Boy Culture

As the kids today consume children’s media, they are inevitably falling under the brainwashing spells of new media determinism. There is a blurring of boundaries between childhood and adulthood, especially when all the “adult secrets” (discussed in the previous post) are revealed in a click of a button. Childhood is now viewed as both threatened and threatening. Before new media such as the television and Internet, however, “boy culture” dominated young social life. Jenkin’s article, “A Tale of Two Childhoods”, digs deeper into this notion of boy culture and how it’s evolved under new media determinism. When boys were done with school during the Industrialization age, they would explore their identity through play in the outdoors rather than going home. They imitated and reenacted adult male activity to grasp a firmer sense of adult ideology, simultaneously shaping their identity to fit in with their social world. For example, they might engage in role-play like cops and robbers or reenact what they’ve seen in real life. With the advent of the television and computer into the household, however, there was an inevitable transformation of boy culture, as the “home region”, or space of self-exploration, comes indoors. The negative stereotype of the boy who stayed in and read books as the “bookworm” did not apply analogously to the boy who stayed in and consumed video games, a different new media other than text. Instead of using their imagination to transform a stick into a shotgun rifle, boys could now play competitively through LAN or online video games and virtually shoot each other with damn realistic portrayals of guns. Boys can even engage in the exploration of world issues in video games, such as Call of Duty, a game that teaches a lot about war history. In addition, their social circle is no longer restricted to the neighborhood children around the block, but expands infinitely when playing video games with others online. As a result, the degree of interactivity sky rockets. The great mobility associated to the outdoors in boy culture is still no match to the divine access given by the World Wide Web. On the other hand, however, this facilitated form of play severely influences the development of imagination, as technology does all the creative thinking for us. No longer do children need to imagine contexts of play as they once did in the outdoors when modern video games already simulate a virtual world with prescribed representations of characters and objects for them to interact with. In a sense, the pricelessness of original imagination and pretend play that is the essence of childhood has been lost. If you are interested, David Buckingham further illuminates the "death of childhood" in his book, After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media.