It’s got to be good to be Warren Buffett these days. HBO makes a documentary that depicts you saving the American economy while you’re at a Dairy Queen with your grandchildren. You get to look all magnanimous and cool in comparison to your fellow billionaires when you offer to pay more taxes. And apparently, you also get to have a children’s webseries called Secret Millionaires Club.

The show is kind of dorky and hilarious, and if Buffett wasn’t America’s Rich Grandpa, the show’s theme song, where the cast of adorable multi-racial moppets declare, “I’m good friends with Warren Buffett,” and the whole concept of them hanging out in a secret clubhouse in Buffett’s office would probably come across as pretty strange. But it respects kids’ intelligence, and in a moment when financial stresses increasingly are things that parents can’t keep quarantined for their children, finding a way to explain things like why it makes sense to wait to buy a new Wii, or why it’s so hard to get a business off the ground, is not the world’s worst idea.

In a way, I wish the show were even stranger and more narrative. We already have a Health Care Inequity Ghost, so maybe Buffett could use his considerable riches to reboot Ghostwriter and play a ghost who helps Gabby and Alex figure out what it actually means to keep a bodega afloat; Lenni what it means to survive in a creative economy; and Jamal what happens when the Post Office contracts and Grandma Jenkins gets laid off.

A new study from the University of Virginia suggests that fast-paced television, defined by the researchers in the following way — “To quantify pacing, the 2 television episodes were viewed for the number of times a complete scene change occurred (eg, from swimming pool to bedroom). For the fast-paced show, the scene completely changed on average every 11 seconds; even within the scene, characters were almost constantly rapidly moving through space. The educational television show had a
complete scene change every 34 seconds on average” — has a negative impact on children’s self-control and attention span. I’d be curious to know, though, how much that has to do on whether the information conveyed from scene to scene builds on information you’ve received previously. If the Ghostwriter kids are bopping from the community garden to the bodega to Lenni’s studio to Jamal’s townhouse because they’re putting together clues in a case, wouldn’t that make viewers tune out distractions and focus on what the kids are learning along the way? I guess Ghostwriter and Sponge Bob, which the study used as a test show, are aimed at different ages when kids have different levels of cognition. But I’d be curious to know at which age kids start to be able to follow a narrative, and what kinds of narratives are a reach that help them learn versus which sort of narratives are just too complicated for them.

I’m taking a little time this week to look at some of the earliest pop culture examinations of the Internet. Yesterday, Erica Newland wrote about the extreme prescience of Ghostwriter. Up today: Hackers.

Hackers, which came out in 1995, is not exactly what you’d call a good movie. It’s got ridiculous animations that are meant to make the Internet seem comprehensible to the legions of Americans who were beginning to sign up for web access as the Internet went commercial. Jonny Lee Miller seems so gummed up by the complexities of pulling off an American accent that when Angelina Jolie asks his character, early in the film, “Do you speak English?” the correct answer is really “No, but he’s trying very hard.” The hacker glam is ridiculous in the extreme. But I got obsessed with the movie in high school, Hackers was the perfect aspirational movie for angry smart kids everywhere who spent a lot of time on the Internet, whether they were hacking corporations or spending lots of time talking to teenagers from other states who participated in the same dorkily intellectual after-school activities that they did. And even though I no longer sign into chat programs under my deeply embarrassing first handle, Hackers had some real sense of where the Internet was going — and where we were going with it.

PCWorld gives Hackers credit for having at least some sense of hacker canon:”Before the core crew of hackers allows Jonny Lee Miller’s Dade to enter their group, they challenge him to identify a series of technical manuals considered essential reading among real hackers in the early 1980s. Dade aces the test, which culminates with the Ugly Red Book That Won’t Fit on a Shelf.” But Hackers gets its longevity less from specific demonstrations of technical foresight—the hardware the characters drool over is laughably antiquated today — and more from its portrayal of what would become the dominant attitudes about the Internet and the way we live our lives on it.
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After my appreciate of Ghostwriter last week, my friend Erica Newland, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, pointed out that not only is the show a model of race and class diversity, but even thought it was filmed before the Internet made its commercial debut in 1995, it was a brilliantly prescient look at the way we’d come to live our lives online. She’s discussed that further here, and for the rest of the week, I’ll be taking a look at some of the pop culture artifacts from the earliest days of the internet to see what we got right, and what we didn’t.

By Erica Newland

Last week, Alyssa wrote about Ghostwriter, a PBS children’s series about thoroughly normal kids from Brooklyn who solve neighborhood mysteries with the help of their eponymous ghost friend. Although it aired from 1992-1995, Ghostwriter works surprisingly well today: in many ways it is a thoroughly 21st century show, and not just because the title character is something of a search engine for the real world. In making computers a central part of the Ghostwriter characters’ lives, the show anticipated the role that the Internet would play in our lives and our television shows.

Television today is awash with Internet-themed episodes. Last season, Brick from The Middle developed an Internet addiction, Liz Lemon of 30 Rock was impugned on a Jezebel-like website, and Chief Webber discovered Twitter on Grey’s Anatomy. But even in these episodes, digital devices and the connectivity they enable are gimmicks that drive a storyline, not the third limbs and backup brains that they have become in the real world. With a couple exceptions, like The Big Bang Theory and iCarly, remarkably few characters on TV while away hours reading blogs, cement relationships over instant messager, make important life decisions via email, or Google a contested point in the middle of an argument.

It can be tough to turn scenes like these into good television—and it’s an open question whether we really want our on-screen doppelgangers as chained to their devices as we are. But the brains behind Ghostwriter deserve extra credit for figuring out a way to turn computer use into entertaining TV.
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Our conversation about the FCC’s attempts to regulate children’s television earlier this week and Peter Suderman’s post expressing skepticism of the whole enterprise (with which I largely agree) have made me realize I don’t have a very good sense of how the market for children’s television works. Obviously, FCC limitations means there’s less potential for advertising in any given hour of television, but it seems like that advertising’s more likely to be effective because the content of the show narrows the audience down to advertisers’ preferred market. You don’t have to worry that you’re going to get a good overall audience but that the ratings won’t be high enough in the demo. I have no idea if the Children’s Programming Emmy Awards actually drive viewership at all. Mainstream publications like the New York Times don’t really appear to review children’s programming, and a quick jaunt through Parenting and Family Circle magazines suggests that they do a lot of list-like guides, but don’t provide a regular stream of comprehensive reviews of new shows.

So it seems we have a couple of problems. It’s not really clear that networks want to produce children’s programs, even as pay channels do, but the government feels there’s got to be some children’s programming available to people who don’t have pay cable. And Peter’s right to say that parents should make informed decisions about what their children watch, but it doesn’t really seem like there’s great information available without a major search that goes beyond ratings and plot summaries.

I can rattle off the names of dozens of television critics in a heartbeat, but I can’t think of one influential critic who regularly writes about programming for children in a way that’s aimed at helping parents decide what shows their children might enjoy from those they benefit from, rather than addressing children’s television as a matter of nostalgia. I’ll admit that I am not the target demographic for such criticism, but there does seem to be an odd gap between the amount of attention that we give children’s and young adult fiction in book form and the amount of critical attention to children’s and young adult television. Part of the problem may be that there isn’t really much in the way of young adult television at all — one of the complaints from parents in the GAO report I wrote about in that original post was that there aren’t many programs that are targeted at children over the age of 8. And so perhaps rather than seeing children’s television as part of a continuum with the programming we’ll watch as adults, we see them as entirely different animals: television for kids is instruction, while television for the rest of us is culture (and some commenters suggested this is actually what parents want, but it still seems like better information about what achieves that would be useful).

I don’t know what the fix is here, but it does seem like we have a scenario where a lot of people are unhappy, or feel like the market isn’t shaking out right. If we want a mix of network programming that includes Dora the Explorer, and The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Arthur and Ghostwriter, uses of the medium that help children learn both educational basics and how to be consumers of more sophisticated culture, something has to change. I don’t think regulation’s going to magically produce this regime, but I don’t know that the market, as it currently exists, is helping parents become informed consumers either.