Playful visions : optical toys and the emergence of children's media culture

著者

    • Bak, Meredith A.

書誌事項

Playful visions : optical toys and the emergence of children's media culture

Meredith A. Bak

The MIT Press, 2020

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注記

Includes bibliographical references and index

Summary: "In this richly detailed work Meredith Bak explores how the historical legacy of optical toys figures into the formation of children's media culture. Bak's analysis draws on her own archival research, as well as scholarship in a variety of disciplines including film and cinema studies, media archeology, history, literature, and childhood studies. The book is organized around a close analysis of the use and context for nineteenth and twentieth optical media -- the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, zoetrope, praxinoscope, movable toy books, kaleidoscope, and stereoscope. While these mechanisms are fascinating in themselves, they are often seen merely as precursors to more fully developed film and cinema technologies. Bak restores these devices to their original context - middle-class nurseries and living rooms - and reveals how the types of play that they encouraged were engaged with changing ideas of childhood, the psychology of vision, and the education of the senses. One reviewer remarks, "The author's

収録内容

  • Introduction: the ludic archive
  • Templates, toys, and text: optical toys in nineteenth-century children's culture
  • Language in motion: the thaumatrope establishes a multimedia convention
  • Seeing things: optical play at home
  • Movable toy books and the culture of independent play
  • Color education: from the chaotic kaleidoscope to the orderly spectrum
  • Democracy and discipline: object lessons and the stereoscope in American education, 1870-1920
  • Conclusion: oversized optics in the digital age

内容説明・目次

内容説明

The kaleidoscope, the stereoscope, and other nineteenth-century optical toys analyzed as "new media" of their era, provoking anxieties similar to our own about children and screens. In the nineteenth century, the kaleidoscope, the thaumatrope, the zoetrope, the stereoscope, and other optical toys were standard accessories of a middle-class childhood, used both at home and at school. In Playful Visions, Meredith Bak argues that the optical toys of the nineteenth century were the "new media" of their era, teaching children to be discerning consumers of media-and also provoking anxieties similar to contemporary worries about children's screen time. Bak shows that optical toys-which produced visual effects ranging from a moving image to the illusion of depth-established and reinforced a new understanding of vision as an interpretive process. At the same time, the expansion of the middle class as well as education and labor reforms contributed to a new notion of childhood as a time of innocence and play. Modern media culture and the emergence of modern Western childhood are thus deeply interconnected. Drawing on extensive archival research, Bak discusses, among other things, the circulation of optical toys, and the wide visibility gained by their appearance as printed templates and textual descriptions in periodicals; expanding conceptions of literacy, which came to include visual acuity; and how optical play allowed children to exercise a sense of visual mastery. She examines optical toys alongside related visual technologies including chromolithography-which inspired both chromatic delight and chromophobia. Finally, considering the contemporary use of optical toys in advertising, education, and art, Bak analyzes the endurance of nineteenth-century visual paradigms.

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