Children's media and modernity

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Throughout the modern era, the figure of the child has mirrored adult concerns about industrialization, urbanization, technology, consumerism, and capitalism. Children symbolize a retreat from modern life, often associated with fairy tales, medievalism, animals, and nature, while also embodying the future and contemporary popular culture. This exploration investigates how products for children navigate these contradictions through the history and textuality of three major media forms: cinema, television, and digital games. Case studies, including Wallace and Gromit, Teletubbies, Horrible Histories, Little Big Planet, and Disney Infinity, illustrate the complex intersections between children’s culture and modernity. Cinema, linked to the rise of modernity and mass culture, has had to negotiate its relationship with child audiences and depictions of childhood, often obscuring its ties to modernity. In contrast, television’s role in family-centered, post-war modernity positioned children as a clear audience for domestic entertainment. The latter decades of the twentieth century saw home computers promoted as educational tools for future generations, leveraging positive associations between children and technology, while digital games emerged as a significant medium within children’s culture through their narrative references, aesthetics, and merchandise.