By Peter Holley
THE WASHINGTON POST - December 16, 2014
For some, the Elf on the Shelf doll, with its doe-eyed gaze and
cherubic face, has become a whimsical holiday tradition — one that
helpfully reminds children to stay out of trouble in the lead-up to
Christmas.
For others — like, say, digital technology professor
Laura Pinto — the Elf on the Shelf is “a capillary form of power that
normalizes the voluntary surrender of privacy, teaching young people to
blindly accept panoptic surveillance and” [deep breath] “reify hegemonic
power.”
I mean, obvs, right?
The latter perspective is detailed in “Who’s the Boss,”
a paper published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, in
which Pinto and co-author Selena Nemorin argue that the popular seasonal
doll is preparing a generation of children to uncritically accept
“increasingly intrusive (albeit whimsically packaged) modes of
surveillance.”
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