Tom Keenan: I recently heard a privacy expert railing about KidsCom and how it invades the privacy of children as young as five years old—the site gives kids cash points if they sign up their friends. eKids has been given $15 million by Hewlett Packard; this is viral marketing where you get it for free for six months, then you have to start paying for it or sign up a friend. So when you see the likes of Hewlett Packard getting behind this, it’s an interesting statement. Disney now has an Australian site: Disney.com.au. This is part of the big trend of localization and having the ability to speak to kids all over the world in a way that’s meaningful to them. Then we have the Playstation which, in my opinion, is the secret weapon of the future. When we put all this together, I think we have an interesting time ahead of us.

Frank Boyd: I started out working with the community arts movement and with people who were excluded from the mainstream and had no means of self-expression. We looked at ways of developing processes to allow these people access to every aspect of the creative development of a project. Then we started a multimedia company—this was 1978, when none of us had yet seen a computer.

It was vital to find a way of opening up the creative development process while guaranteeing a quality product. People, particularly kids, have high standards and are not satisfied with anything of poor quality. We became skilled at balancing the challenge of producing work which satisfied artists, and giving them access to a process that allowed self-expression. The important principal is empowerment and what develops from that.

Digital technology has changed everything, of course. In 1990, we started looking at creative applications of computer technology. We sought out the most marginalized people in the labour market and offered them training. Lately, we’ve been working with independent producers with experience in interactive media, and looking at how to use the principal of interactivity to create something that can be a commercial proposition. Then I was approached by the BBC to show television producers how they can adapt their skills to interactivity and new media.

As far as kids are concerned, there’s no reason for moral panic about the proliferation of technologies and kids’ access to them. Neither is there a case for euphoria about the electronic generation that’s going to be in control of technology and participating in electronic democracy. The truth is somewhere in between. What we do have is a responsibility to ensure that interactivity is used to empower young people—it’s critical that we find ways of engaging them. But there are major issues: of privacy, and the polarization between media-rich and media-poor.

The last fifty years of media has been an aberration in the history of communications. Television, almost uniquely, is a medium from which most people are excluded from making it. To the majority, and compared with photography or literature, it’s a mystifying, closed medium. That’s all changing now and the challenge for television people is adapting their skills and knowledge to provide access to the content they’re producing so that people can participate and their voices can be heard.

You have to look particularly at young people who have high expectations and know more about this technology than you do. How are you going to engage them through producing high-quality linear television, while taking advantage of the potential of Internet access, interactivity and mobile devices?

SD: In a society of haves and have-nots, kids represent a significant population. How do you work with them?

FB: There are a number of levels of engagement. There are small, intimate products which don’t have much of a broadcast application. At the BBC, we’ve been experimenting in mainstream, popular TV programs and finding ways of building a community around that. As yet there are few successful developers; we still have to develop the formats.

Cort Lane: In LA, we deal with the marketers of major product brands as well as producers. The challenge I’ve had is that they can’t get their minds around interactivity. They take the passive media square peg and try to shove it into the round interactive hole. The results are basically marketing sites. The other challenge is where you’ve got kids experienced with film, television and video games and they expect something comparable, but we have this web bandwidth and, despite what people say, I think broadband convergence is still a long way off.

The third challenge is providing a truly interactive experience. Customized learning, personalization, community—all the activities that kids enjoy, require that you get information from kids, sometimes personal information. So security and privacy are huge issues and now we have laws that are awkward to implement because they require that the parents do a lot of work to register the child. So do you market to the parent or the kid? How do you market to both? My focus testing shows that what parents think their kids like or need is very different from what the kids enjoy. Parents think they know their kids but they don’t.

We’ve been working on a site called KidsEdge. The goal is to entertain, educate, challenge and nurture kids. Parents get involved to whatever degree they want. It’s free. We have lots of customized content so kids feel like it’s a unique experience for them. We’ve created original characters, lots of animation, lots of sound and interaction. It’s a more insulated environment, where there’s lots to do and click on. There are 100 activities, and characters go with the child from one level to the next. We’ve done three different environments for the various age and reading levels. There are collectible rewards that can be redeemed for prizes over time, and there are trading opportunities which some kids are really into. There are lots of opportunities for community interaction that’s safe but also encourages learning. These are the values that the web can bring that passive entertainment can’t.

TK: How do you make money from the site?

CL: The client [Knowledge Kids Network] hasn’t fully explained that to me yet. There will be an additional hard-core learning area that is subscription-based. On the parent side, there will be an opportunity for advertising revenue and tie-ins—if the child likes horses, they’ll see a list

of books about horses. So there is e-commerce, but nothing is marketed to the child and there’s no opportunity for the child to spend money.

Audience Question: What have you built in to the site to give users the advantage of being on-line and part of a community, rather than using it in isolation?

CL:  The reward system. The child sees his point count and a personalized welcome message. He sees scoring related to activities, rewards and trades. In the community areas, there’s an e-mail list that they can be on with parent approval. The child’s activity is tracked and reported to the parent. We want to take advantage of the web while staying within the laws, so we have to be creative. 

Elizabeth Vander Zaag: I’ve produced an exhibit called Talk Nice, which is an exploration of communication styles among young women, addressing the issue of how many girls speak with an up-take at the end of each sentence. It lets girls experience how their voice inflection affects their self-esteem—the goal is to get them to speak down. Talk Nice represents a lot of research in communication styles between genders, and goes further to explore decisions that teens make around drugs and sex and feelings of isolation and belonging. It tries to get into issues that teens are facing through helping them assess their tones of voice. Voice style is important to teens. The way they speak is a celebration of their identity and the different reality they’ve created for themselves.

When we create projects for youth, we do it because parents and teachers think youth should have them. Or because we think projects will sell to teens. As a mother, I want to see content that will protect and nurture my teens; as a producer, I want to make work that teens will engage with. Youth are faced with a multicultural diaspora that has led them to embrace a mecca reality of globalware, music and voice styles. So the complexity of belonging for teens in this culture is something we don’t understand.

Teens are not picky about the platforms they use. Kids don’t care about the elements, as long as they have good sound and video cards. They mix and match media and that’s the empowerment of interactivity. I think that multi-platform deliverables are the way things are going, and as soon as the technology figures it out it will all be converged. One place it will converge is through voice technology and voice print recognition is where couch potatoes will interact and be engaged—once the keyboard and the mouse are banished.

The pitch recognition software we’re developing is an example of how you can interact with a video narrative using the tone of your voice. If you lay that on top of complex speech recognition engines, you could go further but I don’t think producers are ready for the number of variables that would occur if the video had to respond to the user’s specific arbitrary words. I’m working on user pitch, mood and emotion, then getting users to adopt different moods and articulating video clips that are played back in response. When we get to multi-platform delivery, this would be used in personalization software and push advertising. The next stage will be for gender, age group and general emotional state.

AQ What’s the business model for it?

EV This will be an interactive engine with a linear video alongside it, but I don’t see the audience as being ready for a straight interactive piece yet.

AQ Can you talk about your audience?

CL This site is for kids but the marketing will be toward parents. The client is hoping for word of mouth among kids too, but sales data shows that mothers buy educational products for kids far more than fathers. So we’re marketing to mothers—with an extra push to single mothers because working single mothers feel guilty about not being able to be as involved with their children’s education. The parent component allows them to be involved without spending hours going through their homework in the evening. It also allows them to keep tabs on their kids from the office.

TK What about instantaneous communication devices, those inexpensive wireless communication platforms? And the whole idea of being beeped about a sale inside the store you’re walking past.

CL We’re fascinated by it. Girls are really into it. In Asia especially, where 20% of teens own wireless devices. Definitely, the thing for the next few years is connecting with kids, helping clients communicate with kids in creative ways, helping kids exchange and find information. But in terms of turning wireless into interactive communication, that will happen in Europe or Asia. I think we’ll be left behind.

FB In Europe, kids were using the messaging systems on their mobile phones so much that schools banned them. There’s a culture developing around that which the entertainment and broadcast industries are responding to very slowly. In the multimedia labs I run with independent producers, many are looking at the relationships between interactive narrative and development for the web or interactive TV, and how they can incorporate mobile messaging.

SD What are your perceptions about youth consciousness?

TK That once kids have friendly, open-source platforms and the right software, today’s professional web developers will be out of work. Because the good stuff will come from kids.