development argued that children should be affiliated with animals at certain stages, and needed to pass through their animal phases properly in order to become successful adults ("Mickey" 211-13). DeCordova's research is significant because it makes a provocative effort to contextualize the reception of Disney merchandising in the 1930s in a way that demonstrates both the continuities and the discontinuities in criticism of the effects of children's media. Developmental psychology then, as now, is...