Archive for October, 2007
Some interesting facts about Asian youth.
The threebillion project was asked to put together a video on-behalf of MTV Asia for the Music Matters conference last week in Hong Kong.
The brief was to create a facts’n’stats video dedicated to Asian youth. However, when you consider that 61% of the world’s three billion people youth live in Asia, it is pretty apparent that no-one will ever quantify everything and certainly not in a 3 minute video.
Whether it be teenage marriage in India, mobile phone usage in Japan, Filipino TV watching or Saudi Arabian Bluetooth porn, each market is rich it’s own brand of youth culture. This video is dedicated to the best thirty six facts we could find.
Sometimes I wish CNN would just roll over and die. An announcement they are creating a news bureau in Second Life confirms that they are trend followers, and are no longer innovators. Yeah, so maybe a 24/7 news network was once a brilliant idea, but with the Web, who cares? Having failed at emulating the Fox News effect (by proliferating right wing news commentators through out their broadcasts) and comedy (by trying to inject Daily News antics here and there), they are now looking for salvation in user generated media, but the thing that they forget is that they are a huge multinational corporation. How does their business model jive with the new media revolution? Hence the humor of the following anecdote from youth media advocate Anastasia Goodstein:
Ypulse: Media for the Next Generation:
… when I was visiting CNN, they were talking about how to get young people to upload their own news video — one person remarked that they have been getting one kind of interesting video from teenagers: video imitating CNN anchors. Teens would create their own satirical skits making fun of the news and upload it to CNN (”The Daily Show” effect?).
Technorati Tags: Anastasia Goodstein, CNN
A bush mosaic made of faces with photos of deceased soldiers from the Iraq debacle. If you add the images of dead of Iraqis I think they would blot out his face. You can download this image from The Nation magazine.
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For every insane megalomaniac who makes my stomach churn, there are tenfold amazingly beautiful people who crate projects like NGO in a Box. This is an an open source collection of media tools for any hardworking democrat and rebel fighting tyranny with knowledge and communication. It’s worth visiting the site and exploring more deeply the tools that this little kit offers (you can also download them as well).
What is the Audio/Video Edition of NGO-in-a-box? | Audio/Video Box:
The Audio/Video edition of NGO-in-a-Box is a toolkit that lowers the entry level for NGOs, non-profits and media activists wanting to use audio and video for social change. It is a collection of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools, documentation and tutorials that introduce you to the world of FOSS and the low-cost technology that is transforming the balance of forces in the realm of media production.
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Curious about your dwindling financial resources? Jim Kunstler explains:
Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler:
Even if it were hypothetically possible to keep all the cars running forever, would it be good thing to make suburban-sprawl-building the basis of our economy – because that’s the direct consequence of perpetually cheap energy. Has anyone noticed that the housing bubble and subsequent implosion is following the peak oil line exactly?
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Periodically I get requests to review material to see if it’s relevant for media literacy. I was asked to view the above clip, which I found instructive in terms of how not to think about media. What follows is my reading:
Upon reviewing the video I would not recommend it for media literacy. While it is true that the many people in corporate media are on the CFR, I don’t believe they take directives from a secret group. It’s an issue of them all sharing the same values and worldview in the same way the same people mentioned probably all went to Ivy League schools and were in the same fraternities. Also, in terms of its educational applicability, it’s my opinion that it’s better to demonstrate how coverage of certain issues benefit specific sectors of society. A good example of this would be from the Noam Chomsky documentary, Manufacturing Consent, because it has good case studies.
Furthermore, I really don’t like the idea of conspiracies and secret cabals. Life is chaotic and messy. It’s easier to create chaos than order, although there is a point that generating a perpetual state of disorder is one kind of control, and that certainly has been true through out history. But that tiger is not an easy ride. If mind control truly were possible, we’d all be pretty mind-frakked right now. The system is in place to do it. Why hasn’t it happened?
Also, all the media discussed in the clip are increasingly irrelevant because the entire mediascape is evolving into a new paradigm. The assumptions of the narrator is that we inhabit a one-to-many, vertical model of information distribution, when in fact we are now in a more horizontal, many-to-many distribution flow. I’m not saying that corporate media are not dangerous to the planet, but we need newer ways of understanding, and unfortunately this particular clip features some outdated views of how media currently operate.
Finally, I don’t believe in the “conduit” form of media: that is, the idea that information exists as objects that are delivered from one person to the next without being altered. Communication is messy, so ideas don’t transfer that well. For example, how many of you can repeat all Ten Commandments and agree on what they mean? What is dangerous about media is how they produce “subjectivities”: ways of thinking. In a sense, the above clip just repeats the same “subjectivity” of the people it purports to critique, yet another example of the snake eating its tail. Time to change our diet.
Leave it to the fun loving Stalinists as Fox Sports to make Bush a world series hero who throws “strikes.” Hmm. I feel bad for the producers, really. History will not judge them kindly.
A Wooster Collective comic based on street art characters. Frakken brilliant.
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Speaking of Taco Bell, here’s a nice little culture jam from Vinchen.
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Thanks Spiro!
Look first, then read on.
If she goes clockwise, you’re right-brained, and if it goes counter clockwise you’re left-brained. Concentrate and make her change directions. Ack!
Via Souljerky.
The Right Brain vs Left Brain | The Daily Telegraph:
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteLEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safeRIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
“big picture” oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking
I have a cousin who used to have an herbal supplements business. He gave me some of the best advice in my life: the best medicine is the food you eat. It’s obvious to me that much of what is wrong with the US has to do with food, from the industrial production of it which destroys the nutrients of the soil and poisons agriculture, to the artery clogging ingredients of processed foods, to the low quality of most restaurant foods, to the transportation of foods causing global warming, to the imbalance of food stuffs that people consume, to the ill-health and lower life span this causes, to the nauseating taste of most prepared foods, and so on.
Michael Pollen, the one-man food revolutionary who authored The Omnivore’s Dilemma and now a new book, In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating, distills some his latest views in this fantastic interview. If you want to know what is going into your body and avoid future trips to the hospital, I highly recommend reading his work.
AlterNet: Health and Wellness: Michael Pollan: Americans’ Unhealthy Relationship with Food:
I spent a lot of time looking at the science of nutrition, and learned pretty quickly there’s less there than meets the eye, and that the scientists really haven’t figured out that much about food. Letting them tell us how to eat is probably not a very good idea, and indeed the culture — which is to say tradition and our ancestors — has more to teach us about how to eat well than science does. That was kind of surprising to me.
It really comes down to seven words: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” What is food? How do you know whether you’re getting food or a food-like product? The interesting thing that I learned was that if you’re really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmer and the best decisions for the environment — and that there is no contradiction there.
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Ram Dass once said this of gurus: G-U-R-U, aka Gee You Are You.
Ode Magazine : Fire your gurus:
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteMore than 1,000 years ago, the Chinese Zen master Lin Chi underlined the danger of gurus. He saw that many of his contemporaries in the 9th century transferred responsibility for their spiritual well-being to others. He said this meant they gave away their power and authenticity. This inspired Lin Chi’s oft-quoted statement: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” In other words, if you think you can find enlightenment outside yourself, you’re on the wrong track. After all, the essence of Buddha’s teachings is that everyone carries the Buddha nature inside, or—put another way—we are all Buddha. Lin Chi’s warning is still relevant today. Despite the far-reaching individualization in the modern Western world, people continue to seek handholds. Nowadays, there are more gurus than ever, despite the change in titles: mental coach, therapist, social worker.
The Edge asks, What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm?
Douglas Rushkoff made the above graph to outline his approach to the matrix between the medium and social control.
There are many other cool formulas by great thinkers. Be forewarned, though, the site’s navigation really sucks.
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Huff Post’s Marty Kaplan has a nice piece prophesizing the up-coming onslaught that Fox will be making against George Soros’ There You Go Again conference celebrating George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”
Marty Kaplan: Soros or Murdoch - Media on The Huffington Post:
The name of George Soros’s foundation, the Open Society Institute, comes from a phrase popularized by a hero of his, the British philosopher Karl Popper. His two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, was an attack on a philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel, and on the modern tyrannies, from communism to Nazism, which Popper saw as its consequence. Reading it in graduate school was, for me, one of those intellectually life-changing experiences. The difference between a closed and an open society, says Popper, is not that an open society says yes to all propositions. If it were, then the modern media — where propagandists and nutjobs are cloaked in the same plausibility afforded to, say, legitimate investigative reporters and scientists — would be the bedrock of a civic utopia. Openness doesn’t mean “anything goes”; it doesn’t mean “pick your poison.” It means that there is a broadly agreed-upon process for a society to test and refute, or test and accept-for-now, the contentions and conjectures on the table.
Technorati Tags: George Soros, Marty Kaplan, George Orwell
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Our Ancestral Mind in the Modern World: An Interview with Satoshi Kanazawa | Open Culture:
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteDC: Evolutionary psychology portrays us as having impulses that took form long ago, in a very pre-modern context (say, 10,000 years ago), and now these impulses are sometimes rather ill-adapted to our contemporary world. For example, in a food-scarce environment, we became programmed to eat whenever we can; now, with food abounding in many parts of the world, this impulse creates the conditions for an obesity epidemic. Given that our world will likely continue changing at a rapid pace, are we doomed to have our impulses constantly playing catch up with our environment, and does that potentially doom us as a species?
SK: In fact, we’re not playing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.
One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in the Stone Age.
No wonder the US is losing the war in Iraq. Like Taco Bell, it thinks people want convenience over authenticity. The battle for hearts and minds goes on…
Taco Bell Looks to Sell Mexican to … Mexicans - Advertising Age - News:
“We’re not trying to be authentic Mexican food,” said Rob Poetsch, director-public relations at Taco Bell. “So we’re not competing with taquerias. We’re a quick-service restaurant, and value and convenience are our core pillars.”
Need I say more? Below are some photos I took of taco venders in Mexico City. It took only a minute to get one of these served, and, boy was it delicious!
File this one under inexplicable partnerships. National Geographic has now branded a hydrogen powered Hummer. I have mixed feeling about this. National Geographic is generally considered a green brand, perhaps because of its global scope and efforts to document the vanishing human and natural world. Hummer, on the other hand, is the perfect symbol of the war economy, as a gas-guzzling behemoth, but also as a stand-in for the emasculated male member. I have long monitored Hummer ads and have seen a repeated message that we humans have become extraterrestrials. Forget spaceship earth, the Hummer is spaceship survival. With an absence of drivers in this ad, you get the sense that the Hummer is a borg, and we are simply its servomechanism. The quick cuts of the commercial also generates a discontinuous, disjointed relationship with place. We jumpcut around the globe as if the SUV will serve as our time-space machine.
I am because of you
(c) ODTmaps
An interesting article on how the world can teach the US a thing or two. What follows is a snip that discusses “ubuntu.”
AlterNet: 11 Things We Can Learn from the Rest of the World:
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