Thursday 13 November 2008

What hath Webkinz wrought?

Wired report here that 'when this plucky line of stuffed animals launched in 2005, it had a unique feature: Each creature (like the goldfish above) comes with a code that unlocks its virtual doppelgänger in the Webkinz.com online world'. Although metaverses such as Second Life may be slower off the block, commercially oriented ones aimed at children show no sign of sluggishness.

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I am director of the Media and Persuasive Communication (MPC) network at Bangor University where I also lecture on political-economy of the media. I am currently working on a book provisionally titled Deconstructing Privacy for Peter Lang and leading two empirical projects in connection with privacy perception and the use of new media for smoking cessation. I am author of Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events and Process (Routledge, 2013); The Mood of Information: A Critique of Behavioural Advertising (Continuum, 2011); and Digital Advertising (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009). Please contact me at mcstay@bangor.ac.uk if you are interested in Ph.D supervision or consultancy services.