The Commercialization of Childhood: The Pinwheel of Disney

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CRS1002 Interdisciplinary Study of Contemporary Culture

End-term Essay

Student: Tang Yat Chin

Student no. : s07623284

The Commercialization of Childhood: The Pinwheel of Disney

Over decades, the vast media empire of Walt Disney, dabbling in a variety of almost every aspect of the industry from television to film, department stores to theme parks, has undeniably infiltrated into our everyday lives and influenced our culture in numerous aspects, with or without us realizing. In the age of bursting information, the media touches their lives more directly than ever before. The sources are so scattered and the socializing process can be so subtle, that even adults sometimes forget to be critical to what we take in on a daily basis, let alone our children. They have too little sophistication and experience to discriminate and so they receive and learn from basically everything they are offered. That is why it is crucial for us to be alerted to the real power of the Disney kingdom, which has the access to and control over what children read and watch, what children play and use, what and how they think, and find out what it is conveying to our children and how it is manipulating the meaning of childhood.

In this essay, inspired by Richard deCordova’s ‘The Mickey in Macy’s Window: Childhood, Consumerism, and Disney Animation’, I would first explore how the word ‘Childhood’ has evolved in time, mostly on how and why it has become consuming-oriented as it is nowadays. Then, I would briefly elaborate on some basic theories related to consumerism, followed by how Disney redefines childhood and family, in order to consolidate and raise its commercial interest.

The Invention of Childhood

Children’s culture in the West has a complex history. The idea of childhood is under constant change along with history. It is not always synonymous with innocence, fun and purity, in fact it can be considered as one of the most important inventions of after the industrial revolution. Children used to have no autonomy, separate status, privileges or any forms of social right that were entirely their own. There was no separate world of childhood. Not only do they used to share the same lives with adults, also they were expected to participate in work as soon as they could. There is a sharp contrast between then and the profound concern with children’s rights, leisure and pleasure nowadays, which is readily apparent in the legal definition of children’s rights which excludes them from the industrial world and exempts them from the adult criminal legislation.

From the nineteenth century onwards, children were being excluded more and more from the “reality” and were seen to innocent objects, to be “socialized”, that is to be shape and mould into civilized beings by learning “tailor-made” curriculum and social norms, by institutions like families, schools and churches.

During the last few decades of the nineteenth century, rapid industrialization created vast amount of supply which both allowed and provoked people’s needs of goods. Children’s culture, like all other cultures, was unavoidably forced to join the parade of commercialization. Using all available means, the commercial world has successfully molded “childhood” as a period of using specific services and products, specially designed for children, which is proved by the profusion of toys and designer products that fill any ordinary child’s own room.

The Commercialized Childhood

The topic of consumerism, which is first put up by the US economist Thorstein Veblen, a number of anthropologists and social theorists have challenged the classical model of market exchange by suggesting that all goods have a cultural component that shapes and expresses their ‘use-value’. Veblen calls the social process in which goods are ritually displayed and consumed ‘conspicuous consumption’.

Mary Douglas, on the other hand, provided a more anthropological perspective on consumerism. She argued that the new consuming process is not simply exchange values/goods, but also exchange of symbols, as goods are social symbols that can generate social objectives, for example, to define one’s experience of celebrations, to convey one’s achievements and to locate oneself in different social groups. As another anthropologist Marshall Sahlins notes, goods can also be a mean to articulate social occasions and define social structures and relations.

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As merchandisers strive to use all possible channels to stimulate interest in their products, they have learned to utilize the expanding information infrastructures to promote their point of view and place the desire for goods into our heart with ever more clever and sophisticated means of communication. Our identities of ourselves have become seamlessly linked with the things we buy. With consumption as our identity basis, we stick to our faulty belief that consumption is the best way to achieve success, happiness and well-being.

From baby appliances, colorful toys graded by months of age, pre-school learning kits, to girly ...

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