ABSTRACT
I am a Senior Executive Producer at WGBH in Boston. I’ve been making digital content for kids for about twenty years.
My work in this space began when I was working in the private sector at Headbone Interactive in Seattle, in the early Dot Com days. Computer access at that time came with the comforting buzz and whirr of a 28.8 dial-up modem. The big players were AOL, Netscape, and Webcrawler and the most popular domains were still those of universities, not corporations. For those of us making online content for kids, these were the years before the Federal Trade Commission 1 regulated privacy or off ered protection to children from predatory marketers. As such, it was a wild west of experimentation for us and for the nascent public internet. For Headbone Interactive, making its forced transition from a rapidly waning CDROM business to the internet, I built online digital comics, elaborate web-based trading games, and chat rooms staff ed with real-time monitors, typically mothers dialed in from home, who attempted to keep order amidst the chaos. And we made content that was simply for fun: for several years I corresponded with kids as Velma, a southern pig with a Blanche DuBois accent and a skewed way of answering her “Ask Velma” questions forum of topics large and small: school dance etiquette, acid rain, boyfriend trouble, how to become a ventriloquist, whether fi sh sleep, and how much cheese one would need to trap a hamster. They were simpler times.
