Abstract

Drawing on data from a study of children and television this paper considers the ways that the mass media have become a central point of reference for young people. The children involved in this study attended a small rural primary school in West Wales. Focusing on the discussions of a group of 7- to 11-year-olds this paper shows how media personalities, images and experiences saturate the ways that children think and talk about the world.

We argue that television is now the most important resource for children’s sense of the world, society and their place in it.  National and local identities lose significance as children’s primary connection is to the culture of television. Who ‘We’ and ‘They’ are becomes a matter of television genre and narrative conventions. We argue that young children’s use of television as a central point of reference is evident in the often surprising way that even timid children seem to ‘come alive’ when they talk about and assess television. The current generation of children has never known a world without 24-hour television. These children are part of a ‘television nation’.

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