Page 107 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Commun cat on and Knowledge Labor

the premiere of Sesame Street in 1969, which shifted the focus to teaching cogni-
tive skills (see “Sesame Street”). Today, most educational programming is shown
on PBS and on the children’s cable channel Nickelodeon. Blue’s Clues and Dora
the Explorer are among Nickelodeon’s most popular educational shows.
see also Government Censorship and Freedom of Speech; Media Literacy;
Media Reform; Media Watch Groups; Public Broadcasting Service; Regulating
the Airwaves; Television in Schools; Video Games; Violence and Media; Youth
and Media Use.
Further reading: Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the
Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000; Hendershot, Heather. Saturday
Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip. Durham: Duke University
Press, 1998; Jenkins, Henry, ed. The Children’s Culture Reader. New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1998; Jenkins, Henry, ed. “Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington.” Harper’s
Magazine (July 1999): 19–23; Kunkel, Dale. “From a Raised Eyebrow to a Turned Back:
The FCC and Children’s Product-Related Programming.” Journal of Communications 38,
no. 4 (August 1988): 90–108; Morrow, Robert W. Sesame Street and the Reform of Chil-
dren’s Television. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006; Seiter, Ellen. Sold
Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1993; Singer, Dorothy G., and Jerome L. Singer, eds. Handbook of Children
and the Media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001; Spigel, Lynn. “Seducing the Innocent:
Childhood and Television in Postwar America” in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular
Media and Postwar Suburbs, ed. Lynn Spigel. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
Heather Hendershot

CoMMuniCation and knowledge laBor
In the information age, contemporary advanced societies are no longer or-
ganized around agriculture or manufacturing. Instead, an increasing amount of
work is directed toward production and distribution of information, commu-
nication, and knowledge. This shift has changed the occupational structures of
developed societies and is beginning to be felt in some less developed ones as
well. As job opportunities and working environments change with the develop-
ment of new technologies, telecommunication companies have benefited from
reducing the skill component of jobs or eliminating jobs entirely and replac-
ing them with automated systems. This especially applies to jobs traditionally
filled by women. Global telecommunication technology also allows outsourcing
of knowledge workers to cheaper labor markets in the developing world. With
these changes, the question facing scholars of communication and information
technology is not how such changes will continue, but if knowledge workers will
realize their strength and organize around their common interests.
The study of knowledge labor has raised important questions for academics
and policy makers. Because they have such an important impact on research
and intervention, the most fundamental questions have to do with how we de-
fine and make use of the terms. Since there is extensive debate on this topic, it
is more useful to provide a range of definitions for each term than imagine and
impose one ostensibly correct meaning.