The Payne Fund studies of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to discover—with questionable scientific rigor—whether attending the movies was emotionally and physically harmful to children. Was it the case that disturbing scenes and sensory reactions to light and sound caused children to become nervous, agitated, and upset? Although the Payne studies were controversial and inconclusive, they reflected a general concern about the effect of films on children’s well-being that would influence media regulation and discourse for years to come. Many popular and academic conversations about kids and media are still dominated by the belief that children are vulnerable, developing bodies in need of constant oversight. David Buckingham famously defined these discourses as pedagogical and protectionist, and argued that they can limit the study of kids’ media. Like Buckingham, we see potential pitfalls with the pedagogical and protectionist approaches, including regressive views of audiences; arbitrary boundaries between adult and child cultures; and a neglect of formal analysis and historical inquiry. Significant work has been done in a number of disciplines that seeks to address these challenges and concerns, but there is more to add to the film and media studies conversation that recognizes the complexity of children’s media and the cultures surrounding them.

For this issue, The Velvet Light Trap seeks historical and contemporary studies of kids’ media: that is, media aimed exclusively at kids, media produced with kids in mind as part of the larger audience, or media made by kids themselves. Submissions should add to the study of kids’ media as a creative, social, and cultural phenomenon by moving beyond the protectionist and pedagogical binary. We welcome topics that reflect the agency of young people, acknowledge the complexity of these media texts, and expand film and media histories. We will consider papers that concern people under the age of 18—teens, tweens, “young adults,” infants, and everyone in between—and topics with a national, regional, or international scope. The following subjects offer some topic areas, though submissions are not limited to the following:

• Issues of gender, race, and the queering of childhood
• Children as producers of content, online and in film or TV narratives
• New research methodologies: issues when studying kids or using kids as co-researchers
• Merchandising, toy culture, franchising, and paratexts of kids’ media
• Traditional kids’ media forms and genres—fairy tales, animation, fantasy, etc.—and their boundaries and hybridity
• Child stars and the stars of children’s shows or films
• Sites of kid fandom and kids’ fan culture
• Age and age differentiation within the realm of kids’ media
• Texts with crossover appeal to multiple age demographics
• Industrial studies of kid-focused networks, studios, websites, etc.
• Children’s film festivals and other sites of exhibition
• Historiographic inquiries into the conditions affecting children’s media: technological change, taste cultures, distribution and exhibition practices, external censorship, self-regulation, etc.
• Institutional and educational media

Submission Guidelines:

Submissions should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words, formatted in Chicago style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with a one-page abstract, both saved as a Microsoft Word file. Remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review. The entire essay, including block quotations and notes, should be double-spaced. Quotations not in English should be accompanied by translations. Photocopies of illustrations are sufficient for initial review, but authors should be prepared to supply camera-ready photographs on request. Illustrations will be sized by the publisher. Permissions are the responsibility of the author.

Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to thevelvetlighttrap@gmail.com. Submissions are due September 5, 2015.

If this isn’t as articulate as I’d like, I blame it on both the exhaustion of raising two and a half year old twins and the ethical and emotional struggle I personally experience on this topic daily. Let’s just put my cards on the table. Two and a half years ago I would have spouted forth about how the quantity of age-appropriate(ish) media consumption shouldn’t really be a concern. Like many media scholars, I was a child of television. I did a solid version of binge watching in the context of a 1970s/1980s household without cable, and my feelings about kids and media consumption emerged from a childhood love of The Joker’s Wild, Match Game, and The Brady Bunch and in complete avoidance of actual research. Then I had kids. I now function, like many scholar/parents I’m sure, in an ambiguous space between a belief in the medium I love and a fear of melting the tiny brains of the actual humans for whom I’m responsible. Every morning I try to fight the good fight, when my son wakes up, immediately looks for an iPad, and proclaims “want watch ‘big TV’.” And the struggle continues.

The environment in which I’m raising my tiny 21^st century viewers brings the best and the worst that technological advancements have to offer. Along with providing a wealth of totally watchable age-appropriate content, new delivery systems and interfaces instill awful behavioral patterns that transcend mere viewing habits. Although this new media landscape allows haggard parents a tremendous sense of ease with content location and selection—constantly leading my partner and I to wonder how our ancestors or Laura Ingalls Wilder’s parents survived child-rearing sans television—we should also be concerned with what it’s teaching our kids about expectations and task completion.

Like many kids of the 21^st century, mine live in a house with cord-cutters. Their electronic media comes primarily in the form of DVDs, cartoons on Hulu and Netflix, or videos on YouTube viewed on an iPad. Unlike their foremothers (well, just the two), they never had to wait for their shows to air. Every time-slot belongs to them. There’s no waiting around for Sesame Street or The Electric Company. They’re never forced to begrudgingly watch Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood because it’s that or Donahue. Daniel Tiger, Rabbids Invasion, and Wild Kratts are never more than a click away. Their “now” and “just what I wanted” style of viewership encourages them to be tiny, impatient content bullies. My twins are exceedingly annoyed with advertisements when watching linear television. FBI warnings on DVDs have enraged them since infancy.  If they can’t watch the episode they want when they want it, they’re incredibly frustrated, and we’re now watching this demand for personalization translate into other activities. Why won’t Target replay “Happy” over their loudspeaker now? Why doesn’t everyone have our applesauce? How dare the radio not know what we want to hear at this second? Our reliance on the ease of contemporary media delivery has only aided them—even more than the previous generation’s DVD players and VCRs—in becoming part of a pushy generation of playlist demanders.

Aside from instilling kids with a high degree of impatience and need for immediate satisfaction and customization—and a belief that these expectations are reasonable—contemporary media has further enabled what was once one of the main evils of children’s entertainment. Far from the days of Congress and the FCC debating the scourge of the program-length commercial (damn you Strawberry Shortcake), YouTube has wrought a range of toy videos that function as nothing short of toddler crack. An entire genre of toy unboxing videos shares with kids the wonders of consumer products (and notably, my kids have an uncanny ability to find them). New York Times Magazine recently addressed this genre in “A Mother’s Journey Through the Unnerving Universe of ‘Unboxing’ Videos,” a piece that details user DisneyCollector’s 90million-plus hits—and potential millions in ad revenue—for a video of her opening plastic eggs to reveal small hidden toys inside. DisneyCollector’s contributions, as well as videos with porn-y underscoring showing manicured hands seductively peeling Play-Doh from plastic eggs and endless videos that show kids playing with toys or toy mash-ups, simultaneously (even if as collateral damage) advertise to the very young and reinforce—through their brevity, inanity, and rewindabilty—both compulsive viewing and a tenuous attention span. My household recently deleted YouTube from some and password protected all of our tablets, as the kids were disappearing and our son shouting, “you stay in there ma!” with the hopes that we would not discover them obsessively watching other “kids” play with toys.

I love the ease of 21^st century media and it’s a wonderland for kids. They can hold it in their hands and demand it play at their tiny command. For my two cents, we need to be thinking about how today’s media interactions—not just content—are helping to shape our kids’ interactions outside of the box. I’m not going to take away our TV or iPads—the iPad is, after all, the only way to keep them from puking in the car—but as a parent/scholar, I need to keep my eye on the potential residual behavioral impact of these new forms and increased levels of control. After all, it’s all happening on my watch.

Screens are a tangible piece of hardware, whether part of a television, computer, tablet, phone, or handheld game console. They are not content. More often than not, it’s a show or game or app or program that does the heavy hitting as far as transmitting messages and eliciting activity. So it’s absolutely true and non-newsworthy that screens don’t teach. But are screens a part of a larger package that convey information and facilitate different kinds of meaning-making? Absolutely, and this deserves a conversation deeper than quips of misleading twit-bytes.

I think the attempted educational position above was referencing concerns over “screen time.” This term has been wielded as a sword of parenting fear and guilt (and sometimes trendy emulation) since before the American Academy of Pediatrics set forth their 2001 guidelines advising no more than 1-2 hours of screen time per day (which, by the way, has been adapted recently to take a more balanced approach to kids engaging with digital media). To be sure, there are legitimate concerns about the content and interactions that may be elicited via digital media. But parents and educators are not hostage to the whims of the media industry. They can approach children’s media use by thoughtfully evaluating the content and contexts for media interaction. Here are a few potentially helpful questions:

1. What is the media content? What is the child watching, hearing, or being encouraged to do? Is the particular content appropriate for the child’s cognitive, social, and emotional development or temperament? How will the child make sense of what they see or what they do?

2. What kinds of activity and interaction does the media elicit? Is the child engaging with the media alone? With peers? With older siblings or adults? Is joint media engagement supportive and productive? How do the narrative worlds of the media connect with the child’s play and activity?

3. What role does this media play in the child’s broader swath of life activities? How does the child spend their time? Is there a balance in the child’s activities, including active play, imaginative play, quiet and social times, etc.?

I have a poster child for this. I use this sweetie as an example in many of my talks on the ways kids actively participate in the narrative worlds that are meaningful to them. There was a time, a number of years back, waaaaaaay before Rovio had marketed it to the high hills, when Angry Birds was just one mobile game. (I feel like I should be sitting in a rocking chair for this tale…) As a little guy, he loved to play Angry Birds on his mom’s phone. One day he ended up drawing a group of the bird characters, and used some ribbon as a tool to help launch them. Intrigued by what was transpiring, his mom let him take the lead. Soon he was building obstacles of couch cushions and furniture to try to knock down with his paper birds, which then prompted some great discussions on basic physics concepts and revising his strategies. His engagement in-game led to active creation and experimentation out-of-game, including joint engagement with a caring adult. His play pushed the boundaries of the Angry Birds narrative world. The activity was elicited by media use, by screen time, but became the catalyst for rich engagement to take place. The media wasn’t something he consumed, but something he did. But his story isn’t unique. It does bring us to a broader view of media engagement, though. And with thoughtful consideration, parents and educators can make informed and critical choices about a child’s media engagement, considering more than just screen time.

In sum, screens don’t teach. Screens don’t entertain. But the content, contexts, and interactions that are elicited via screens can have big impacts on young participants. As a term, “screen time” is incomplete. The affordances of different kinds of media and their related interactions will mean different things to different children. So the next time someone asks you what you think of kids and screen time, I hope you’ll help them think critically about media use in ways that promote a child’s positive and productive meaning-making. We’ve gotta help nip the quips in the bud.

Extra stuff:

There are a number of scholars and specialists who provide volumes to this dialogue. If you’d like to dig in more deeply, here’s a short list of people and organizations that present informed and balanced views of children’s media use. They are listed in no particular order, and this list is not exhaustive.

• Daniel Anderson, media researcher & originator of the “media diet” perspective.
• Lisa Guernsey, Director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation, and originator of the “Three C’s” (content, context, and the individual child) perspective for thinking about children’s screen time.
• David Kleeman, Playvangelist at PlayCollective, and all-around smart guy when it comes to children’s media and bridging industry and research.
• The Joan Ganz Cooney Center – the digital media research arm of Sesame Workshop.
• The Fred Rogers Center, and specifically their joint position paper with the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).

The idea came very selfishly from my own sense that many Antenna readers and contributors have kids, work with kids, and/or work on kids media, and you might help me engage thoughtfully with the mediated environment that my daughter is moving through or will soon move through. Too much of the received wisdom on kids media comes from hacks and moral panickers, or from the press’ crude readings of complex quantitative studies that non-number-literate journalists over-simplify. So what do those of us in media and cultural studies, or in correlate, neighbor fields have to say instead? What would a feminist media studies scholar who knows her kids’ media recommend I show an almost three year-old? What issues in the aforementioned received wisdom need to be challenged, revisited, replaced? What’s not on my radar that should be; apparently there’s this show called Breaking Bad that I’m told I need to watch at every conference, but what television shows, books, games, films, and more am I not hearing about that might interest, fascinate, and challenge my daughter, and which texts should she and I run away from screaming?

The series began with that selfish idea, but surely the answers to these questions could help many of us, whether as parents, scholars, and/or specialists.

The posts that follow this one will be the interesting ones, and will give a taste of what the series could do and be. But the series will need more writers, so please let me know at jagray3 at wisc dot edu if you’re interested.

The series will take two forms:

1. traditional blog posts.

2. roundtables. For the latter, we would love to get a whole host of names of interested people who’d be willing to field the occasional short question via email (such as my above one – “what would a feminist media studies scholar who knows her kids’ media recommend I show a three year-old?”), and to type up 100-300 words in response. We can then collate some of these and begin the discussion with a post that hopefully others would contribute to in the comments. The roundtable model acknowledges that some people have no answers, are busy right now, etc., and thus we’d always ask more people than we need to get a post going, so that only some need to reply.

Perhaps the only other parameter to set right now is that by “kids” and “children,” we’re thinking around 0-11. Where we set that end line is fuzzy, partly because we hope to have writers from around the world contribute, and the cultural hingepoints are different in different countries. But we’re interested largely in infancy to the end of elementary school.

We hope the series will be of interest to many of you, and that many of you will write for it.

Sofia the First bugs me. The premise is that young Sofia recently became a princess when her mother married the King of Enchancia. She also has a magical amulet that summons other Disney princesses to aid her. But ironically, those princesses’ aid is mostly required to help her not be such a, well, princess. Sofia is a poster child for white privilege. She regularly does inconsiderate things, but since she realizes at the eleventh hour, apologizes, and tries to make things alright in some nominal way, that’s meant to make her a good kid. Or she’ll decide to care about one of Enchancia’s underclass, but only for a few minutes, before they’re once more unimportant to her. Take one episode, for instance, in which she is chosen to sing the Enchancia anthem at some big event, even though we’ve already learned that her ethnic friends (one is black, one Asian, since she’s a walking college admissions catalogue) sing it way better. She lets this honor get to her head, forgets about her “friends from the village,” and so her amulet gives her a frog in her throat, which is only cured when she gets up on the stage and invites her friends to sing instead of her. Everyone is impressed with her selflessness. But her friends know their place in Enchancia’s racial hierarchy and soon invite her back on the stage, where she assumes her place at the center again. Or another episode sees her butler (voiced by Tim Gunn) given a rare day off, until she and her siblings ensure he actually doesn’t get one, instead making him catch butterflies for them (I envision that this would help the butler title his tell-all Marxist autobiog of later years: Catching Butterflies: The Diary of a Working Stiff).

So very much better is Doc McStuffins. Training to be a doctor not a princess puts Doc on firmer ground with me. Doc is African-American, and she clearly wants to be just like her mom, who is also a doctor (her dad is a stay-at-home dad). She administers check-ups and cures “boo-boos” for toys, who magically come alive in her presence (or is this a projection of her psyche? I just blogged about this here). And though the show never frames her as such, this in effect makes her as much an engineer as a doctor, since toys don’t bleed (“will it hurt?” one toy asks her once. “No, you’re a toy,” she responds). A well-meaning show designed to take the fear out of doctor’s visits, Doc McStuffins has a lot of impressive and noble messaging, with black female authority, men who acknowledge it, and the über-practical Doc. The supporting cast can hurt that messaging, though, at times a lot: Doc’s nurse, for instance, is a cringe-worthy mammy hippo, and just when you thought Doc was offering a different image of juvenile femininity, her frilly-dress-wearing toy lamb with high pitched voice reminds you of the stereotype you thought the show was disposing of. So, it ain’t superb. Indeed, I have a feeling that the “submit to medical authority” narrative might not jibe with a fan of Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic. But she ain’t Sofia. Or Ariel. And because of it, my daughter likes to use her toy stethoscope and otoscope with authority, so I like Doc.

The newest addition to the lineup is Sheriff Callie’s Wild West. The premise suggests more Doc than Sofia, with a Western setting full of odd animals, talking cacti, and so forth, held together by Callie, the cat sheriff whose lasso is every episode’s deus ex machina. I appreciate that again we have a show whose female lead isn’t simply learning how to preen: like all good sheriffs, Callie rides in to save the day frequently, and enjoys the confidence of someone who knows she’s as good at telling people how to be nice to each other as she is at riding, lassoing, and laying down the law. (Of course, it’s a pretty tepid West, though: Deadwood it is not). What’s disappointing about the show is that Callie gets relatively little screen time, at least in the episodes I’ve seen. Her deputy and his talking cactus friend, both men/boys, often center the plot, as do the comings and goings of many of the town’s other (mostly male) inhabitants. Callie therefore takes on the role of Ward in Leave it to Beaver, there to save the day with wisdom and action, but the show is often as much about the town’s boys as Beaver was about that town’s boys. On one hand, I like that a female is able to play that grand authority figure blessed with almost mystical power; certainly, I struggle to think of many other popular filmic or televisual narratives in which a woman is allowed to play this role. On the other hand, though, it relegates her to a lesser role, a Disney version of the sensible woman in a Judd Apatow film who has to clean up the goofy, dumb, yet central male characters’ mess, and as in those Apatowian analogues, she can at times be hard to like as a result. It’s okay, in short, but could be better.

Nick Browne built upon the notion of flow to suggest that “the network is basically a relay in a process of textualizing the interaction of audience and advertiser” (74) and that the audience is active not “directly by what it wants, but through the figure of what is wanted of it.” To “read” flow as a whole for Browne is to read what he calls the “(super)text.” It is to recognize that television is not a medium of a priority in which programming is surrounded by commercials, but a medium in which commercials are surrounded by programming. Television shows thus become the connective tissue of the flow of advertisements, but are themselves really incidental to what television means within a commercial context.

But while Browne’s and to a greater extent Williams’ theories helped coalesce our field around a particular framework in these early years, there is not really an overwhelming body of flow work; indeed, I’m surprised by how infrequently I see it actually deployed (please share good counterexamples in the comments!).

Perhaps because of technological convergence through DVRs and TiVo, television fragmentation, and the so-called post-network era, for many television scholars working on “important” texts – most often masculinized shows that air in primetime – flow has become passé, bygone, and moved beyond in television studies. Choosing not to engage with the (super)text and focusing only on the narrative elements of a show makes for concerning, unremarked-upon assumptions about “quality” audiences and spectatorship practices with strong implications for erasures of class and gender beyond what I can cover here.

But flow is, of course, alive and well and even, as I’ll argue, desired. Moreover, it’s not only characteristic of network broadcasting (especially in daytime), but cable and non-network spaces are themselves begging for ‘flownalyses.’ For instance, I’m an avid viewer of Logo’s #sitcomtherapy nights, which air old episodes of queer-friendly sitcoms like The Golden Girls and Roseanne, punctuated by bumpers showing gay men and couples, PSAs by gay puppets educating audiences about AIDS, and programs for queer shows with queer bodies like RuPaul’s Drag Race, all the while overlaid by Tweets, hashtags, and queer trivia.

This syndicated flow with its rich semiotics of queerness legitimates the queer readings long, though less-explicitly, tied to such shows by queer folks. I admit to becoming willfully complicit in my own exploitation as a live viewer, choosing to sit through commercials instead of popping in a DVD because I find the experience of flow pleasureful, and I long have. And I’m not alone.

Syndicating queerness, as I’m calling it, is something I’m exploring as part of a larger project and in the process of researching it, I’ve found many other instances of the derived pleasure and nostalgia of flow in the post-network, digital era online, one of which I’d like to remark upon here: nick reboot.

nick reboot is a 24/7 online live-streaming “channel” for 1990s and early 2000s Nickelodeon programming – both live action and cartoon. Fan activists (many from the so-called millenial generation) have long petitioned Nickelodeon to revive this nostalgic programming (shows like Salute Your Shorts, Legends of the Hidden Temple, and Rocko’s Modern Life) but every time shows have been revived, they’ve been situated within the wrong flow context, matching twenty year old programming with present-day commercial breaks. So in an effort to recreate the flow of the era, the creators of nick reboot scoured the web to assemble user-uploaded original and syndicated programming (once aired on Nick but perhaps later syndicated elsewhere) as well as commercials, station IDs, and bumpers from the era, VJing them in such a way as to create a mechanics and performance of 90s-era flow.

While DVDs and YouTube videos promise old programming, they remain scarred as edited – incomplete texts without commercials, bumpers, etc. that thus read as less televisual (the problem of the DVD archive). Fans long for flow and the (super)texts of their childhoods, finding in nick reboot pleasure from a place of nostalgia as they re-imagine and relive the subjectivities they inhabited as children viewers.

The single video stream “channel” is accompanied by a live chat room where users reminisce about the shows and advertised products in real-time, virtually recreating the communal characteristic of network television lost, some argue, in the present-day Netflixian era. What’s more, flow is illuminated in nick reboot by its somewhat random nature that seems itself unscheduled. You watch nick reboot, particularly in commercial transitions, often just to see what’s on nick reboot without the luxury of a digital guide that lists all the shows for at least seven days. Users can follow nick reboot on Twitter for a broadcast schedule or have it delivered to their inboxes but only a few hours ahead of air times – a newfangled variance of TV Guide.

TV scholars much stronger and smarter than I have long and successfully defended against the notion that television in the post-network/Hululian era is dead. To the list of the living and, indeed thriving, I add flow itself and encourage us all to challenge ourselves by keeping these “(super)texts” complete in our classrooms and our research where possible. Put down those clickers, put away your video editors, and bask in the flow of television.

Notes:
1. Not unlike the class exclusivity of Nickelodeon, nick reboot is exclusive itself requiring an invitation from one of the original members to join.

2. Scholars themselves struggle researching flow probably as off-air broadcast isn’t long protected by fair use, a problem of the limited television archive that will be a part of an upcoming TV Studies SIG workshop at SCMS.