George Lakoff who introduced to the general population the idea of “framing”- using language to frame how we think of issues- writes on how Bush’s latest rhetoric might be imploding:
The Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.
“That is not a stay-the-course policy,” Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, declared on Monday.
The first rule of using negatives is that negating a frame activates the frame. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant, he’ll think of an elephant. When Richard Nixon said, “I am not a crook” during Watergate, the nation thought of him as a crook.
With not a penny of paid media and in less than a month, “Dove Evolution,” a 75-second viral film created by Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, for the Unilever brand has reaped more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and has gotten significant play on TV talk shows “Ellen” and “The View” as well as on “Entertainment Tonight.” It’s also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com, three times more than Dove’s Super Bowl ad and resulting publicity last year, according to Alexa.com.
You have to hand it to the commodities system for being so effective at absorbing dissent. But also credit the media literacy movement for making the misrepresentation of beauty in commercial media a contentious issue. For over a year now Dove has been running its “Real Beauty” campaign, the above video being its latest salvo. But this needs to fall under the “buyer beware” category. When an advertisement uses deconstruction as its sales technique, it’s a sign that the industry is getting increasingly sophisticated in its ability to deflect criticism.
Advertisers are well aware of our skepticism regarding the claims of commercials. It’s a tribute to our evolving critical engagement skills, but also an indication of the shallowness of commercialized culture. There is no dampening the human spirit when it comes to intuitively comprehending manipulation and false spiritual assertions, and advertisers are constantly searching for ways to circumvent and counter our innate resistance to such deceit. Continue reading ‘A wolf in doves clothes?’
This news item (via BoingBoing) came at a fortuitous moment because just yesterday as I was walking past the Morgan Library in NYC I realized that fonts and architecture serve the same purpose. This “book building” created by the Turkmen government is a symbolic convergence of the two. What prompted this thought was the design of the Morgan library with its classical Greek motifs that intimate tradition and knowledge. Here architecture is a kind of font that helps us read the building’s intent. Likewise, fonts are often used to connect words with points of view. For example, Futura, invented in the 1930s, denotes modernism, where as Times-Roman means consistency and reliability (think of the name). Good design, though, should represent ease of use/readibility, without drawing attention to itself. I think this principle applies to both font design and architecture. The goal is to facilitate the use of space, whether it is physical in the sense of a building, or imaginary, in the sense of the mental reconstruction of thoughts through written words.
My favorite book on fonts is Stop Stealing Sheep. People studying media are encouraged to learn more about this very important subject. Fonts are the gateway to everything you read, including this.
Yet another vision of the future is supplied by the New Urbanists, who have campaigned for a return to the body of principle and methodology drawn from successful historic practice rather than science fiction, politics, or metaphysics. That is, they rely on urban design that has proven to work well in the past and is worth emulating — by which I mean the relations of buildings to public space and with each other, not the deployment of sewer lines and other infrastructure. The New Urbanists are marginalized because their reliance on tradition is considered sentimental and nostalgic. Their work is viewed by the mandarins of architecture through the lens of Modernist ideology, which, going back a hundred years to Adolf Loos’s declaration that ornament is crime, has worked to decouple contemporary practice from what they regard as the filthy claptrap of history. Of course, Modernism itself has self-evidently become historical in its own right, and the more this is true, paradoxically, the more its defenders insist that history does not matter. Whatever else this represents in the form of intellectual imprudence, it at least promotes a discontinuity of human experience which cannot be healthy.
If you read 1984, you may recall that one of the features of the Big Brother-led government is that they would change alliances or history on a dime, denying completely contradictory information to the contrary. It would simple be erased and sent to the “memory hole.” One of the most important propaganda techniques is the Big Lie (developed by the Nazis), which is to repeat the most outrageous claim repeatedly so that after a certain point its reality cannot be denied. Hence the unbelievable statistic that the majority of Americans still believe that WMDs were found in Iraq. For the latest in this hit parade, read the following:
During an interview today on ABC This Week, President Bush tried to distance himself from what has been his core strategy in Iraq for the last three years. George Stephanopoulos asked about James Baker’s plan to develop a strategy for Iraq that is between stay the course and cut and run.
Be forewarned, a movie about magic employs the principle technique of enchantment: misdirection. Thus any film claiming to be about magic has as its subtext the fact of the film itself, which is a carefully constructed illusion, just as any Hollywood motion picture about spectacle is ultimately self-referential (such as Gladiator being a veiled commentary on the studio system). Curiously, this year there have been two films that deal with fabricating reality, locating their narrative in Victorian-era 19th Century: The Illusionist and The Prestige. Both situate themselves at the early stages of media spectacle, a time when phantasmagoria—the predecessor of modern film—was a popular form of pubic performance that utilized the proverbial smoke and mirrors. That there would be a cultural curiosity about this nascent period of magic, performance and spectacle is not coincidental. As we are facing ourselves in a fully engaged mirror of mediation, we are innately curious about the origins of our societal identity crises as we encounter our interdependent relationship with media.
Using these concepts, my basic claim can now be formulated thus: digital information and communication technologies are radically reshaping the very nature of the infosphere, and therein lies the source of some of the most profound transformations and challenging problems that we shall experience in the near future, at least as far as technology is concerned. In the rest of this article, I mean to clarify and substantiate this simple claim by highlighting three fundamental trends in the reshaping of the infosphere and some of their significant implications. Continue reading ‘The rise of inforgs in the infosphere jungle’
These days Martin Luther King Jr. has been so drained of meaning that he is cynically appropriated by parties as diverse as the Republicans and Chevy (some of you may have seen the recent John Mellencamp Chevy ad (click here to view) that argues through its strategic deployment of symbols that Chevy and American dissent are inseparable). But let us not forget MLK’s highly critical attack against the Vietnam War. I encourage all to read the speech, “Beyond Vietnam: Beyond the Violence,” which could easily have been written today. The following three lines are the most precise deconstruction of our current system that you will ever read:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
PS. I found some great MLK quotes at this Peak Oil site. It’s worth checking out.
AdAge has this great chart on media ownership. Check out and download the corporate family tree here. You can also read the article here. The most obvious news is the increasing migration of $$$ to the Internet. Traditional media companies- newspapers and broadcast TV- are not looking so good these days.
Here’s an image from the New York Post editorial: “A Dark Globalism.” It was the featured image in the print version. You have to click through the embedded slide show to get to the picture. It reminds me of the wicked kid trope in recent horror films, as if Muslim children are inherently evil. This is another example of how the so-called “war on terror” (a term that seems less in vogue these days) is ideologically reduced to a horror movie.
As media critics we tend to constantly point the finger at how bad everything is, so it’s nice to be able to also encourage good behavior. In this case, it’s NBC News, which has started a new series, “What Works.” It’s designed to exemplify and showcase programs, projects and people who are making positive changes. This is exactly the kind of thing I wish we’d get on programs like Democracy Now! I find it frustrating to see in media from both the Left and Right a continuously angry and fearful tone. It remains to be seen how the NBC News series goes; it could ultimately chose subjects that presumably only reinforce the prevailing paradigm. But it’s first segment on green roofs in Chicago bodes well. If you click to the link, you can view video as well.
CHICAGO - It’s like a scene from a peaceful meadow: Where wildflowers bloom and the bees are busy. But to reach this slice of Eden, one doesn’t travel out of town, one travels up, 12 stories up.
“I talked about building a green roof,” says Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, “and everybody kind of looked at me whether or not I kind of lost it, ha ha ha.”
But the crazy idea is paying off. Since Chicago installed a 20,000 square foot “green roof” atop City Hall five years ago, the city has saved about $25,000 in energy costs.
PITTSBURGH, Oct. 9 (UPI) — Teens who are savvier about the motives and methods of advertisers may be less inclined to smoke cigarettes, finds a U.S. study.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine say thousands of adolescents each day are lured to smoking cigarettes by advertisements and movies that feature sophisticated models and actors, suggesting that smoking is a glamorous, grown-up activity.
I had a chance to see Center for Digital Democracy’s Jeff Chester at the ACME Summit and I think he is way ahead of the curve in understanding what is really happening with the convergence between new digital media technology and mega-media corporations. His talk was chilling and got me to reconsider my participation in MySpace.
So before everyone gets all rah-rah about GoogleTube, read the following article of his in The Nation. It basically summarized his main talking points.
“Under the radar of all but the most savvy Internet users, powerful commercial forces are rapidly creating a digital media system for the United States that threatens to undermine our ability to create a civil and just society. The takeover of YouTube by Google announced October 9 and the 2005 buyout by Rupert Murdoch of MySpace are not just about mega-deals for new media. They are the leading edge of a powerful interactive system that is being designed to serve the interests of some of the wealthiest corporations on the planet.”
Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil and the Radio Venceremos crew (nice hair!)
More from the ACME summit. It was fun to reconnect with Jonathan and Susan from Reclaim the Media, folks I met several years ago in New Mexico at the first ACME conference. They are radio and indy media activists who told me of a really awesome concept, radio barnraising, a community project for creating popular radio. Essentially activists and volunteers gather to build a local radio station and to train producers in remote communities of typically under-served populations, such Mexican migrant workers.
Among those in attendance was Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil, a Central American radialista who I’ve admired from a distance. He is co-author of one of the best books I’ve read about guerrilla warfare and media, Rebel Radio, a history of the FMLN’s Radio Venceremos that broadcast in the midst of El Salvador’s bloodiest fighting during the Civil War of the 1980s. It’s a gripping tale, and makes punk zine publishing seem like kindergarden. What follows is a snip from his thoughts concerning a production pedagogy. It has good lessons for any media activist out there trying to develop a credible approach to popular media.
Friends, I will take this opportunity to share three ideas, three challenges that I find fundamental in these diffcult times that we are living today. As alternative community radio people (radialistas), as women and men passionate about the radio, I think we have to achieve three combinations, three fusions, the first being the fusion of content and form. Making a stupid, superficial program, void of ideas, is easy. It’s also easy to make a program that is profound and full of ideas, but cumbersome. The first is entertaining and done in an enjoyable, cheerful fashion, but it doesn’t say anything. The second may have great content, but it is boring, and lacks wit. And if it doesn’t have charm, it’s lost, because if it is informative and educational but boring, nobody will listen to it. Even if it has great content, nobody will listen to it. Therefore we have to fuse form and content. Sometimes we say that since we are community based one does not have to worry so much about the quality, but the contrary is the case: only the best for the people. An educational program has to be cheerful, attractive, and seductive, precisely because of what it is it needs to be of excellent quality.
Last weekend I was at the ACME media activist conference giving a workshop on eco-media and had a chance to hang out with Mitch Altman, creator of the most awesome stocking stuffer, TV-B-Gone. This week he was also on WBAI’s “Off the Hook” (a hacktivist radio program) talking about his innovative product. Essentially, Mitch is a countercultural geek who designed a remote control that has only one function: turning off televisions. There are 150 codes programmed into it and it can pretty much turn off any TV except some of the newer, bigger flat screens. One story he tells concerns how CNN caught wind of his device and as a preventative measure encased all their airport TVs (they are the sole provider in US airports) with wood cases. Not to worry, you can point the TV-B-Gone right into the box and it will do its thing. Kudos to Mitch for forcing CNN into such countermeasures.
One can imagine that in the future it will be a crime to not watch TV, but for now it’s perfectly legal to turn them off, and people generally react positively to TVs getting zapped. I’m sure you’re like me in that it’s utterly baffling why TVs are on in public spaces when the point of being in public is to engage other human beings. The most annoying thing to happen while you are talking is having TVs catch your eye, even when you don’t want to watch them. The problem is that your brain processes the change in environment (such as scene edits which look like flashes), immediately drawing it to your attention. This is great for advertisers but has little benefit for the average person. Keeping in mind the advertising secret that once an image is put in your head you can’t take it out, you are doing a pubic service by randomly (and intentionally) turning off TVs. Continue reading ‘TV-B-Gone’
Bridging media literacy with ecoliteracy, written by Antonio Lopez, an old school dharma punk and media educator. Occasionally he shoots from the lip, bloviates, misspells and can be tangential.
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.
This news item (via 
I had a chance to see 
