Children and Adolescents
CHAPTER 1 Children and Adolescents Unique Audiences Sometimes wise and disconcertingly like adults, children are nonetheless children. To the wonder, joy, and vexation of adults, they are different. As they grow older, they become increasingly like us and therefore intelligible to us, but at each age or stage of development there is something for adults to learn more about, to be amused by, and to adjust to. —Professor Aimee Dorr Television and Children: A Special Medium for a Special Audience (1986, p. 12) Over the past twenty or thirty years, the status of childhood and our assumptions about it have become more and more unstable. The distinctions between children and other categories—“youth” or “adults”—have become ever more difficult to sustain. —Professor David Buckingham After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (2000, p. 77) Children and young people are a distinctive and significant cultural grouping in their own right—a sizeable market share, a subculture even, and one which often “leads the way” in the use of new media. —Professor Sonia Livingstone Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment (2002, p. 3) 1 2 CHILDREN, ADOLESCENTS, AND THE MEDIA Unlike the children of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, whose media choices were limited and stood out like isolated, familiar landmarks in communal life, kids today inhabit an environment saturated and shaped by a complex “mediascape” that envelops and bombards them day and night. —James P. Steyer The Other Parent: The Inside Story of Media’s Effect on Our Children (2002, p.
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