Teddy Bears, Television and Play: Rethinking Semiosis in Children's Media Culture

Abstract

The political economy of the cultural industries has historically exploited ancillary markets by merchandising toys based on textual characters. This paper engages in the proliferation of these trends in the area of children's media production by arguing that meaning-making in very young children's media cultures is increasingly generated across intertextual formations that will include plush toys. By drawing on auto-ethnographic materials of children's meaning-making with television, books and such “teddy bears”, it is argued that meaning-making in this context might be best conceptualised in terms of play practices that are both global in their economic scope and singular in their location in everyday life. Accordingly, the social semiotic conceptualisation of “meaning potential” is expanded to include an upper level and a lower level of significance: the lower as the semiotic affordances and organisation of the texts and toys as a semiotic system, the upper as the way in which its realisation in texts are drawn into cultural semiosis in concrete and playful encounters. By drawing on Ron Scollon's model of “mediated discourse”, the paper explores the textuality of these texts, their connection to the economic imperatives of production, and their modelling of children's play as they are drawn into semiosis through parent and child interaction.

Keywords:

• Play
• plush toys
• semiosis
• affect
• mediated action
• mediational means
• meaning potential
• ethnography

Notes

¹Of course, there is a long heritage of both theoretical attempts to address this in Cultural Studies, most notably Roger Silverstone's (1994) Television and Everyday Life, as well as ethnographic work such as Maria Gillespie's (1999) Television Ethnicity & Cultural Change. However as I have noted elsewhere, there is a reluctance in these studies to examine the text in context, with reference to meaning-making or response. Rather, these tend to be taken as separate “moments”. The notable exception is Purnima Mankekar's (1999) Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. See Briggs (2005).

²To do so means distinguishing between the definition of language as: (1) function (instrumental, regulative, interpersonal, heuristic, personal, imaginative, representational), (2) macrofunction (mathetic, pragmatic) and (3) metafunction (ideational, interpersonal, textual) (Halliday 1975, 158).

³For instance, Henry Jenkins (1988), Miller et al. (2000), Richards (1993, 1995) , Reid and Frazer (1980), Gotz et al. (2005) and Wolf and Heath (1992), who all account for “watching television” and “reading” as a particular realm of experience or frame that is best thought of as a type of play.

⁴For an extended discussion of these materials, the nature of their generation, and the epistemological issues involved, see Briggs (2005). For a discussion of the methodological problems in the fields of textual analysis, audience research and media ethnography, see Briggs (2006).

⁵ www.bbc.cbeebies/grownups/curriculum/ surestart

⁶See Lury (2005) for a close analysis of the organisation of the sound.