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Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture

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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.

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: The MIT Press., 2020

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1 online resource

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262358040

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NONE

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Meredith A. Bak

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arin

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Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12386.001.0001

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