Much Ado About Stickam....

Shocking news of the day: latest teen craze StickAm is owned by a company that also streams porn! (or so the New York Timesreports today....)

Funny thing about this..on July 3, the local NBC affiliate WWLP-22 ran a story on Stickam quoting one Stickam user as saying "Girls shaking their butts, that is the biggest popular videos on Stickam." (sounds like the user is pretty much a viewer. as we all know by now, it's only 10% of viewers who bother to participate. And this particular Stickam viewer certainly knows what he's looking for on Stickam)

This fits totally into 22's usual "The Internet is EVIL!" stance. Whenever the network has anything to say about the Internet, it usually quotes someone from law enforcement, a teen-ager, or a clueless parent. It never bothers to speak with anyone who is involved in life online. I guess when you're staring down the barrel of massive digitization and may lose significant revenue because of the Internet, then it makes sense to demonize it and keep the populace thinking that online's a very dangerous place...

But I digress....

The NYTimes article goes on to discuss the allegations of Stickam's former VP, Alex Becker (and some documents) that Stickam's parent company Advanced Video Communications, is managed and owned by Wataru Takahashi, a Japanese businessman who's made a killing in online porn.....not to mention that Stickam NYC shares offices with the AVC's porn folks....

Makes me wonder, though, when Rupert Murdoch took MySpace, which was loaded with age-inappropriate content when he bought it, and started marketing it to teens, that no one batted as much as an eyelash about it. (Even though I was freaking out--yes, I had a MySpace profile back before Rupe bought it. I knew full well what was on that site and knew any curious teen would eventually find its unrestricted adult content. Oh, and isn't a soft-core porn starlet that has the most "friends" on MySpace?? guess this is ok for teens....after all, you can make some good money doing porn, or so I'm told...)

Fascinating, though, is the discussion on Techcrunch's Stickam piece. A number of folks think it's no big whoop to have an adult content producer also hosting a teen video social networking site (rather oxymoronic term when you think about it.) If you think about Rupe and MySpace, sure, it's no big whoop. It will also be no big whoop to you if you're a raging capitalist who likes drawing parallels between Stickam's lineage and Kraft Foods having once been owned by tobacco giant Altira (a.k.a. Phillip Morris) (although Kraft and Altira never shared the same offices.)

What most of the Techcrunchies as well as the fearful folks at 22 and most people don't know or remember is how so much social networking--and many "advances" in Internet commerce--were often tested in the world of adult content (I could do the research on this, but someone in the Techcrunch comments also mentions it, so I'm not smoking crack on this one....) What's rather alarming is the short, bleedingly open and obvious hop from adult content to teen content. Up to this point, we really haven't cared all that much about this small factor. We haven't really cared all that much when someone like Christina Aguilera (who I actually like) is featured simultaneously on the cover of Seventeen and the cover of GQ (in a more seductive pose)....

And that all of this is just OK....

Although I hesitate to jump into the camp of Donna Rice and Enough is Enough. IMO, Rice's org, and many others like hers, takes the whole notion of protecting children just a bit too far. Many of these orgs that seem to want to protect children merely want to sanitize the Internet for your protection (yes, like a toilet seat in a hotel.)

Enough is Enough attacks the wrong parties in all this. It's not the entire Internet that needs to be sanitized. The Internet's a big place, and adults should be able to partake of various forms of adult entertainment without having to hand over a credit card or a social security number. Perhaps what's needed is for Rice's org--and other orgs like hers--is to be more like Eda LeShan and, with great reason and forethought, target marketers who are taking products meant for adults and marketing them to teens.

Think about it: what does a teen need with a webcam and the ability to stream live video of him/herself? Is there any clear and compelling reason for this?

Chances are the answer--aside from "my kid needs to be the coolest on the block"--is no. Teens don't need to be streaming video of themselves so that other teens can see them. It's not going to make them more creative, or give them some sort of creative edge with video. That's just really, really good marketing convincing y'all of that notion...

Don't believe the hype....

So, is Stickam, and its association with porn, really an issue? Well, not necessarily an issue inasmuch as it is a good story--and a story that should have been done before in relation to many, many other products and services that make a bit of backdoor dirty money via porn. Stickam's not alone. But Sickam also shouldn't be marketed to teens as the Next Big Thing....

And maybe that's where Sickam really went wrong...

stickam, media, web 2.0, social networking