Children's Music, MP3 Players, and Expressive Practices at a Vermont Elementary School: Media Consumption as Social Organization among Schoolchildren
type: CreativeWork
description: Over the last generation changes in the social structure of the family and children's command of an increasing share of family spending have led marketers to cultivate children as an important consumer demographic. The designation "tween," which one marketer refers to as kids "too old for Elmo but too young for Eminem," has become a catchall category that includes kids as young as four and as old as fifteen. Music marketed to children--led by the Disney juggernaut, which promotes superstar acts such as the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus across television, radio, film, DVDs and CDs, and branded toys, clothing, and electronics--represents a rare "healthy" area of the music industry, whose growth has paralleled the expansion of portable media technologies throughout U.S. consumer culture. The increasing availability of portable media devices, along with the widespread installation of Internet terminals in schools and educators' turn toward corporate-produced "edutainment" for lessons, has reconfigured schools as central sites of children's media consumption. Off-brand MP3 players packaged with cheap and brightly colored earbuds have become more and more affordable, and marketers increasingly target kids with celebrity-branded music devices and innovations like Hasbro's iDog series of toy portable speakers, which fit naturally among children's colorful and interactive collections of toys. At the forefront of the "digital revolution, children are now active--even iconic--users of digital music technologies. This dissertation argues that tweens, as prominent consumers of ascendant music genres and media devices, represent a burgeoning counterpublic, whose expressions of solidarity and group affiliation are increasingly deferred to by mainstream artists and the entertainment industry. We appear to be witnessing the culmination of a process set in motion almost seventy years ago, when during the postwar period marketers experimented with promoting products di…
abstract: Over the last generation changes in the social structure of the family and children's command of an increasing share of family spending have led marketers to cultivate children as an important consumer demographic. The designation "tween," which one marketer refers to as kids "too old for Elmo but too young for Eminem," has become a catchall category that includes kids as young as four and as old as fifteen. Music marketed to children--led by the Disney juggernaut, which promotes superstar acts such as the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus across television, radio, film, DVDs and CDs, and branded toys, clothing, and electronics--represents a rare "healthy" area of the music industry, whose growth has paralleled the expansion of portable media technologies throughout U.S. consumer culture. The increasing availability of portable media devices, along with the widespread installation of Internet terminals in schools and educators' turn toward corporate-produced "edutainment" for lessons, has reconfigured schools as central sites of children's media consumption. Off-brand MP3 players packaged with cheap and brightly colored earbuds have become more and more affordable, and marketers increasingly target kids with celebrity-branded music devices and innovations like Hasbro's iDog series of toy portable speakers, which fit naturally among children's colorful and interactive collections of toys. At the forefront of the "digital revolution, children are now active--even iconic--users of digital music technologies. This dissertation argues that tweens, as prominent consumers of ascendant music genres and media devices, represent a burgeoning counterpublic, whose expressions of solidarity and group affiliation are increasingly deferred to by mainstream artists and the entertainment industry. We appear to be witnessing the culmination of a process set in motion almost seventy years ago, when during the postwar period marketers experimented with promoting products di…
author: Bickford, Tyler
language: English
keywords: Music, Ethnology, Educational sociology, Education--Sociological aspects
date published: 2011
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:44:13Z
provider: Columbia University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Columbia University

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7916/D800081S