This research has, as its main focus, the relationship established between child and publicity on TV. The theoretical and methodological perspective is based on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin and Oliviero Toscani. The goal is to understand the broader social and cultural context within which this issue is kept under permanent tension. Some important changes have marked it: the emergence of new family groups which, by differing from the traditional nucleus arrangements, asks for the reordering of the child-adult relationship; the loss of a clear delimitation for capitalism and its concentration on consumption; the fragmentation of every-day life; the construction of a video policy and the inversion suffered by the public and private stages; the central place now occupied by the media and the hegemony of electronic and virtual technologies in communication processes. Last, but not least, it is worth to mention the pulverisation of knowledge spaces. Within such context, audio-visual means - television among them - have shared the educational function with family and school, producing a great discomfort for both of them: it is necessary, more than ever, to rethink the social place that these institutions fulfil.
CHILDHOOD; TELEVISION; PUBLICITY; RESEARCH METHODS