New York's Gramercy Park is a curious institution: two acres of fenced-in greenspace that is accessible only to those who own the houses surrounding the park. (Non-residents must either stay at the Gramercy Park Hotel or join the Players Club or National Arts Club if they want to visit, and each of these institutions has a limited number of park keys.) Private parks like it are the exception, of course, not the rule: since the days of Frederick Law Olmsted, who campaigned for and designed city parks across North America (Central Park, in New York, and Montreal's Mount Royal Park among them) we have come to expect most of our recreational spaces to be public. Cities and neighbourhoods are routinely rated on both the quantity and quality of their parks, and any suggestion that these services should be cut back always receives violent reactions from taxpayers; playgrounds, too, are public by default.

The near-universality of public parks and playgrounds in our physical spaces makes it all the more striking that the online world contains almost no spaces that are genuinely public. Instead, it is made up almost entirely of spaces that are either overtly or covertly commercial. The latter of these we might term “pseudo-public” spaces, where there is a disconnect between users' perceptions of them as public and their actual private nature.

Before continuing, it would be good to make a clear definition of what is meant by the term public space. To begin with, we might say that a public space is a public service: it does not have to justify its existence by any means other than providing citizens with a place to be. Its status as a public service means that its continued existence is guaranteed: if you move into a neighbourhood with parks and playgrounds, you can expect that they will not be paved over. (The notion of a public service blurs somewhat when we look at services that are considered essential but may be provided by private entities, such as power or telephone service; in these cases, while the government is not providing the service, it does guarantee through regulation that the service will not be discontinued.) Another essential element of public spaces is that they are by default accessible to all: their use is a right that can only be taken away due to misbehaviour, not a privilege that must be bought or earned, and using them involves no special contractual obligations. This also means that people using public spaces do not have to give up any of their other rights, most notably freedom of expression. Finally, it is worth pointing out that public spaces are, by definition, public and not private, and therefore normally free of advertising or other commercial content.

With this definition in hand we can see that few of the online spaces perceived by their users as public are anything of the sort. Perhaps the best example would be Facebook, a site which bills itself as a community and is generally treated as such by its users. It's not hard to see why: it is free to use, and like its competitors it very much feels like “my space” -- users can customize their profiles, organize their own groups and communities and select or even create their own apps (third-party programs that do a variety of things such as games, quizzes and so on.) Facebook has become a focus for civic participation, and users frequently behave as though it were itself a democracy (such as when changes to the Terms of Service were protested in 2009.)

Despite its appearance, though, Facebook is in no way a public space. To begin with, it is owned by a corporation, that is not government regulated, and while there is no direct fee for participating, users pay through being exposed to ads (in the same way that we pay for television.) Moreover, its continued existence is not guaranteed: aside from its contracts with advertisers, there is nothing preventing Facebook from going permanently offline tomorrow. Similarly, to participate in Facebook one must agree to its Terms of Service, which involve giving up rights to privacy, intellectual property, and freedom of expression – and which allow Facebook to terminate a user's account at any time for essentially any reason. (Those terms are also subject to being unilaterally changed by Facebook.) Finally, its dependence on advertising for revenue means that when conflicts arise advertisers will always win out

When viewed through this lens, it becomes clear that nearly everything online that looks like a public space, from Facebook to Hotmail to Google to YouTube, does not meet any reasonable definition of the term. (Perhaps the only exceptions are those sites operated by public broadcasters, such as the CBC or PBS, and donation-funded non-profit organizations such as Wikipedia.) Children's online spaces are, if anything, even less public. MNet's 2005 survey Young Canadians In A Wired World found that the vast majority of sites popular among youth were heavily commercialized, and in the years since that survey was released advertisers have become even more skilful at integrating commercial content into kids' online experiences; for instance, the virtual worlds BarbieGirls and Nicktropolis include brand-related references in the pre-programmed phrases available in their “safe chat” mechanisms.

Considering how attached we are to our offline public spaces, how is it that the absence of public space online has received so little attention? One reason is no doubt due to the ad hoc nature of the Internet: there are no zoning restrictions, not city plans, no directly elected authorities to whom we might appeal. As well, the Internet -- at least once it spread beyond the halls of academe -- has always been commercial: unlike the European and American traditions of a village commons or town square, there is no history of genuinely free space on the Internet. Likely the most significant reason, though, is that so much of the Internet seems free. As noted above, there are few online services for which one pays directly anymore; instead, we pay largely without knowing it, with our attention and our personal data as the currency. Facebook, again, is a good example of what we might call a “commercial commons”: though it is a for-profit enterprise it goes to great lengths to seem like a public space. Google, too, feels like a public service, if not a public space, but it too is beholden to a variety of commercial interests; so too are webmail services such as Hotmail and Gmail.

We get the Internet we deserve, of course, and it's reasonable to say that if no genuinely public equivalents to these sites exist it's because we don't really want them to -- after all, we have a choice to agree to their Terms of Service, which define a space that is unambiguously private.  But the fact that these sites create such a successful illusion of being public spaces or services means that people are all that much more likely to be unaware of the implications of their commercial nature. People rightly object if Canada Post changes the services it offers (as when they made the move to “super-boxes” in rural communities), but they may not be aware that Microsoft is under no obligation to continue providing “free” webmail access through Hotmail.

More importantly, we have to face the fact that not everyone who uses these services is an adult. Facebook allows users to agree to its Terms of Service at thirteen -- five years before someone can legally agree to a contract, in most countries -- and that policy is little-enforced:  a quarter of youth under twelve in the UK have social networking profiles. Moreover, many sites aimed explicitly at children, from Neopets to Club Penguin, make similar efforts to create a sense of being public spaces and communities. If Gramercy Park had been the model for our municipal parks -- if we had to pay to let our children use them, whether directly in money, indirectly through advertising or data collection, or a mixture of both -- would we stand for it? Or would we demand that our governments provide true public spaces where all our children could play?

Further reading

To explore these issues further, you can take a look at our sister site Be Web Aware for more information on:

Social networking sites

Virtual worlds

Online advertising

For information on how to talk to youth about public space issues, check out the recent book Watch This Space (to which I contributed)

It's a question that most parents of young daughters face: "Has she hit the 'princess phase' yet?" Not all parents are upset by this, of course: many happily buy their girls princess costumes, toys and accessories ranging from shoes to purses, all in pink. Some, though, despair of the powerful gender stereotyping this delivers to young girls and each new piece of princess gear can be a source of conflict.

The source of much of this princess culture is Disney, of course, and this winter the studio is extending its reach by introducing its first African-American princess, Tiana, in the animated film The Princess and The Frog. Princesses are big business for Disney: since 2000, when the company began to tie together all the merchandising for any of its characters who might conceivably be called "princesses," the line has become one of the company's biggest earners. Disney's Andy Mooney, who spearheaded the creation of the princess line, told the New York Times  that he got the idea from seeing girls at Disney on Ice shows who were dressed in non-Disney princess costumes, but there's no doubt that in the years since the company has pushed the line into almost every imaginable aspect of a child's life, from beddings to Band-Aids to lip balm. Not surprisingly, the marketing of Princess Tiana began well in advance of the movie's December 11 premiere: more than 45,000 dolls based on the character had already been sold by mid-November, while actors portraying her were already performing in "Tiana's Showboat Jubilee" at Disneyland and Disney World. 

The creation of Princess Tiana would seem to be an attempt to expand into the one market as yet untouched by princesses: African-Amerian girls. The official list of Disney princesses includes, along with born princess Snow White and married-to-royalty Cinderella, two entirely non-royal characters, Mulan and Pocahontas, who are Chinese and Native respectively. The last two characters, though, rarely appear on merchandise -- less, perhaps, due to their ethnic origin than the fact that neither fits well with the "princess aesthetic": in their movies Pocahontas appears in tolerably realistic (if somewhat revealing) Native garb and Mulan actively rejects feminine attire in order to masquerade as a male soldier. Tiana, though, is carefully crafted to fit the princess mould, with an hourglass figure, many glamorous dresses, and even a tiara. Of course, she spends much of the movie in the shape of a frog, but that's not the image that will adorn lunchboxes everywhere. If the movie is at all successful, an entire new population of young girls will soon have caught princess fever.

Is this necessarily a bad thing, though? After all, princesses -- whether born to royalty at the beginning of a story or married into it by the end -- have been fairy-tale protagonists for hundreds of years; the characters of Cinderella and Snow White long predate their Disney incarnations. The appeal of princesses is not hard to see: the unearned wealth and privilege of being a princess makes it a close parallel to classic boys' fantasies of being demigods or orphans rocketed at birth from a distant planet. Where the male and female versions diverge is that where the boys imagine gaining powers and abilities from their special status, being a princess instead brings girls wealth, beauty and romance. It's not surprising, then, that many parents are concerned about just what gender roles their daughters are being trained to play.

Graphic by Jeff Brunner

One common feature of the many articles on this phenomenon is that young girls resist any criticism or alteration of their princesses. In the New York Times article cited above, the writer's daughter asks repeatedly if her mother likes her princess heroines; in her article in The Los Angeles Times  Rosa Brooks fails to convince her daughters that princesses are more likely to end up at a guillotine than a fairy-tale wedding; and Tracee Sioux, who writes a blog titled The Girl Revolution, describes her unsuccessful efforts to steer her daughter away from princesses. Nor can girls be easily swayed by stories that try to subvert the classic princess: "Frogs and snails and feminist tales: Preschool children and gender," a 1989 study by Bronwyn Davies, found that both boys and girls often rejected stories that tried to alter the traditional gender roles found in fairy tales.

Is it really gender roles that children are so attached to, though, or is it the fairy-tale narratives on which they are experts? A recent article by Karen Wohlwend, "Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts Through Disney Princess Play,"  finds that while children engaging in "media play" with princess characters feel a strong loyalty to the original narratives, they are not averse to changing things like the gender of secondary characters (turning Prince Charming into a princess, for instance) or making the protagonist more active, especially if that means giving themselves a larger and more entertaining role to play. (One of the girls in Wohlwend's study finds a way to involve a comatose Sleeping Beauty in a swordfight.)

The children in Wohlwend's study, though, are kindergarteners; though they might have been exposed to quite a lot of princess-related media by this age, they’re still in the early stages of forming gender identities. As girls get older, the worrying aspects of princess culture -- the passivity, consumerism, and so on -- may become more and more confining. As Lyn Mikel Brown, co-author of Packaging Girlhood  writes, the issue is not princess play but the sheer dominance of princess culture: “When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.” Her co-author, Sharon Lamb, points out as well that the road travelled by princesses is a narrow one, leading to the hypersexualized roles now being sold to ‘tween and teen girls: "There’s a trap at the end of that rainbow, because the natural progression from pale, innocent pink is not to other colors. It’s to hot, sexy pink -- exactly the kind of sexualization parents are trying to avoid.”

How should parents deal with the arrival of the "princess phase"? One option is simply to say “no” -- something parents should never be afraid to do. But an outright ban may backfire by making all things princess even more desirable. What may be more effective is to make sure that girls (and boys) are also exposed to more positive female role models. There are many children's books with strong female characters; kids' movies with good female leads can be harder to find, but the anime produced by Studio Ghibli -- such as Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro -- is a good place to start.

Most important is that parents engage with their children's media and be ready to discuss the images and events they see. Don't be confrontational, but ask questions: do you think you can really make an angry person nice like Belle does to the Beast? Is it worth it to give up your voice, and your family, for a boy the way Ariel does? If Mulan spends most of her movie dressed as a boy, why is she in girls' clothes on the merchandising? There may be no escaping the "princess phase," but teaching kids to view media critically can help make sure your princess doesn't grow up expecting a handsome prince -- or a fairy godmother -- to solve all her problems.

MNet Resources

Teachers can address the presence of gender stereotypes in fairy tales and other children's media through the less Once Upon a Time (for Grades 2 to 6).
 
Media Stereotyping: Media Portrayals of Girls and Women looks at the ways that mass media can stereotype girls and women; the effects this can have on girls' body image, self-esteem and views of gender roles; and provides tips for kids and parents on resisting stereotypes and working for change.

Marketing and Consumerism: Special Issues for Tweens and Teens  talks about how young girls and boys are sold rigid gender identities by consumer culture.

Some concerns have been raised about the portrayal of race in the movie The Princess and the Frog. To help kids deal with racial and ethnic stereotypes, consult Media Portrayals of Ethnic and Visible Minorities .

On Saturday, September 26, 2009, the US network Nickelodeon did something unusual: it switched itself off. This was in observance of the "Worldwide Day of Play," an event Nickelodeon inaugurated in 2004. The network -- along with its sister channels Noggin, the N, and Nicktoons, and their associated Web sites -- went dark for three hours to encourage its young viewers to "ride a bike, do a dance, kick a ball, skate a board, jump a rope, swing a swing, climb a wall, run a race, do ANYTHING that gets you up and playing!"

While this is certainly a laudable sentiment, it's interesting to take a look at the list of things that kids are told not to do during that time, which includes "read a book," "watch television or movies," "surf the web" and "play video games." This suggests that the Day of Play is somewhat akin to Turnoff Week in its attitude towards media (and, indeed, the Day of Play occurred on the last day of the 2009 Turnoff Week) -- that anything media-related is, by definition, not play, even playing video games. Other efforts to bring back "traditional" play, such as those described in these New York Times articles,  also focus heavily on physical, typically competitive games such as stickball, ringalevio and jump rope.

It’s easy and fairly natural to make this distinction: consuming media has always been seen as a passive activity, in contrast to physical play -- consider the traditional contrast between the "bookworm," or the violin-carrying child off to his music lesson, with the "all-round boy" engaged in physical play. But are play and media really incompatible? For that matter, what exactly is play?

What is play?

This turns out to be one of those questions that is much more complicated than it looks. As children, we are certainly aware of a distinction between those things we do that are "play" and those that are not, but it's difficult to broaden this into a true definition. There is no agreement, for that matter, on why we play: while some varieties of play make evolutionary sense, such as the "rehearsal" play we share with other animals (cats, for example), other kinds of play are harder to justify from an evolutionary standpoint. (A good summary of the leading theories of play can be found here.) Among the few qualities of play that are universally acknowledged are that participants in play share an acknowledgement that they are playing, that play involves activities removed from their normal context, and that play only happens in leisure; in situations of significant stress, such as hunger or other kinds of deprivation, play disappears.

The National Institute of Play  has identified seven types of play, these being:
attunement play (behaviours that build a connection between the player and another person or group)

• body play (motions and activities with no purpose other than to take pleasure in them)
• object play (taking pleasure in the manipulation and observation of objects)
• social play (playing with social roles and hierarchies)
• imaginative and pretend play, storytelling play (distinct from the former because it requires narrative)
• transformative-integrative play (play with ideas, exploring concepts and possibilities.)

The NIP makes the point that adults take part in these activities as much as children: a baseball fan doing "the wave" is engaged in attunement play as much as a baby playing "peekaboo." As well, it should be noted that there is not necessarily a hard and fast line between "play" and "work". Artists, for instance, engage in a sort of "professional play" (and we disdain art that is lacking that feeling of play, calling it "by the numbers" or "hackwork"), while Einstein, as the NIP's Web site points out, was engaged in transformative-integrative play when he performed the famous thought experiments, such as imagining himself riding a beam of light, that led to his theories of relativity.

It's clear, though, that the Day of Play is specifically about physical play. While the decline of outdoor play and the increase in childhood obesity are certainly matters of concern, some experts feel that we've suffered more from a loss of imaginative play. Laura Berk, an Executive Function Researcher at Illinois University, told National Public radio that children have less ability to regulate their behaviour than in the past because they engage in less make-believe play, which requires what's called "private speech": "If we compare preschoolers' activities and the amount of private speech that occurs across them, we find that this self-regulating language is highest during make-believe play. And this type of self-regulating language… has been shown in many studies to be predictive of executive functions." (Indeed, one study summarized here found that sustained imaginative play was one of the only reliable ways of improving children's self-control.) One widely-cited study compared the ability of children in 2001 to stand still with children in the late 1940s, and found that the earlier group was two years ahead (so that a seven-year-old in the 2001 experiment showed the same level of self-control as a five-year-old in the earlier study.)

Media play

Why are kids engaging in less imaginative play? The easy answer is to blame it on the media: children spend more time as passive consumers of movies, TV, video games, YouTube videos and so on, leaving them with no room for imagination. But children in the 1940s consumed plenty of media such as movies, radio and comic books. The screenwriter William Goldman has written of spending entire Saturdays at the movies, by no means an unusual experience, and in many houses the radio was turned on as soon as the children got home from school, broadcasting adventure serials and comedies just as TV does today. This media diet was not absent from children's play, nor did it detract from it: Brian Doyle, whose novel Angel Square is based in part on his own childhood experiences, depicts his heroes re-enacting and elaborating on the stories they saw and heard in the movies and radio. In my own childhood the media certainly played a large role in our imaginative play, but not a limiting one: our Star Wars figures journeyed to places Luke Skywalker never saw and George Lucas never imagined, and our Smurfs were as likely to have adventures drawn from Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons as from their own comics.

Children have probably always based their play on the media they consumed; where else would classic schoolyard games like "Cops and Robbers" have come from? Certainly children weren't watching policemen chase criminals on their own streets -- but they were watching, hearing, and reading about those stories, directly or second-hand, through the various media of their times. Media play can be seen as a declaration of ownership, of independence, taking the branded entertainments we are sold and warping them into the stories we want to tell.

What's changed is not the role of the media alone but also the decline of unstructured play time, which provides an opportunity for this kind of media appropriation. Two main factors are responsible for this: first, a growing fear over the last thirty years or so that children cannot be safely left to play unsupervised, and a cultural pressure to have children engage in "worthwhile" or "educational" activities rather than unstructured play. (The media is responsible, at least in part, for both of these: the former due to unrealistic depictions of crime, and the latter due to bad science reporting and the relentless advertising of supposedly educational games, videos, and so on, nearly all of which have been shown to have no developmental value -- a toddler gets as much benefit out of wearing a Baby Einstein video as a hat as he does from watching it.) As well, changing patterns in employment -- both an increased number of women working outside the home and longer average work hours for both sexes -- have led to a perception that parents have less time to spend with their children (though in fact Statistics Canada reports the amount of time spent with children is actually on the increase), which may cause parents to enrol their children in organized activities that are seen as being "worth more" than unstructured play.

Play school

What's particularly unfortunate about the decline of unstructured, imaginative play is that it fosters skills that are more important than ever before, and not just the self-control Berk refers to -- though that is surely of importance at a time when our words can be instantly transmitted around the world and may haunt us forever online. In fact, Project New Media Literacies identifies Play as the first of their "Core Media Literacy Skills," defining it as "the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving." Simulation is another, and simulation forms the heart of imaginative play. As children "try on" roles and identities in games as basic as "House"; their understanding of these roles is drawn as much from media as from life -- as is ours.  Appropriation, defined as "the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content," is explicitly tied to media play: without knowing it, this is what children have been doing for years when they have Barbie marry G.I. Joe or Superman fight Popeye. Another of these new media literacies, Collective Intelligence -- defined as "the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal" -- has more in common with imaginative play than it does with more structured activities. In a sport, after all, or other organized or "educational" play, the rules and conventions are already set; there is none of the collaboration and negotiation that's involved in imaginative play, whether or not it's media-related ("We're playing Star Wars, but Jeff and Max both want to play Han Solo." "Well, maybe Han has a long-lost brother…'")

Play day

Of course, Nickelodeon should be praised for encouraging kids to engage in active play (though a cynical soul might note that they typically follow their three-hour "blackout" with marathons of their most popular shows, which adds up to a rather mixed message.) But it's important to get past the simple equation of play with exercise and recognize the value of play for what it is: unstructured time in which we can, if we choose, defy Nickelodeon's commandments and "take a nap," "read a book" or "twiddle your thumbs." So, too, must we abandon the notion that free play is wasted time, that it's only useful if children learn something. Children at play certainly are learning things, but they are doing so in ways that cannot be planned or designed.

Exercises for teachers

• How can we incorporate elements of imaginative play into our classes? What are the key elements (creativity, choice, open-endedness, etc.)?
• Discuss ways in which different media can stimulate types of play.
• Think of ways you can encourage students to appropriate and play creatively with the media products they consume. For example, you might ask students to act out a story where an unlikable media character becomes the hero, or where a character defies his/her stereotyped depiction.
• Take an exercise or assignment and convert it into a play-based activity. What has to be changed? How much of the instructional content has to be sacrificed?
• Try to think of a few opportunities for students to just "play" with your class content. Think about applying this to different subjects. Do some lend themselves more naturally to play? Why?
• Think of ways to incorporate extended imaginative play into your classroom. Encourage your students to stay in the roles they've chosen as long as possible and interact with each other according to those roles. Don't forget the "pre-play" period where you and the students negotiate roles and rules: if students are role-playing numbers or elements, for instance, talk about what those roles will mean, both to the individual student and in relation to one another (for instance, larger numbers might boss smaller numbers around, positive ions might be cheerful and optimistic and look to pair with gloomy negatives, and so on.)
• What are the limitations of play in a classroom setting? When should play activities not be used, and why?

Last year in this space we wrote about how summer movies serve as advertisements for various kinds of merchandising. The success of 2007's Transformers and its sequel this summer point to a different but similar trend: making movies that are actually about the toys companies sell.

Transformers 2 has had the second-largest opening weekend of the summer, and is likely on its way to be one of the year's highest-grossing pictures. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra –  which, like Transformers, is based on a 1980s toy-line –  is set to debut in August, and more toy- and game-related movies are waiting in the wings. In fact, for a while reality was moving faster than parody: before you could even make a joke about them, movies based on Monopoly, Battleship, and even Ouija were announced, leading almost inevitably to this video:

What stands behind this odd trend? One factor is simply Hollywood's relentless appetite for content. As screenwriter John Rogers explains, behind every ten finished films stand a thousand scripts in varying stages of completion. In the face of this, it's not surprising that almost any hook will do. Compared to the total cost of making a movie, the price of optioning a property (buying the right to develop it) is almost inconsequential. The answer to "Why toys and games?" might easily be "Why not?" Hollywood has scoured novels, plays, comics and video games for content, so why not toys?

Of course, there's an advantage to adapting existing properties that goes beyond the fact that the material already exists. If a property is well-known to the public, it takes a lot less time and effort to advertise it. The advertising campaign for an original movie has a lot of work to do: it has to get across the genre, the premise, the expected audience, and the tone before it even touches on what makes this particular movie unique. When you hear that there's a Transformers movie, on the other hand, you already have a pretty clear idea of what it's about: giant robots that turn into other things and bash at each other. Monopoly may not sound like the most obvious property to turn into a movie, but nearly everyone has played it at some time or another. Because the nature of these toys and games is open-ended (as opposed to adapting a novel or a play) it's easy to turn them into a franchise and churn out sequels until the audience moves on.

What may be more interesting than the fact that toys are being made into movies is precisely the choice of which toys. It's instructive to note that 2007's Transformers was not the first movie made from that property: in 1986 a cheaply-made animated film appeared and quickly disappeared from theatres. While that movie was released when the toys were at the height of their popularity, when the 2007 version appeared Transformers toys had largely been absent from store shelves for more than a decade. This does not make it unusual among the properties being made into movies: GI Joe, its companion in this summer's movie season, was discontinued in 1994, while two other projects currently slated for adaptation –  Stretch Armstrong and Major Matt Mason –  have not been widely available for more than thirty years. Even Monopoly, though still a strong seller, is a long way from its glory days. 

At face value this seems like an odd strategy. In an age where every five-year-old boy has dozens of pieces of Cars merchandise, why base movies on properties that young viewers are unlikely to have heard of? Why not make movies based on currently popular toys and games such as Neopets, Bionicle and World of Warcraft? The answer is that these movies –  or at least the choice of properties to adapt –  aren't aimed at young viewers at all. The market for Baby Boomer nostalgia is well-known, and Generation X has proven to be, if anything, even more susceptible to its charms (half the jokes on Family Guy, for example, are references to 1980s youth culture.) The theory may be that teenage boys are going to go see goofy comedies and action movies anyway, so there's no need to choose a property that will appeal to them specifically. Make a movie about a toy or game with strong nostalgia appeal, however –  Transformers and GI Joe for Generation Xers, Major Matt Mason and Monopoly for Baby Boomers –  and you add another potential audience, and possibly their children. (The power of nostalgia may explain the otherwise inexplicable decision of some respected directors and actors to do these projects, such as Peter Berg on Battleship and Tom Hanks on Major Matt Mason; apparently Hanks brought his own collection of Matt Mason figurines to his first meeting with the film's producers.) Of course, this can still work for the toymakers' advantage, by bringing old toys back to prominence and popularity: nearly half a billion dollars worth of Transformers merchandise was sold after the 2007 movie's release.

Childhood, it would seem, has become a moving target. While we are rightly concerned about what's called Kids Getting Older Younger (the increasing sexualisation and sophistication of childhood play, such as that described here), a parallel phenomenon might be termed Adults Staying Kids Forever, an obsession with the trappings of childhood such as the particular toys and games you had, or didn't have but wanted, when you were young. (This is not to be confused with the genuine pleasures of childhood, such as play and exploration, which are available to anyone at any age.) The root cause of both is the same: consumerism, which is served by teaching both kids and adults that they can be happy if only they buy the right things – "sexy" clothes, the toys you loved as a child, and so on. Seen this way, Hannah Montana and Transformers are both working to make sure kids and adults meet in the middle to become that most desirable demographic: the perpetual teenager.

It’s a persistent phenomenon: the faster we move into the future, the more we find it embedded with the bones of the past. Why else, for instance, would we still talk about “dialling” a phone, and later about “hanging it up”? Few people remember the early TV remote controls that worked by sending high-frequency sounds, but we still call remotes “clickers.” We still say “stay tuned,” “CC” (carbon copy) e-mails, “rewind” DVDs, and “post” online messages. Even new media darling YouTube contains an old-media artefact of this kind: the name is obviously meant to make us think of television, the “boob tube,” but few TVs have tubes in them anymore.

These kinds of throwbacks aren’t just linguistic, they’re found in technology as well. Most often these come from a failure to rethink assumptions, or an aesthetic attachment to the old technology – think of the wood paneling found for so long on cars, a relic from the time when a station wagon was really a wagon – but sometimes they are intentional design choices. An amusing example is Betamaxmas, which uses the Web to recreate the experience of watching TV sometime in the early 1980s. The site’s content is made up of old TV shows and commercials, but what sets it apart is the presentation: a rabbit-eared TV sitting in front of a faux wood paneling wall, framed by a Christmas tree and grey cloth couch in the foreground. It’s easy to dismiss the site as nostalgia – and that’s certainly what it is – but what’s interesting here is that the main purpose of the interface is to limit the user’s control. While the content of this site comes from YouTube, the interface is decidedly analog: a genuine “clicker” whose only controls are Channel Up and Down, Volume Up and Down, and Fullscreen (which zooms in on the screen, though the TV remains in frame.)

What is the difference between pressing the button on a remote control (or clicking a cursor on a picture of a button on a remote control) and typing in the search box of YouTube? The answer may be that the former is a tactile experience, albeit a simulated one. Look at all of those old-technology holdovers in our language – how many of them refer to a physical activity such as dialling, rewinding and clicking? As technology becomes increasingly digital, both in the sense that it is entirely computer-based and in the sense that our digits are the only part of our body that interacts with it, we may feel the lack of a tactile connection. More and more, technology is taking tasks that used to be done in the physical world and making them virtual. Consider the progress from the vinyl LP to the CD to the digital music player: from the tactile experience of fitting a needle into the groove (and seeing it skip if something went wrong), to putting a disc into the tray and watching it spin, to the inscrutable workings of a tiny metal and plastic box. Even as recent a technology as the fax has been virtualized: all of the physical properties of the task of faxing – printing a document, placing it in the machine, keying in (dialling?) the fax number, listening to the dial tone and eventual handshake noise, receiving the confirmation and reply on slick, curly paper – have been replaced by a direct computer-to-computer process.

Some new technologies try to incorporate a physical experience. The most successful digital-tactile hybrid is the iPhone, which uses accelerometers to translate actions – tilting, turning or shaking the phone – into digital processes. Some of the most successful apps for the iPhone have been those that directly reproduce tactile experiences: maze games, like those that once filled innumerable car-trip hours, in which a ball is guided through a maze; virtual Zippo lighters for holding up in tribute at rock concerts; and even applications, like the one pictured above, that turn it into a rotary phone. E-book readers, similarly, compete with one another to most fully reproduce the physical experience of reading a book: the Kindle’s “paper” screen, the tactile page-turning feature in Classics app for the iPhone, and the leather cover of the Sony e-Reader.

More evidence that we miss the tactile properties of old technology can be found in books such as The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Mysterious Benedict Society, both of which deny or at least ignore the virtual world. The first of these offers advice on a variety of old-school children’s activities such as building a fire, tying knots and folding paper airplanes; the second, a novel, features young protagonists who employ similar skills to foil an evil plot to brainwash the world’s children through TV. Although The Mysterious Benedict Society is ostensibly set in the present, the Internet is oddly absent: the characters are brought into the action by a classified ad in the newspaper, dictionaries and encyclopedias are consulted when information is needed, and Morse code is used in place of cell phones. Again, nostalgia is undoubtedly a factor here – the former book could easily be titled The Dangerous Book for Dads – but there’s also a genuine longing for a more physical, tactile world.

The irony is that being denied access to that physical world is a big part of what’s driven young people online; as writers such as Anastasia Goodstein and Dr. Tanya Byron have suggested, a lack of unstructured play is due largely to exaggerated fears of the dangers of letting kids go unsupervised – when in fact most parents of young children today grew up at a time when the crime rate was significantly higher. This has made the Internet the only place youth can go to experiment, test their limits and escape adult scrutiny, while parents look at their wired, over-scheduled children and feel pangs of nostalgia for their own days of racing bikes, burning ants with magnifying glasses, skinning knees and occasionally needing booster shots for tetanus.

How will the current generation of children feel about this? Most of the technologies that try to bring a tactile experience into the virtual world – the iPhone, the Wii – are aimed primarily at adults, not kids. Will today’s children eventually feel the lack of the physical in their online lives, or will they simply accept a world experienced only through the eyes, ears and fingertips?

Discussion Questions

• Do you think young people place less importance on a physical experience when using technology for work or play? Why or why not?
• Will technologies that try to bring a physical experience into their interface, such as the iPhone and Wii, be successful with young people or only adults? Why would this approach appeal or not appeal to young people?
• Is the phenomenon of “retro” kids’ books such as The Dangerous Books for Boys and The Mysterious Benedict Society something that appeals to young people, or just their parents?
• Is something important lost when technology becomes completely digital? Why or why not?
  

There’s an old urban legend called “the water engine,” which tells of the discovery of a way to turn water into fuel. There are variations to the story – sometimes it’s tap water, sometimes sea water; in recent versions it’s specified the fuel is nonpolluting – but the ending is always the same: the invention is suppressed by the oil companies, either by buying the invention and burying it or by forcing the inventor into ruin and suicide. One reason the legend has persisted so long – it’s been recorded as early as the 1950s, and probably dates to the first time someone grumbled about the cost of filling up his car – is because it confirms something we already believe, which is that the oil companies are evil and would rather murder a man and doom the world than sacrifice a dime of profit.

Today, of course, we know better: instead of suppressing the invention, oil companies would promise to develop it – sometime soon. (Remember the ad that ends with a single drop of water falling from a car’s tailpipe?) Now the name of the game, whether ads are selling cars, computers, paper towels or electricity, is to promote your product as being environmentally friendly, if not now then in the near future. Just like the water engine, though, many of these claims evaporate on close inspection. 

The exaggeration of environmental claims is common enough to have a name, “greenwashing,” and to have provoked a backlash (The Guardian even has a column devoted to exposing it.) Few countries have specific regulations about what can be called “green,” but specific claims can be investigated; the U.K. Advertising Standards Authority received more than 500 complaints about environmental claims in ads in 2007. No product category is immune to the green appeal, from cars to household cleanser and even green bullets. Some of these claims are laughably thin – a Japanese SUV that’s advertised as being from the home of the Kyoto Accords – while some are harder to judge, such as claims by Procter and Gamble that washing dishes in a dishwasher uses less energy than washing them by hand. Green can be more grey in cases where the environmentally friendly option is simply less bad for the environment than its competitors, such as water that comes in glass bottles instead of plastic. (Those glass bottles, incidentally, don’t generally get refilled or recycled as bottles; instead they’re crushed for a variety of industrial uses.)

For high-end items, green is often more of a fashion statement than a genuine environmental commitment. Bamboo, for instance, is frequently touted as a green alternative to wood – it grows much more quickly, being a grass, and can be used to make paper or for many of wood’s other functions – but has found its most visible role as a veneer applied to high-tech items such as computers and stereos. It’s a visible (and stylish) way to say “I’m concerned about the environment” that recycled toilet paper just can’t match.

The biggest green fashion, of course, is for hybrid cars: automakers have retired their humble-but-honest gas-sippers and replaced them with design-conscious status symbols. Though you might brag about the mileage you get from one of these cars, they’re priced high enough that you’d have to be constantly driving to actually save money with them. Now automakers are scrambling to produce the next season’s fashion, which will make hybrids look old and dull, the all-electric hydrogen car. This is the car mentioned at the beginning of this article, which will have no emissions other than water, and be the quintessential green car – except  that the electricity it runs on has to come from somewhere, and in North America that somewhere is most often a coal-fired plant. If it’s not, it’s likely to be a nuclear plant or else a hydroelectric dam, which the James Bay Cree can tell you is not necessarily environmentally friendly. The electric car is really a tool for pushing the environmental costs of driving out of sight and, automakers hope, out of mind.

There’s no question that consumers are keen to buy green: a recent study shows that over three-quarters of consumers identified themselves as “green,” 71 per cent of those surveyed said they were interested in buying a more environmentally friendly car, and just over half had made a purchase they identified as green in the previous six months. The disparity between those numbers – half again as many people said they made environmentally sound purchases as actually did it – suggests that for many people green may be no more than skin deep. Many people, it would seem, are happy to greenwash themselves.

For those who are serious about making a difference through their purchases, though, it can be tough to tell which green claims are legitimate. It’s worth trying: in our consumer society, what we buy has more influence on the world around us than nearly anything else we do. (Depending on where you live, it may count more than your vote.)

As with all advertising claims, the best defense is critical thinking and an understanding of how ads work. Fred Pearce, in the Guardian’s “Greenwashing” column, suggests a number of warning signs to watch for: vague claims, use of “nature” imagery in packaging, and profiles of scientists on staff working on green projects. For teachers, MNet lessons such as Advertising All Around Us, Creating a Marketing Frenzy, Hype!, Scientific Detectives and the Marketing to Teens series offer a way to teach their students to view ads and advertising claims skeptically.

There are also a number of online resources available for the concerned consumer. The Competition Bureau and Canadian Standards Association has released an industry guide to making accurate environmental claims while the US Federal Trade Commission has prepared a report, “Sorting Out ‘Green’ Advertising Claims,” that clearly explains what different claims mean. Two Web sites, GoodGuide and Green Wikia, provide more information about specific claims and products. GoodGuide is a research-based site which studies and reviews products that make environmental claims, while Green Wikia is a collaborative “Wiki” project that aims to do the same thing. Both sites are free to use, and users can access GoodGuide’s data through mobile devices by texting a product’s UPC code.

A recent issue of Entertainment Weekly was devoted to a list of so-called “new classics,” a top one-hundred list of the best movies, books, TV shows, and so on, published since 1983. The lists themselves are liable to provoke discussion (Die Hard is #9, ahead of Goodfellas, Schindler’s List and Unforgiven?) but perhaps a more interesting question is whether, in the Media Age, the very idea of a “classic” still means anything.

• List two or three books, movies or TV shows you consider to be “classics.” What makes you think of them that way? Do you think that your friends would agree with you? How about your parents or teachers? Why or why not?

• Is there anything you can think of that everyone might agree is a “classic”? What makes it that way?

• How often do you think “classic” is used in a negative way? Why do you think it has both a positive and a negative meaning?

• Do you think anything will be widely regarded as a “classic” in the future? Why or why not?

• Can something be a “classic” if only a small group of people consider it to be one? Why or why not?

There’s no question that credit cards are intimately tied into consumerism. Some scholars, such as Claudette Levesque Ware, have suggested that things like credit cards train us to define our lives in terms of what we buy. As Ware puts it, “the influences of corporate politics, the commercialization of culture, and the impact of the mass media have given rise to artificial material wants that many consumers tend to interpret as genuine human needs.” This idea has been around for a while, of course – at least since the 19^th Century, when Thorstein Veblen first coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” – but the explosion of mass media, particularly television, has made people more keen than ever to emulate the wealthy and fashionable. Harvard professor Juliet Schor, in her book Do Americans Shop Too Much?, suggests that television has led consumers to compare themselves to TV characters rather than their neighbours, and to borrow money to do it.

On November 23rd concerned citizens in as many as 65 countries will participate in the 15^th annual Buy Nothing Day. Timed to coincide with one of the busiest shopping days of the year—the day after the American Thanksgiving—Buy Nothing Day encourages a 24-hour moratorium on consumer spending.

The international event has been gaining momentum in light of rising awareness of the impacts of climate change, prompting more people to seek greener alternatives to unrestrained consumption. 

The day is an opportune time to get young people to think about the impact of mass consumerism on the cultural and natural environment of the world. 

For Discussion

Ask students:  

• How does our current level of consumption of consumer goods affect the global environment?
• How do our purchasing choices affect the environment? (For example, what are the pros and cons of purchasing locally grown food from markets or butchers compared to buying mass-produced food products from a supermarket?) 
• What actions can companies and manufacturers take to help minimize waste associated with consumption and the packaging of products? (For example, companies can use minimal amount of packaging as possible, use materials that can be recycled or require less energy to manufacture.)

• As Christmas approaches, what types of messages surrounding consumption do they anticipate encountering on television, radio and in the malls?
• What types of products are usually highlighted before Christmas? What types of products are people encouraged to consume for the holiday season?

Activities
  

• Have students follow the advertising campaign for one or more toys during December. Have them track where they’ve encountered advertisements (television, catalogues, online, advertisements in malls) for the toys. Ask them what types of messages are associated with the product’s advertisements.
• Ask students to design a Christmas public service announcement that stresses the non-commercial aspects of the Christmas season.  

For more ideas and activities on the topics of consumption and commercialism, visit the teachable moments Buy Nothing Day and Christmas Commercialism.