What Matters Online

If anyone catches this blog, you might also want to read my Internet marketing/social media blog, What Matters Online, at http://whatmattersonline.wordpress.com/.

Does my 3-year-old need an MP3 player?

My three year old Dorian (the muffin-smeared wretch on the right) is an absolute digital addict. He speaks Internet fluently, for a baby at least, using the terms "click," "download," and "online" appropriately and often. He plays Flash games for literally hours at a time without break--he's a Nick Jr. branding guy's dream--and just adores PC and console gaming. Unlike Mommy, he's a Sonic freak. He really digs Civilization III and can't wait to see the warriors wail on each other. Sometimes it's hard to get him to bed because he wants to stay in the digital world just a few minutes more. Even my Dad, who was at the forefront of the computer revolution in the sixties, would have found it hard to imagine his grandson's absolute commitment to computing.

I guess that explains why marketers at Fischer-Price, a company that has kept its place in the world of toys for a reason, is introducing a baby MP3 device it tags the Kid-Tough FP3 Player. The device, which retails for $70, is part of Fischer-Price's "Preschool Electronics" product line. Somehow, this gives me the sense that Dori is not as unique as I thought he was. Amazing as it seems to a person raised on television and books--both of which are physically inert and can't be changed by interaction--I see that my baby is going to grow up in a world where his toys respond to his command in amazing ways. I'm in no way unhappy about this, mind you...I think Dori can handle the world he's living in. I just can't help but find it a bit disorienting.

No surprise: Kids are big mobile spenders

Apparently, today's 10-year-olds will spend more than $15K on mobile services by the time they're 35. This information comes courtesy of the World Wireless Forum, which just completed a study on the mobile market among youths.

According to the study, kids and young adults are gobbling up text messaging, mobile music and mobile radio services at a pace well ahead of the rest of the world. The mobile industry is counting on these youngsters to spark growth in what is otherwise a fairly "mature"--read, low growth--business for the carriers. In other words, mobile folks need to make the next gen into addicted spenders if they're going to keep making a reasonable profit. But luckily for them, getting today's younger gen to spend on mobile is a cinch--just a matter of dropping a spark on some very dry tinder.

My first-grader and preschooler are already major digital consumers, they see Daddy and Mommy using the Internet every day, and they own every gaming platform and PC imaginable. For these guys, I think, nothing short of a virtual-gaming and mobile-texting capable, Internet-friendly and cell-network connected skin implant will do the trick. No wonder The Sims was such a major hit--our kids are becoming Sims, living more in the mobile, digital, virtual world than they do in the one in front of them. God only knows what my three year old, who's already having long imaginary talks on his toy cell phone, will be spending by the time he's ten!

Protecting a new right

So AOL has had a management shakeup over the disclosure of potentially personalizable search activity data by 650,000 members. Apparently, a few staff members were canned, but more importantly, the media giant's chief technology officer has left under a cloud.

What fascinates me about these data-privacy battles--which, as Net veterans know, have surfaced now and again for years--is the extent to which they are a new societal issue. While massive offline databases have been on the fringes of consumer consciousness for decades, never before has there been such an organized resistance to the aggregation and disclosure of personal data. But then again, there's never been such a massive amount of data following us around before.

My grandmother, for example, didn't have to give personally-identifiable digital information a thought. When she applied for a loan in the 1940s, there were no credit databases; from what she told me, all she needed a handshake and proof that she was working. No dragging around the albatross of a (potentially misleading or incorrect) credit report.

My mom, for her part, may have needed to have a clean credit report when she got her first home mortgage, but I doubt that she had reason to be afraid that her personal medical or shopping history would become part of public discourse. At the very least, she didn't have to worry about the data ending up on the Internet, freely distributed for any yahoo to drool over--or use as the basis to sell her designer pharmaceuticals.

My generation, though, has everything to worry about when it comes to dispersed digital identitities. For us, it's become a core value to fight the aggregation of data, and particularly, the distribution of personal data in the public marketplace. Folks like me that grew into middle age as the Web emerged know in our bones that this medium can destroy us just by "knowing" too much about us. It's not even that we've done anything we're ashamed of; we just don't want to be pawed over. So we fight, instinctively, for a right to digital privacy our parents and grandparents never knew existed.

When I was a child experimenting with primitive computing, I never imagined the day in which it wouldn't be an unqualified friend and tool. But the reality is, the downside of digital technology is living through mind-boggling expansions of its reach...especially its power to expose us to the elements. And believe me, being profiled as part of the raucous, bored, redneck-friendly AOL public square is a fate I'd particularly like to avoid.

I buy therefore I am

Over the past several months, biometric technology vendor Pay By Touch has begun working with some mainstream retailers to set up and get the bugs out of fingerprint-based commerce.

Pay By Touch is based in San Francisco, suggesting that this idea has, if nothing else, a serious hipness quotient. And it's venture-capital funded to the rather serious tune of $60 million. Neither of these impress me much. But what does catch my attention is that this company is actually testing the technology in several real-world settings, including Pathmark stores, Albertsons and Star Markets. This is not a toy or bleeding edge application--it's something as mundane as buying your groceries. I must admit that I'm excited...and appallled...and fascinated.

For me at least, there's something impersonal and vaguely threatening about the idea of merging your unique fingerprint with the world of financial databases and electronic funds transfers. To be honest, it sort of gives me the creeps to share my very skin with vendors, no less so because there allegedly have been cases where thieves chopped of the fingers of those who used biometrics for banking.

Paradoxically, that the very things that make fingerprint identification a scary notion make it seem quite appealing as well. For a digital citizen like myself, there's something thrilling--even awe-inspiring--about the idea of merging your finances and physical self. Complete information immersion, after all, is the ultimate goal of any dedicated Internet user (okay, for me at least). Even with my atavistic alarm bells going off, I find the idea of biometric buying too seductive to avoid. So Pay To Touch, and competitors, bring it on!

Mom's senior moment

While my kids and I are of the digital generation, my mother falls on the opposite side of the scale. She views my father's Compaq with a mix of fear and disdain; in fact, watching her, you'd think she's afraid it will bite. And writing e-mail? A tremendous effort that she'll only consider under the most dire of circumstances, awkwardly hunt-and-pecking out what she has to say.

It's not that Mom lacks a compelling motive to go online. After all, three of her five children volley e-mail back and forth non-stop, and we live too far away from her for her to interact with us much otherwise. But according to research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, she's typical. While about three-quarters of people aged 51-59 go online, only a third or so of Americans aged 65+ have ventured into the online world. It seems that they share my Mom's wariness. "If she really wants to e-mail someone, she'll have Dad do it," my sister notes.

Oh, and then there's that other technology breakthrough which seems to have met her needs far better. A few years ago, Mom signed up for cell service "just for emergencies," and seldom touched the handset. But now she carries her cell at all times, and if you want to reach her, calling her cell is by far the best way to do it. I guess the combination of convenience and familiarity (she has used a telephone her entire life) provided a much stronger attraction.

Now, I could attempt to reason with Mom. I've explained at length the ways in the Internet can add to your life in ways that cellular (all right, perhaps PCS if you want to get technical) service can't. But it's just not something she can absorb. After 64 years as a non-networked person, it's completely out of her frame of reference...something she can't imagine using successfully, or for that matter, wanting to do so. And I guess that's something I'll have to accept. But let's face it: every now and then my inner Internet evangelist will rise up and share the joys of connected life, and I guess that's something she'll have to accept, too.

Swimming in digits

Benny and Dorian are normal suburban kids with a decent set of digital toys.

That is to say that at ages six and three, Benny and Dori own--and bicker over daily--a Gamecube and Nintendo64, NintendoDS, the educational gaming console vSmile, a mid-range desktop PC, an obsolete Mac running OS 8 and CD/DVD players for each of their rooms.

Our family owns perhaps fifty educational games for the PC. Most of them are in regular rotation between Son 1 and Son 2, with the baby taking the lead. (One of Dori's favorite activities is to fire up his Sesame Street game and tickle Elmo with a digital feather.)

My boys watch movies on a computer monitor and listen to MP3s acquired virtually through Real's Rhapsody service. When my six-year-old wants to find out how a volcano works, he asks me to look it up online. The three-year-old spends hours at a time playing Flash games on PlayhouseDisney.com (he prefers Internet Explorer, to my chagrin), navigating through most games himself with great aplomb and startlingly focused attention.

Now, I am the child of one of the tech industry's first programmers--Dad worked for Sylvania in 1963--and I was my own generation's version of a digital kid. I spent countless hours playing "Adventure" via my father's work mainframe, and the scream of the VAX connecting through the toaster-sized 300 baud modem was music to my ears. My family had one of the first Atari systems, and a nice set of games to go with it, which I played obsessively. Hey, I even fell in love with calculators, working a paper route with manic energy until I could buy one of my own.

But unlike me, Benny and Dori are starting out life living in this world--and their thought processes are intricately linked to their digital habits. (Benny describes using his imagination as "running the Photoshop in my mind.") They're submerged in the digital ocean all of the time.

With an online journalist for a mom, and Web designer for a dad, maybe they had a bit of a leg up in all of this. But that doesn't make their immersion any less remarkable, or profound.

Could it be that all of this online play and learning has shaped their thoughts into forms I wouldn't recognize? I may never know. But given the wonders evolving in the digital world every day, I'm willing to take that risk.