Childhood Is Disappearing in the Information Age
Childhood is not a biological fact but a social invention one created by the printing press and now being destroyed by electronic media.
"In a literate world children must become adults. But in a nonliterate world there is no need to distinguish sharply between the child and the adult, for there are few secrets, and the culture does not need to provide training in how to understand itself." Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood
Neil Postman's argument is deceptively simple: childhood exists only when a society has secrets worth keeping from the young, and a mechanism for revealing those secrets gradually. Before the printing press, in oral cultures, childhood effectively ended at age seven the age of linguistic competence. A seven-year-old in medieval Europe could understand everything adults discussed. There were no age-gated layers of knowledge, no concept of information too mature for young ears. The Catholic Church designated seven as the "age of reason" for exactly this reason.
The printing press changed everything. Literacy created a new definition of adulthood based on reading competence. Adults inhabited a world of complex written knowledge about sex, violence, money, death that children could access only after years of education. Schools emerged to manage this graduated revelation. The family reorganized itself around the project of slowly preparing children for the adult world. Childhood became a distinct stage of life, lasting well into the teenage years, with its own culture, vocabulary, and protections.
Television reversed this process. Unlike reading, watching requires no training, no prerequisites, no sequential mastery. A three-year-old can absorb the same content as a thirty-year-old. The boundary between adult knowledge and childhood innocence maintained for centuries by the gatekeeping power of literacy dissolved. Today, social media and smartphones have accelerated this dissolution beyond anything Postman imagined. Children are exposed to the full spectrum of adult life before they have the psychological apparatus to process it, while adults increasingly consume content designed for childlike attention spans.
Takeaway: The technology of communication determines the boundary between childhood and adulthood when information can no longer be sequenced and controlled, childhood as a protected stage of life ceases to exist.
See also: We Amuse Ourselves to Death | Culture Wars Are Won Over Generations | Legibility Kills What It Tries to Measure