MyCBBC – ‘Facebook for kids’
Diligent as ever, The Lorries have asked for another opinion piece – this time they’re after a response to the news that the BBC is launching a social networking site for kids called MyCBBC, filling the gap left by sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo who set their lower age limit at 13.
Marc Goodchild, head of interactive and on-demand at BBC children’s, is bullish about the opportunity here for the BBC: “There is a commercial market failing in the children’s space because they don’t want to take on the responsibility for younger users. The only player which can do this has to be a public service broadcaster.”
This may be true, but the BBC will need to move beyond this traditional remit considerably if it is to succeed in delivering a genuine social networking experience. It will be interesting to see whether they can overcome their instinct to broadcast and embrace the aspects of the web that best characterise social media; aspects that differentiate it from their traditional haunts of television and radio?
I’m talking about personalisation, at the expense of brand integrity; user-generated content, at the expense of quality control; and, most importantly, using the web as a medium for the free exchange of ideas between ‘audience’ members, rather than as a mechanism for their delivery from a single, central point of origin.
It would be easy to imagine that this somehow doesn’t apply for kids, and that they will settle for less. Less freedom, less creativity, less of a platform for their imaginitive energy. Yet when is your creativity less inhibited, and your urge for self-expression more exuberant, than when you are a child?
Bebo recently declared itself a ’social media network’, and, with reality shows like The Gap Year, appears to be moving inexorably in the direction of becoming a web-only broadcaster. As reality TV and interactive media blur at the edges, it will be fascinating to see if the Beeb is capable of moving far enough fast enough in the opposite direction.
<!–Indeed, there are very few commercial players in this space at the moment. Disney-owned Club Penguin is probably the best example. Last time I was out in LA I had the chance to find out a thing or two about Club Penguin, over a huge rack of ribs at Houston’s enjoyed with my good friend Mary Hunter, her daughter Amy and her two grand-children, Hannah and Lucas.
They key challenge facing any kids’ social network is how to facilitate
Hannah and Lucas are both ardent members of the Club Penguin community, and delighted in telling me all about it. It emerged that they had
What really struck me was how in touch they were with the nuances of the community
When I was last out in LA I had the pleasure of taking my good friend Mary Hunter and her family out for dinner. The party included two grand-children who are ardent Club Penguin users. What struck me was how readily they’d grasped the nuances of community safety. Both took active pride in their secret Club Penguin ranking, by which they had been given their own small share of responsibility for reporting any inappropriate behaviour. Will MyCBBC operate a similar decentralised moderation model, rather than simply limiting infractions by curbing freedoms?
Much of the initial focus is on the inevitable balancing act of enabling community members to send private ‘unscripted’ messages without being able to make ‘unscripted contact with strangers’. I hope they have the courage and faith in their audience to do so.
However it is they go about reconciling the need to facilitate communication and interaction in a way that pre-emptively prevents net predators from ‘grooming’ potential targets, the greater challenge facing the Beeb is a more fundamental one.–>
Tags: social media
