Josh Getzler
Last week, I had the distinct pleasure of walking three blocks up Hudson Street to the Penguin offices to sit in on a marketing meeting for Geoff Rodkey’s wonderful Princess-Bride-with-13-year-olds middle grade adventure novel, The Chronicles of Egg: Deadweather and Sunrise. The book, which is the first of a trilogy, sold to Putnam in April and has gained some wonderful momentum. We had an interesting, exciting conversation, with members of the various divisions discussing what the plans for the book could be.
One element, though, which I thought was extremely interesting and brought about several minutes of discussion, centered around the particular topic of What do Middle Grade Boys Do on the Internet? Geoff and I both have middle grade sons (I also have middle grade daughters, but they were not our target there), so we were able to give anecdotal testimony, which we all thought was pretty interesting. It also made me think in a new way about my son’s internet habits.
The first thing is that neither of our tweens was on Facebook. They’re certainly aware of it, and have looked at different pages—my son has seen mine, and I’ve let him go on assorted Muppet-related FB pages at times. But he doesn’t have an account. His school has a closed network through Moodle, which he uses to discuss homework with his classmates. But he does spend every possible minute online.
Most of the time, he’s on Youtube, which was not at all intuitive to me. But when I think about it, it’s the equivalent of so many kids growing up in front of the TV. Only now, he gets to choose what to watch, and has it delivered in bit-sized chunks and by himself. He watches Loony Tunes clips, Muppet Show excerpts, and when he thinks we’re not looking, Family Guy. (We’re not yet in the danger zone of puberty, so we haven’t had him looking at THOSE sites yet.) He spends the majority of his time, though, being on a social network different from Moodle and different from FB: a much larger than I thought could be possible group of people who create video mash-ups of cartoon characters performing pop songs.
I had to really hold my breath before allowing him to be part of this. He’d been creating these mash-ups (Phineus and Ferb doing Tik Tok, for example), with pretty great creativity, for months, and was begging me to allow him to upload them. I was, reasonably, apprehensive, since there is really very little in the way of possible monitoring of this kind of user group. But we agreed that I would have complete access to his account and would monitor occasionally. If I saw anything I didn’t like, I’d take him off it, he agreed, and also said he’d give no true personal information.
He’s now been on this group for several months. He feels like he has a real (if ephemeral) group of friends, who are also creative and—from what I can see—unthreatening. He has a bunch of followers, and it’s been terrific for his self-esteem to have people see his work and compliment his artistry. And it hasn’t (yet) even had a whiff of creepy.
Geoff’s son’s experience, while also Youtube-centered, was different, but it also indicated that there are an awful lot of kids lurking around Youtube. It certainly gave the folks at Penguin—who’d been thinking more in the way of Poptropica—pause. It’ll be interesting to see what they end up deciding to do.
I’d be fascinated to hear what you, who are reading this, think of these habits. Do you have kids? What do they tend to do? Have you had any issues with any sites? I’d love to hear what you think.
