Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article describes the relation between the production, distribution, and consumption of children’s software, focusing on how genres of “entertainment” and “education” structure everyday practice; institutions; and our understandings of childhood, play, and learning. Starting with a description of how the vernaculars of popular visual culture and entertainment found their way into children’s educational software and how related products are marketed, the article then turns to examples of play with children’s software that are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork. The cultural opposition between entertainment and education is a compelling dichotomy—a pair of material, semiotic, technical genres—that manifests in a range of institutionalized relations. After first describing a theoretical commitment to discursive analysis, this article presents the production and marketing context that structures the entertainment genre in children’s software and then looks at instance of play in the after-school computer clubs that mobilize entertainment and fun as social resources.

Keywords

children’s software children’s media inter-active media play computer games software industry

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Buckingham, David . 2000. After the death of childhood: Growing up in the age of electronic media. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Cole, Michael . 1997. Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Debord, Guy . 1995. Society of the spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black & Red.

Foucault, Michel . 1978. The history of sexuality: An introduction. Vol. 1. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

Ito, Mizuko. 2003. Engineering play: Children’s software and the productions of everyday life. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.

Kline, Stephen . 1993. Out of the garden: Toys and children’s culture in the age of TV marketing. New York: Verso.

Seiter, Ellen . 1995. Sold separately: Parents and children in consumer culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Sutton-Smith, Brian . 1997. The ambiguity of play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Turkle, Sherry . 1984. The second self: Computers and the human spirit. New York: Touchstone.

10.

Vasquez, Olga A. , Lucinda Pease-Alvarez , and Sheila M. Shannon . 1994. Pushing boundaries: Language and culture in a Mexicano community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mobilizing Fun in the Production and Consumption of Children’s Software

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References