Like taking candy from a baby...

Not before time, many more organisations are now focusing on the media activities of young children. For example, Consumer Reports Webwatch have published a study on the commercialisation of the Internet for children under eight. The report can be downloaded here. It makes for fascinating reading and whilst I do not share the overly-Piagetian analysis of the children's online activities, I do agree with some of the points made. However, I am not sure how some of the recommendations can be achieved in the business models often used by online sites for children. For example, one of the recommendations of the report is that virtual worlds such as Club Penguin should not use free trials to entice children into buying subscriptions. Whilst I very much sympathise with this viewpoint (and indeed have observed the impact of differential social and economic capital in these online worlds), this is the nature of free Internet trials. Most of us, at some point, will have signed up for a free trial and then lived to regret it as we are then pestered with emails to fully sign up, or feel frustrated as we can only access limited areas of the site's provision. So should we be working with young children to enable them to understand this aspect of online commercial sites in relation to free trials and helping them to come to terms with the emotional fall-out from that? On the other hand, I do feel commercial sites aimed at children have a responsibility in terms of their marketing strategies and making children aware at every turn of what they cannot access is unnecessary. In-world advertising, such as that operated by Barbie Girls, for example, is often pernicious in nature. There is much work to do here in terms of identifying the dynamic between the users and producers of these sites and so research such as that conducted by Sara Grimes will be important in helping us to understand the complexities embedded within this relationship. In the meantime, I am involved in a study exploring the literacy practices related to the use of some of these virtual worlds and I will post a paper on this here soon!

Children's virtual worlds

I have been observing my 5-, 8- and 9-year-old nieces as they navigate the virtual worlds 'Club Penguin' and 'Barbie Girls'. Interestingly, the social side of this 'social software' appears to take second-place to identity construction and shopping (and therefore needing to earn enough money to shop). Children's play has been embedded within commercialised practices for many years, but this engagement with a virtual labour market is novel. Some parents may no doubt quite like the idea of their children developing a work ethic, but it seems to me that this aspect of these worlds mitigates against more extensive social involvement and further entrenches children in the markets of globalised commodities. For example, the Barbie virtual shopping experience is linked to the 'real'-word purchase of a Barbie MP3 player - once you have purchased that (with 'real' $s, not 'Barbie bucks'), you can buy more, even cooler, things in the online world. I guess what is going on here is little different to some of the adult activity in virtual worlds - this is, as we know, a booming real-word economy. This analysis of virtual (or 'synthetic') world economies draws on Bourdieu's concepts of economic, social and cultural capital, concepts as relevant to these spaces as 'meat-space'. Certainly, an analysis of the interactions of these three forms of capital can help to illuminate much of the current activity in 'Club Penguin' and 'Barbie World' and is informing a current paper I am writing, which I will post here when I set up the appropriate feeder site. It will be interesting to hear about the project Guy is involved in, in which he is working with schools on constructing and using a virtual world - what form of capital becomes of most value in an educationally-orientated virtual world? Virtual cultural capital?