Viral behavior itself seemed to find parallels in the world the Web had wrought. In his provocative treatise Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, Douglas Rushkoff argued that ideas and trends were not just taking on viruslike qualities of replication, dissemination, and adaptation. They were viruses. Just as a biological virus that causes the common cold or AIDS attaches itself to a healthy host cell with a sticky protein shell, a media virus first hooks into a person’s mind via a titillating news event, scientific theory, or new technology. Then, just as a biological virus injects its own genetic code to turn healthy cells into virus-replicating machines, a media virus infects thoughts with ideological code: “Like real genetic material, these [ideological codes] infiltrate the way we do business, educate ourselves, interact with one another — even the way we perceive reality.” In both cases, the weaker the host, the more susceptible to viral infiltration. Soon Rushkoff’s book became required reading at major marketing firms; Rushkoff himself became one of the hottest speakers on the business conference circuit. Marketers around the country wanted to learn how to unleash their own media viruses.
THE BABY GENIUS VIRUS
With the emergence of lapware, a new media virus seemed to be taking form: a baby genius virus with several major components. One was the notion that “technology makes you smarter and better.” While the fertile conditions of the dot-com era fostered a particularly virulent strain in the nineties, that sentiment had been around for a long time.
Historians have pointed out that America’s confidence in technological progress is probably as old as the nation itself. The ingenuity of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and many other iconic figures in American history has always been touted and mythologized. In his prescient nineteenth-century work Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on Americans’ “addiction” to the uses of “practical science.” Confidence in technology has become inextricably linked with many of the traits we associate with the American character: the pioneering ethic, self-reliance, self-improvement, reinvention, pragmatism, and optimism. The faith that the correct application of science and technology can somehow transmit such values is central to the American outlook. From the Eisenhower-era film loops featuring the can-do star Our Friend the Atom to the Reagan administration’s deep faith in the Star Wars defense system to Silicon Valley’s conviction that the Internet-driven “New Economy” would coincide with the new millennium, the promise that technology would bring about a brighter tomorrow has inspired Americans even as it has disappointed them.
Such pitches and promises are key to our consumer economy, too. Most advertising campaigns rely on targeting the “aspirational,” often the spark of hope ignited when we learn of the amazing “technology,” “advance,” or “breakthrough” embedded in the new car, computer, phone, face cream, razor blade, dishwashing soap, saucepan, or coffee maker. Such commercials work because, however embarrassingly or unconsciously, we have internalized the suggestion that this new technology is the conduit for self-improvement, reinvention, optimism — manifest destiny itself. We want to believe.
The other major component of the baby genius virus, the emphasis on the profound importance of the first three years of life, was propelled by the Carnegie Foundation’s report and the White House brain conference. Although the conference organizers intended to convey the necessity of government-funded, standards-based child care for infants and toddlers, the event’s lasting legacy was a resurgence of the national preoccupation with raising babies the right way. These two forces united to produce an extremely potent germ. Because online communities of mothers were growing exponentially — and Gen-Xers relied on them for information as well as moral support — the baby genius virus began to multiply like crazy. If it is true that our American consumer economy takes our concerns, commodifies them, and sells them back to us (a notion attributable, I believe, to Noam Chomsky), then the baby genius zeitgeist was clearly a case in point. The brain conference raised concerns about the importance of babies’ first three years, which was being sold back to parents in the form of brain “stimulators” such as lapware, baby videos, “learning” toys, and so on. What was most remarkable about the baby genius media virus was that, like the flu, it infected everyone. It started in a population of upper-middle-class parents on the East and West Coasts, but over the next several years it spread across the country and across ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Also remarkable was how little resistance there was to the idea. There was no evidence that any of these products was any more educationally stimulating than shaking a rattle, playing with blocks, mucking around in the backyard, or just hanging out, playing with a beloved caregiver or parent. Indeed, there were no studies available on how babies and toddlers even processed screened media or electronic toys. There was no reason to believe any of it.
PERSONAL CONVERSATIONS
In 1999 I began reporting on online privacy. At the time the two biggest concerns were the possibilities that hackers would tunnel into people’s hard disks and steal their financial information and that pedophiles would lure children into lurid conversations by pretending to be children themselves. But during my work on this beat, I learned about another worrisome practice that was far more widespread: marketers using children’s personal information to target them as customers. I had been covering the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines for the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which required commercial Web sites targeted at anyone younger than thirteen to take certain steps to maintain children’s privacy online. The steps outlined were pretty flimsy. For example, the FTC required sites to state clearly to users that they were collecting personal data and to declare how they were planning to use it; sites were supposed to get verifiable parental consent before collecting and using that information and to allow parents to screen their children’s personal information and stop marketers from using it again. However, it was easy for children to duck such hurdles; any kid old enough to type competently could forge the consent forms. Furthermore, while the guidelines emphasized children’s safety, they did nothing to protect children from marketers. Sites were not required to get parental permission before collecting children’s e-mail addresses or names if they were procured in response to kids’ e-mails or to contest entries or e-newsletter subscriptions.
What alarmed critics was the ability of marketers to use “spokes-characters” to develop personalized relationships with children. The Center for Media Education feared that sites with branded characters could conduct ongoing “personal” conversations with young children through e-mail or personalized Web sites. And through the use of basic tracking software, sites could register each child’s online footprint and use a simple algorithm to determine his habits, fears, likes, and tastes; such techniques were already widely used in targeting adult customers. An automatic program could then produce irresistible messages tailor-made for each child. Child development professionals, such as Michael Brody of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, were concerned that young children’s emotional investment in cartoon spokescharacters would make them especially vulnerable to these intimate marketing messages. Such figures were celebrities to children, Brody said, and could have a powerful psychological impact.
As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argued in his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, it is through iconic fairy tales that young children unwittingly explore their unconscious fears of abandonment or the death of a parent; such narratives help children process these abiding fears without talking about them directly, which would be overwhelming — and, developmentally, almost impossible. Turning fairy tale characters into corporate spokespeople robs children of a vital part of their inner lives, of a rite of passage fundamental to human development. It has been proven that children under the age of eight are not cognitively able to understand persuasion, even in the blatant form of a TV ad. This kind of personalized character marketing is far more subtle and insidious than a TV ad. Brody said bluntly, “Marketers have become child experts, just like pedophiles.”
BEHIND THAT FRIENDLY, FURRY FACE
By the time I was pregnant with my first child in 2000, baby genius tech toys had come to dominate the market. Now especially curious about the efficacy of such
