Family Locator Makes Me Mad.

There was this Verizon ad on TV that sparked a long conversation between my wife and me. It was showcasing an app called Family Locator, which tracks your family members via their cell phones. The point of the ad was that this worrisome mom could track her daughter (who looked somewhere between 10 and 12) on her very first solo outing (with friends) in an indoor shopping mall.

I can't show you the ad, because Verizon has made it private, in its own channel, for some reason.

We saw pros and cons to this child-tracking software. On one hand, a parent armed with this technology may allow their child out of their sight sooner, possibly allowing a child to take the bus alone before a parent would have ordinarily let them.

On the other had, this app could be seen as a staggering and possibly development-stunting invasion of privacy; a technological cashing-in on modern parental paranoia. A real idiot's breakfast, if you will.

So many parents I've met are so terrified of letting children out of their sight that they simply don't. Parents can hardly be blamed for feeling like this--my parenting peers and I were raised at the dawn of cable news, which turned local, isolated incidents of child abduction into apparently pandemic national nightmares. I'm sure there's more to it than that. Maybe they love their kids more than I do mine. They way I see it, though, it's an irrational fear, and we have a duty to our children to overcome our irrational fears for the sake of our their mental health and development.

But what if your child gets abducted? Stranger Danger. Ugh. When I hear moms my age trading helpful tips on how to make their children terrified of strangers, I have to bite my tongue to keep from reminding them that their children have more to fear from their own family members than from real strangers [citation needed]. Maybe this is a case of parents just doing what they can to protect their children, but it really feels like a blunt and stupid shortcut to teaching their kids real skills for evaluating situations. Resorting to tracking their location is even lazier.

Moreover, what does it do a kid's brain, knowing that your mom or dad is monitoring your every move, ready at the drop of a hat to swoop in for immediate evac the moment things get even slightly out of hand? So much of growing up, for me, depended on being somewhere my parents may not have approved of--or even just being out on my own, knowing that I was the only one who knew where I was. Sure, I was alone or with friends in the tiny streams connecting suburban backyards, but even if independence is an illusion, I believe it's an important game for a child to play.

I'm not exempt from this, by the way--my instincts are to protect my boys in any way I can. I get nervous when I can't see them. I'm also a little scared of the dark, because I suspect there's a gorilla with human intelligence standing a few inches from my face. Again, though, there's a duty to understand and overcome fears like this, not to simply pass them on unexamined. All's I'm saying is that just because the technology exists to take advantage of your every whim don't mean you got's ta use it. I mean, in an emergency, sure. But all the time? As a matter of course? If you can put a chip in your daughter's brain so you can switch her off if she thinks about climbing a fence or smells alcohol or looks at a boy, are you protecting her? Yes, maybe, but in a really assy way. And you're robbing her of the ability to make a real decision on her own. There's also the larger (possibly smaller) question of the rightness of an action changing (or not changing) is that action becomes easier to perform, but that's probably another conversation.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'm being reckless. Maybe my kids won't grow up to be mighty and self-reliant adventurers or captains of industry. Maybe they'll be captured and enslaved by a cult. I know while there aren't too many parents among you, a great many of you are former children. I'm interested to know what you think, despite the rantiness of this post, which started off as a 140-character tweet.

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EDIT: If I'd seen this, I might have just linked to it. Lenore Skenazi, Author of Free Range Kids has written a more focused and succinct response to the same ad. The commenters are all similarly appalled, although to be fair, they are commenting on a blog called Free Range Kids. Some do make the interesting point that this app would be very useful if you lost your cell phone.

Playstation Home

I've been messing around with Playstation Home, which is this free virtual world thingy that just appeared one day in the menus of My PS3. For all you World of Warcraft players out there, it's like Second Life, but without anything fun to do. For you Second Lifers, it's like WoW without anything fun to do. For the rest of you, it's like Hell, as depicted in No Exit, but with bowling.

You start by making a avatar. The character creation system is fine, if you want to make a charming and attractive hipster mid-20s human avatar. Not super-surprising, but I was disappointed that the parameters are so limited. I made Mike (pictured, above), and it sort of looks like him.

You have your very own apartment, which overlooks a marina. Kind of relaxing. Nothing to do, though. So you leave and go to the Central Plaza, which looks like some sort of Central Plaza. The Central Plaza is filled with other avatars, real people having conversations that look like what you'd imagine 14-year olds' SMS conversations look like. Turns out, that's pretty much what's going on. Beyond "whr u from" and "lol this sux", I didn't get very far with anyone, as far as talking about stuff goes. I mean, the avatars are bland, the environments are bland, I figured that the point of Home was human interaction.

So I made a new avatar, and made her look like Lois. This unlocked a whole new aspect of the game, and out in the Plaza, lots of people had all kinds of things to say to me. Mostly "Hey baby", but often, folks dug deep and tried to think of interesting things to say.


I was talking to this person named Lonestar-Loc, (about the game environment, mostly, and specifically the Mall, where you can buy stuff using real money--including my green shirt, which I was totally willing to shell out a dollar for) and then this other person named Mid_Zero came and started dancing at us. He said some incomprehensible things, and then invited us back to his apartment. I had no idea you could do that, and I said yes right away. My new friend Lonestar came too. At which point, things quickly got out of hand.





Here are some things I have learned from this experiment:

1. When random people come up to you and start dancing at you, it is a very strange thing they are doing. I vow to immediately stop doing this to women in real life.


2. As you can see, Zero's apartment looks just like mine, and it overlooks the same marina. Sony is offering furniture for sale, again, for real dollars. While I heard many people in the Home complain about having to buy individuality in an essentially free game, I think it's worth pointing out that this is one of the most tried and true business models in human history.


3. Sony does not want to have Home populated with creatures that look like giant penises. As noble a goal as that may be, it is clear that erring on the side of caution is still an err. I think having a giant penis head is a great conversation starter. I predict that this will be the next great debate in gaming, whether or not you allow giant penis people in your game. All else hinges upon this question.


4. Rather than being accurate models of the real world, environments like this are subsets of subsets of subsets of people, and are full of weirdos. Not of women in these environments, either. I cannot blame them!


5. I'm pretty sure Lonestar was a guy pretending to be a girl!


6. I look good in green.

Later, I went bowling with some people. None of us said anything beyond "Nice shot." I got a strike!