February 2005

Blogging, which is getting more popular with teens, can attract the wrong kind of attention. KTHV in Little Rock has a story, Teens Offering Too Much Information Online.

It’s not just about blogging. The same risks are inherent in instant messaging, chat rooms, web sites, etc.

Parental involvement is key here. Communicate with your kids, explain the risks, and keep a watchful eye. Let your kids blog about things other than themselves perhaps?

Hat Tip: The Blog Herald

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The Digital Goddess, Kim Komando, provides a list of important rules that kids should definitely understand and obey when they are online.

Kim Komando’s 10 Commandments for Kids Online

Worth reviewing with your kids from time to time and it should probably be hung near the computer as a constant reminder for them to be careful.

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I read the AP article Toys R Kids: High-Tech Playmates over on Wired News.

Make no mistake, the toy business is first and foremost a business. Their goal is to take your money, and they will seek any means available to do so, even if it provides your kids with toys that rob them of their use of their imagination.

All kinds of toys are going high-tech — industry analysts estimate that at least 75 percent of toys debuting this year will have a microchip. Jim Silver, publisher of the Toy Book, a New York-based industry magazine, now calls the toy business “the family entertainment business.”

I look at it this way: Toys that contain microchips in them do the thinking and the imagining for the kids. Instead of kids casting their stuffed animals or dolls into their own imaginary scenes, these preprogrammed toys have their stories built in. The problem is that your childs imagination could come up with an infinite number of scripts for thier toys, while the computerized toys have only a small, very limited number of scenarios. The kids replay the few, preprogrammed scenarios over and over until their bored with them. Then toss them aside.

Any parent who has observed the trance that kids get into while watching TV or playing video games knows that entertainment is not the same as imaginitive play. Quite the opposite effect really; it puts the thinking parts of the brain to sleep. So it’s a wake-up call to hear a toy industry expert say that he “now calls the toy business ‘the family entertainment business.””

In other words, the toy business is less about stimulation of your kids imaginations and healthy play, and more about entertaining your kids and putting them into the mind-numbing trance.

These new toys are also very expensive. The toy companies aren’t stupid. They know that toys that do the entertaining for the kids quickly bore the kids. Kids crave being entertained. Kids beg Mom and Dad sooner for more toys.

Try this experiment: If you’ve got young children, remove all possibility of them playing video games and watching TV for the day. Now go find a couple of very large cardboard boxes that one or two kids can comfortably sit in, give them to your kids and say, “go build a fort in the living room.” Enjoy.

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Clive Thompson over at Collision Detection cites a New York Times article about a study of handwriting vs keyboading by students.

Computers have drastically reduced the amount a student writes by hand, so much that the skill, “like an unused muscle”, is pretty much dead by your senior year. But there’s an interesting question buried in this piece: What is the cognitive effect of handwriting versus typing? (referring to a NYT article)

Then he goes on to ask:

“For me, there’s an even deeper question: Are there any qualitative differences — in the way you think, create, or express yourself — between handwriting and typing?”

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ComputerTime receives a mention over on the Techworthy Blog! The article details many of the perils facing kids today.

We were also featured by the Game Industry News this month.

UPDATE: A really nice article in the Lafayette Journal and Courier talks about Kids, Computers, ComputerTime, and has excerpts from an interview with CEO Joe Acunzo.

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This blog post by Joel Achenbach made me laugh. Brings back memories of my dad yelling at me to shut the lights when I was a kid, and now I’m wearing his shoes and always turning off the lights that my kids leave on.

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I’ve been in the technology field for some time now and I love the Internet, email, the Web, eBay, blogs, and on and on.

But one thing I’ve managed to avoid to this point was Instant Messaging. I have people telling me all of the time that I should install it so that they can IM me. I usually respond with some variation of “Like I don’t already have enough distractions in my day, I need to give you a way to pop up messages on my screen at will?”

I endearingly call it “Instant Interruption” and say, “No Thanks. If it’s not critical, just email me and I’ll get around to it at my convenience. If it’s critical, call me. I can talk faster than I can type.” So it’s not on my work PC and it’s not on my home PCs either. But apparently it’s going to be pushing its way into my life in the near future — via my kids.

The lure of instant messaging seems to kick in about sixth grade, a pivotal time when family relationships begin to take a back seat to friendships.

That’s when Joshua, 11, started begging his father, Greg Coffey, 45, to get instant messaging. A month and a half later, Joshua’s buddy list had grown to 23 friends who attend different schools.

“It’s like candy, an addiction. It’s hard to get them off,” says Coffey.

In my parents day, I guess the hang out was the drive-in theater or burger stand. My generation, it was the video arcade. My kids generation, it’s apparently the Internet.

Instant messaging plays an important part in helping youths form identities, says Susannah Stern, a University of San Diego assistant professor specializing in youth media studies.

“Kids are using it to enhance their reputations by appearing to be affiliated with a lot of people,” Stern says.

So I can resist using it, but for my kids, it’s apparently going to be an important part of their culture growing up, regardless of what we think about it and despite it’s downsides.

But the allure can be like a siren’s call. Teens readily admit that instant messaging is a distraction they welcome, especially during tedious history readings or math projects.

Parents who want to read more about the mix of Instant Messaging with the teens and tweens should read the whole article: Teens use IMs to widen their social circles.

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