1.2..-Basada en el enfoque del desarrollo socio-económico territorialmente Competitividad espacial

Many scholars have reported concerns about children’s participation in consumer media culture, focusing particularly on ever-growing direct advertising appeals and marketing exploitation (Hori, 1996; Linn, 2004; Postman, 1982; Rashinban, 2005; Schor, 2004).

Yet consumer media culture is well embedded in children’s cultures, not only in that of teenagers and preteenagers but also of pre-schoolers. I therefore term children’s culture a ‘peer consumer culture’. In this respect, my perspective on consumer culture accords with consumer culture theory (Arnould & Thompson, 2005, 2007) and the notion of consumer enculturation (Cook, 2010) in that it explores “the relations between lived culture and social resources, and between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend” (Arnould & Thompson, 2005: 869). Culture may frame a certain pattern of people’s actions, yet it does not determine individual or communal actions as outcomes. Thus, consumer culture needs to be understood as a reciprocal and circular process where individuals are both the outcomes and the transformers of the social world.

My understanding of children’s peer culture also echoes that of Corsaro (2003, 2005) who has conducted long-term observation of young children’s culture and social

relationships in preschool settings. In taking an interpretive perspective on culture as public, collective and performative, Corsaro defines ‘peers’ as a group of children who spend time together on a daily basis and peer culture as “a stable set of activities or routines, artifacts, values, and concerns that children produce and share in interaction with peers” (Corsaro, 2005: 110). Through daily face-to-face interaction, preschool children produce and share a peer culture in relation to the wider cultures of other children and adults within which they are situated, and their local peer cultures are in turn part of, and contribute to, those wider cultures.

Children’s peer culture exists within a wider contextual frame, which emerges through their engagement with the adult culture: Davies (1982) describes children’s creative and fluid encounters as a ‘double world’ of childhood where children use varieties of goods, roles and activities that are considered part of the adult culture as a source of their own peer culture. Consumer activities – such as what you have bought; where you are going for the weekend; what kinds of TV shows you watch; in which store you buy your clothes and shoes – identify who you are and what social group you belong to. As Buckingham (2000) mentions, it is impossible to discuss children’s peer culture without their consumer possessions and knowledge because those are the relational currency that give them status and position among peers through daily interactions.

My theoretical position in terms of peer consumer culture is based on the perspective of interpretive reproduction introduced by Corsaro (1992, 2005). This is grounded in the belief that children are competent social actors, both as individuals and as members of a collective group, who make meanings out of those constructed by others and produce their own meaningful cultural world with their peers in a creative manner. Thus, in terms of their participation in consumption practices, as consumer culture theory (Arnould & Thompson, 2005) and the notion of commercial enculturation (Cook, 2010) suggest, children (as well as adults) continuously learn in the sense that they collectively take in information from wider cultures and use it to address values, interests and concerns that are important to them as children and peers.

One extensively observed and analysed example of children’s local peer cultures in connection with wider consumer media cultures is the Pokémon phenomenon, which

became a global craze around the turn of the century (Allison, 2006; Ito, 2005; Tobin, 2004b) (also see Chapter 3). Pikachu’s Global Adventure edited by Tobin (2004b) cross-culturally examines the ways in which children interact with Pokémon products.

The empirical studies collected here stress the children’s agency in their creative play and the educational benefits of Pokémon. For example, interviews with children aged 6-14 conducted in Israel by Lemish and Bloch (2004) reveal how important it is for child informants as Pokémon ‘trainers’ to establish a personal relationship – almost like a friendship – with their Pokémon: winning battles is not everything. Also, their analysis of interviews points out that the Pokémon TV series, whose contents mostly originated in Japan, provided children with a meaningful site for sorting through moral struggles with dichotomies – such as good and evil, cuteness and strength, friendship and competition, and masculinity and femininity – and an opportunity to experiment with the meanings that might arise when these dichotomies become blurred.

Pokémon TV programmes, toys, clothes and games are still found in many countries, and Pikachu is considered as one of children’s favourite characters, and yet the producers and marketers did not intend nor predict the quickly spread global craze of Pokémon in the first five years from its first production in Japan, nor its rapid fall. This unpredictable global rise and fall of the Pokémon phenomenon demonstrates some paradoxical aspects of children’s popular peer culture in relation to consumption and media. While children as well as adults may be vulnerable to media persuasion and to subtle marketing techniques, many carefully orchestrated products fail to succeed.

Tobin’s claim that “children may be prone to consumer crazes, but they choose which crazes, and they decide when a craze is over” (2004a: 10) underlines not only children’s fragility but also their competent, creative, collective and sometimes fickle production and reproduction of their peer consumer cultures, which to some extent counterbalances the power of marketing.

Children’s peer consumer culture is closely linked to notions of friendship and belongingness: how children present their possessions, knowledge and experiences is critical in terms of their sharing and participation among peers. In the next section, I will discuss the concept of friendship particularly focusing on young children.