Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship »

Sarah Banet-Weiser is Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity and coeditor of Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (forthcoming).

A study of the Nickelodeon’s children’s TV network and its subsidiary media and how they have influenced the concept of children as “citizens” within a community of their own that is separate from adults.

Jennifer Zarr - Library Journal

Popular literature on the child as consumer focuses on children as victims of aggressive marketing campaigns, e.g., Juliet B. Schor's Born To Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. According to Banet-Weiser (Annenberg Sch. for Communication, Univ. of Southern California; The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity), however, the kid-centered cable station Nickelodeon sees children in a very different way-as media savvy consumers or, "consumer citizens." Not as educational as PBS or as commercial as toy-based programming on network television, Nickelodeon, says this author, is a commercial station with a mission: to empower kids by giving them a space where they can be themselves. Each of her six chapters is written as a separate essay. There is a chapter that traces the history of the station from its early days as "green vegetable" educational television to its current status as a hip, kid-centered media giant of original programming. Another two chapters are devoted to the network's dedication to representing racial diversity and its sensitivity to gender issues as part of the Nickelodeon brand. This is not the first book about this cable network giant (see, e.g., Heather Hendershot's Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics, and Economics of America's Only TV Channel for Kids), but the focus here, on children as "citizens" within a commercial context, is distinct. Recommended for academic libraries.

List of Illustrations     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
"We, The People of Nickelodeon": Theorizing Empowerment and Consumer Citizenship     1
The Success Story: Nickelodeon and the Cable Industry     38
The Nickelodeon Brand: Buying and Selling the Audience     69
Girls Rule! Gender, Feminism, and Nickelodeon     104
Consuming Race on Nickelodeon     142
Is Nick for Kids? Irony, Camp, and Animation in the Nickelodeon Brand     178
Conclusion: Kids Rule: The Nickelodeon Universe     211
Notes     219
Bibliography     245
Index     259