I Have a Face

By David, Grade 5, Jeanne Sauve French Immersion School, London, Ontario, Canada

I have hair,
So my head's not bare.
I have ears,
So I can hear.
I have eyes,
So things may maximize.
I have a nose,
Because the nose always knows.
I have a mouth,
So I can shout.
I have teeth,
So I can have treats.
And I have a face,
So I can put those things some place. (n.p.)

David is an Internet writer who submitted this poem to KidNews, a site for kids' writing I started in February, 1995. David has a face which has organized for him an admirably coherent sense of his universe. The Internet, on the other hand, has no face. It is an enormous, alarmingly fast-growing blob that reminds me of a frightening dream I had as a child. In the dream, an amoeba-like blob grew and grew and grew. As it grew, I became more and more frightened, but I didn't know what the object of my fear really was. It threatened to crowd me out of myself, to suffocate me, and it was its lack of shape, its amorphous slitheryness and absence of definition that made it worse than any monster I could imagine. Sometimes this growing blob seemed to me to be the end of the world.

The Internet sometimes gives me the same sensation...a slithery, ever- growing monster that becomes more dangerous, more chaotic, more lost, more dizzying, more frightening as it grows. It is an electronic fun-house mirror of all we know that is growing so fast that I can't really say it's evolving...a word that presupposes an organizational principle. The other day I did a simple search using Alta Vista, Digital's robust search engine. I typed in 'kids' and a few seconds later was told that I had 300,000 choices. Somewhere in that vast lonely crowd KidNews' 4000 authors were chirping away.

Over the past year I've done hundreds of Yahoo searches and found this admirably ambitious indexing tool to be increasingly less useful, while full-blown search engines like Alta Vista have become simply absurd. There are explanations, of course. There are skillful uses of Boolean algebra. But my goal was to assume the role of a new Internet user looking for something worthwhile for my kids. I had hoped for a short list and instead got the equivalent of the yellow pages of an enormous urban phone directory. It reminded me of my childhood nightmare.

When I first opened KidNews to public view on my university server in February, 1995, the World Wide Web was a relatively new phenomenon mostly known only to academics, computer junkies, government officials, and forward-thinking business people. Within a year, KidNews grew to the point that it was attracting nearly as many hits as our entire university server. It was taking up too much band width and not enough people could get in, plus there were enough shutdowns and server problems so that I decided to move to a commercial site. I decided I would try to sell sponsorships, and try to run KidNews like a real newspaper hoping that it would at least pay for itself.

To my surprise, finding sponsors was not easy, and with over 60,000 hits a month and hundreds of new submissions, I didn't have time to market my site and be its editor at the same time. I had to make a choice, and I chose being editor and neglected its marketing. My third alternative would have been to take out a loan, hire some helpers, and turn KidNews into a real business with ad people, marketing specialists, assistant editors, and the whole nine yards. This presumably would have allowed KidNews to grow enormously from 55,000 or so hits a month to a million or so. That would have put me into some numbers of interest to advertisers, but it would also have meant a huge influx of new submissions and a ton of new heavy maintenance required in setting all the new writing in hypertext mark-up language (HTML) and posting new submissions in my menus and various files. It would also have turned me into a manager, which I had hoped to avoid at all costs. KidNews is what's known as a heavy maintenance site, very different from the vast majority of sites that post a few static pieces of information and sit there passively hoping for visitors. These low maintenance sites are very cost effective, very easy to run, and threaten to swamp the Web in a drab sea of mediocrity.

One of the seeming virtues of the Internet is that it has made publishing an almost purely democratic activity. For very little money, just about everyone and anyone with a little computer know-how could open their own Web site and begin a publishing fiefdom. Being able to speak to the world has always been the favored privilege of the wealthy and powerful, but the Internet changed that... at least for a time. But gradually this pure democracy is receding under the volume of its own mass, and the power of money and privilege is threatening to engulf the Web. KidNews is illustrative. Beginning as a one-person publishing venue by a teacher (myself) and a bunch of kids around the world, KidNews grew rapidly in relatively uncrowded field. Before long schools began publishing their own work, even though KidNews offered to do it for them. Other kids' sites sprang up by the dozen, but the biggest change was the emergence of corporate kids' sites by Disney, toy companies, cereal and kids' food manufacturers, publishers, software companies, and Internet entrepreneurs. Armed with games and promotions that gathered information and lists of product buyers, many of these sites aggressively pursued buyers rather than provided genuine services, and nearly all of them entered the field as low-maintenance sites, taking a great deal more than they gave back.

According to a recent study by the Center for Media Education (CME) of Washington, DC, commercial Web site exploitation of children has already reached an alarming stage:

This investigation has uncovered a number of disturbing new practices. They pose two kinds of threats: 1) invasion of children's privacy through solicitation of personal information and tracking of online computer use; and 2) exploitation of vulnerable, young computer users through new unfair and deceptive forms of advertising. Many of the practices... are already in place. Industry sources expect other, more problematic practices to be rolled out in the near future. (n.p.)

While criticized for being a bit too shrill by free speech absolutists and Internet freedom advocates, the study nonetheless describes practices that are dubious at best and increasingly setting the trend in this harshly competitive market:

Marketers have devised a variety of techniques to collect detailed data and to compile individual profiles on children. For example, children are offered free gifts such as T-shirts or chances to win prizes like portable CD players if they will fill out online surveys about themselves. Tracking technologies make it possible to monitor every interaction between a child and an advertisement. The ultimate goal is to create personalized interactive ads designed to "microtarget" the individual child. (CME, n.p.)

In order to attract kids to these surveys, sites provide games and activities that lure them:

Entire electronic advertising "environments" have been built to entice children to spend countless hours playing with such popular product "spokescharacters" as Tony the Tiger, Chester Cheetah, and Snap! Crackle! & Pop! Interactive forms of product placement are being developed to encourage children to click on icons in their favorite games and play areas and immediately be transported to advertising sites. (CME, n.p.)


Unlike the numerous low-impact sites swamping much of the Net in drab mediocrity, these are expensive, flashy sites increasingly replete with Java bells and whistles, animations, and advanced uses of Internet technology. Yet, at the same time, they are mostly low-maintenance sites that use computer technology to create an illusion of personal contact. So even though the technology may be expensive, the sites are often mechanical and, in the long run, cheap and easy to maintain.
As a software designer and author, I've always resented the notion that computers are somehow impersonal, a priori, and that users are invariably being manipulated by lifeless electronic impulses, in effect, turning the users into quasi robots. Computers are authored media, the same as books, and good software conveys the creativity, intelligence, and essential values of software authors. The flip side of this assertion is that bad, exploitive, and destructive software should be held to the same authorship standards as books and magazines. It's not the computer's fault; it's the fault of people who develop this stuff. Similarly, it's easy to depersonalize the Internet and ascribe to it these roboticizing attributes. But the Internet is really an authored medium, too, but one so large that it is turning amorphous, faceless, and beyond control or convenient differentiation. It's hard to describe it without being reminded that it sounds like an organism riddled with metastasizing cancer.

Trying to impose a moral order on the Internet, however, is an equally disquieting problem because governments and controlling agents that select and censor Internet material so often remind us of tyranny. It would be a monumental irony if this beast that began in the form of nearly perfect democracy could end up being an instrument of the most colossal thought-control totalitarianism ever devised. The U.S. government is only one among many governments that has attempted to legislate the moral content of the Internet. Emerging to counter these forces are advocates for user and author rights.


According to Justin D'Onofrio, 15, writing for the 19 June 1996 Netizen:
Children need to know that they have certain rights: the right to stand up to adults; the right to talk with their political leaders; and, most importantly, the right to comprehend the rights they have been given. (n.p.)

Jonathan Katz, Editor of Wired and Hotwired's 'Media Rant,' likens kids' Internet rights to rights of various minority and oppressed groups:

These kids, it seemed to me, have inalienable rights of access to their rich new culture. (It has become)... clear that children are not being given truthful information about danger and violence. Middle-class computer users are far less likely than their inner-city counterparts to ever be in real personal danger. The fact that the media ignores the real-world danger in favor of hyping the perils imagined online is what got me going. I hope kids, especially older kids who act responsibly, will be accorded some of the basic rights and dignities that other groups - women, blacks, gays - are fighting for and winning. Culture and technology are critical to the young. The Internet is their medium. Nobody should have the right to arbitrarily throw them off it or restrict their access without just cause. (n.p.)

Katz is an ardent critic of such software control mechanisms as Surfwatch which he describes as 'Software that blocks kids' online freedom.' He says that Net Nanny, another software screening tool, keeps 'kids safe whether they want it or not,' and while such groups as the Frontier Foundation work against censorship for adults, children's rights are virtually ignored.

Ultimately schools will have a huge impact on children's access to Internet freedom. While surprisingly slow in gaining access to so rich an educational resource, schools are gradually climbing onto the Web. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, however, that the content of curriculum falls within the control of school authorities. In its controversial Hazelwood decision over a decade ago, the court ruled that even student newspapers were a part of a school curriculum and that the content of such newspapers could be controlled by school authorities. As schools access Internet material for their curricula, the use of 'censoring' software will undoubtedly become universal. And the content of the Web seeping into the schools will undoubtedly provoke parent and community involvement that is highly protective. Teachers, in the interest of avoiding battles and reducing Internet overload, will be motivated to channel Internet content to a trickle of carefully controlled, essentially conservative sites that match broad (which is to say very safe) school materials guidelines.

The attitudes of parents are far less predictable. KidNews requires signed parents' permission by slow mail before posting e-mail addresses of kids seeking pen-pals. Hundreds of parents have submitted such forms, most of them eager for the 'opportunity' for their kids to converse with other kids around the world. But other parents are considerably more cautious, some of them bordering on paranoia. After KidNews ran an innocuous story by a Cambridge, Massachusetts sixth grader reporting that his school sponsored a gay rights history week, several parents wrote angry letters condemning KidNews for exposing kids to information about homosexuality. One parent, involved in advocating safe sites for kids in her region, said she was removing KidNews from her recommended list and would warn parents and teachers because I had run the Cambridge story.

According to Rebecca Kochenderfer, Editor of Edusource Web Reviews, an on-line newsgroup newsletter, 'The Internet truly is a global community and like any community I suppose it pays to be 'street smart.' We'll just have to train our children, students, and ourselves to treat the Internet like we would our telephone, television and front door.' (n.p.) Clearly the Internet is a public environment, a lot less dangerous than streets, malls, and public places and mostly less insidious than television. But it is a public arena, and e-mail is an electronic point of intrusion...a point of personal contact with faceless outsiders not afforded yet by TV. No amount of advocacy for freedom will erase fears by substantial segments of the population who want access by their children at no risk of exposure to the Internet's sometimes ugly underbelly. And access without risk is a prescription for regulation and government control. Indeed, the concluding recommendations from the Center for Media Education study called for government intervention: 'Given the inability of most parents to monitor their children's activities online, and the unlikely prospect of adequate industry self-regulation, the best hope for children is a regulatory framework which will give them the protection they need.' (n.p.)

On a brief stop not so long ago on the light-speed clock of Internet time travel, I had a notion that the Web had the potential to revolutionize children's literacy. Hypertext, afterall, is text and requires reading. And interactivity, among other things, requires writing. These activities have fallen into shocking decline in the U.S. as a result of the alarming increase of TV viewing by children. The X-generation represented the first wave of post-literate, image saturated children, and in America these X'ers posted horrible scores in reading, writing, math, and general knowledge compared to children in other nations and past generations of Americans. Then along came the Web, and kids started reading and writing again. They often spent more time using computers than watching TV, and I began feeling more optimistic about the future of reading and writing.

But then along came Java and various animation, sound, video, and interactive helper applications that could be activated by browsers. Just as in the early 1980's in the world of computer applications, hypertext will soon replaced by multi-media and hypermedia. When CD's, gigabytes, and speedy computers arrived a few years ago, out went text-intensive educational software, replaced by multimedia cartoons and dazzling CD's laced with movies. By the early 1990s, it was possible to travel to France via CD and learn conversational French by listening to and interacting with real-time TV characters wrestling with landlords, engaging in simulated telephone conversations, and fumbling through complex problems reflecting life's real choices and blunders. Software designers at M.I.T. introduced this magical world in 1993. Great stuff... a wonderful way to learn a language. But the mere introduction of multimedia, interactive TV spelled an immediate decline in the use of text as a dominant communications channel in educational software.
The same is happening with the Internet. A small California company called Marimba told Wired Magazine in November 1996 that it was releasing a software product called Castanet that would turn Web browsers into the equivalent of interactive TV transmitters, thus allowing computer applications, movies, TV segments, and the sort of multimedia mix we now see on CD's to be delivered to a home computer via the Internet. Marimba is a little company made up of former 'core members' of the Java Development team at Sun Microsystems (Freund, 122), and they are in a race with Microsoft to revolutionize the Internet and leave the Web, as we now know it, in a digital universe even less interesting than 'gopher' sites are to Web users today. So much for my visions of a rebirth of text-based literacy via hypertext.

The pattern is a familiar one. In the early days of microcomputers, it was possible for reasonably clever people to sit at their computers and design remarkably good text-intensive software at very little cost. The first stage of the micro revolution was a cottage industry. Apple Computer emerged from a cluttered garage. The world of publishing was vastly expanded, and microcomputers delivered a refreshing democracy of ideas largely via text-intensive applications and tools. Even relatively non-technical people could compete in this world. As an English teacher without a clue about computers, I was able to teach myself programming and published a text-intensive educational program called Super Scoop through a little company called COMPress headquartered in a New Hampshire farm house.

A decade later I was still designing software, but the power and speed of computers had increased so drastically that my new publishers at Tom Snyder Productions vetoed a good deal of my art work and handed it over to a professional team of illustrators who could take advantage of th extraordinary new levels of resolution. Had I launched the project two or three years later after my 1991 start-up, I would have used large segments of video in addition to drawings, considerable blocks of sound in addition to text. By the time my Classroom Newspaper Workshop was published in 1994, the technology had changed so drastically that I would never have been able to design this software largely on my own. It would have been a team project entirely, with TV production crews, professional animators, and Disney-like production values. Gone were the days of my one-person cottage industry and perhaps never again will I be able to call myself a software author. There is no such creature any more in commercial software publishing. Gone, too, are many of the small, inventive companies that produced these programs. COMPress was swallowed by Queue, an industry giant which buys software company lists but produces almost no new work. Tom Snyder Productions was acquired by the Toronto Star publishing empire and is now heavily involved in television. Small inventive, companies at the cutting edge of new ideas are gobbled up at a dizzying rate by industry giants.

The same pattern is occurring with the Internet. A simple technology is giving way to complex programming and multiple forms of production requiring teams of specialized people. These teams are expensive which means large, well financed companies will eventually gain control of increasingly larger and larger segments of the Internet. But the critical factor is that once new technologies emerge, old technologies inevitably fall away. Hypertext, the backbone of the World Wide Web, is already obsolete, and the multimedia tools replacing it will be dominated by teams from well-financed production companies and software giants. The next generation of Internet designers will be team members... script writers, actors, animators, programmers, producers... all employees and cogs in larger wheels.

Cottage industry democracy will have been replaced by marketplaces, authors by committees, invention as the power of imagination by invention as the power of producers to swing viable deals. The end-game of this process will be interactive television, an Internet delivered to TV screens dominated by visuals and sound with a default standard similar to what has evolved in TV news: if you don't have video, it's not news! Text-based interactively will be part of the interplay, but not a major part.

Because all of these components are so expensive, there will be many fewer experiments, fewer risks, less invention, much greater emphasis on mass appeal, huge 'click-through rates,' and dazzling ratings. Remarkable individual initiatives so frequently found on today's Internet either will be swallowed up or tucked away in obscure corners... back to the old days of obscure journals and old-fashioned databases... gopherized in the dark twitchy shadows of a new Internet glitz and razzle dazzle.

The future looks too much like the past for me to feel very optimistic. Maybe we are already experiencing a golden age of media literacy, a quick flicker of activity before Hollywood pumps the Net to the bursting point with a new generation of flashy content... my childhood nightmare arriving with mind-boggling special effects.

In the meantime, I'll close with a few excerpts from KidNews where today's kids reveal a fun mix of savvy and innocence in the simple world of text (parenthetical remarks mine). These are the multi-media team members of the future, the next wave of Internet entrepreneurs. Maybe they'll get it right; maybe things are better than they look.


-- TV can rot your brain (On today's media)

By Lila, Grade 7, Jonas Clarke Middle School, Lexington, Massachusetts, USA

Okay, here's the deal. Too many kids are sitting around watching TV, or using it as a sense of entertainment.

Watching TV sometimes is fine, maybe when you're tired, or your favorite show is on. But to just turn it on, sit down, and not even care what is on is a waste. When I was little, I watched the television all the time. But I learned from it! Then I took what I saw and started doing things, such as save our earth bumperstickers, or can drives.

Sure, sometimes I do just sit down in front of the TV, but it is never because I am bored! Television can be great, but if you use it the wrong way, it rots your brain.

-- Tired of being screamed at... (On justice)

My name is K. I am 10 years old and live in New Jersey. I hate it when aides in our lunchroom stand there and scream at you. I don't see why they can't just talk nicely and tell you to be good. My teacher tells us not to talk in class and "Save it for lunch time." When we go to lunch the aides tell us to be quiet. So when can we talk?

-- Making Good Money Walking Dogs (On free enterprise and the child's wage)

Michael, Grade 5, Homeschool, Naperville, Illinois, USA
I make about $6 an hour by just walking other people's dogs. I mean, come on,that's $2256 per year. Maybe kids should make a dollar or two more, but that's still a lot of money.

--Why do Dogs Bark So Much? (On forgiveness)

By Alie, 6th Grade, Mary Peacock Elementary, Crescent City, California, USA

My dog barks a LOT!! She barks at every person that walks by!!

It is so annoying! But I still love her even though she would most likely bark at her own reflection!

--Kids' don't talk too much! (A reply to another message alleging that kids and especially girls talk too much)

By Bizzy , Grade 9, Illinois, U.S.A.

Paul:

Excuse me, but number one: What do you mean by kids talk a lot? Kids talk, but not too much! In fact, I love rumors! Every day, I look forward to school because of all the rumors! Life would not be worth living without gossip!

Second: Hello! I'm sorry but girls don't talk more than boys! At least not in the school I go to! But I guess you'll learn that when you get older.

--Mommy Saves Squirrel (Breaking news)

By Jana, Grade 1, Bruce Shulkey Elementary School, Fort Worth, Texas, USA

Mommy came home and said I have a squirrel in the car. Daddy took pictures. The squirrel was hit by a car. He woke up in Mommy's car. He was ok. My brother Eric let him go in our back yard. The squirrel let us pick him up. The End.

-- When You Were Little And I Was Big (On parenting)

By Krystal, Grade 5, J.V.Humphries School, Kaslo, British Columbia, Canada

Mommy, I am going to tell you a story about when you were little and I was big.

When you were little and I was big, I never got mad when you woke me up early and wanted to get in bed with me.

When you were little and I was big, you picked all the yellow daffodils in the front yard just for me.

When you were little and I was big I took you to work with me.

When you were little and I was big, I played doctor and dolls and trucks with you all day long.

When you were little and I was big, I didn't take your gum away when you unrolled all the toilet paper.

When you were little and I was big, we looked for a hippopotamus- a Mommy hippopotamus, and a Daddy hippopotamus and a baby. We never found a hippopotamus, not even one!

When you were little and I was big, you cried and cried when Daddy had to go away. I hugged you tight.

When you were little and I was big, I put tree band-aids on Teddy when he fell and hurt his knee.

When you were little and I was big, I always go on the big toilet and you never fell in.

When you were little and I was big, I let you stay up late and watch T.V. on Saturday night.

When you were little and I was big, Kanga and Slinkey and Tiger and Frog all got in the bathtub with you every single night.

When you were little and I was big.


--A Mother's Voice (On life and death)

By Julia, 8th Grade, James Lick Middle School, San Francisco, California, USA

I never knew much about her, not as much as a daughter should know. Sure, I knew those big chunks like how many languages she knew and her education, but those things aren't important, not to me.

What I want to know is the sound of her voice. I remember her telling me to lay on my stomach when it hurt, but I don't remember the voice that said it.

I want to know how it feels to have a mother hug me. I feel guilty about not remembering, and there is nothing I can do about it. I knew how it felt ten years ago, but that is a long time ago, especially if you are only thirteen-years-old.

I want to know how she acted. People try to tell me only the good things, but I also want to know about the bad. They say I act like her. I wouldn't know if I did.

I wish I could see what she looked like. I have a million photographs of her, but those don't show every freckle, every line, every eye lash.

Big chunks don't make a life. It's the little things that make a person a human and a human an individual. Remember a person when they are there and don't forget them when they are gone.

Me, my mother and my grandmother at Muir Woods in May of 1986, less than a month before my mother's death on June 3rd, 1986. She was 43. I was three.



Works Cited


Center for Media Education (CME). 'Web of Deception: Threats to Children from Online Marketing.'
http://tap.epn.org/cme/cmwdecov.html (1996).

David, 'I Have a Face,' KidNews,
http://www.vsa.cape.com/~powens/Canadian.html (19 Dec. 1996).

D'Onofrio, Justin. 'A Room for Kids: Kids Report.' Netizen. URL:
http://www.netizen.com/netizen/96/25/kid2a.html (19 June 1996).

Freund, Jesse. 'Tuning in to Marimba.' Wired. November, 1996.

Katz, Jonathan. 'The Rights of Children in the Digital Age' HotWired.
http://www.hotwired.com/wired_online/4.07/kids/index.html
20 June, 1996

KidNews excerpts. KidNews. URL:
http://www.vsa.cape.com/~powens/Kidnews3.html (1995, 1996, 1997).

Kochenderfer, Rebecca. 'Fun Sites for Kids.' Edusource Web Reviews.
http://www.vsa.cape.com/~powens/newsletter.html (Aug./Sept. 1996).


© Peter Owens

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