video killed the radio star
 
Amidst all the serious talk on the web about the dangers of webcams, I’ve uncovered a scourge of a different sort.  If you, like me, are the parent of a young child, and your own parents are reasonably technologically savvy and live at least half-an-hour away from you—well, really, from their precious grandchild—chances are that you recognize the symptoms too.
 
Call it GOCSS (pronounced “gox”), or Grandparental On-Camera Silliness Syndrome.  It starts with the seemingly innocuous giving of a gift from your parents to you: a shiny new webcam.  In our case, being a  Mac family, it was an iSight that attached magnetically to the perfect spot on top of our iMac G5 [too bad we bought before the new ones with the built-in camera came out, huh?].  What it leads to are weekly phone calls that last only the handful of seconds it takes to say, “Do you want to go on the computer?”
 
You’d think that the possibilities of adding video to iChat would enhance the normal, newsy, parents-checking-up-on-their-kids phone call.  You’d be wrong.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to “see” the ‘rents and definitely a technological wonder for grandparents and granddaughter to “see” each other more often.  But actual informational content?  Not so much.
 
At least, as The Pumpkin’s gotten older , we’ve finally gone beyond the stage of her staring, confused, at the screen, wondering why Grandma was on the computer and what the hell was going on, refusing to interact with the strange pixellating 2-D versions of her grandparents.  Not that that stopped dear ol’ Grandma—and herein lies the first major symptom of GOCSS.  Doesn’t matter if the baby is cognitively unready to comprehend that the talking picture on the computer screen is actually her grandmother and that she can talk back to it—Grandma will do enough talking for the both of them.  That is, if by “talking,” you mean repeating “Hi baby, it’s Grandma!  Hi baby it’s Grandma!  Hi baby, it’s Grandma!” over and over and over again in quick succession.
 
Next symptom:  extreme close-ups.  And I mean extreme.  Look baby, there’s Grandma’s eyebrow!  Then there’s the fun of two adults trying to fit on screen at the same time (with only one chair in front of the computer):  Look baby, where’s Grandpa’s head? Now, before you start getting on my case, saying that I’m being mean to my poor parents who, after all, just wanna see their precious grandchild, I do acknowledge that The Pumpkin loooves talking to her grandparents on the computer.  Sometimes, she sees the computer and goes, “Ba-ma? Ba-ba?” My mother’s even got a few methods to increase interactivity, which, of course, work better now than before.  Apropos of nothing, she’ll stop in the middle of a conversation to start a game of peek-a-boo with a piece of paper.  And when we go to their house, The Pumpkin now looks for the board book than Grandma keeps by the computer to read via iChat, and the photos of a much younger Pumpkin and their best friends’ dog.  “Look, baby!  Look, doggie!”  [Don’t forget, when doing this, you must put the object to be displayed as close to the camera lens as possible for maximum fun, and a few back-and-forth pull-backs, in quick succession, are always good too.]
 
Now, like I said, The Pumpkin has grown to love and anticipate this.  She’s gone from staring to jumping jerkily in my lap whenever I say to say something to, now, singing and running all over the office, playing “bed/blanket” on the futon, drumming on the file cabinet, all while I’m trying to move the camera around so my parents can see.  But, like I said before, there ain’t much conversating goin’ on.  And I know, I guess that’s not really what it’s for.  [And I guess it could be worse.  My poor mother-in-law spent what felt like half-an-hour on the phone the other night trying to get my stubbornly silent little girl to “sing for Nana.”  Which, of course, she’ll oblige as soon as the phone’s off.]
 
But here’s the GOCSS symptom that really led to this post, and that’s the tendency for the dear old loved ones on the other end of the high-speed internet connection to do things, on camera, that they probably wouldn’t do in public.  One of The Pumpkin’s new things is that she loooves to pull up her shirt to show her “bummy” (for some reason, she can’t say “tummy”), and what she loves more than that is to get one of her parents to lift their shirt (or do it for them) for a “bummy kiss,” her cute, diminutive version of a belly bump.  [Just waiting for her to try this in public, which will invariably lead to CPS getting called on our asses.]  So, of course, not getting the whole “2D vs. 3D” thing [she still tries to pry things out of magazine photos, especially food], the other night she starts doing the whole tummy/tummy kiss thing with my parents on the computer.  All I can say is, for my dear old dad reading this, I love you, man, but somebody’s lucky that I’m pretty technologically illiterate and so don’t know how to record video during an iChat session, or otherwise “webcam close-up of Grandpa’s blindingly white tummy” would be doing brisk business on YouTube right now.  [See?  I’m not that mean!  All I’m doing is writing about it, at least I didn’t do the other thing.  Heh.]  ‘Cause if there’s one thing your granddaughter (not to mention your son and daughter-in-law) really needs to see on the 20-inch flat-panel computer screen, it’s that.  [And if you’re wondering where Grandma was during all of this, what do you think prompted Grandpa’s display?]
 
So, yeah, GOCSS.  A little technology is great, but...  Recognize the signs, and stop it before it’s too late.
Thursday, August 3, 2006