Sticky Advertainment: The Webkinz Are Alright
I was checking out the buzz log over at Yahoo! and came across this ominously titled post, "The Webkinz Will Rise," about the collectible and cuddly phenomenon known as Webkinz. Apparently, "Webkinz" ranks in the top 100 searches on Yahoo! and buzz about the Webkinz.com site has increased tenfold over the last 12 months.
For those of you who don't know, Webkinz are stuffed animals, kind of like Beanie Babies, only bigger, and each one comes with a special code that you can use to visit your new "pet" on-line, buy stuff for it, dress it up, etc.
I refer to Webkinz and their world as "advertainment" because, well, that's what it is! The Webkinz animal gives you access to the Webkinz world, which is a multi-faceted, immersive commercial for Webkinz. In this way, it resembles the Pokemon revolution of 1995, when Nintendo created a video game that became a card game, a comic, a cartoon, a vast collectible menagerie, and a huge merchandising franchise. In a Leibnizian twist, every part of the Pokemon universe became an advertisement for every other part of it.
In addition to sucking money out of parents' wallets and purses, Webkinz is sort of like a Sesame Street for on-line communities. Just as Sesame Street taught children of my generation and after how to watch television, Webkinz teaches kids how to be part of an on-line social network - how to add friends to your "Friends List," how to send e-mail, how to play games against people you'll probably never meet or see, and so on. Second Life, World of Warcraft, and even IM are novel innovations to me and my generation because we can remember a time when they did not exist. My children are growing up with "virtual worlds" from Webkinz to Club Penguin to Runescape (which is a kind of "training bra" version of WoW), where they are "digital natives."
Of course, the word "native," has two meanings. On the one hand, it means that they are "at home from birth" in the digital world. On the other hand, and this gives me pause, it means that they are the subjects, not to say "slaves," of digital colonizers. What will happen when these natives get a little restless?
Image courtesy of blmurch.
