Princess Tiana

Princess Tiana is Disney's first ever black princess and inevitably, given Disney's track record for racial insensitivity, her launch is surrounded by controversy. And from the desk of YoBlogger, a media journal developed by young people in the US, comes a commentary on Disney's actions from Jazmyne Young and Erricka X:

Clickable fairies

Robin Raskin has an interesting post about Disney's range of products relating to fairies, such as Pixie Hollow in which children can create a fairie avatar for the Pixie Hollow world. As Robin explains, Disney have collaborated with Clickables to provide artefacts that can link in RL to each other and this activity then relates to the online world:

A clickable item...can “click” with another Disney Fairies piece of jewelry, allowing girls to trade items from jewelry to jewelry, girl to girl. Once at home they can place their jewelry in a special jewelry box and whatever trade took place in real life between two friends shows up on their on-screen avatars in the Pixie Hollow world. As you play the games on Pixie Hollow you gain points towards things for your personal space in that world, and when you click bracelets in the real world you get points that you can redeem online.

This is an interesting development on the Webkinz model, in which RL toys integrate with online environments, as it extends the possibilities for RL social networking around the worlds and related artefacts and dissolves further the boundaries between online and offline activities.

Baby Einsteins

Couldn't resist linking to this photograph, from Trendhunter, which accompanies an article about how Baby Einstein videos 'make infants dumber', according to research by Zimmerman and Christakis at the University of Washington. More interesting than the study itself is the report about how Disney, owners of Baby Einstein, have asked the UoW to retract its media report, given the critique of the study's methodology (for a brief overview of those criticisms, see here). If this is true, then this raises a number of important issues about the relationship between academia and the media industries. Rather than demanding the retraction of media reports, Disney should simply provide a critique of the study in question themselves - after all, that's how things work in peer-reviewed journals. However, perhaps more significantly, this story illustrates the misplaced emphasis in much of the research on young children and media effects, which often seeks to prove causation rather than correlation between factors and is thus open to promoting sensational media headlines...it would be good if we could move on from this narrow and limiting agenda.