by Deirdre Devers Interactive television has been sold as opening up a new world to children. When people said the same of the internet, the meaning of the phrase was simple--the bodies who own the airwaves lost control of a medium that let everyone have their say. Large amounts of information and communication became freely available from, and moves between, ordinary people from all over. And the world which was opened up was not new or virtual at all. It was our own.
The virtual worlds came later, especially after the creation of the world wide web. By changing emphasis from the information people exchange to the clicking they do to get it, many games, works of fiction, and on-screen "hangouts" were created. What defines these online places is their element of control. Visitors have control of what happens within an unreal "space," the design of which is in total control of a designer. They are not communications with Earth, but an alternative to it, measured in users' hours of enjoyment and whatever else their designers have in mind.
On interactive television, such virtual worlds, usually created by ad agencies, will be the only ones on offer. And the people for whom most of them have been designed are children, those earliest of early adopters of new technology. To see how everyone will live with interactive television, it is worth examining these worlds that the next generation of interactive consumers already inhabit.
For mother and child, interactive children's programming appears at first to be a great improvement over passive television viewing. But the relief they feel, and their need for increasingly sophisticated entertainment technology, are themselves a new phenomenon. Any virtual world must take place within a real one, most frequently a child's bedroom. What is important about any interactive media is not what is presented on the screen, but what goes on around it.
"Families have become more fragmented," says Matthew Timms of Two Way TV, one of the companies working to develop interactive television. "We've found that most of the families we were talking to tended to have three or more TVs in their home and everybody would go off and watch their own programs on their own TVs; you know there's more channels, more choice."
As Timms demonstrates, children are increasingly seen as sophisticated consumers of their own media experiences, making their own decisions about what they watch and how they interact with machines. But a five-year, Europe-wide study of children has recently questioned whether children actually have the choices they want.
In Britain, Dr. Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics has described a process she observed from interviews with children at home whereby nervous parents keep children inside from fear of crime and traffic. To avoid arguments and make up for the loss of freedom, parents buy their children entertainment technology to explore. So computers and televisions are not the first choice of these supposedly sophisticated young media consumers. Repeatedly, what children told Livingstone they wanted was the freedom to go outside and be with friends. A study in Zurich went further, describing children as either "free range" or "battery." The "battery" children were poorly socialized, aggressive, and prone to depression.
The excitement of exploring virtual worlds is being offered to children not in addition to, but in place of something. Only now are people beginning to count the real world cost of virtual convenience. Dr. Anthony Underwood is a pediatrician in Australia who has been studying the effect of television on children's imaginations.
"When a child comes into my surgery who watches a lot of television, I can tell," says Underwood, and describes what happens when such a child is offered some blocks to play with. "The child will not know how to play with them. He'll wait for instructions or ask what they do."
To doctors or parents, news of children with impaired imaginations trapped in their bedrooms is troubling. But, by what it is hopefully just a coincidence, it is nothing but good news for people whose livelihoods depend on a captive, unquestioning audience. Virtual worlds, full of children with nowhere else to go, are a marketing man's dream.
As is already done on the internet, interactivity allows the use of a meeting place or hangout metaphor, meant to take the place of the tree houses or street corners that are now off limits. the Kellogg's Club House web page welcomes young users with the following meticulously researched kidspeak:
"Hey there Cyberslackers, you've made it to Kellogg's Clubhouse, the hottest stop for the hippest Web hopper. . . . Looking for some household hype? Then eyeball these Awesome Activities, or send a stylin cybersurprise with Kellog's E-cards."
Nobody is actually at this website, except illustrations of Snap, Crackle and Pop reading the letters they've been sent. The site should probably provide some animation quickly if it is to keep up with the proliferation of club houses, secret clubs, hideaways and virtual soda shops crowding the web with various well-drawn, well-researched non-entities. Children are willing to join in these simple imitations of companionship because, looking around their own houses, they have little choice.
Almost like playing with a real friend, the virtual world is a shielded and private place for expression, in which parents are rarely involved. Almost like playing outside, a child is given a sense of power by exerting control over characters on the screen.
A virtual world will also offer incentives for returning, calling the child by his or her name, or offering rewards such as vouchers. "For instance," says Matthew Timm of Two Way TV, "in a pre-school, three or four year old type of program, we run a recognition game so that whenever a particular character runs on screen you press a button and you get a reward for having seen it happen."
The virtual world also provides for a child's real life needs without the responsibilities or social demands of real life. In the Kellogg's Clubhouse, a child isn't chastized or bullied or told off by teachers. It's a great benefit to the growing number of children who, for some reason, now suffer from shyness.
Excerpted from Spy TV: Just Who Is the Digital Revolution Overthrowing?
Editor's Note: Kellog's has changed its website, and the "Kellog's Club House" described above no longer exists.
