Today, cultural politics and institutions shape nearly every aspect of our lives. Henry Giroux takes up this issue by looking at the world’s most influential corporation. He explores the diverse ways in which the Disney Corporation has become a political force in shaping images of public memory, producing children as consuming subjects, and legitimating ideological positions that constitute a deeply conservative and disturbing view of the roles imparted to children and adults alike. Giroux shows how Disney attempts to hide behind a cloak of innocence and entertainment, while exercising its influence as a major force on both global economics and cultural learning. Disney is among several corporations that not only preside over international media but also outstrip the traditional practices of schooling in shaping the desires, needs, and futures of today’s children. Written by one of the leading cultural critics, this book is important reading for anyone interested in education, society and political culture.
The organization and regulation of culture by large corporations such as Disney profoundly influence children’s culture and their everyday lives. The Hollywood film industry, television, satellite broadcasting technologies, the internet, posters, magazines, billboards, newspapers, videos, and other media forms and technologies have transformed culture into a pivotal force, “shaping human meaning and behavior and regulat[ing] our social practices at every turn.”
Mass-produced images fill our daily lives and condition our most intimate perceptions and desires. An issue for parents, educators, and others is how culture, especially media culture, has become a substantial, if not primary, educational force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms that offer up and legitimate particular subject positions what it means to claim an identity as a male, female, white, black, citizen, non-citizen. The media culture defines childhood, the national past, beauty, truth, and social agency.
Consider the enormous control that a handful of transnational corporations have over the diverse properties that shape popular and media culture: “51 of the largest 100 economies in the world are corporations.” Moreover, the U.S. media is dominated by fewer than ten conglomerates, whose annual sales range from $10 billion to $27 billion. These include major corporations such as Time Warner, General Electric, Disney, Viacom, TCI, and Westinghouse. Not only are these firms major producers of much of the entertainment and news, culture, and information that permeates our daily lives, they also produce “media software and have distribution networks like television network, cable channels and retail stores.”
For adults, Disney’s theme parks offer an invitation to adventure, a respite from the drudgery of work, and an opportunity to escape from the alienation of daily life. For children, Disney is a wish-landscape that combines fantasy, fun, and the opportunity to enter into a more colorful and imaginary world. Its animated films usher children into terrains that are exotic and filled with the fantasies of escape, romantic adventures, and powerful emotional themes about survival, separation, death, and loss – and provide points of identification and the capacity to mediate and experience in fantasy form realities that children have not yet encountered. Disney offers children the opportunity to dream, vindicating the necessity of fantasies that contain utopian traces and that offer an antidote to the brutality and emptiness of everyday life. But like all dreams, the dreams that Disney provides for children are not innocent and must be interrogated for the futures they envision, the values they promote, and the forms of identifications they offer.
This book takes as its main tenet that what Disney teaches cannot be abstracted from a number of larger questions: What does it mean to make corporations accountable to the public? How do we link public pedagogy to a critical democratic view of citizenship? How do we develop forms of critical education that enable young people and adults to become aware of and interrogate the media as a major political, pedagogical, and social force? At the very least, such a project suggests developing educational programs, both within and outside of schools, that offer students the opportunity to learn how to use and critically read the new media technologies and their cultural productions. Organizing to democratize the media and make it accountable to a participating citizenry also demands engaging in the hard political and pedagogical task of opening up corporations such as Disney to public interrogation and critical dialogue.
Disney’s overwhelming presence in the United States and abroad reminds us that the battle over culture is central to the struggle over meaning and institutional power and that, for learning to become meaningful, critical, and emancipatory, it must not be surrendered to the dictates of consumer choice or to a prohibition on critical engagements with how ideologies work within cultural discourses. On the contrary, critical learning must be linked to the empowering demands of social responsibility, public accountability, and critical citizenship.
Far from being a model of moral leadership and social responsibility, Disney monopolizes media power, limits the free flow of information, and undermines substantive public debate. Disney poses a serious threat to democracy by corporatizing public space and by limiting the avenues of public expression and choice. Disney does not, of course, have the power to launch armies, dismantle the welfare state, or eliminate basic social programs for children; Disney’s influence is more subtle and pervasive. It shapes public consciousness through its enormous economic holdings and cultural power. Michael Ovitz, a former Disney executive, says that Disney is not a company but a nation-state, exercising vast influence over global constituencies. Influencing large facets of cultural life, Disney ranks fifty-first in the Fortune 500 and controls ABC, numerous TV and cable stations, five motion picture studios, 466 Disney Stores, multimedia companies, and two major publishing houses. In 1997, Disney pulled in a record $22.7 billion in revenues from all of its divisions.
Disney’s view of children as consumers has little to do with innocence and a great deal to do with corporate greed and the realization that behind the vocabulary of family fun and wholesome entertainment is the opportunity for teaching children that critical thinking and civic action in society are far less important to them than the role of passive consumers. Eager to reach children under twelve, “who shell out $17 billion a year in gift and allowance income and influence $172 billion more spent by their parents,” Disney relies on consultants such as the marketing researcher James McNeal to tap into such a market. McNeal can barely contain his enthusiasm about targeting children as a fertile market and argues that the “world is poised on the threshold of a new era in marketing and that…fairly standardized multinational marketing strategies to children around the globe are viable.” For McNeal and his client, the Walt Disney Company, kids are reduced to customers, and serving the public good is an afterthought.
As market culture permeates the social order, it threatens to cancel out the tension between market values and those values representative of civil society that cannot be measured in commercial terms but that are critical to democracy, values such as justice, freedom, equality, health, respect, and the rights of citizens as equal and free human beings. Without such values, students are relegated to the role of economic machines, and the growing disregard for public life is left unchecked.
What strategies are open to educators, parents, and others who want to challenge the corporate Disney barons who are shaping children’s culture in the United States? First, it must become clear that Disney is not merely about peddling entertainment; it is also about politics, economics, and education. Corporations such as Disney do not give a high priority to social values, except to manipulate and exploit them. With every product that Disney produces, whether for adults or children, there is the accompanying commercial blitzkrieg aimed at excessive consumerism, selfishness, and individualism. This commercial onslaught undermines and displaces the values necessary to define ourselves as active and critical citizens rather than as consumers.
Educators, parents, community groups, and others must call into question existing structures of corporate power in order to make the democratization of media culture central to any reform movement. In part, this suggests taking ownership away from the media giants and spreading these resources among many sites in order to make media culture diffuse and accountable. Such monopolies are a political and cultural toxin, and their hold can be broken through broad-based movements using a variety of strategies, including public announcements, sit-ins, teach-ins, and boycotts, to raise public consciousness, promote regulation, and encourage antitrust legislation aimed at breaking up media monopolies and promoting the noncommercial, nonprofit public sphere.
Defending media democracy is not tantamount to demanding that schools teach media literacy, nor is it simply about providing students with more choices in what they watch, hear, buy, or consume. These issues are important but become meaningless if abstracted from issues of institutional and economic power and how it is used, organized, controlled, and distributed. For example, as important as it is to teach students to learn how to read ads critically in order to understand the values and worldviews the ads are selling, it is not enough. Such literacy should not be limited to matters of textual interpretation or to the recognition that media culture is about business rather than entertainment. Parents, educators, and others need to actively question the manufactured myths, lifestyles, and values created by media giants like Disney to sell identities and increase profits.
The time has come to challenge Disney’s self-proclaimed role as a purveyor of ‘pure entertainment’ and take seriously Disney’s educational role in producing ideologically loaded fantasies aimed at teaching children selective roles, values, and cultural ideals. Progressive educators and other cultural workers need to pay attention to how the pedagogical practices produced and circulated by Disney and other mass-media conglomerates organize and control a circuit of power that extends from producing cultural texts to shaping the contexts in which they will be taken up by children and others.
Finally, we need to organize those who inhabit cultural spheres that produce, circulate, and distribute knowledge but who seem removed from matters of education, pedagogy, and cultural politics. Artists, lawyers, social workers, and others need to acknowledge their role as public intellectuals engaged in a pedagogy that offers them an opportunity to join with other cultural workers to expand the non-commodified public space.
Challenging the ideological underpinnings of Disney’s construction of common sense is the first step in understanding the ways in which corporate culture has refashioned the relationship between education and entertainment, on the one hand, and institutional power and cultural politics, on the other. It is also a way of rewriting and transforming such a relationship by putting democracy before profits and entertainment and by defining such a project within the parameters of a broad political and pedagogical struggle. The aims of this struggle are:
(1) creating public spheres that educate for critical consciousness,
(2) closing the gap in wealth and property between the rich and poor, and,
(3) providing the resources for creating a democratic media linked to multiple public spheres.
