After the Death of Childhood: Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media

This seminal work goes a long ways towards identifying the key themes and debates that have structured studies of children and media. At its core, Buckingham's book offers a broad stroke review and criticism of the competing, and often polarizing, tendency towards dystopian or utopian accounts about the relationship between media and children. On the one hand there is a tendency to posit electronic media as a threat to childhood, usually because it is seen to erode boundaries between childhood and adulthood by providing children with access to adult-themed knowledge, typically about sex, violence, and drugs. Such criticisms have frequently been directed towards television but have more recently been directed towards video games and many forms of digital media. Buckingham notes that these dystopian accounts tend to cast media monolithically as “entertainment.”

Buckingham contrasts these accounts with more utopian works that frame digital media's relationship to children and young people as empowering, democratic, participatory, interactive, innovative, and liberating. Often these accounts draw a sharp distinction between the “new” digital media and older forms of media such as TV. Instead of “entertainment,” these accounts tend to cast digital media as primarily “educational.”

Importantly, Buckingham criticizes both accounts for making technologically deterministic arguments that essentialize both media and children. In both, differences in media and differences in children tend to be ignored. Children are often figured as either inherently vulnerable and threatened, or as naturally creative with an innate thirst for learning. Buckingham builds his criticism from the view that our understandings of “childhood” are socially produced and, as such, we must look to broader changes in social institutions such as the family and schooling, as well as changes in the organization of the economy, to understand changes in our understandings of childhood as well as changes in the lived experiences of children. Once children’s media engagements are viewed through a broader scope we can see that contemporary changes in childhood are going in several directions at the same time. On the one hand children are becoming more empowered, especially as consumers. On the other hand, children's lives are becoming increasingly institutionalized and subject to adult control. Similarly, while some boundaries between children and adults are being blurred, others are being more powerfully reinforced. Buckingham suggests we should cast debates about children and media in terms of the ways by which children should be gaining access as participants in the adult world. For Buckingham, such questions can be thought of in terms of “rights” and “competencies,” where the key issue becomes deciding when children are competent to exercise certain rights of participation. Buckingham argues that such a view calls on education to help develop these competencies so that young persons can extend their active and informed participation in the media culture that surrounds them. As such, the goal for educators and policy makers should not be to isolate children from the adult world but, rather, to give them what they need to cope with the adult world, to participate in it, and perhaps to even change it.

(Christo Sims)