My 16 Week Old Baby Has a Blog

I set up a blog on Vox for my daughter so my wife and I could share photos and videos with our friends and family without the messy snapfish downloads (that always seem to spam you too).  In retrospect, we’ve started chain of digital events that my daughter will have little chance of fending off. 

Today the FT had an extremely interesting analysis piece by Jonathan Birchall that talks about how social networking tools and worlds are being designed for users as young as 5 years old.   Mattel’s Barbie doll – the worlds most popular toy – launched Barbiegirls.com with a paid subscription VIP section for fans to play, dress, and socialize with 11 million other registered Barbie avatars across the globe. Of course Nickelodeon is already doing this with its successful Nicktropolis site, built around its wildly popular TV show characters. Don’t forget Webkinz -- those fluffy animal toys with codes to link to online versions and worlds -- have taken the youth market like gang busters. And the 900 pound gorilla Disney, whose sites attracted more than 27m users in March, has created a management group to focus on virtual worlds and online communities. Disney also bought the Club Penguin social networking and virtual world site for $350 million.

Personally I never really liked Second Life, my old computer (IBM’s T41) was always to slow for my avatar to fly, and people I met in business settings were usually rude and boring. Not that I expect these children sites to be a forum for online bullying (which is real problem and a separate entry for a different day), but these sites promote mass consumerism and skew the way kids socialize.  When 11 million Barbie doll avatars see an advertisement for an upcoming Disney movie while driving their virtual Barbie corvettes on the virtual freeway, 99% of the kids will notice and take action.  This means asking the parents for tickets to the movie which leads to stuffed dolls, t-shirts and special codes to go to more online sites, fan forums, theme parks (digital or real) and more advertisements.  Did the little girl on the Barbie site even have a chance to say no?  This is an interesting quote from the FT story: "Companies are targeting ever younger children and there is a bigger push to get even preschoolers online and engaged in social networking sites and virtual worlds," says Susan Linn, of the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. "While virtual worlds can be a creative endeavor for teenagers, there are real problems about their impact on younger children."

I’m not saying kids should play outside or jump-rope all day, I certainly didn’t, but these sites are just a savvy digital formula for sales, branding recognition and product placement. Kudos to the businesses for leveraging all the digital tools kids will be using anyways, but at what cost I wonder.

Joe and PepperDigital