Week of December 25, 2005
Besides all the looking-back-at-2005 technology articles this week, there was cellphone theme to kid-tech news...
Cellphones disconnect us?!
"Addicted" is a word tossed around in connection with technology a lot these days (see this item on "Net addiction"). In its report on a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, the Christian Science Monitor cites the experience of a stress-management coach as saying that a lot of her clients are "addicted to staying in touch." They never turn off their cellphones, so that even when they're at home with their families, they're not really there. Sociologists are calling it "absent presence," the Monitor reports. "For employees on electronic leashes, cellphones and pagers raise questions about who draws the line between work and home, and where that line is." Sound at all familiar?
What the article, full of family anecdotes, indicates is that the line between work and play is drawn differently at different times, and each time it depends on intentions. The question never goes a way for parents (or any avid cellphone user): Am I being a workaholic (or cellphone-aholic) at the expense of the people I'm with? Or - in the case of families - is the phone actually helping parents be with children? It's complicated, and sociologists say the answer isn't necessarily just to turn the phone off when at home or on vacation. One parent cited in the piece could only go on vacation because he had his phone with him.
Contest for phone 'filmmakers'
The prize for this "film festival" is for "best student film shot entirely with a camera cellphone" - for presentation, of course, on a 1-to-2-inch screen. ESchoolNews reports that high school and university students throughout the US are eligible to enter their 30-second films for a $5,000 prize. "It might seem like an attention-grabbing gimmick, but [Ithaca College's Roy H. Park School of Communications, Dean Dianne] Lynch leaves no doubt of the contest's academic purpose. In today's media marketplace - where cell phones can take pictures, play music and games, be a personal secretary, or connect to Web sites - it's all about thinking small and mobile" at a time and in a country where it seems to be all about thinking big: "bigger houses, bigger cars, bigger portions at the local fast food joint," etc. The deadline for film submission is January 10. Winners will be announced at the end of the month. But Ithaca College isn't the first in this space, the Associated Press reports. For example, there's MTV's "Head and Body," a series of programs for phones; last year's Zoie Films festival, which dubbed itself "the world's first cell-phone film festival; and, in Paris last fall, the Forum des Images's Pocket Film Festival.
Cellphone alerts for gamers
Microsoft is working on further blurring the line between game and phone communications. In about six months, it'll introduce a system that will alert Xbox 360 users on their phones when their friends are playing on the 360. "The alerts would be sent over the Internet via Xbox Live and come to a mobile over the air as an instant message," report GameSHOUT and the BBC.
In Other News
- 2005 was big year for movie/games. Before this year, most movie-spinoff videogames were either "abysmal" or "drably formulaic," writes New York Times "Game Theory" columnist Charles Herold. "Last month's release of the video-game adaptation of "Peter Jackson's King Kong" caps a year that proves those days are over." On the Abysmal side were "Charlie's Angels" and "The Crow: City of Angels," according to Herold. What turned the tide was "The Chronicles of Riddick." Its critical and commercial success seemed to convince game developers that more people would play a good game than a bad one - sales weren't necessarily tied to a film's box-office intake. "Madagascar" and "Batman Begins" are two other "success stories."
- Of teen blogs' value. There are more and more stories in papers nationwide about teen blogging, pointing to the pros as well as the cons. "I see incredible value to teen blogs," writes Joyce Valenza in a commentary in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Joyce knows a lot about blogging, not just because she has her own professional blog, but also because she's a high school librarian in the Philadelphia area and the mother of a blogger. "I know many teens who are newly motivated to write and who find themselves, for the first time, writing for a real audience. Groups of friends, remote and local, are brought closer in online communities." She also sees value in classroom blogging, but acknowledges schools' legitimate concerns about "potential liability for personal blogging on school computers during recess and study halls." A University of Alabama psychology professor quoted in the Tuscaloosa News says there's "ample research" showing that revealing secrets and sharing strong feelings is good for physical and psychological health - of course not when so much is revealed that an online predator can groom or stalk an unsuspecting blogger. Teen bloggers, the News reports, don't often think about the potential downside.
- 'Songbird' the 'music browser': It could be seens as a Web-wide iTunes, maybe, or a playlist for the people. Songbird sounds like a tool that would interest a lot of digital-music fans because of its flexibility (something the music industry hasn't provided a lot of yet). The idea is to allow people to make a playlist of tunes that don't just "live" on their computer harddrives, but rather one that pulls together their favorite songs from wherever they are, out on the Web or on their computer. It's software "based on much of the same underlying open-source technology as the Firefox Web browser," CNET reports, and it's the brainchild of "digital-music veteran Rob Lord" and the other five people of Pioneers of the Inevitable, the start-up developing it. Lord says he's creating Songbird because iTunes is too restricting. He says Apple's music store is like the Internet Explorer browser if it could only access Microsoft.com.
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