Taylor the Teacher

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You must make an online play space for your children. Immediately.

Just reading the Cluetrain Manifesto. I know I’m very late in reading this, compared to many of the web old timers. I apologize if someone has already said this. Here’s my off-the-cuff children’s web cluetrain 19 theses:

1. Traditional media have focused of late on scaring parents.

2. These media outlets have demonized MySpace and other online platforms, characterizing them as a place where your children are unsafe. Statistically, however, your children are more likely to be molested, beaten, neglected, or kidnapped by someone in real life than someone on the web. It is exponentially more likely that a child will be physically harmed in his or her own home than on the web.

3. The old media have exploited your love and concern for your children in an attempt to turn a profit through advertising. They know you tune into nothing so fast as when you believe it’s for the benefit of your children.

4. Parents, researchers, and teachers have long recongized the power of mass media to sway children’s minds. This is the reason we have PBS. We didn’t want our children watching exclusively commercial television. Just as we built public parks so that children wouldn’t have to play in the street, there had to be a safe place for kids to “play” on TV.
5. The nature of publishing/disseminating information has changed. Paying for PBS through tax dollars or donating during the annual fund raising drive will not cut it anymore. You have no choice but to get involved.

6. This goes beyond monitoring your child’s online activity. Predators are no more a threat on the Internet than they are on the street. Teach your kids not to talk to strangers. Isn’t this what parents have always done? Supervising your childis supposed to be a given.

7. The reason the mass media want you to focus on the 4% of children who are victimized by strangers through the Internet is to distract you from the Internet’s real danger. They’re hoping you overlook all-consuming commercialism creeping into your child’s mind while you’re on the lookout for toothless strangers.

8. The media do this because their advertisers read the cluetrain and it scared them shitless. They decided to go the route of Orwell’s Napoleon and just write the older generation off as a loss. “Napoleon took no interest in Snowball’s committees networks. He said that the education of the young was more important than anything that could be done for those who were already grown up.”

9. Companies know that you, the adult web user, expect an authentic voice. They are incapable of providing this.

10. Their “education” for your young consists of commercially driven sites for children, within which they can train the next generation of web consumers.

11. Companies running commercially driven children’s sites are filling a legitimate need, and most are doing so fairly.

12. Adults have always written children’s literature. Children are too young to do it. Don’t the web geeks say “code is poetry.” They might be right.

13. Because a company isn’t allowing predators onto their site, doesn’t mean they’re protecting your children from the dangers of commercialism, which Americans just 60 years ago thought was enough of a problem to create PBS. The web is even more engrossing than television.

14. Parents, you must create an open-source, freely available WYSIWYG social networking and content creation location on the web for your children. No one can do it for you. Write a platform for your kids to play in. Write a children’s poem and post it there. Draw something funny. Make an interesting kids’ podcast. Tell some knock-knock jokes, or make funny faces with your video camera. Write a fun plug-in for your child’s page, then share it with other children and parents.

15. It has to be fun. It has to be ALL fun. When I go over to a child’s house, that child wants to show me her toys. She doesn’t hang out in the living room listening to her parents discuss pork futures. B.O.R.I.N.G.!!! Posting a kids’ item occasionally on your personal blog isn’t good enough. Two or three sites aren’t enough. The web is vast. Do you surf only 2 or 3 sites?

16. Volunteer to moderate this site for free so that all children will be able to access it. Let’s not have another Jim Crow era, Internet style. It would be easy to just pay someone to do this, but for-pay sites aren’t available to everyone.

17. Don’t let assholes ruin the lovely web playground you created for your kids.

18. If you don’t, the only people creating content for your children will be people trying to sell them stuff.

19. This is parenting in the 21st century. You gotta jump in. Write. Paint. Sing. Program. Take pictures. It takes a village.