Children's Media Culture in a Big Data World

Last year’s holiday shopping season featured a new generation of imaginative, interactive digital playthings for children linked to the Internet through mobile apps and other devices. LEGO’s new app-based “LEGO Fusion” prompts kids to build structures out of their physical bricks, scan and import them into the digital game, and share them with friends through an online gaming platform. A new company called Anki Drive has developed a line of artificially intelligent robotic slot cars—billed as “part toy, part video game in the real world”—enabling players to race with each other by controlling the cars through a mobile app that also keeps track of their scores. Mattel’s “Barbie Fashion Design Maker” encourages girls to design and produce clothes for their dolls by using a computer or tablet and then printing the actual clothing on special sticker-backed fabric. Among the major trends at the 2015 North American International Toy Fair were “wearable tech toys” and “smart play toys,” all fueled by Internet connectivity (Toy Fair, 2015). Marking the growing fusion of the virtual and physical worlds, these next-generation products promise to revolutionize the nature of child play, offering custom-built gadgets, unique personalized experiences and opportunities to collaborate with other children around the globe. As the technology continues to evolve, more and more of these Internetconnected toys are being designed to react to a child’s behavior in real time and “grow” with children as they become older, using software to retool a device’s functionality in order to correspond to a child’s developmental stage. The Internet has already profoundly altered the structure and operation of children’s media, spawning a proliferation of media platforms—from websites to games to mobile devices—and transforming children from passive viewers to active users who not only consume but also generate content. As the digital media system enters its third decade, it is both shaping and being shaped by Big Data. Advances in computer technology, artificial intelligence, digital communication networks, and sophisticated data processing and analysis tools have triggered a sea change in the amount, speed and variety of data that can be gathered and processed. The costs of collecting, storing and processing data have gone down as the sources for gathering data have proliferated. Because of its potential for economic transformation, Big Data is often referred to as the “oil of the information economy.” The growth of Big Data is reconfiguring all of the major institutions in our society, disrupting the structures and operations of government, commerce, health, financial Journal of Children and Media, 2015 Vol. 9, No. 2, 266–271, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2015.1021197