Call Me Once You’ve Quit Your Crying

I’m reading annotated bibliographies from my students this morning, making
notes and emailing them back.  They’ve come up with several really
interesting projects–ideas nested contextually in the arena of McLuhan’s The
Medium is the Massage
and Barabasi’s Linked.  We also pulled a
chapter from Gladwell’s The Tipping Point this semester, "The Stickiness
Factor."  And so one student is thinking about some of the factors
affecting the design of children’s television, particularly Sesame Street
and Blue’s Clues, the programs Gladwell draws on.  Coincidentally,
just as I thinking about this project, which, among other things, considers the
reluctance by early developers of Sesame Street to conflate real and
imagined elements out of concern that pre-linguistic children would be confused
by the discordance, I clicked onto this article from today’s New York Times,

"A Way to Calm a Fussy Baby: ‘Sesame Street’ by Cellphone."

The article is basically about all the corporate scrambling to win the market for
multi-feature portable electronics, particularly mini-entertainment apparatuses
for tikes. 

To test the personal appeal of mini-entertainment, Hyers turned to his own
children, ages 3 and 5. He downloaded movie trailers for "Harry Potter" and
"Finding Nemo" to a personal device and passed them the little screen. "They
watched it over and over," Mr. Hyers said.

"It’s really convenient because there’s only so much ‘I Spy’ that you can
play out the window."

Phone entertainment is so novel that even children’s organizations that
readily dispense advice are stumped.

I spy something…hold on a sec, my phone’s crying.