Remember those old Folgers ads where the voice-over guy says in hushed tones usually reserved for golf matches, “We are here at Tavern on the Green where we’ve secretly replaced the fine coffee they usually serve with Folgers Crystals. Let’s see if anyone can tell the difference!” Payoff was nobody noticed. And even if they did, we’re talking about coffee here so the fraud could have been fixed rather quickly if some well-dressed patron spit their coffee out in a brown shower.

According to Engadget, the marketing whiz kids over at Microsoft thought it’d be plenty neat to try a similar tactic with the Zune. A couple hundred “lucky” Zune buyers didn’t get the black, white, or brown (!) Zune they thought they were getting and instead got a Pepto-pink Zune in its place. Pink. Hot, shocking, flaming PINK.

As I was driving home tonight one of Clear Channel’s biggest Minneapolis stations ran a bumper ad that said

Your iPod can’t find new music…tune into Cities 97 for new music…

It took a second for all of this to sink in. Within a few years, a gnat-like company that only black turtle necked people associated themselves with is now…The Man.

Ah…America.

So I received the obligatory email messages from retailers in the few days leading up to “Black Friday” (which, no matter what your local news outfit tells you, is not the biggest shopping day of the year) and it amazes me that top tier retailers like Apple, Home Depot, and Nordstrom used the opportunity to merely stick a billboard in front of me. Why not offer email subscribers deals or offers not available to the general public? Like, how about giving me a measly extra 10% off if I bring in my email (or even 5%)? Or a free-while-they-last t-shirt or something? Seems like a missed opportunity to me.

Biggest software company in the world and they can’t find anyone willing to work for them who gets it? Installing the Zune software apparently sucks. Quick show of hands here…who’s surprised?

Before you equip the nursery with a plasma screen read on….

I’ve heard lots of conversation lately from parents about their kids’ screentime (television, computer, games, anything with a screen) limits, habits and the effects thereof.

To those folks I offer these thoughts from MIT profession Henry Jenkins about children, new participatory media, and ethics in the age of technology. In his recent article “The Future of Literacy Education in a Participatory Media Culture” (Threshold, Winter, 2006) he writes:

“Generals tend to fight the last war rather than adequately prepare for future conflicts. Many current media literacy efforts are the pedagogical equivalent of the Maginot Line: still protecting children from the old “threat” of mass media as if the digital revolution never occurred. Television is still enemy number one, media consumption is still understood in passive terms, the focus is still on effects rather than ethics, and proposed solutions still range from “turn off your television” to critical reading skills. Meanwhile, network executives are struggling to hold onto their younger viewers as they increasingly spend more hours playing games or chatting online than watching broadcast media. So what would it mean to rethink media literacy for an age when the computer game, not television, is the dominant medium in young people’s lives?

I am one of the principle investigators for the New Media Literacies Project, launched this past spring by the MacArthur Foundation. We wantto identify skills, knowledge, and competencies young people need to become meaningful participants in the culture around them – skills central to citizenship, community life, and cultural expression. We will design and test new approaches to media literacy through schools, after school programs, public institutions, and commercial culture.

In this new landscape of video games, cell phones, podcasting, blogging, instant messaging and other kinds of media-intensiveexperiences, children are participants – not spectators, not even consumers in the traditional sense of the term. They are actively shaping the media. These new media forms and the cultures that emerge around them offer young people new opportunities for emotional growth and intellectual development but also require new kinds of ethical responsibilities. The goal of media literacy education in the 21st century should be prepare kids to live within a more participatory media culture. ”

A far cry from “Hey, teacher! Leave these kids alone” — this seems to be a call for more intense and intentional communication with our children, our students, and young people around us in their realtime lives, their media culture participation and their development as responsible and independent thinkers.

Maybe we should worry less about limiting screentime and more about peppering their screentime with teachable moments…as someone around the office has been heard to say “Playing video games with my son IS quality time- in the same way fishing together might be.”

To hear someone smarter than myself say more on this topc see Dr. Jenkins’ further body of work.