Top 10 Apps 4 you Dad and Toddler!

Why are toddlers so interested in their parent’s iphone? A friend of mine has a full page of apps dedicated to her two year old daughter. She calls it her “life saver!” Where ever she is she can hand over her iphone and the toddler flips to her page, settles down and selects her favorite app! She not only knows how to get to her app page but she can slide through picture, take a picture and call her dad with no one’s help! She is just learning to talk but she is an iphone expert!!

Furthermore, my 55-year-old Dad has no idea how to even turn on a computer. My brother has even written him step-by-step directing including pictures of what buttons to push! So when my Mom called me this summer to tell me she had bought Dad an ipad I was shocked! How did he know how to turn it on? What would he do with it? He can’t even type! Sure enough when I went home a few weeks later, there was my Dad, ipad in hand writing an email, my jaw literally dropped to the floor! He showed me all the apps he downloaded to check the weather, the stocks and his work schedule.

TIME magazine came out with a list of "top 10 Apps for your Dad"…

1. GolfCard
2. iHandyCarpenter
3. GasCubby
4. Grill Guide
5. Family Guy
6. Trapster
7. Hundred Pushups
8. 5800+ Drink and Cocktail Recipes
9. Fanfinder
10. Thing

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1906008,00.html

Road Trip for Family writes, "Back in the day, parents handed fussy toddlers their keys, a teething toy or maybe a rattle. Now, we hand over the iPhone.... It’s about iPhone apps. So, we decided to do some research and let our fingers do the downloading as we tried out some of the top contenders and a few more obscure apps. Here are our recommendations for the apps worth downloading. Let the happy road trips begin (www.roadtripsforfamilies.com)."

Road Trips for families Top 10 Apps for Toddlers and Kids

Disney’s Fairies Fly

ABC’s

Virtual Zippo Lighter

Wheels on the Bus

Teach Me: Kindergarten

Balloonimals

Bugdom 2

Toddler Teasers

Peekaboo Barn

Wordex

http://www.roadtripsforfamilies.com/2010/02/10-best-iphone-apps-for-toddlers-and-kids/

“Aka-San”- Mr. Baby

I found an article that sort of relates to what we were discussing two weeks ago- how nothing you post on the internet is sacred. Everyone all over the world will see it. This was the case with Allen S. Rout, who posted a picture of his 5-month-old son back in 2000 on his own personal website. The picture was captioned “We’re really blessed; Stephen is an amazingly happy baby.” After 10 years, Rout had forgotten about the picture, but one day decided to do a Google search of himself, where to his surprise, he happened to find the picture of his baby he had posted 10 years ago, except it wasn’t exactly the same photo.

The photo had been edited where he was surrounded by cartoonish word bubbles filled with Japanese writing: “Don’t call me baby! Call me Mr. Baby!” (in Japanese). This was not the only transformation. Others showed the baby with a head full of snakes: or the baby’s face pasted onto Kurt Cobain’s head one where his face was carved into Mount Rushmore and tattooed onto David Beckham’s torso.

Somehow, Stephen’s smiling face had leaked into Japanese visual culture. According to the article, it showed up on Japanese television game shows, and the baby’s face was also used to blot out images of genitalia in pornography. According to the article, for a time, if you did a Google Image search for “happy baby,” the original photo of Stephen was the first result that would appear, which is called an internet meme- “an idea, image, catchphrase or video that goes viral, mutating via amateur remixes into unexpected forms. Often, memes revolve around an inside joke — say, a screen capture from an obscure video game- but just as often they make jokes of the source material” (Andrew Gross).

What I thought was interesting is that there is an actual site: KnowYourMeme.com that compiles different internet memes and creates funny videos that explain how certain memes were created and where they came from. KnowYourMeme started working on the meme of Stephen Rout’s baby and created a page for what they called “Aka-San” (which means“Mr. Baby” in Japanese).With help of its multilingual readers and Google Insights (a tool that tracks Web searches by time and location), KnowYourMeme was able to figure out that this particular meme started in 2004, on 2chan.net, which is an imageboard in Japan that allows users to post images anonymously. A user then superimposed the baby’s face over an image from a comic book, added words to it and from then on more and more people in Japan were continuing to transform this baby’s photo. It became so popular in Japan that someone even made a plastic figure (or toy) out of the image:

It is interesting how Stephen Rout’s baby became a hit in visual culture in Japan, without knowing anything about it for 10 years. I do not know how I would feel if, for example, my child’s face was being used in a different country to censor private parts in pornography. It is weird to think that any picture I post can be found in a Google search- and who knows what people will do to the image.

Sources:
www.2chan.net
www.KnowYourMeme.com
New York Times article- A Baby Photo Becomes an Internet Meme by Andrew Gross Sept.15th 2010