Kids and cell phones
Question: what is a cell phone to a child: luxury, indulgence, dangerous...or important to have. Answer: important to have. The question is: at what age? According to this article in WirelessWeek, 400,000 kids in the UK under the age of 10 (that's got to be a fair %) regularly use mobile phones compared with 80,000 3 years ago. If you feel so inclined you can take this questionnaire from TracFone. It has such loaded questions as:
Do I want the security of knowing the whereabouts of my child at any given time? Now I ask you, who the hell is going to say "no" to that question? "do I want to know where my 9-year-old is? Nah, not really...why do you ask?" please.
Newsweek has a great section on kids and technology in this weeks issue (although for the life of me I cannot find this online).
The first article was on the topic of what I'd call "adaptive personalization"...something that was a helluva lot more interesting before spam killed the internet. A company called ChoiceStream endeavors to do a better job than Amazon or MyBestBets on AOL. An acquaintance of mine, Michael Pazanni - who has made a career of this, explains in this paper how this will work with the mobile web. If there was ever a place to avoid lengthy q&a it's a cell phone.
Other pieces in the Newsweek section included profound observations such as "more kids are playing video games" types of stats, with some clinical test results that indicate that gamers...well.. are better at test that are somewhat game-like - such as a finding a needle in a graphic haystack (or Waldo, or a guy aiming an Uzi at you). It concludes with this dazzling observation: "..kids are getting better at paying attention to several things at once...but there's a cost in that you don't go into any one thing in as much depth". duh.
I'd never heard of the term "screenagers", an old term, but maybe I'm sheltered. I'd never heard of "Metrosexual" either until last month.
I did learn that VCDs are the choice of the third world. I've always wondered, since I learned (and learned to loathe..in fact..the reason I own a Mac now is due to problems suffered with Pinnacle) Pinnacle software who uses that format for storing videos.
finally, Steven Levy has a great "geek bill of rights" which I'll paraphrase here:
1. every kid deserves internet access : agreed. I'd say they all need BROADBAND and a cell phone too
2. Teacher Access via email - YES YES PLEASE - why is this not mandatory? I don't want to wait until the bi-annual "parent teacher" conference for quick questions...or leave a message at the office and hope to get a call back..or any other needlessly lengthy process to get a simple answer from the teacher
3. Freedom from Multimedia..interesting. trending against the propensity for hardware developers (and software of course) to push the latest technology, which aside from games, turns everybody into amateur Spielbergs. Of course, while attending Torrey Pines High School in 1976, I took "TV and the Media" for english credit...our big project was making a TV commercial. I created a product called "no sweat" anti-perspirant and for the first time (making the video) got the attention of the cheerleader - whom I needed for the video...hmmm...that should have stimulated more thought...
4. Freedom from predators - here here..why can't we put those guys that send my 10-year old porno links to jail?
5.Filter the filters - again, agreed. I've tried both AOL 9.0 and MSN 8.0 and I'm here to tell you they are broadband killers when you use the parental controls. As usual, these devices look better than they work. Either it was painfully slow, or my 13 year old was forever asking my permission for simple sites.
Question: what is a cell phone to a child: luxury, indulgence, dangerous...or important to have. Answer: important to have. The question is: at what age? According to this article in WirelessWeek, 400,000 kids in the UK under the age of 10 (that's got to be a fair %) regularly use mobile phones compared with 80,000 3 years ago. If you feel so inclined you can take this questionnaire from TracFone. It has such loaded questions as:
Do I want the security of knowing the whereabouts of my child at any given time? Now I ask you, who the hell is going to say "no" to that question? "do I want to know where my 9-year-old is? Nah, not really...why do you ask?" please.
Newsweek has a great section on kids and technology in this weeks issue (although for the life of me I cannot find this online).
The first article was on the topic of what I'd call "adaptive personalization"...something that was a helluva lot more interesting before spam killed the internet. A company called ChoiceStream endeavors to do a better job than Amazon or MyBestBets on AOL. An acquaintance of mine, Michael Pazanni - who has made a career of this, explains in this paper how this will work with the mobile web. If there was ever a place to avoid lengthy q&a it's a cell phone.
Other pieces in the Newsweek section included profound observations such as "more kids are playing video games" types of stats, with some clinical test results that indicate that gamers...well.. are better at test that are somewhat game-like - such as a finding a needle in a graphic haystack (or Waldo, or a guy aiming an Uzi at you). It concludes with this dazzling observation: "..kids are getting better at paying attention to several things at once...but there's a cost in that you don't go into any one thing in as much depth". duh.
I'd never heard of the term "screenagers", an old term, but maybe I'm sheltered. I'd never heard of "Metrosexual" either until last month.
I did learn that VCDs are the choice of the third world. I've always wondered, since I learned (and learned to loathe..in fact..the reason I own a Mac now is due to problems suffered with Pinnacle) Pinnacle software who uses that format for storing videos.
finally, Steven Levy has a great "geek bill of rights" which I'll paraphrase here:
1. every kid deserves internet access : agreed. I'd say they all need BROADBAND and a cell phone too
2. Teacher Access via email - YES YES PLEASE - why is this not mandatory? I don't want to wait until the bi-annual "parent teacher" conference for quick questions...or leave a message at the office and hope to get a call back..or any other needlessly lengthy process to get a simple answer from the teacher
3. Freedom from Multimedia..interesting. trending against the propensity for hardware developers (and software of course) to push the latest technology, which aside from games, turns everybody into amateur Spielbergs. Of course, while attending Torrey Pines High School in 1976, I took "TV and the Media" for english credit...our big project was making a TV commercial. I created a product called "no sweat" anti-perspirant and for the first time (making the video) got the attention of the cheerleader - whom I needed for the video...hmmm...that should have stimulated more thought...
4. Freedom from predators - here here..why can't we put those guys that send my 10-year old porno links to jail?
5.Filter the filters - again, agreed. I've tried both AOL 9.0 and MSN 8.0 and I'm here to tell you they are broadband killers when you use the parental controls. As usual, these devices look better than they work. Either it was painfully slow, or my 13 year old was forever asking my permission for simple sites.
posted by Spasssmeister at 3:19 PM
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