Consumer Electronics Show: Digital Rights Mgmt. & Kids’ Policy

Vegas may be kitsch, and I’m sure my daughter would love to go there sometime, but other than Blue Man Group and some wacky “people-watching” offering fascinating sociological snapshots of media-induced ‘get-rich-quick’ high roller mentality, it can really be quite disheartening…

I actually have written for a few of the hotels (Treasure Island/ Mirage) and had to ‘push the envelope’ of my comfort zone to promote a fantasy-land that’s as false as a set of showgirl 48DDs spinning with tasseled frenzy in stiletto heels.

Ultimately…I bailed. Just wasn’t the right fit. Couldn’t stomach it. (Though I wrote a heckuva James Bond weekend-wannabe package, naming 007’s environs, creating a black tie ‘tie-in’ and all…)

Vegas just couldn’t decide if it WAS or WAS NOT for kids for awhile…Luring with fun family fare, water parks and cheap buffets, then staving off once they realized there was no ‘profit’ in those packages. Now it’s host to the annual Sandbox Summit, where they’re discussing kids’ digital media rather than entertaining kids with it…smarter idea for ‘adult playground’ environs.

Shaping Youth has dispatched eyes and ears on our behalf to the CES cauldron of opportunity (and random tidbits of higher learning) in the hopes we’ll glean a few nuggets we can use to further our cause for positive media offerings in the kids arena…

This is the first link in a series of ‘guest correspondent’ features from MC Milker (an academic AND marketer who blogs here) who has kindly granted us the right to peek into her hands-on world of Vegas redux in an effort to distill information for parents into its most usable form…

As we wrote in this fair use post prior, Pat Aufderheide from American University also moderated a panel at the CES summit on digital rights management which Pat blogged about here in Online Video and Copyright in Vegas.

Without further ado, here’s MC Milken’s first post, setting the scene for where we’re Shaping Youth in a variety of contexts as technology shifts the way children play, learn and connect in the digital world.

Once a year, techies from around the world descend upon Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show.

One of the largest trade shows in the world, CES is where major technological advances have been announced for several decades now.

I will be talking a lot about the CES show this week on my blog as technology has entered childhood in a big way and impacts the way children play today.

I’ve attended this event a number of times, weaving down The Strip dodging inebriated conventioneers and fighting the crowds around the booths featuring the newest technology or the most outlandish design (complete indoor ice skating rinks, full on stage productions and elaborate costumes are not unheard of).

Retailers and manufacturers gather in Las Vegas each year to see the latest technology that will be available in stores over the next 12 months.

It is NOT open to the general public but is open to those who will be deciding what the latest and greatest technological gadget you will be buying.

To give you some perspective on this show, It was here that the world learned about The Commodore 64 computer in 1982. In 1981 the compact disc player was introduced, and in 1996, the DVD player. In 1985, the Nintendo game system was introduced and in 2001 the X-box. Gives you an idea of how this show has changed over the years.

While the masses are focused on the keynote speech given by Bill Gates (his last, so he says) I will be focusing on The Sandbox Summit, a day long event billed as: A play date with technology.

The Sandbox Summit is a series of conferences exploring how technology is changing the ways kids play, learn, and connect in a digital world.

This is of course of interest not only to those who create technology based toys but to parents, educators, teachers and child development specialists. The Parent’s Choice Awards will be hosting a conference on The New Frontier in Play and has this to say:

Play, from toddler toys to adult gaming, has become such a serious activity that the idea of free play – play for the pure fun of it – has gone the way of stick ball and paper dolls.

In an honest attempt to make our kids smarter, faster, earlier, parents, educators, toy manufacturers, and legislators are unwittingly squeezing the fun out of childhood. Our kids are becoming like the virtual pets they carry in their pockets: predictably responding to preset stimuli.

Independent, creative thinking has no place in their time-pressed, goal-oriented world. We are at risk of raising a generation of kids who can competently navigate achievement tests, but lack the skills and experience for thinking out of the box.

–MC Milker, ‘The Not Quite Crunchy Parent’ blog

What do you think, readers?

How can we balance (and counter-market?) this ‘Baby Einstein’ fallacy to shift that cultural mindset?

Free play and free thinking are assets we can’t afford to lose…Period.

Thoughts? Ideas? Best practices? There’s so much opportunity if we channel the learning and the knowledge toward free-thinking, creative collaboration…