Another day, another review. Yesterday I was innocently reading the latest New Yorker, which contains an article about Cocomelon, a new-to-me animated series for young children. I mentioned to my husband that I was very confused by it. Always a man of action when YouTube in involved, he promptly launched an episode onto our TV.
Watching it affected me as I imagine hallucinogenic mushrooms might. I was transfixed, unable to move, even to sit down, as I watched large-eyed denizens of the Uncanny Valley participate in actions that can be described with real words–grocery shopping, playing with toys, playing with toys in a grocery, using groceries as if they were toys–but were not really those things.
Happily the one we watched was only about five minutes long, so I was released shortly, feeling dazed at first but quickly regaining brain function, which I used to promptly turn the feed off. There are 30- and 60-minute versions as well, from which I fear I might not have recovered.
Maybe the problem was the music, which my body was insisting should be ominous but was horribly not-ominous in a cruel way. The parents and children were oddly proportioned and simultaneously acrobatic and clumsy. There were no spoken words, only English subtitles, which did the opposite of explaining.
Perhaps a warning could be appended: Activities are not representative of those in real life.
This warning would be as useless as the subtitles, since the targeted audience is mostly pre-literates, primarily toddlers and infants. I’m old enough to indulge my inner curmudgeon, and I find myself nostalgic for the days when moms conversed with their children, even very young children, instead of both being engaged by devices.
As with the industrial food system, many people have no choice but to partake. The article’s views of the behind-the-scenes production revealed a pernicious research technique: A tot is given two screens, one showing Cocomelon and one showing a parent doing typical things around the house, and whenever the tot switched attention to the real life screen, observers analyzed the Cocomelon video to figure out how to punch it up to avoid the distraction.
Before release, the videos are scrutinized against a list of corporate no-nos, including Coco-children shown as sleepy or sleeping, which might inspire a viewer to leave the video for a nap or bedtime, and Coco-children riding on a parent’s shoulders, which would reveal how unnaturally enormous their heads are.
At some point this was the brainstorm of an individual, but that person has long ago cashed out. Cocomelon is now in the hands of its second or third profit-focused owner and has expanded correspondingly. It is now the third most subscribed channel on YouTube In The World, after MrBeast (even I’ve heard of MrBeast, so you must have) and T-Series, a Bollywood channel in Hindi shown in India.
The company has fired quite a few people lately, and may be planning a wholesale switch to AI for content-generation. That should kill it?–or else the bot-indoctrinated children will come after the rest of us when they grow up.
Culminating Triad 
I just watched the short with the kid and mom chasing the blue egg through the supermarket. In and of itself, I found it innocuous enough. As for the music–I have willingly listened to music ranging from Beethoven to Tom Waits, the Grateful Dead, Tori Amos, Robin Spielberg, Philip Glass, and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, so that doesn’t bother me. I think I remember my grandchildren watching it. I just talked with Skadi about it, and they’re also familiar with it. Skadi has the same concerns that you have, about children left abandoned to the mercy of screens. This concern is nothing new, as I myself spent countless hours in front of the tube as a child. My relatives have actually claimed that I learned to speak English watching television, as everyone in my family spoke Spanish at home, but I was fluent in English by the time I entered kindergarten. That was also before Newton Minow made his famous “vast wasteland” speech, but also before the internet opened up a vast wasteland to dwarf Mr. Minow’s worst nightmare. I will say that while I definitely do not agree with that idiot Harrison Butker on the idea that women should be satisfied with being wives and mothers and nothing else (especially after just having spent four years in college), or that men should be the sole breadwinner (I used to enjoy the old Adam comic strip featuring a very competent stay-at-home dad–one panel of which featured the immortal line “Real men don’t eat quiche–they make it!”), the fact that kids are left to the screen is a product of the fact that both spouses often have to work full-time jobs to survive. Now as far as the market research bit goes, targeted advertising is the future of marketing–if I *have* to look at an ad, it might as well be for something that I am interested in–but it is creepy as hell when it’s done on toddlers with the express intent of holding their attention and keeping them from watching their parents. It’s as if they’re being groomed for a future as obedient consumers. That’s what scares me the most. I remember many occasions insisting on getting products I saw advertised on TV–be they PF Flyers sneakers, Stripe toothpaste, Bosco, or Cap’n Crunch cereal. (That last one was awful and I never asked for it again. But they sold me one box.)
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