Monday, April 18, 2005

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.

Bookmark and Share Posted by at April 18, 2005 9:56 AM to Media
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