英语论文网

al of each new medium,whichdemand that research address the same questions over and again—about thedisplacement of reading,exercise,and conversation;about social isolation andaddiction;about violent and consumerist content(Barker and Petley 2001)—havea long history.Bettelheim(1999)traces them back via Goethe’s The Sorrows ofYoung Werther,blamed for a wave of suicides in eighteenth-century Germany,toPlato’s ideal state that banned imaginative literature for corrupting the young.But what this makes plain is that society’s perennial anxieties about children,childhood,and the family are catalyzed by“the new,”the popular hope being thatby fixing the technology,society can fix the problems of childhood.However,acritical rejection of both moral panics and technological determinism does not
permit us to conclude that television played no role in the unfolding history of
the family in the twentieth century.Indeed,I am partly provoked to write this
article by the notable absence of answers to the“so what?”question from the
many scholars who,over the decades,have zealously charted the facts and figures
on the prominence of television within the family.1 Surely television must have
made some difference.Equally surely,family life would have been different with-
out television or had television been itself different.
To avert the charge of technological determinism hovering in the minds of
this volume’s readers(MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999),I stress that the startingpoint must be the recognition that television,both the domestic set and itsbroadcast forms and contents,was developed,designed,financed,regulated,and marketed by the very society that then worried about the consequences.Crucially,society has itself undergone profound changes over the past half cen-
tury,so that television is just one of many factors that have influenced family lifein the second half of the twentieth century.These changes include the urbaniza-tion and education of the population,the growing emancipation of women,thegrowth of affluent individualism and the rise of consumer society together withan increasingly dispossessed poor,the gradual inclusion of the diversity of thepopulation in terms of ethnicity and sexuality,the decline in public participationand political commitment,and,specifically relevant here,the posttraditionalfamily and research on adolescence.Together,these factors haverefashioned
the family during the twentieth century in the direction ofindividualizationand democratization,ever further away from the Victorian family(Beck andDownloaded fromhttps://ann.sagepub.comby Barbara Sadler on October 22,2009HALF A CENTURY OF TELEVISION IN THE LIVES OF OUR CHILDREN 153
Beck-Gernsheim 2002;Coontz 1997;Gadlin 1978);they have therefore also
shaped the context within which television was appropriated,acquiring a mean-
ingful place within the family.2
Parallel changes in media and in childhood must be considered in tandem if we
are to avoid either technological or cultural determinism.However,this shortarticle can only sketch the outline of an analysis of television’s place in the lives ofparents and children,and in so doing,it must rely on an even sketchier accountof the major societal shifts during the past half century to contextualize the arrivalof television.Specifically,I argue,first,that the coincidence of mass television in the1950s and what Stephanie Coontz(1997)has called“the 1950s family experiment”meant that for a t