Media Stuff: A Panel on Material Media Cultures

w/ Dr. Meredith Bak, Dr. Caetlin Benson-Allott, and Pat Bonner

Respondant: Dr. Haidee Wasson

As film moves to television and television to our pockets, the material conditions of everyday media consumption appear once again to have changed. But not only are past and present media practices more varied, unpredictable, and historically-rooted, they also challenge the (still dominant) visual-centricism of spectatorship studies. Indeed, our sensory experiences (of sound, touch, smell, etc.) are shaped and stimulated by diverse material forms, emotional attachments, and expressive rituals. Drawing on cultural history, media archaeology, and ordinary media stuff, this panel reconsiders the present focus on smartphones, social media and streaming by exploring transformations in material media cultures since the 1980s: toy voice devices, comfort viewing, and interactive video. Together, these talks examine the cultural politics of media consumption in recent decades.

Presentation abstracts

Meredith Bak

Talking Back: Mediating the 90s Child’s Voice

The 1990s saw a range of consumer media devices designed to record, manipulate, and amplify children’s voices. Media toys such as Tiger Electronics’ Talkboy line and YES! Gear’s Yak Bak line utilized technological protocols from magnetic tape to integrated circuits to combine voice recording with playback effects such as speed and pitch alteration and sound effects. These devices proliferated alongside a range of commercial and political articulations of children’s voices, such as the Nickelodeon television network’s promotional appeals to children as consumer-citizens and Article 12 of the 1989 United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child’s (UNCRC), which specifies children’s right to the freedom of expression and opportunity to be heard in matters concerning them.

Through a media archaeological approach that combines material and discursive analysis, my talk considers how voice-transforming toys of the 1990s imagined and produced “the child’s voice” as a political and economic asset. The notion of voice has long been fraught terrain within multidisciplinary studies of childhood, as both a conceptual category and a social practice—one particularly vulnerable to characterizations as unmediated or authentic. My investigation explores how the design and functionality of toy voice devices, including their technological configurations, facilitated vocal expressions that reflected how children’s interpersonal exchanges and capabilities as social actors were imagined by toy and media industry stakeholders.

Caetlin Benson-Allott

The Material Culture of Comfort Viewing

Attending to material media cultures encourages us to theorize what Rita Felski calls “ordinary motives” for spectatorship, including the longing for escape or comfort. Since the fourteenth century, comfort has referred to both emotional solace and bodily relief from want, pain, or sickness. Both meanings come to bear in the ordinary spectatorial practice of “comfort viewing,” yet the discourse on comfort viewing privileges narrative content over physical creature comforts. I argue that comfort viewing is a deeply material practice whose pleasures emerged as part of the 1980s home video revolution and remain tied to the material conditions of media consumption. Attending to both media representations and ethnographic accounts of comfort viewing reveals it to be an idiosyncratic, sensual practice that cannot be achieved without the right clothing, sustenance, and setting. As contingent as every comfort viewing practice may be, acknowledging it as a material media culture brings us closer to understanding how viewers interpellate media to serve their needs too.

Pat Bonner

Video Kids: How Home Video Transformed (Canadian) Children's Television

In the 1980s and 1990s, home video transformed film and television, providing U.S. media conglomerates with new revenue streams that strengthened their domination of the global box office. Home video distribution triggered a widespread dismantling of protectionist cultural policies, as TV industries worldwide expanded their cable systems to compete with the slew of video products flooding their markets. Television for children, the most “protected” audience demographic, was especially affected by home video. Video’s materiality reconstituted the child’s relationship to television, while video’s interactive imaginary reshaped how media industries addressed kids as consumers. Imbricated with adjacent sectors such as book publishing, toy manufacturing, fast food, and media electronics, children’s video was a particularly destabilizing media form.

Canada’s children’s television industries adapted to video’s increasingly hypercommercial logics in a context where domestic home video distribution was controlled mainly by American studios. Examining the Canadian children’s horror series Goosebumps (YTV 1995-1998) and its video remediations, I consider how Canadian children’s television was especially vulnerable to the rise of commercial home video. Video pulled children’s television in Canada more tightly into the U.S. media industries’ orbit, introducing new forms of dependency that have come to characterize Canadian media in the new millennium.

About the speakers

Meredith A. Bak is an Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture (MIT Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in journals including The Journal for Cinema and Media Studies and Early Popular Visual Culture, and in several edited collections. Her fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter and Molotov Cocktail. She is working on a project about the role of cardboard in children’s material culture.

Caetlin Benson-Allott is Professor of English and Director of Film & Media Studies at Georgetown University. She authored The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film & Television (University of California Press, 2021), Remote Control (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Killer Tapes & Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (University of California Press, 2013) and is currently working on a book about escapism.

Pat Bonner is a PhD Candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, and Coordinator at the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab. His work has been published in Canadian Journal of Film and Media Studies and Canadian Journal of Communication. He is currently completing his dissertation on the material production and cultural politics of the Canadian children’s network YTV.