The hard working folks at Center for Media and Democracy, who publish PR Watch and other invaluable resources, have compiled a list of the worse spinsters of the year. If you have been tracking the media in 2006, you will recognize many of these stories. It’s an excellent, compact list of the latest misinformation strategies being employed in the mediasphere.
The two top winners of our third annual Falsies Awards share a love of film. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a misleading moving picture must be worth tens of thousands of lies. In contrast, the third-place Falsies winner spread its money and its message over many media, including the Internet, television, radio and billboards. All the better to spin you with, my dear!
Dishonorable mentions go to a partisan front group, anti-environmental think tanks, efforts to recruit elementary school children for the military, and paid bloggers posing as grassroots supporters of the world’s largest retailer. Lastly, the 1,204 respondents to our Falsies Awards survey nominated dozens of other worthy recipients, several of whom are mentioned below in our Reader’s Choice Awards.
The folks at Save the Internet have released this nicely produced video into the googlesphere that explains the issues of “net neutrality.” Granted , this is not an objective presentation of the materials, but I still like how the CEOs of communications companies are portrayed as aliens. If you are convinced that you should take action, then click on the following link:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans will spend nearly 10 hours a day watching television, surfing the Internet, reading books, newspapers and magazines and listening to music this year, the U.S.
Census Bureau said on Friday.
The article is called “Media Threat,” which is a terrible choice of words because everything the article is about concerns new media. Just because it’s interactive doesn’t mean it’s not media. And though interactive, social media my threaten old models, it doesn’t mean they are a threat per se. However, though I don’t quite agree with the singularity theory or necessarily with the Utopianism of the following article, I do think it’s an interesting, updated look into the whole Web 2.0 social media phenomena. If you don’t know what that last sentence means, please read on.
In 1993, computer scientist Vernor Vinge published an essay titled “The Coming Technological Singularity.†It detailed a time, in the relatively near future, when the exponential growth of computing power and disparate technologies would coalesce, leading to a single moment of sudden technological evolution that would fundamentally change the fabric of reality for humanity and usher in the “post-human†era. While famed scientist/inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts this singularity won’t occur until sometime in 2045, this week may very well go down in history as the moment when the Internet hit a “singularity moment†that accelerated the evolution of the Web in such rapid fashion as to move the space into heretofore unknown territory. Quietly, nearly unnoticed—as are many of history’s major events—two recent announcements that could dictate the very future of media slipped into the news stream amid the din of billion-dollar digital Internet deals and print media buyouts…
A case study in how viral media spread. This is from sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling’s blog at Wired.com. It’s an account of the infamous “Macaca” comment by Senate candidate (and now loser) George Allen:
According to Vanden Berg, they chose to post the video on YouTube because it was free (simple enough). But before they tossed it out for the public to see, they’d already pitched the story to a Washington Post reporter, who wrote about it online on Monday. Only after the Post story appeared and the issue had been properly framed did the Webb folks send an email to their supporter list and to friendly bloggers.
The fact that the video was on YouTube made it particularly easy to distribute, since bloggers could insert it directly into their pages, but it was the campaign’s promotional work that spread the word.
And as the story developed, they constantly worked reporters and bloggers behind the scenes to shape the public discussion.
The video had its REALLY significant effects when the mainstream media picked it up and showed it over and over — 400,000 people many have seen it online, but millions saw it on television. Webb’s people also had help from their opponent: Vanden Berg attributed much of the issue’s long shelf life to the Allen campaign’s very poor response — bad damage control killed them.
It’s always interesting when reality catches up with reality TV. Apparently it might be difficult to tell who is shooting who in Fiji these days. While the CBS reality TV series Survivor points cameras at castaways, rogue soldiers are pointing their guns at the rulers of this remote region of the South Pacific.
“To be shooting Survivor while in the midst of a coup is a bit surreal for all of us here in Fiji,” Probst wrote Tuesday in an email to Entertainment Weekly. “We have set up our satellite TV in the catering area [for producers and crew members only], and during dinner the entire crew watches the local news to get updates on what is happening.
I once worked on a crew that built the set for the Billboard Music Awards in a hanger at the Santa Monica airport. We slaved 16 hours a day for three weeks while consuming massive amounts of raw materials, including miles of plywood and metal piping. But after the three-hour television event, everything went to the dump. That’s Hollywood for you. So it’s finally refreshing to see something come out of Hollywood that actually ends up being useful for normal human beings. Turns out that in Tunisia the old sets from the original Star Wars movie now provide real housing and not just shelter for our fantasies.
While ruthless Hollywood knocks over the set of each movie as soon as the director shouts his final “Cut!,” Tunisia, where George Lucas shot most of the “Star Wars” scenes, still keeps the original set from the ’70s, protecting it from the burning sun and the evil winds of the Sahara.
NEW YORK - In advertising, image is everything. So to attract aging baby boomers — the generation that once proclaimed “never trust anyone over 30″ — advertisers are turning to some icons of their youth.
Dennis Hopper, the counterculture rebel of the movie “Easy Rider,” pitches retirement planning; “Star Trek’s†Mr. Spock, pain relief, and “Rocky Horror’s†Susan Sarandon escaped the time warp to turn back the hands of time for Revlon.
1. Reclaim the term ‘hacker’. If you tinker with electronics, you are a hacker. If you use things in more ways than intended by the manufacturer, you are a hacker. If you build things out of strange, unexpected parts, you are a hacker. Reclaim the term.
2. Violating a license agreement is not theft.
3. All corporations are not on your side.
4. Keep in touch with everyone you can vote for and make sure you know where they stand on the issues you care about.
5. More importantly, make sure they know where you stand on the issues you care about.
6. Everything will enter the public domain some day- even Mickey Mouse.
7. Read the original 95 theses. Yes, they are irrelevant to these causes. Yes, they are religious- and not even close to my religion. And yes, they are 500 years old. But they do demonstrate how stating your beliefs clearly, effectively and publicly to challenge the status quo can change the world. Of course, I have no delusions of grandeur!
8. Use TOR for privacy and anonymity.
9. Trusted computers must not be trusted.
10. Democrats may seem to be on your side, but keep an eye on them. They may only be the lesser of two evils.
A few weeks ago this story caught my attention. It’s about a four-year-old boy named Stevie Long who foiled a robbery by dressing as a Power Ranger and scarring of the attackers in his home with a plastic sword. It got me thinking about some of the criticisms people have made about media. Jerry Mander, for one, who authored the Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, had his anti-TV epiphany when he saw his children during a family outing in the woods role-playing characters from Star Trek. I did a lot of that too (I was Spock, of course). And so have humans for thousands of years. They may not have dressed up to pretend they were in the band Kiss or play Vulcans in an imaginary spaceship, but they wore masks, dressed as animals and performed rituals from the stories of their cultures and ancestors.
Now, I still think it is unwise to challenge people with guns, but there is nothing inherently bad about taking on a power animal or superhero for inspiration. These days a lot of kids (and adults too!) are creating avatars to live extended lives that match a more fantastic vision of who they are and could be. Are they playing virtual characters? Absolutely not! There is nothing unreal about playing out a fantasy in cyberspace. It’s just a different location; netspace is not a false reality, it’s a very real place. People who claim that role-playing is inauthentic should question when they are truly authentic in their own lives. We are always playing roles and performing. Don’t believe me? Check in with yourself the next time you have a meeting with a banker, professor, potential employer, a new landlord or your parents. Who are you playing then?
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The folks at Media Channel have created News Trust, a social news network. What is “social news”? Building on the new paradigm of collective, self-organized intelligence that is the Web 2.0, readers can rate what they are reading as “trustworthy.” The old paradigm based on advertising determines what’s popular by what people buy, or the consumer patterns of a particular demographic that also reads the news service. So rather than voting with your dollars, at News Trust you vote with your intelligence. In all honesty, though, I’m not sure if I agree with the premise that an informed citizenry necessarily creates democracy. There’s also the issue of pedagogy and education. Just because someone can read facts doesn’t necessarily translate as action or democracy. Still, grassroots media services like this are absolutely necessary to balance large corporate media organizations that tend to filter according to their own operating paradigm in the service of capital rather than humans (or nature).
Reconstruction is an on-line journal that has a whole issue dedicated blogging and culture. Lots of great theory on social media. Truth is, this stuff is so new, we are inventing it as we go. But if you can pause for a moment to reflect on new digital media and social networks, it’s like digital permaculture.
Do media start wars? Many critics believe that if the MSM (AKA US corporate mainstream media) had been critical of Bush and Co.’s arguments for war leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the campaign would never have been supported by the public. I’m a little dubious of this argument, only because people’s opinions are not solely shaped by media, but by a number of other factors. You can’t blame media for people’s attitudes about war; it’s a far deeper issue that relates to, among other things, how history is taught in school and also a cultural attitude about violence as a way of resolving conflict. Believe me, I learned a lot more about that in the sandbox during kindergarten than I did from watching TV. Still, I don’t doubt that media contributed largely to the misperceptions of the situation. For example, there is no other explanation for why people still believe that WMDs were found in Iraq, which is contrary to the facts.
Anyhow, I want to draw your attention to a riveting documentary, The Revolution Will Not be Televised, that depicts a situation in which a coup d’etat was literally orchestrated by media in Venezuela. The filmmakers, an Irish crew that was in Caracas making a documentary about its controversial president, Hugo Chavez, happened to be in the presidential palace when a coup was staged. Regardless of what you think about Chavez, this is a rare film in which history actually unfolds on camera, and all I can say without giving too much away is that the documentary is absolutely incredible. Thankfully it’s now available on GoogleVideo at the above link. The movie demonstrates in the most literal example yet, how media under specific conditions could instigate wars, or at least light the match of a counterrevolution. Watch it and learn.
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.
