Writing the Child in Media Theory

“[A] story about a child is scarier than one about an adult roughly 80% of the time”: Creepypasta, Children’s media, and the child in media discourse

“…An early and now classic example of SKS creepypasta, “Candle Cove” pioneered of many of the tropes associated with “Lost Episode” and SKS creepypasta, manipulating the conventions of generic horror and the contemporary legend to produce an uncanny effect by re-presenting the “old and long familiar” (Freud, 1919/2004: 90)—here, a television program the characters of “Candle Cove” recall from their childhood—in ways that suggest its inherently frightful nature. As it offers an increasingly perverse description of the television show at the center of its story and implies, in its climax, that the program’s origins were super- or preternatural, “Candle Cove” affects a critique of the constructed and constructive child typically constituted in discussions of children and their engagement with mass media (Rudd, 2005; Bignell, 2002) that both disputes and secures the figure of the innocent child implied by both discourses.…”

“…Academic and popular debates about young people’s interaction with mass media reify a binary conception of childhood that centers innocence as an ideal (Bignell, 2002). In these discursive contexts, children are, by turns, figured as what David Rudd (2005) calls “constructed” or “constructive” beings: as tabulae rasae interpellated by and through adult-created media (“constructed”) or as active subjects who interact with, appropriate, perform, and resist the scripts these adult-authored media establish for them (“constructive”) (Bernstein, 2011; Bignell, 2002; Buckingham, 2008; Mavoa et al, 2017).…”

“…These media and writings sought to explain Geyser’s and Weier’s fascination with Slender Man and the Internet legendry that grew around him and, as they did so, made use of institutional discourses commonly employed to address young people’s engagement with the mass media. These discourses conceive of the child as potentially constructed or constructive (Rudd, 2005), figuring it within a continuum bounded by poles that, Jonathan Bignell writes, imagine the child as either “passive, positioned, and interpellated by the media text” or as “an active appropriator of media amid a complex social and cultural context” (2002: 130-131).…”

Familiar aliens: Teletubbies and postmodern childhood

“…19 The debates about whether Teletubbies promotes the acquisition of language and social relationships, or wallows in directionless play, rehearse old arguments about the aims, legitimacy and value of children's television in an era of waning certainty about the function and value of public service television. 20 Parents, educators and regulators targeted the BBC in particular to urge that programmes for children should have greater regard for the functions of television in education and child development. These responsibilities on the part of programme-makers and broadcasters have underlain much of the discourse of British television production for children in the public service tradition, since PSB has aimed to provide educative or improving programmes, and to offer a range of different programme types at different levels of accessibility for adult and child audiences.…”

Broadcasting Children’s Music

“…While attentive listening might have been the predominant mode of experiencing children's music, some listeners' reactions suggest much greater physical interactivity and less disciplining by the enclosed, triadic relationship between child, parent and radio receiver. This tension between disciplined listening and its association with passivity, in contrast to attempts to engage children actively at the cost of spontaneous and ungoverned responses, is a persistent theme in the history of broadcasting (Bignell, 2002;Buckingham, 2005).…”