Santa Goes Digital

Written by Nicole Ferraro

12/24/2010 10 comments

In my day, my mom had to drive me two miles to the nearest shopping center, unbuckle my seatbelt, and walk me into a store, in order to bring me face to face with the one and only Santa Claus.

Thanks to the Internet, that's no longer the case.

Santa wannabes: Put away your fat suits and beards. All you need this year in order to thrust fantasy on gullible children is an Internet connection.

Several organizations and companies are doing their part to digitize Santa this holiday season.

NORAD, the military organization responsible for the aerospace and maritime defense of the US and Canada, for example, has set Santa up with his own Facebook page and Twitter account. NORAD also hosts an online Santa-tracker, and on Christmas Eve people will be able to enter "Santa" into Google Maps on their mobile phones in order to determine his location. According to the site's detailed explanation of Santa tracking, "NORAD uses four high-tech systems to track Santa - radar, satellites, Santa Cams and fighter jets." Feel safer now?

Santa himself has gotten pretty good at digital communications. A visit to PortableNorthPole.tvwill allow people to get Santa to send personalized greetings to their loved ones. And the siteTextSanta.net offers text messages from Old Saint Nick. For $3.99 a child (or childish adult) can receive a single text from Santa; and for $5.49 a child can receive three personalized SMS messages. ($1 from each text purchase is donated to the March of Dimes.)

Companies and organizations aren't the only ones getting into the digital Christmas spirit. Another Facebook page for Santa Claus has more than 9,000 "Likes" and was started by a man named Don Lanier who had intended to set up a Santa Facebook page to show his granddaughter.

"I showed it to her and she was all excited. That's what motivated me to keep it up," said Lanier in an interview with Internet Evolution.

Not expecting the large response he got to the Facebook page, Lanier had to enlist volunteer "elves" once the page grew past 3,000 fans. He's making it a point to respond to every Christmas wish wall post and email that comes in. While the "elves" handle some of the Facebook page activity, Lanier responds to each individual email, of which he's received nearly 700 and is amassing 50 to 150 per day.

Since Facebook only allows for users 13 and over to join the site, the activity on the page has been heavily influenced by parents who are speaking for their kids.

It hasn't all been Christmassy over on the Facebook page, though. Lanier has had to deal with spam and inappropriate posts; and he was even locked out of his own page by Facebook.

"One of the drawbacks is Facebook doesn't have very good administrative tools, so I can't approve messages before they're posted on the site. There have been really mean posts by children and adults alike. Then these people started flagging all of the comments and ended up blocking me out, and we couldn't update anything," he told us. "They knocked us off two or three times, it was frustrating."

But overall the experience has been positive and Lanier intends to keep the page going and possibly start a blog in conjunction with it. One of the draws, he says, has been all of the personal stories parents and children are sharing on the wall. Families have shared stories of financial and health hardships, and one post from a child currently on the wall asks for her family to be happy again.

"There are some sad stories in here. I wish I was a millionaire and could help some people out, but I can't," said Lanier. "I write back to them to motivate them and keep them going."

Editor's Note: Internet Evolution will be on a lighter posting schedule next week. We'll still have new content available every day, so please be sure to stop in. We'll resume normal posting on Monday, January 3rd. Happy Holidays!

— Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution

Widening Our Perceptions of Reading and Writing Difficulties

Learning to read and write are complex processes, which can be disrupted in various ways, leading to disorders known as dyslexia and dysgraphia. Two new studies, published in a recent special issue of Elsevier'sCortex provide evidence of this variety, suggesting that effective treatment needs to take it into account.


A group of researchers from the Universities of Bari and Rome in Italy studied the reading and writing abilities of 33 Italian dyslexic children, comparing their performance with that of children with normal reading ability. Italian is an "orthographically transparent" language, meaning that letters tend to correspond to the same sounds, whereas many letters in the English alphabet change their sound from word to word (like the "c" in car and city). However, the new study showed that even in Italian, in which it is relatively straightforward to convert sounds into letters, children still have difficulties in spelling.

Younger children with dyslexia generally performed worse than proficient readers; however, the older ones showed a more selective impairment when spelling words, suggesting that knowledge of vocabulary may be more important in spelling than previously thought.

The other study, from Tel Aviv University, Israel, provided the first systematic description of a type of reading disorder called "attentional dyslexia" in which children identify letters correctly, but the letters jump between words on the page, e.g., "kind wing" is read as "wind king." Teachers and neuropsychologists often notice that children substitute letters when reading, but in this type of dyslexia the substitutions are not caused by inability to identify letters or convert them to sounds; they result from migrations of letters between words. The findings showed that letters would mostly migrate to the same position in another word, so the first letter of one word would switch places with the first letter of another word. Awareness to the existence of this type of dyslexia is important, because it suggests a straightforward way to assist these children in reading -- by presenting a ‎single word at a time, e.g., with the help of a word-sized window cut in a piece of cardboard.

Elsevier. "Widening our perceptions of reading and writing difficulties." ScienceDaily 8 December 2010. 8 December 2010 http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2010/12/101208125809.