Adults don’t want to see their beloved children’s classics messed with. But when they do decide to mess with them, they do so with abandon. I consider this all to be satire, or at the very least irony, so I’m taking it as such.
Except for Disney’s Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars, which they appear to be actually making. This production brings up a logical fallacy that drives me nuts, the assumption that:
- Kids are ahead of adults in adopting new technologies.
- Adults all love them some blogging and tweeting.
- Therefore: Why aren’t the kids on Twitter? Where are their blogs? What the heck is going on? Hurry, somebody do a study!
It’s a mistake to start with the assumption that just because one demographic has adopted a technology that all others will follow. The better assumption is that no group is going to adopt a technology unless it’s a good lifestyle fit.
So, without further ado, my favorites from the folks at Jezebel.
- margaret48267: are you there god?
- The Twits
- The Bridge to Tumblrbithia
- From The Mixed-Up Tweets Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
- Wikipedia Brown, Boy E-Tective
- The /bin/cat in /dev/hat
- The Little Search Engine That Could
- Charlie and the Chipset Factory
- Tales of a Fourth Grade Code Monkey
- Frog and Toad Are Facebook Friends
- A Rickroll In Time
- Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Comments Section
- The Fantastic Mr. Firefox
- The Box.net Children
- The Etsy Bitsy Spider
- Charlotte’s Web 2.0
- Hardy Boys: Die Hardyer (ok, so this last one isn’t social media, but I had to include it)
Katherine Paterson, whom I had the great pleasure of meeting at the recent IBBY conference, has contributed eloquently to the ongoing discussion of the threat technology poses to children’s books.
My favorite part:
It is as futile for us to fight technological advances as it was for Plato to battle literacy. Yet I have hope. I have seven grandchildren, all of whom are well-equipped with electronic gadgets. Yet all of them are readers – because their parents are readers who have read to them, because they have teachers who care about literature and librarians who introduce them to books they will enjoy and be enriched by.
