Television as a marker of boys’ construction of growing up

Abstract

Media play an important role in children’s and young people’s construction of identity and construction of experience in Western cultures. Masculine identity can be constructed by the ways boys use, relate and talk about media; but construction of identity is not only gendered, it is also ‘age-related’. This article seeks to figure out how particularly television constitutes a framework for interpretation, where boys may demonstrate individual growth by marking themselves as young boys in opposition to their earlier life as younger boys.It describes some of the binary oppositions that constitute boys’ concepts of growing older compared with being younger, and shows that the concept of development is powerful compared to newer thinking of childhood as a valued period in its own right. The analysis is based on interviews of boys aged 15 to 17, who have grown up in three different areas of Norway.