Archive for May, 2006

Dropping thought bombs

Dropping Knowledge
The ghost of Tibor Kalman, whose tenure at the helm of Colors Magazine revitalized and re-appropiated the language of commercial graphics for social change, seems eerily present behind the creative campaign of Dropping Knowledge. Like a Zen koan, Dropping Knowledge is part playful pun, part serious business. We drop a dime like anonymous tipsters to the cosmic dharma police on nonsensical, idiotic social practices, and we download knowledge like hidden viruses inside protein shell ad phrases.

The project is part of a trend of participatory new media, utilizing the Web as an instantaneous democratic medium. In this case site users can upload questions, which then get translated into ads, films and commercials. The more successful combination of images and words have built in paradoxes that get us thinking the way that riddles scramble our rational minds. Ideally these should be ready for meme deployment. That is, I’d like to see ready-made code available so people can easily drop Dropping Knowledge onto their iPods, P2Ps, and into emails. Thankfully the movies are in Quicktime format so they are easy to download, but I’d still like to see viral marketing strategies in place. But… it’s a nice start. I look forward to more idea infections.


“Tibor Kalman, Perverse Optimist” (Peter Hall, Michael Bierut)


“Colors : Tibor Kalman, Issues 1-13″ (Tibor Kalman, Maira Kalman)

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Are we not men?

X-Men
Few films are as gratifying as X-Men: The Last Stand. The effects are seamless, plot complex, emotions driven and social issues nuanced and prescient. The movie as dream is utterly captivating, and since most will focus on the entertaining aspect of the film, I just want to point out a few social aspects worth noting.

The mutants are humans merging with nature; as ciphers for us, they are hybrids. Typically in sci-fi, hybrids are part machine. In the case of X-Men, the characters are elemental or animalistic. In a sense they are the earth force re-balancing the human realm, which at first resists the mutants and insists on instituting a policy of “curing them” (made possible by a genetically engineered serum). Unlike typical sci-fi, the conflict is not mediated by technology, but rather by biology (and bio-science). As the struggle ensues between the mutant factions, the battle goes mano-a-mano, albeit the group that harnesses the perfect balance between the forces of nature and human prevails.

As an example of “sustainable media,” the X-Men strikes an equilibrium between cinema’s tendency to obliterate nature through the spectacle of destruction (both in the act of making the film and symbolically), and to bridge the natural world through its fusion of electricity (a biological force) and communication. It eliminates the false barrier we make between the environment and media, for in our world, media is the environment, yet it has a hybrid quality like the mutants. Though few are willing to admit it, we in the high-tech world are cyborgs, but in a good sense. Our fusion with technology is not into a false world, but into one of complexity and hybridity. There are dangers, of course, due to the unsustainable paradigm of our collective operating system. Yet we also have an opportunity to leverage interdependence. As operators, each one of us has the ability to input new data into the system as it self-organizes. As Buckminster Fuller once said, on Spaceship Earth there are no passengers, only pilots. Just as the new beings in Xavier’s Academy for Gifted Youngsters learn to harvest their abilities for the collective good, so too can we not reject our powers, but embrace them for the evolutionary challenges that await us.

Note: the title of this post is not only lifted from my beloved Devo, but also from a chapter in an excellent book on film and ecology:


“EcoMedia (Contemporary Cinema 1)” (Sean Cubitt)


“Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!” (Devo)


“Devo - The Complete Truth About De-Evolution” (Rhino / Wea)

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Busting Adbusters

AdbustersMy colleague over at the New Mexico Media Literacy Project, Christie McAuley, wrote the following letter to Adbusters. I think it is right on, and speaks for itself. I want to qualify this as constructive criticism. I have loved Adbusters for many years but have been somewhat disenchanted with its direction. It used to be really easy to read, but now it ventures into a very postmodern realm with its efforts to deconstruct the concept of a magazine. My suggestion: stop publishing a magazine if you don’t like the format. It has gotten so artsy, I find it incomprehensible. I also find the tone very us vs. them, which to me is a lot more tired than traditional magazine formats. I actually confronted Adbuster’s founder, Kalle Lasn, about this and he just said that it was worth the risk of alienating folks such as myself. Well, I’m not alienated, I just can’t use the magazine anymore as an effective tool for change. Anyhow, please read Christie’s letter, I think it’s great.

Hello Adbusters folks,

I am jazzed to see that you included New Mexico Media Literacy Project (NMMLP) on your “After 50 Years of Media Activism, What Will it Take to Break Through?” chart in the May/June 2006 issue. The organizations you referenced, including Adbusters, do important media work, and bring a much-needed perspective not covered in Big Media. In fact, NMMLP relies on many of the resources and insight provided by these very groups to help fulfill our mission.

However, what’s a chart without any critical analysis of its content?

In any piece of media, chart or otherwise, not all points of view can be accommodated. Editors choose to include some perspectives, while excluding others, even if they are trying to present objective and unbiased information. Thus, for every piece of media that tells a story, there are untold stories as well. Unfortunately, those untold stories often include under-represented populations like people of color, the disabled, youth, the working class, immigrants and LGBTQI communities.

While the groups mentioned in your chart do necessary and compelling work, there are other organizations that were not mentioned yet are breaking ground in terms of media analysis, production, justice and activism. I’ll list only a few (due to space and time constraints): Project Censored, Bitch Magazine, Third World Majority, Bodies of Work and Listen Up. I’m inspired to know that in the fight for better communities.Whileh stronger when we join together to know the media, change the media and be the media.

United in democracy,

Christie McAuley
Director of Curriculum Development
New Mexico Media Literacy Project

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The future looks bright (and shiny)

averting climate changeA friend once said that if you don’t envision a future, you will live in someone else’s. This is why I like the following piece of media produced by Free Range Studios (the folks who made The Meatrix). It’s a news dispatch from the future on how we averted climate catastrophe, albeit some of the reportage is quite silly, claiming a presidential ticket of McCain and Obama had won the ‘08 election. And there is a doctor named Yosemite White (she is white, of course) and another guy sporting a Nehru shirt and natural cotton vest. Yes the future looks like a Northern California Buddhist retreat. Yet, in principle the thought is a good one, and I would encourage others to make media from the future on how we survived this huge mess. My one complaint (yes, just one), is that the video is not set-up for viral deployment. It should have the same kind of embedded distribution mechanism that YouTube smartly has so people can send this thing around to like-minded amigos.
You can view it here and here.

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All and all it’s just another brick in the… toilet?

“We don’t need no ed-u-cation…” (disco guitar);
“We don’t need no thought control…” (disco guitar);
“No dark sarcasm in the classroom” (you get the idea);
“Teachers leave them kids alone” (yeah, you);
“Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!” (chorus of cool kids);
“All in all it’s just another brick in the… toilet.”
“All in all you’re just another brick in the toilet.”

OK, so Roger Waters is a bit of a cynic. But you don’t have to be. The folks at MySpace have a really cool feature, A Brick in the Toilet. There’s lots of little, practical features to get your ecology on. Plus you can see a preview of El Presidente Gore’s new missive: An Inconvenient Truth. Speaking of which, I haven’t seen the film, but I wonder about the disaster film aesthetic. Can anyone tell the difference between The Day After Tomorrow and an infomercial on global warming?

I suppose many people are only motivated by fear, so the dramatic strings and timphony drums will certainly get a rise out of some folks. But I’m still searching for a way to focus on the positive efforts of people (hopefully the movie will propose solutions, as I suspect it will). There is a tendency among media activists to believe that just by opposing something, by default it makes society more democratic. What gets me are the fear tactics of media like Democracy Now! The example of MySpace’s Brick in a Toilet is a good way to feel like you can actually do something today to alleviate climate change. I hope my little critique is not self-contradictory, but I’m really hungry for solutions, not fear. I believe most would agree.

Warnography: DIY frontline Iraq war videos and the explosion of on-line video

Iraq video stillI guess the Marine training that equates a hard-on with a deadly weapon translates well to the optical unconsciousness. At FreeVideoBlog soldiers are posting their combat footage (and in other cases doing things as mundane as doing BMX bike tricks in the middle of a vacant desert). Some of the clips are straightforward sad, with titles as simple as the great American lament, “Iraq Sucks.” Others though, are adrenalin-fueled, quickly cut montages of door knockdowns, home invasions, and assaults on Faluja. Overdubbed voices celebrate the “once in a lifetime opportunity” to attack a city full of insurgents. One video is just a guy “getting some” as he fires his machinegun from a helicopter; hell knows where those bullets are landing. Continue reading ‘Warnography: DIY frontline Iraq war videos and the explosion of on-line video’

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Food marketers to tone it down

You can thank the media literacy movement for this:

Advertising Age - FTC, HHS Call for Strict Standards in Children’s Food Marketing:

Two government agencies are calling on advertisers to market only healthier food products to children in the continuing clampdown on children’s obesity.

Compose yourself

A great article From The Economist print edition on the possibilities of “citizen journalism” as traditional newspapers decline:

Journalism too is becoming interactive, and maybe better

Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, says that “journalism needs to become a community service rather than a profit centre,” and is working on making this happen. As The State of the News Media puts it, “the worry is not the wondrous addition of citizen media, but the decline of full-time, professional monitoring of powerful institutions.” That, after all, is what a free press in democracies is supposed to be for.




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Now available, Antonio's health and media literacy CDROM curriculum for youth of color, Merchants of Culture. This valuable resource contains dozens of video and print examples of how advertisers market harmful substances such as alcohol and tobacco to various niche audiences, including Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asians, GLBT and Women. This is an excellent primer for introducing the subject of cultural marketing to high school and middle school students. This is also a great product for health professionals and councilors working in the area of prevention.

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