COMM 432

Media in Film

The Disappearance of Childhood

Suggested Reading

The Disappearance of Childhood

The Idea of Childhood

  • Childhood as a social construct
  • Child:
    • Human being, age 7-17, who needs protection and nurture.
  • This simple idea has not always existed.
  • One of the many inventions of the Renaissance (science, nation-state, religious freedom, …)
  • Thesis:
    • The idea of childhood is disappearing,
    • and the mass media are responsible for it.

When there were no children

  • Greek and Roman culture came close to the idea of children
    • Education
    • Shame
  • This development of the idea of childhood completely vanished during the Middle Ages.
  • This dark time brought the destruction of
    • literacy,
    • education and
    • shame
  • 7 years – Age of Reason.
  • Reading was not considered part of the adult’s world.

The Typographic Mind and the New Adult

  • The invention of the printing press redefined adulthood – and this opened space for the new idea of childhood.
  • Printing press introduced a radical change in the intellectual life.
  • Gutenberg’s mind connected “a winepress to book manufacturing, but it is a safe conjecture that he had no intention of amplifying individualism or, for that matter, of undermining the authority of the Catholic Church”.
  • The printing press reinforced individualism and changed the structure of thinking.
    • Isolated reader versus communication in social context
    • The particular logic of the book:
      • The structured complexity of typographic language
      • The logical organization of books (sentences, paragraphs, chapters).
      • The mind adapts to the sequential nature of reading.

The Birth of Childhood

  • During the Renaissance, the child became an “object of respect”.
  • Explosion of knowledge: The amount of things to learn increased spectacularly in few years.
  • More time was necessary in order to become an adult.
  • Infancy ended when the child started to talk. Childhood started when the child learned how to read.
  • “A child evolves toward adulthood by acquiring the sort of intellect we expect of a good reader: a vigorous sense of individuality, the capacity to distance oneself from symbols, the capacity to manipulate high orders of abstraction, the capacity to defer gratification”.
  • At the end of the process, what defines a child is what he/she does not know.
  • And, as a logical consequence, to protect the childhood means to avoid that they learn what is characteristic of the adulthood. The adult ended up thinking that childhood needs to be separated and protected from adulthood.

Nature and Impact of TV

  • TV = Electricity + Image
    • Electricity destroys the limitations of time and space in communication processes.
    • Photographic reproduction of images makes possible to create a plethora of images that are easier to interpret.
  • TV is fast paced (3-4 seconds shots)
  • It requires perception, not conception.
  • No skills are required to watch TV – and no skills are acquired watching TV.
  • TV destroys distinction between adulthood and childhood:
    • It requires no instruction,
    • It does not make complex demands on either mind or behavior,
    • It does not segregate its audience.

The Total Disclosure Medium

  • Literacy open secrets, but also creates obstacles to reach them.
    • Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller, 1934)
  • “TV is an open-admission technology to which there are no physical, economic, cognitive, or imaginative restraints”.
  • It destroys secrets, the feeling of mystery and awe.
  • With no secrets, mystery, or awe, shame vanishes, and with the shame, the manners.
  • The process of civilization needs that the individual develops a self-control of natural impulses.
  • Sexual contents, violence, brutal and obscene language, illness, death, consumerism, …

The Adult Child

  • Literate versus electric culture: The idea of childhood disappears, but also the one of adulthood.
  • The Adult-Child:
    • “Grown-ups whose intellectual and emotional capacities are unrealized and, in particular, not significantly different from those associated with children”.
  • Political Communication:
    • “The political judgment is transformed from an intellectual assessment of proportions to an intuitive and emotional response to the totality of an image”.
    • The adult-child does not agree/disagree. S/He likes/dislikes.

Plato’s Myth of the cave

When studying mass communication in general – and TV in particular – I like to introduce Plato’s allegory (or myth) of the cave.

With this simple story of prisoners chained in front of a wall full of shadows, Plato was anticipating the most relevant issues we now associate to mass media (about 2,500 years before mass media existed). 

Being There (1979)

  • Director: Hal Ashby (1929-1988)
    • The Last Detail (1967), Harold and Maud (1971), Coming Home (1978)
  • Writer: Jerry Kosinski (1933-1981)
    • The Painted Bird (1965), Steps (1969), Being There (1971)
  • Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas

Keep the following questions in mind when watching the film to connect it with Neil Postman’s theory of the Disappearance of Childhood.

1 – First, You should be able to understand, after watching Being There, why I chose this movie to illustrate Postman’s main thesis.

Why do you think I chose this movie to illustrate Postman’s thesis in the Disappearance of Childhood?

2 – Second, Do you see children, or the idea of childhood, in danger in this Film?

3 – Third, TV was, according to Postman endangering the idea of childhood, but not only. What are the potential harmful effects of TV on the social body?

4 and finally – How does the film express this danger?