On the Web site for the CBS reality show Kid Nation (2007) the tagline reads: “40 kids have 40 days to build a brave new world without adults to help or hinder their efforts.” The show takes place in a New Mexico ghost town called Bonanza City, where one can just imagine Lorne Green or Michael Landon lurking somewhere offscreen. The children are charged with creating this new world on their own, a heavy responsibility for a cast ranging in age from eight to fifteen. Aside from the obvious biblical reference to Noah and the Flood, the show offers visual nostalgia for the grand ol’ days of a shoot-’em-up Wild West that must be tamed (minus, of course, outlaws or hostile Native Americans). According to Jyotsna Kapur, “Children are invoked as mediums through which the past [glory and power] can be restored” (87), and Kid Nation functions as a modern fusion of such ideological themes as civilization versus nature, individual strength against great odds, the glory of the Western frontier, and the innocence of childhood. The series alludes to such cultural artifacts as William Goldings's Lord of the Flies and John Ford westerns. The tagline on the Web site continues, “Will they come together as a cohesive unit or will they succumb to the childhood temptations that lead to chaos?” This question challenges broad cultural fantasies of an imagined Victorian-style childhood innocence. In our postmodern society, childhood is increasingly conceived of in nostalgic terms that infuse it with a desire for a “perfect” past that has not yet been created. In reality, the postmodern child's material and geographic condition is an increasingly multitextual space: urban, wired, materialist, graphic, and more adultlike; here nostalgia for a “lost” childhood works alongside a youth's desire for adult autonomy. Reinforcing that quest for an idealized childhood are the growing communities of “cyber-real” space (computer and video games, online communities, text messaging, Facebook, YouTube, and so on), which offer the promise of multiple satisfactions. The image of childhood, as commonly conceived, is being transformed as a result of the constant infusion of technology into daily life. Childhood has become “staged for public consumption” (Postman 82-83) to fit a nostalgic ideal of what childhood should be. Kid Nation is one, perhaps inevitable, move toward uniting the reality show with the adult quest for youth in this era of an increasing loss of “childness.” As Postman argues, broad access to the information superhighway has allowed for a certain level of knowledge now available to children that, in an earlier time, would have been exclusive to adults (85). The line between adult and child in Kid Nation is blurred; it is situated between children's desire to be adult (adultifying) and adult desire to recapture youth. The series attempts to offer a fantasy to both groups.
The reality show experience changes the discourse of childhood as a socially negotiated space by authenticating existing social structures in the series’ myth of creating a brave new world. The series sets up the typical conflict dynamic between participants expected from a reality show within the coming-of-age frame. This site of mediation between childhood and adulthood in Kid Nation, as a display, requires a reexamination of common assumptions about what it means to be a child in the digital age. The sociopolitical structures implemented in Kid Nation severely restrict the children's ability to actually create the new society that the series promises; instead, childhood is displayed as a condition that must be overcome in the quest for increased productivity in Bonanza City. Kid Nation commodifies childhood and then systematically destroys it. In a paradoxical move, the rhetoric of recaptured youth (free from adults) instead offers the visual and emotional destruction of childhood while the viewer commiserates with the young people trapped within adult social matrices, much like rats in a maze: how will the children negotiate the assigned challenges of money, class, race, religion, prejudice—and their own state of childhood?
Television, unlike film, creates a sense of immediacy, of the “now” and the “real,” what Jane Feuer calls “liveness.” In contrast to the highly scripted formats and star personalities of classic television of the 1950s, modern reality-style television has changed the way ordinary people are presented, blurring the line between star and everyday individual. Formerly, regular people were “taken in themselves as signs of the real” (Biressi and Nunn 4), but in the reality TV of the twenty-first century, the real has encompassed both ordinary and star to such an extent that the line between real and the imaginary has become fuzzy. Expectations for a “realist representation” have become the frame through which reality shows compete with each other—who is the most “real”? And those real people now include blue-collar workers, professionals, educators, and a broad range of participants from a wide variety of social and economic conditions. Even marginal groups (the very poor, Goths, punks), normally invisible to the mainstream, are represented in reality shows such as the MTV documentary-reality series True Life, which follows the lives of people living in different subcultures, such as welfare moms, homeless families, and people living in “the projects.” Reality TV has taken the shine off the mystique of celebrity, and many has-been celebrities have become more “real” and revamped their careers through their “authentic” appearances on such reality shows as The Salt-N-Peppa Show (2007-2008), Scott Baio Is 45 … and Single (2007), and Hogan Knows Best (2005-2007). Biressi and Nunn argue that the new “scopic technologies,” those technological products that “watch” (i.e., cell-phone cameras, mini-digital video cameras, and particularly Web cams), transmit a “sense of immediacy and intimacy and ‘unscripted’ material featuring ‘real’ people” that have helped reality TV “claim to reveal social, psychological, political and historical truths” (3). Seeing people in their private homes gives an illusion of historical and social truth. According to Mark Andrejevic, “The penchant for voyeurism associated with the explosion of reality programming … [is] symptomatic of a waning sense of reality in the postmodern era and a symptom of the merging of news and entertainment” (8). The 1980s Reagan era of expanding capitalism spawned a new social and political atmosphere that privileged social mobility and media visibility as the “touchstone of individual achievement,” which has been intensified through the rise of the Internet, series such as Donald Trump's The Apprentice (2004-), and the wide participation in the reality phenomenon today through an explosion of public postings of amateur digital videos on sites such as YouTube and MySpace (4), and even into television “news” with the iReports segment on CNN (video news and opinions sent in by viewers—”real” people). The space of the real today is intertwined with media technologies and exhibition.
According to Matthew J. Smith and Andrew F. Wood, the actual reality shows’ locations or premises may vary, but all reality shows follow the same basic plot: “introduce a diverse group of people, put them into situations bound to induce conflict, and watch them squirm” (1). The popular reality game show Survivor (2001-) provides the model for Kid Nation. In Survivor, a group of adults is dropped on a deserted island—in later episodes an exotic but extreme locale—and charged with living off the land for a predetermined length of time. They are to construct shelter and forage for their food. The entire experience is devoid of any modern conveniences or accoutrements. The participants divide themselves into tribes and create primitive signifier rituals as part of their new social space. Each week, however, the contestants compete for prizes and vote one of their members off the island, which creates multiple layers of deceit, disingenuousness, and competition within and between the tribes. The tribes have “no fixed, central State apparatus and no global power mechanisms or specialized political institutions,” which Deleuze and Guattari argue creates “social segments that [have] a certain leeway between the two extreme poles of fusion and scission” (209). The participants organize themselves in opposition: they compete against each other yet must help each other. This oscillation between two positions creates a social “segmentarity” that allows for the two tribes to produce for the viewer a fluid, ever-changing overlap of loyalty, competition, and survival. Survivor is a TV phenomenon that sparked a multilayered convergence of media-based fan activity as viewers clamored to be a part of the Survivor experience through fan sites, discussion boards, mediated videos posted on YouTube, and a host of other online participatory activities. Survivor and its interplay among contestants, extreme material conditions, and the negotiations between loyalty, competition, and endurance became the baseline model for the myriad popular reality shows that followed in its wake, including Kid Nation.
Kid Nation adheres to a similar trajectory of contestant negotiations of temporal, social, and geographic space, though no one is actually voted out of the town. Instead, each week the council awards one child a gold star worth $20,000. The series does, however, divide the children into labor “classes” and attaches an economic value to each class and its assigned duties. The participants are given a supply of basic foodstuffs such as pasta, potatoes, flour, and a small flock of chickens, but they do not have any canned items. The second episode features the council's decision to butcher a couple of chickens, which elicited much criticism from animal rights organizations; Last Chance for Animals condemned the chicken “murder” as “staged purely for entertainment.” The LCA also criticized CBS's position on the incident: the network argued that the only way for the kids to get any protein was to kill and eat an animal (“LCA Condemns”). During episode 11 the council again decides to kill some chickens, but this time young Taylor (eight years old) declares that only the “ugly” chickens should be killed and that the “pretty” brown chickens deserved to live: only “ugly animals should die, but not the pretty ones … they don't matter as much as the beautiful ones.” The episode briefly highlights only two children who criticize Taylor's segregation of the chickens—a disturbing commentary on and evidence of how some children learn that only aesthetically pleasing life has value.
A town hall meeting on Kid Nation (CBS, 2007) shows children participating as adult citizens. Courtesy of CBS/PhotoFest.
Rather than allow the children to create a society completely on their own, Kid Nation replicates Western social apparatuses—power divisions by color [race] and labor class—capitalism and consumption being the forces that drive the children to cooperate. Each week the series’ moderator, John, and the “Journal” (a conveniently placed, conceptually biblical book that serves as a visible script for the participants to follow) insert into the society a new condition: first, the division into groups by color (red, yellow, green, blue), then the introduction of four social “classes” (Upper Class, Merchants, Cooks, Workers) with corresponding pay rates (a dollar, a half dollar, a quarter, a dime, respectively). Ellen Goodman charges the show with promoting the “three C's” of our culture: “cutthroat consumerism, class divisions, [and] unrelenting consumerism.” Only the four council members are allowed to read the Journal, and they interpret it for the rest of the group, an arrangement that seems to advocate a hierarchical power structure in which the populace's access to knowledge is only through the filter of the political elite, which in turn validates the social structures the children must negotiate. If any participant questioned the pay, class, or power arrangement, such doubt was edited out of the series. Each week the Journal gives a suggestion to the council—such as instituting law and order, religion, education—that will help their new society flourish. At the end of each episode there is a competition, called a showdown (another reference to the Wild West), to decide which group will inhabit which class. These showdowns—which rely on physical prowess, aggressive competition, and group cooperation—are the only condition that allow for movement between the classes.
Despite CBS's claim that the children are free to create their own society, they are explicitly directed to add specific sociopolitical conditions to the community during both the Journal readings and strictly scripted town hall meetings. The producers do not allow the children to create their own social matrices as a natural consequence of their environmental, geopolitical, or sociopolitical groupings. Aside from the ability of the four council members to choose whom they wanted in their groups (and the children they chose had no say in the matter), none of the social conditions evolving in Kid Nation was devised, decided, or even voted on by the children. Those with special skills or knowledge, such as cooking, are restricted to doing the work of their assigned class, rather than the labor they are most suited for or desire to do; for instance, in episode 1, Sophia takes on cooking for the town, as she enjoys it and knows how. But when the council divides the kids into groups, and those groups then compete in the first showdown for their class designations, Sophia ends up with the Workers, not the Cooks. Though she has the cooking skill, she is not allowed to do the cooking because she does not belong to that class. Such constraints on social mobility reflect many real-life restrictions on individual mobility that are based on economic limitations or social myths about those who belong to the labor or worker classes. The class segregation continued through the series until the final episode, which opens with the job board on fire. The town pulls together to put the fire out, but then the moderator appears and tells them there are no more assigned jobs or classes. Sophia immediately shoulders the cooking, as she had done during the first episode.
Another example is the yellow group, which has the youngest children, most of who are female; yet they land in the Cook class numerous times throughout the series. They were unqualified and unskilled in the art of cooking, particularly for that many mouths. The second time they “earn” that spot through their performance during the showdown, they go on strike and refuse to cook. What follows the yellow group's strike declaration is a brief montage of sound bites by some participants about the girls’ laziness and lack of work ethic. When they finally fold under pressure and cook, the meal they prepare—fried potatoes—is not enough to feed the whole town. The yellow group's apathy toward a responsibility they are physically and mentally unsuited for in turn leads to a naturalized belief by the other participants in the younger children's laziness, instead of compassion for their very real condition of immaturity and inexperience. Rather than encouraging or helping these participants to perform their assigned work better, the peer-group criticism gives the younger girls (and it is always the youngest girls who are perceived as lazy, never the youngest boys) license to wallow in a fantasy of perpetual “victimhood,” an attitude the younger girls assume throughout the series.
The series’ rhetorical framework appears to encourage the ideals of “the good of the many”; in practice, however, the grouping of labor functions by class division (which are signified by color) creates discord and apathy among those who are stuck in a class for which they are mentally or physically unsuited or unqualified. The Upper Class is exempt from doing any work (unless they choose to), and their patrician position garners the most gain (one dollar per episode for producing the least, while the Workers do the most for the least money (ten cents). Money itself is conveniently introduced into Kid Nation by the moderator (episode 1), who decides the amount each group will be paid. The children are not allowed to vote for or decide on any other pay scale and must adhere to conditions that emanate from the omniscient producers, who dictate (through the Journal and the moderator) the “natural” division of wealth and labor. The Upper Class's monetary gain for producing the least gives the impression that just being in the Upper Class is equivalent to deserving wealth, and any real-world labor behind that gain is conspicuously absent, which validates the “natural” power of the elite. The series’ construction of the Upper Class also functions to reinforce social stereotypes of the lazy affluent, who do nothing for their wealth, a cliché that removes all hints of the real social, political, and economic conditions that make it possible to accumulate such wealth, particularly from the exploited labor of the Workers. What the series rarely makes evident are those in the Upper Class who do work and do help out. Most of the shots of those in the Upper Class consist of their brief comments about how they do not have to work like the others. Conversely, rarely do the producers highlight the drudgery of the Workers’ chores, other than to emphasize someone's refusal to do those duties—and in this case the series consistently makes Taylor the brunt of such criticism. The actual labor itself is not worthy of screen time as much as the refusal to labor is. The low pay and heavy responsibilities of the Worker class also make evident the real-world social exploitation of those who do the majority of the work to maintain a high standard of living for the rest; yet the Worker class reaps the least profit or appreciation for its efforts.
The same type of division of labor and class, and the emphasis on adult material gain, is most evident in Kid Nation’s lack of normal childlike behaviors, particularly its lack of images of play.
There are no toys in Bonanza City but for a few stuffed animals that the younger girls have brought with them. During episode 1, the girls create a “stuffed animal day care,” but the episode's framing of their play implies that it is a silent rebellion against the girls’ assigned work, rather than the natural behavior of young children. The accompanying music is slightly ominous, rather than lighthearted, and there is a montage of the exasperated expressions of the others as they criticize the girls’ lack of participation in their assigned tasks. None of the children is ever shown creating toys or playing with available materials. In fact, throughout the series the complaint that gets the most camera time is that someone is lazy (play = laziness) and not working. The majority of the gold stars are awarded on the basis of how hard a participant has worked. Furthermore, most of the workload and other activities shown in each episode are traditionally gender-determined. The series highlights the “natural” gendered division of labor, which functions as a reaffirmation of the status quo and allows the Kid Nation childhood fantasy adventure to “endow reality with fictional coherence and stability, which seem to guarantee that such reality, the social world in which we take our place,” is legitimized within adult desire (Edelman 34). The girls are always shown doing traditional “woman's work”—such as cleaning and cooking—while the boys do most of the physical labor—carrying water and fixing things. During the first episode Greg (fifteen years old), who desperately wants to earn a gold star, rarely helps out and functions as the show's juvenile delinquent. After his group (blue) wins Upper-Class status, Greg and Eric (fourteen) write “blue” in chalk all over the others’ bunkhouses. Greg consistently and aggressively confronts the younger children and uses foul language (to which the series immediately responds with a reaction-shot montage of the younger children's shock). With the gold star as a lure, Greg goes out of his way to help out, though that help is mixed with his frequent bouts of anger, abusive language, and occasional physical threats. During episode 2, Greg and the Upper-Class boys do the dishes, but that action is contrasted with his violent outburst earlier in the episode. It takes until episode 5 for Greg to win the gold star.
Children experience firsthand the frontier experience on Kid Nation (CBS, 2007). Courtesy of CBS/PhotoFest.
Aside from the gendered division of labor, the series also genders what little play does exist. In fact, when images of play do appear, as in episode 11—the council chooses a free arcade as the showdown prize—the series frames the play as dangerous to the town. Rather, it is labor that is the defining characteristic of being adult and mature. When play is shown, it is disturbingly masculine and, in the case of the party at the Saloon in episode 3, behavior that promotes substance abuse. The first single all-community playtime occurs at the opening of episode 3, when there is a rip-roaring party at the Saloon. But this “play” is disturbingly adultlike, as the children mimic drinking liquor—chugging and binge-drinking while they cheer each other on. As Lindsey Ward describes:
Unless there's something I'm missing, kids probably shouldn't know how to mix boilermakers. … But on Wednesday, there the young pioneers of Kid Nation were, feet planted firmly on the tables of the town saloon, chuggin’ ‘em back like they were Frank the Tank. Of course, all work and no play makes for dull girls and boys. And their concoctions were made of root beer. But it's the way they consumed it—in assuming mugs, bottles, lowballs and shotglasses—that was unsettling. That and the fact that the kids who had taken part in the particularly rowdy bash were very “tired” the next day.
The “play” that the series espouses is the play of adults’ fantasy, not children's. The Wild West framing of the series’ experience creates a reliving of the glorious American frontier past that is a stand-in for childhood play.
Though the girls in the series are rarely shown playing, Kid Nation offers a much different vision of the boys. The series frequently closes episodes with shots of boys going off on “manly” treks of discovery or challenging nature; in episode 3, for example, Colton (eleven) displays his budding manhood by challenging a longhorn cow. In the same episode, two of the younger boys are in the kitchen throwing flour at each other, giggling and tussling and running around the room. In the next shot, Mallory, an eight-year-old girl, is struggling to clean it all up, the boys conspicuously absent. The girls are rarely shown exploring their surroundings, and they never go off on adventures. The younger girls are often shown in the early morning giggling or goofing off in their beds, usually bundled up in coats and tucked into their sleeping bags (a confined space, yet the only “free” place to play), evidence of their immaturity, but the play is framed as negative, as a resistance to their assigned duties, their lack of labor, their laziness.
Rather than exhibit normal childhood behavior and desires, the children are conditioned by their enforced material conditions and the lack of technology to desire adult things. When the children arrive, the town consists of one outhouse for all forty of them (which hints at a Freudian producer control over bodily functions). After the first showdown, the council has to choose between two community prizes—seven more toilets, or a television. The council (not the town) is forced to choose necessity—the toilets—over pleasure—the TV—which only intensifies the desire for the TV. All the showdowns end with a choice between an object of necessity and one more pleasurable and suited to children. In episode 3 the choice is between a microwave oven and forty heavily topped pizzas, which elicits a near riot from the half-starved children. The group loudly demands the pizzas, but Taylor, speaking for the council, chooses the very unpopular microwave, which draws heavy criticism from the other participants. Until the final episodes, the council consistently chooses the necessary items.
In episode 11 the council chooses play over necessity for the first time: a fully stocked arcade. Pandemonium ensues, and soon the entire town spends hours in the arcade. There are numerous shots of dishes piling up, of garbage left unburied, of chores abandoned, all juxtaposed with shots of children zoning out on video games or intently shooting pool. Most of the shots of the arcade play are close-up or medium shots that tend to emphasize the loose abandon of the arcade play; the participants finally get to be children. The council meets in secret to figure out what to do, as no one is working. The Journal tells them they must have “law and order”; they therefore elect Sophia as the sheriff. The episode then dissolves into a power struggle between the council and the others for access to play. The arcade is padlocked, and playtime within it depends entirely on the amount of work that gets done. Play here is emphasized as bad, negative, a disruption of social responsibility, and something that must be doled out—in timed increments and by a representative of authority—only to those who deserve it.
The town's lack of traditional childhood trappings and the series’ heavy emphasis on choices that force the children constantly to confront, and then deny, their childish impulses lend support to the notion that in a capitalist reality childhood is only ancillary to the real condition of becoming a consuming adult. It is perhaps an unintended sociopolitical marketing strategy that works to sell youth to adults while at the same time selling adulthood to youth; this creates a desire for the accessories of one condition and a constant yearning for the other. This space between childhood and adulthood is constantly filled with conflicting desires—for the innocence of youth, but also for the maturity and freedom from authority adulthood brings. On Kid Nation, however, that desire for adulthood is coterminous with the desire for wealth and material gain. According to Sharon Stevens, “The domain of childhood … is increasingly shot through with the values of the marketplace and the discursive politics of postmodern global culture” (24), which is increasingly materialistic. The material conditions on Kid Nation are contrived by its producers to place the participants in a situation of constant lack and then taunt them with choices that highlight that lack. The material conditions of Bonanza City reinforce for the young participants the denial of childish pleasure in favor of necessity. Perhaps for CBS's advertising support, which increased after the first episode aired,1 “children's imagination, when not turned into a source for generating profit, becomes a terribly fearful thing that threatens to overturn the economic … and social status quo” (Kapur 164), a status quo that Kid Nation seeks to render natural, validated by images of children that emphasize labor, material wealth, and purchasing rather than imagination and play.
In episode 1 the General Store and the Saloon are magically stocked to the brim—rendering certain manufacture and distribution invisible—with a myriad of products, from jars of penny candy to a bicycle that becomes the object of desire for Sophia. As a Worker, Sophia does not make enough money to buy it, so she resorts to dancing and begging in the street for donations so she can buy the coveted bike, which she does by the end of the episode. The children's daily survival becomes the vehicle through which consumerism is possible, rather than a social networking of equals working for the good of the community. There is a constant struggle by the Upper and Merchant classes, for instance, to get the Workers and Cooks to wash the dishes, which pile up until in one episode they have to hold their dinner in one bare hand and eat it with the other. But the participants do work together to help Sophia purchase something by giving some of their hard-earned money (as charity) to her. As Jyotsna Kapur argues, “Capitalism … consumes the young by withdrawing the social protections from them and consequently turn[s] them into labor, subjecting children to the same exploitation as adults” (113). The Kid Nation participants learn to do this through the trajectory of the series’ capitalist agenda. The episode does not linger long on Sophia's imaginative attempts to raise the money or on her ability to save money, but only on the end result—the purchase. Though the closing scene shows Sophia riding her new bike (riding off into the sunset?), it is her ability to buy it that the series privileges, rather than the pleasure and fun the bike gives her. (The series never divulges whether Sophia shared her bicycle with those who so generously contributed to its acquisition. The bicycle is never seen in the series again.)
The Kid Nation participants are manipulated into exploiting each other and their labor through the series’ preestablished class divisions; “the social order exists to preserve … a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself” (Edelman 11) is an idea that parallels the myth of childhood innocence, the return to which has become an American cultural obsession. Giroux argues that “innocence in this instance makes children invisible except as projections of adult fantasies—fantasies that allow adults to believe that children do not suffer from their greed, recklessness, perversions of will and spirit and that adults are, in the final analysis, unaccountable for their actions” (40). By placing children in the adult structures and conventions of the “reality show,” adult viewers can satisfy their nostalgic desire for childhood innocence within the discourse of childhood itself as conceptually more “real,” while enjoying the destruction of that very myth that is denied them. The series constructs conditions that demand “that social welfare be abolished and individuals, including children, provide for themselves through their own effort and labor” (Kapur 164), yet that effort and labor must fall within a predetermined pro-capitalist space. Any notion of the common good is secondary to the need for establishing class position or escaping the labor required to benefit the entire group. By instituting socioeconomic conditions that re-create today's social apparatus, the series conveniently nullifies any chance for the children to truly create their own society.
The quest for the real in the postmodern fractured truths has led to a new “economy of realism” that requires “confession, exhibitionism and emotional revelation” as the marks of authenticity or of truth (Biressi and Nunn 7). Children within such a cultural frame are perhaps perceived as more authentic and closer to the real than adults, yet they carry a mystique, a myth, of an innocence that for adults is idealized in much the same way as the myths of Hollywood stardom. It would seem that there would have to be a very careful consideration of the conditions under which children would be placed on a reality show—they could not be as harsh as conditions for adult participants—and the conflicts would have to be less contentious than the ones adult reality show contestants experience. This particular reality TV premise challenges the very nature of childhood as a protected space by placing children in the very conditions adults are to protect them from: “Critics of reality TV have described these conditions as that of a ‘human zoo’ or a container under pressure which forces inmates ‘inwards,’ making them deal with one another continually and under highly constrained conditions” (Biressi and Nunn 15). These difficult circumstances provide pleasure for the adult viewing audience, a pleasure that is heightened by the perverse notion of watching the destruction of the very thing many adults desire: a return to childhood innocence.
In reality shows like Kid Nation several elements intersect—”the fetishization of the ordinary, the elevation of the personal and the interpersonal to the level of grand narrative, and the exploitation of the real subjects who consent to appear in the shows” (Brenton and Cohen 9). In Kid Nation, fetishizing the “ordinary” (i.e., the child) refers to an adult who assigns an overabundance of meaning to both the child body as desired youth and the idea of innocence that body symbolizes. Henry Giroux argues that “within the myth of innocence, children are often portrayed as inhabiting a world that is untainted, magical, and utterly protected from the harshness of adult life. In this scenario, innocence not only erases the complexities of childhood and the range of experiences different children encounter, but it also offers an excuse for adults to evade responsibility for how children are firmly connected to and shaped by the social and cultural institutions run largely by adults” (Giroux 39-40). The participants in Kid Nation are first directed to negotiate adult social matrices and harsh material conditions, and then framed for reality TV as symbols of the innocent youth “myth-in-crisis,” a condition the children are set up to survive and negotiate without adult protections.
In Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Žižek argues that perversion (of which fetishism is one specific type) always bears the structure of a “closed loop”: “It is quite normal to say to the beloved woman, ‘I would love you even if you were wrinkled and mutilated!’; a perverse person is the one who intentionally mutilates the woman, distorts her beautiful face, so that he can continue to love her, thereby proving the sublime nature of his love” (194). This kind of perversion of human emotion is demonstrated in our society every time a man or woman kills a spouse or partner because he or she “loves” that person. If “child” is substituted for “woman” in Žižek's argument, the distortion of the “beautiful face” becomes a distortion of “childhood,” a way instead for adults to prove a kind of love for childhood itself by rendering it even more out of reach by its very destruction. For the myth of childhood innocence to be visually reinforced, onscreen children must act like children—make irrational or immature decisions and use their heightened imaginations to pretend and play, to be silly, and to revel in a perceived natural freedom from worry or adult pressures. Kid Nation offers very little in the way of childlike images and instead lingers, almost malevolently, on the youthful appearance of the children, but then takes the greatest pleasure in watching the faces of those same children in distress or conflict, particularly in their constant emotional and physical struggle to become more adultlike. The American frontier theme that frames the children's struggle functions in a similar way: like childhood, it is much romanticized, and it cannot be returned to in its original form.
In every episode of Kid Nation, the participants must confront some aspect of their material condition that adults normally protect them from, and in each confrontation the children are pressured both from peers and from the dictates of the Journal to make the most grown-up decision. Some of the participants are overwhelmed by the emotional struggle between their actual childness and the expectation of adult maturity. The children's struggle with choices about food or daily survival is visually fixed by a camera that lingers on the girls’ woefully large, weepy eyes or a young boy's struggle to suppress welling tears as he wrestles against his youth to maintain his burgeoning manliness. In episode 3, little Taylor (ten years old) handles the pressures of being a council member by resorting to the phrase “deal with it” as she imperiously makes unpopular decisions while struggling to be more adult and yet acting the most childlike. During the town hall meeting (shot in a long take), the group verbally attacks her for not working and for her arrogance and “queen-like” manner; Taylor thereupon bursts into tears (zoom to close-up), a much sought-after commodity on Kid Nation. The camera lingers, lovingly, expectantly, using extreme close-ups of the children who cry, particularly the boys, as they struggle with homesickness, peer pressure and abuse, hunger, cold, overwork, and, for the boys, the constant push for heterosexual, masculine behavior. There are numerous shots of Greg hugging the smaller girls who suffer from homesickness and tears. There are shots of the older girls—Sophia or Migle—comforting a sobbing younger girl. But there are no scenes of the same type of physical comforting between the older and younger boys. There are many pats on the back and, in episode 12, a quick arm-around-the-shoulders between two boys who are “like brothers” (DK and Guylan) as they struggle with their emotional stress.
The very setting of Kid Nation in the Wild West seems an added pressure on the boys to aspire to a traditional “John Wayne-style” masculinity—mental toughness, maturity, determination, qualities that are beneficial and not exclusively masculine. Yet the series positions the attainment of those qualities as directly the result of labor alone, rather than being achieved through imagination or interpersonal struggle. The image of the historic Wild West cowboy, not to mention the vast conventions of the western film genre, functions in Kid Nation as an unspoken yet constantly hovering shadow over the boys. The series framework follows that of the traditional western: a hero's quest into the unknown and an emphasis on open spaces, rugged individualism, trials of individual participants, loners, and the righteousness of the settlers. The children are continually reminded that their purpose is to create a new world, a new Eden. Brought together, the conventions of the Western frontier as the geographic setting and the discourse of creating this paradise create an Edenic geopolitical agenda that affirms both the innocence of childhood (though lost) and the colonizing of the American West. The series effectively creates nostalgia for both. But the condition of innocent childhood is continually denied on Kid Nation, particularly for boys.
Rather than fostering sympathy for the boys who cry on Kid Nation, the series’ visuals tend to criticize the boys who cry as weak. In episode 4 Cody (age nine), who had been one of the most “masculine-framed” of the boys for his exploits chasing cows with Colton, gets a letter from his girlfriend that sends him into deep homesickness. He is frequently framed in close-up, tears streaming down his face, as he tries to explain his pain. The series at first appears to sympathize with him through tight shots of his swollen, tear-stained face, but it then mocks him by following those shots with a montage of comments by the others about Cody's lack of toughness. His homesickness is presented as pathetic through the frequent emphasis on his lapses into tears and, in the end, his decision to leave the show. Each time the moderator asks at the town hall meeting if anyone wants to go home, the question is positioned as a challenge by both the moderator's tone and by the dynamic tension-building, game show-style music that usually prefaces a particularly significant answer from a contestant. There are quick shots of the children's faces all looking around to discover who is going to quit. When Cody raises his hand, there is a quick zoom on his tearing eyes and trembling chin as he stands, turns, apologizes for being weak, and says that he “can't stand it anymore.”
For young fans of Kid Nation, the transmedia experiences that extend beyond the actual broadcast of the show offer only one example of the changing cultural landscape of childhood. As Edelman explains, it is the “image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children, [that] serves to regulate political discourse” (11), and that discourse is solidly consumerist in nature. Kid Nation juxtaposes childhood and adulthood in an artificially constructed landscape that marketers hope will create what Jenkins calls a “consumption community” (85), where viewers can interact with the children of Kid Nation through blogs, fan sites, discussion boards, spin-off stories and fan-based fictions, and a cornucopia of products. (Shop.www.seenon.com and the CBS store offer Kid Nation T-shirts in all four group colors that sport the Bonanza City logo, correspondingly colored bandanas, and water bottles. There are Kid Nation ring tones available, and the official Kid Nation site advertises iPod songs for download.) The seduction of the online imaginative spaces where kids believe they can participate in the “reality” of Bonanza City underscores the participants’ position as spectacle to be consumed, a condition that becomes just a part of their everyday lived experiences—the “scopic technologies” that constantly observe and watch. At the series’ end, numerous blogs and reality TV Web sites were calling for a reunion of the Kid Nation participants; not surprisingly, the majority of those comments were from adult viewers of the series. For example, Brian Stelter's article on the New York Times's Web site, “Kid Nation Makes Little Racket, after All,” elicited ninety-one responses—all from adult viewers.
In the pre-Internet era, a show with a premise like Kid Nation's would have perhaps sparked imaginative neighborhood children to re-create Bonanza City in their backyards or local parks, possibly with a tree house serving as the town hall. The predigital child had the same real-world negotiations of political and material conditions, but within different space and time frames. With whom a child negotiated space depended on such limiting factors as transportation availability or actual physical proximity to other children. Today, however, heterogeneous participation by many children across cyberspace social networks like YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook, and the numerous Kid Nation fan sites (Junior Celebs, BuddyTV, Technorati, Yahoo, and Mahalo, to name a few) have changed the way children perceive the real world by encouraging the transference of their actual physical play into such digital media as Web sites, iPods, blogs, cell phones, and instant messaging. To network with each other through virtual space has in some ways become a replacement for live, local, real-world interactions between children. Before the series ended, seven children were so eager to become a part of the next Kid Nation experience that they'd videoed their auditions for Kid Nation 2 and posted them (along with a handful of Kid Nation parodies) on YouTube. Although the future of Kid Nation 2 is undecided, “the network admitted that ‘there has been casting and other preproduction activity so the show would be ready in the event of a pick-up’” (“Officials Drop”).
The brave new world that Kid Nation advertised does not take place on the series or through watching the forty children negotiate adult social matrices. Rather, the growing digitalization of childhood through the series’ inspired virtual networks is, according to Manuel Castells, the “social morphology of our time” within the “growing enclosure of communication” (419) in niche-market Web sites and blogs. Through these children can engage in virtual discourse about the series, an activity that is encouraged as a form of play, which in turn may foster consumption of related products. Children in the digital age, much like the adults they seek to emulate, can be seduced by the illusion of real participation in the experience of Bonanza City, or in the case of the YouTube auditions, commodify themselves in the hopes of becoming a participant (417).
The Kid Nation Web site interface is very kid-friendly; it has links to Facebook, Google, and Diggs, where children or adults can participate in the digital cybersphere created by fellow Nationites. The site encourages viewers to spend time reading each of the children's biographies: “We challenged the Kids to create their own pages with artwork, pictures, colors and even YouTube video links! Enjoy each Kid's own page as designed by them, each with their own unique look, feel and voice. There aren't any grown up rules here. The Kids have taken the reins and made their very own pages for everyone to read and explore. Listen to the Kids sing or play piano, read their poems or check out their pictures from home. It's all about the Kids. Check it out now” (CBS).
For younger children, the personalized Web pages of each Kid Nation participant offer virtual friendship. For the network and producers of Kid Nation, the economic possibilities of forty characters’ stories extending beyond the television broadcast to Web communities and spawning an infinite amount of intertextual and self-referential discourses are a function of “new models of marketing [that] seek to expand consumers’ emotional, social, and intellectual investments with the goal of shaping consumption patterns” (Jenkins 63). As marketers continually seek to command early brand loyalties and shape children's future consumption patterns, Kid Nation offers a broad communal reception experience that crosses racial, gender, and generational lines. The site's message board contains hundreds of kids’ remarks about the show, such as “OMG Greg was so mean to those little kids!” (posted by glossygal90) and Hopeful777’s ruminations about the possibility of a romance (or sex) between Greg and Sophia. The message board discourse ranges from analyzing the characters, the showdowns, and the economic, social, and political conditions in the town to criticisms of individual participants, as well as of the series itself. A great many of the children who post comments on the message boards gleefully speculate about season 2.
The series suffered a bit from pre-air controversy about casting children in a Survivor-type reality show. The state of New Mexico, where Bonanza City is located, charged the production with violating child labor laws (McNary). But CBS and Tom Forman, the executive producer, defended the show: “CBS has detailed the precautions and procedures put in place to ensure that adults were ready to step in should real danger arise during the shoot”; these precautions included “on-site paramedics, a pediatrician, an animal safety expert and a child psychologist, not to mention a roster of producers assigned to monitor the kids’ behavior” (Littleton 3). Parents of the Kid Nation participants were required to sign a twenty-two-page contract that left “little room for parents to argue that they did not know what their children might encounter. … The parents and children agreed not to hold the producers and CBS responsible if their children died or were injured” (Wyatt). Eventually, New Mexico's attorney general announced the state was dropping its investigation owing to the lack of complaints by the participants’ parents (“Officials Drop”). But the legal scare made it difficult for CBS to find a location for Kid Nation 2. It should be noted that the agreements between CBS and the participants’ parents also includes a gag clause (under threat of a multimillion dollar liability) that forbids the parents from speaking about Kid Nation without first obtaining permission from CBS. All the early controversy, however, kept Kid Nation in the spotlight. Though ratings were strong at first, they had leveled off by the time of the series finale, which had a “fourth-place finish in the 18-49 demographic” (Stelter). The controversy surrounding Kid Nation before it even aired perhaps helped to fuel the vibrant digital participation and media convergence that is a part of the new cultural landscape of childhood.
The “cult of the child” in the case of Kid Nation does not signify a new, innocent, “better society, brighter tomorrow,” but instead offers a fantasy that functions to “reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future” (Edelman 31). The geographic space of the series is a signifier of the reaffirmation of the power of the American Wild West past within the present, while at the same time the geographic space on Kid Nation is infused with objects of modernity in the shape of portable toilets, a microwave oven, pizza, a TV, washing machines, hot-air balloons, dune buggies (which the kids were unable to win), and other techno-objects—including the video arcade that the children won in episode 11. According to the series’ producers, it appears that the “new social order” is a land filled with modern appliances and the desire for techno-toys (products), restricted freedom, and adherence to classism and domination by an elite group. The child participant in Kid Nation is infused with adult longing for a better world that is not based on any actual comparison to a real lived past (since they are only children). Rather, that longing for a romantic past functions as a constant flux in the interstitial space between desiring child and adult, what Andrejevic calls “moving forward into the past” (199). To achieve a “better world” the Kid Nation participant must deny her childness in favor of the more “real” pleasures of being like an adult consumer. The child's denial of her own natural state of being in favor of the more satisfying and autonomous condition of consuming adult suggests a cultural Fordist (i.e., ready-made, assembly-line production) approach to the reimagining of childhood in the postmodern age. Under such conditions of commodification, childhood today is in the process of becoming what Jean Baudrillard calls the “idea of the object”: we no longer take pleasure in the object itself but in its fantasy ideal (92). Childhood becomes merely a “sign of [its own] absence” (93), experiencing and desiring its own end, in this case within the reality show format, “as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order” (184); its absence is privileged in favor of the more fulfilling space of adulthood, a space that continually desires to return to its roots in childhood.
The “cult of the child” is not just misplaced; it is missing in Kid Nation. Instead, the series structures a replica of an adult world: a cult of consumerism that inserts desirable products (and the children are encouraged to desire them) and infects their budding society with adult prejudices (groupings by color and class), intolerances (religion), social Darwinism (showdowns), and capitalist exploitation (wage hierarchies and labor exploitation). What Kid Nation does not give the viewer is the vision of play, make-believe, creativity, imagination, and the general joy of experiencing the world through a child's eyes, the very things that are idealized by those adults who search for a return to youth. The question of whether children, if truly left on their own, can create a better society (or a worse one) is never answered on Kid Nation. During the finale, when the job board has burned and is left a smoldering pile of ash, and the children are finally free from the dictates of the Journal, they succumb to their newfound freedom and their forty days of deprivation and raid the general store in what one blogger calls the “Great Candy Riot of 2007 … liberated from the powerful fear of reprisal that kept them from indulging their every antisocial desire, [they] descended upon Bonanza City's confectionary, swallowing every gobstopper, licorice whip, and Sour Patch Kid their rapidly distending bellies could handle” (“The ‘Kid Nation’ Ends in Ruins”). Finally, the series allows a brief glimpse of true, unfettered childhood behavior.
The series ends with a bang, however, in the form of three extra gold stars worth $50,000 each that the council has to award to the participants whom they believe have captured the spirit of Bonanza City: one final commodification. The children's parents arrive, running as an invading horde down the dirt road into town. The final episode highlights the many tears and the parents’ shocked reactions to the children's lack of clean living conditions, another form of visual reinforcement of the inadequacy of childhood and the rightness of being adult. The parents are allowed to sit in on the final town hall meeting and witness the three lucky recipients winning their gold stars (Sophia, Migle, and Morgan). The series ends with a final shot of the kids singing around the piano, an unusual glimpse of simple play.
What is apparent in the series, however, is the resilience and adaptability of real childhood, demonstrated by the forty participants as they gracefully, and with as much dignity as their young years allow, throughout the series negotiate difficult socioeconomic intricacies for the enjoyment of a voyeuristic adult world. It is ironic that children, the most defenseless and marginalized of us all, are insidiously manipulated into creating the illusion of a paradise that, in reality, is a glorification of their own childhood's demise. As Jyotsna Kapur so insightfully explains:
Here we see once again that the growing up of the young, an extension of their power made possible by technology and to a limited extent by their status as consumers, is perceived as a threat not only to the hierarchy of children and adults but also ultimately to the status quo of society more generally. After all, if children separate from their parents, they stand to invent a new society in which the older norms of class, gender, race, and sexuality may no longer operate. Choosing to focus only on technology, the spread of consumer culture of the relationship between children and adults to the exclusion of the overarching domination of capital and the specific ways in which the bourgeois home is under transformation leads to a reactionary call for the old-fashioned family with the old-fashioned child at the center. (Kapur 126)
And Kid Nation offers up the old-fashioned child placed in the heart of that nostalgic American Eden—the Wild West. Perhaps that is the real fear of the adult producers of Kid Nation—that if left to their own devices, the children of Kid Nation would create a society that establishes as natural more equitable material distributions and denies the seduction of consumerism and the state of constant nostalgia for a lost innocence that is, like the idea itself, a fiction.
1. According to Advertising Age, after the first episode aired CBS picked up advertising from “Capitol One, Red Bull, and a handful of pharmaceuticals, including Pfizer's Chantix.” General Motors also ran an ad for its OnStar service (Steinberg).
Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Conspiracy of Art. Trans. Ames Hodges. New York: Semiotext(e), 2005.
Biressi, Anita, and Heather Nunn. Reality TV: Realism and Revelation. New York: Wallflower Press, 2005.
Brenton, Sam, and Reuben Cohen. Shooting People: Adventures in Reality TV. New York: Verso, 2003.
Castells, Manuel. “Materials for an Exploratory Theory of a Networked Society.” American Cultural Studies: A Reader. Ed. John Hartley and Roberta E. Pearson. London: Oxford University Press, 2000. 414-426.
CBS. Kid Nation, www.cbs.com/primetime/kid_fnation/bio.shtml.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Feuer, Jane. “The Concept of Live Television.” Regarding Television. Ed. E. Kaplan. Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1983.
Giroux, Henry. Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture's War on Children. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Goodman, Ellen. “‘Kid Nation’ Sure Isn't a Bonanza!” Tulsa World, September 28, 2007, A15.
Holloway, Sarah L., and Gill Valentine. Cyberkids: Children in the Information Age. London: Routledge Falmer, 2003.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Johnny, Leanne. “Reconceptualizing Childhood: Children's Rights and Youth Participation in Schools.” International Education Journal 7.1 (2006): 17-25.
Kapur, Jyotsna. Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Keveney, Bill. “Future of ‘Kid Nation’ Undecided.” USA Today, December 13, 2007.
Kid Nation. CBS. Episodes 1-13. September 1-December 12, 2007. “The ‘Kid Nation’ Ends in Ruin,” http://defamer.gawker.com/333850/the-kid-nation-ends-in-ruin.
“LCA Condemns CBS for Chicken Killing on “Kid Nation,’ “www.marketwire.com/press-release/Last-Chance-For-Animals-774710.xhtml.
Littleton, Cynthia. “‘Kid Nation’ Producer Answers the $64,000 Question.” Variety, August 24, 2007.
McNary, Dave. “SAG Blasts ‘Kid Nation’ Again.” Variety, September 20, 2007.
“Officials Drop ‘Kid Nation’ Investigation,” www.buddytv.com/articles/kid-nation/officals-drop-kid-nation-inve-14499.aspx, December 8, 2007.
Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Schnoop, Jackie. “Kid Nation: I Just Like the Recess Part,” www.tvsquad.com/2007/11/28/kid-nation-i-just-like-the-recess-part/.
Smith, Matthew J., and Andrew F. Wood. Survivor Lessons: Essays on Communication and Reality Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.
Steinberg, Brian. “A Few More Advertisers Tiptoe into ‘Kid Nation.’ “Advertising Age, September 27, 2007, www.adage.com/results.php?endeca=1&return=endeca&D=01%2F14%2F2009&Nty=1&Ne=28&N =4294958308.
Stelter, Brian. “‘Kid Nation’ Makes Little Racket, After All.” New York Times, September 28, 2007, http://tvdecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/kid-nation-makes-little-racket-after-all/.
Stevens, Sharon. “Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism.’ “Children and the Politics of Culture. Ed. Sharon Stevens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. 3-48.
Ward, Lindsey. “Booze and Kids Should Never Mix.” Edmonton Sun, October 6, 2007, www.edmontonsun.com/Entertainment/Television /2007/10/06/4555419-sun.xhtml.
Wyatt, Edward. “‘Kid Nation’ Parents Gave Show Free Rein.” New York Times, August 23, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/arts/television/23kids.xhtml.
Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.