The above work is the product of two my star students, Wanda and Sara Gabai. This summer they did an intensive media literacy seminar with me, creating the above video as part of their coursework. I’m impressed by the quality of the script and how they contextualized it with their own mash-up of Web imagery. It was the first video they have ever made or posted to YouTube. If you like it, please to go the video’s YouTube page and post a comment or give it a thumbs up.
In my efforts to be more holistic with my media literacy approach I’ve been moving in the direction of not just looking at the content of media, but their entire production process, from the making of content to the production of gadgets. There’s a good book,Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman
The Lunesta ad parody that has survived fair use on YouTube (not the one I posted)
Apparently that cute little Lunesta butterfly flapping around in a corporate induced stupor is a rather pissy drug shill. I posted the Lunesta ad on my YouTube channel because I used it for teaching purposes in my courses. Accompanying the video I posted the following comment: “Corporation is a butterfly, replaces nature.”
To my chagrin YouTube users made lots of positive comments about the commercial, one stating that it was her four-year-old daughter’s favorite ad and thanked me for posting it. In fact, this has been a common trend: I post an ad for the purposes of criticism, and the commentators end up loving it. Go figure.
Anyhow, Sepracor, the maker or Lunesta, decided that an open media system is more than it can take. Too bad for them, because ultimately I made the one mistake of culture jamming: through my efforts to critique corporate brands, I end up giving them even more attention than they deserve, and hence more “mind share.”
Hey Sepracor, didn’t you learn anything from PT Barnum, who said there’s no such thing as bad publicity?
This, too me, is what I have been fearing about the future of the Web, and particular for those of us who teach media literacy. So far there has been a “hands off” approach from advertisers when it come to us using their work as part of our teaching materials. Either the Fair Use provision has kept them away, or we’re too few to care about. But you know the saying, you have free speech as long as no one listens to you.
Or put differently, does a copyright violation happen when a deconstruction takes place in the forest?
For what it’s worth, this is what the take down notice said (click here to see the rest):
Continue reading →
An alternate take on media literacy that goes beyond the standard anti-media rant. It’s from Henry “Convergence Media” Jenkins’ program at MIT. They run through a mouthful of terms at the end, but I find them useful because they acknowledge that these days the line between consumer and producer is bleeding the old definitions of literacy to death.
One of my most favorite human beings and a media lit colleague, Kathleen Tyner, organized a really cutting edge media literacy conference at the University of Texas at Austin in June. Thanks to the new tools available to us, we can all be digital flies on the wall. We can be there now by clicking through to the conference Website, which offers vodcasts and powerpoints of the presentations, including the super awesome Multimedia Mandala above.
The Dumbing Of America – washingtonpost.com:
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
This is the latest installment in the dumbing of America argument. The “dumbing down” polemic is pervasive in the media literacy movement and is also a subtext of Jean Twenge-inspired attacks on gen-y and the millennials so-called mediated narcissism.Though the article is compelling in its finely tuned arguments, riddle me this: if early educators in the US believed that universal literacy would produce a rational society, what happened? It appears to me that everything that the “dumbing down” crowd rails against is the product of highly rational, extremely well-educated people. From my vantage, rationality seems to be the problem, not the other way around.
Sometimes you have to thank the media gods for providing free resources to deconstruct their world. So welcome to Super Bowl Monday Planet: Firebrand, a ridiculously conceived Website that can be likened to a content-free television network, i.e. all ads, now shows. But if you are like me and are infinitely curious and attracted to ads like we are to a car wreck on the freeway, then Firebrand is pure unadulterated consumeristic voyeurism. Forget the strange premise that people will watch ads for entertainment value. We have a free media literacy download site!
You can download any commercials onto your computer and use them for teaching about media. Firebrand supports a number of formats, including iPod, iPhone, Windows Media and Quicktime.
OK media lit folks. Have at it!
From the Website:
OUR MANIFESTO
We love commercials. We submit, with rare exception, that they?re the best stuff on TV. In under a minute you get the best directors, the sickest special effects, the funniest writers?what?s not to love?
We love commercials. 1984. Mean Joe Green. Whasssup? You know you love them, too. So let?s gather ?round the best of them. Sort them. Judge them. Share them. Love them.
We love commercials. The eye candy. The laugh out louds. The did-you-just-see-thats. The most loved, the most emailed, the ones we still talk about today. Let every day be Super Bowl Monday.
Technorati Tags: Firebrand
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.
Ha! Got you to look. Here are some clips by the great deconstructionist, Jean Kilbourne, who critically examines images of women in advertising.
Technorati Tags: advertising, Jean Kilbourne
A preview for a cool little documentary based on a great book that dissects Hollywood stereptypes of Arabs, Reel Bad Arabs. The author, Dr. Jack Shaheen, is a really nice guy. I met him at the Taos Talking Pictures Film festival and saw the talk that this film is based on. It’s powerful stuff and badly needed. Please support him and what he has to say by sharing this video.
Technorati Tags: Reel Bad Arabs
Panel from Understanding Comics
If it’s true that graphic novels are subversive, it’s probably why I love them so much. Scott McCloud‘s Understanding Comics makes a very convincing argument that graphic novels are indeed a high form of art. My absolute favorite is The Invisibles, but there’s too much drugs and sex to make it usable in a normal classroom setting. Still, I hope will read the series anyway.
Anyhow, I came across the following article that argues for graphic novels in the classroom. I wholeheartedly agree!
Reading Online – New Literacies::
Educators need not worry that graphic novels discourage text reading. Lavin (1998) even suggested that reading graphic novels may require more complex cognitive skills than the reading of text alone. Some English teachers use graphic novels to teach literary terms and techniques such as dialogue, and they use works like the Victorian murder novel The Mystery of Mary Rogers (Geary, 2001) as a bridge to other classics of that period. Graphic novels can also inspire writing assignments. For example, the human interest story Jack Cole and the Plastic Man (Spiegelman & Kidd, 2001) intersperses an essay on the short, tragic life of comic artist Jack Cole with examples of his artwork, photographs, and even reproductions of a Christmas card Cole sent. The collage that results captures biography in a new way. For a challenging classroom project, students could create graphic novels based on literary works or their own autobiographies.
Technorati Tags: Scott McCloud
According to CURT HOLMAN, the seven deadly sins of kid culture are:
1) INSIPIDNESS
2) BRATTINESS
3) “PRINCESS-NESS”
4) “STEREO-TYPING”
5) VIOLENCE
6) VULGARITY
7) SLUTTINESS
While I agree that seeing these attitudes expressed in media for youth is troubling, I’d like to argue that kids have their own culture independent of media (this is not to say it is influenced by media). I disagree with authors when the see children role playing TV shows as bad. Kids always role play, and I find the adult culture much more dangerous than what is being streamed to kids. Besides, look at the kind of role playing certain arm chair militarists are doing as they toy with people’s lives while they project their fantasy of virility upon the youth soldiers of the world.
I disagree with the solution stated below, which is to cut off the source. I think it is far better to let children be exposed to the world but to discuss it and teach them to critically engage what they are experience. This is coming from someone who grew up on a lot of TV (at least 4-6 hours a day) and as someone who used to role play such horrible programs like the Six Million Dollar Man and S.W.A.T. You may disagree, but I don’t think I’m damaged as a result.
For now, the Seven Deadly Sins of Kid Culture – or as I like to call them, Blandy, Bratty, Dippy, Bleedy, Gassy, Trampy and Jar Jar – can be exhausting opponents. Because of them, however, I appreciate the children’s arts that my daughter and I discover together all the more, such as the graphic novel Owly by Lilburn’s Andy Runton, or the catchy, hook-laden songs of Laurie Berkner, or the new Pixar movies.
But being well-rounded isn’t the only virtue I want to encourage in my daughter. The best way to fight the seven deadly sins is to cut off, shut down and unplug all their sources of entry. Even the best things about kid culture, even Ratatouille, can’t compare to a walk in the park.
H/T to Will for passing on this great post from the Center for Citizen Media. It’s an excellent review of recent trends and has a nice little section on media literacy that focuses on principles rather than techniques. Here is a snip:
Center for Citizen Media: Blog » Blog Archive » Citizen Media: A Progress Report:
* Be skeptical. We need to be skeptical of just about all media. This means not taking or granted the trustworthiness of what we read, see or hear from media of all kinds, whether from traditional news organizations, blogs, online videos or you name it.
* Use an internal “trust meter.” But being skeptical of everything doesn’t mean being equally skeptical of everything. That’s why we need to bring to the modern media the same kinds of parsing we learned in a less complex time when there were only a few primary sources of information. Imagine a credibility scale ranging from plus 10 to minus 10. I give a New York Times or Wall Street Journal article an automatic plus 8 or 9; I don’t assume perfection but I do trust that, in articles by most reporters for those publications, a strong effort went into getting it right. An anonymous comment on a random blog, by contrast, starts at minus 8 or 9; it would have to go a long way to merely have zero credibility.
* Learn media techniques. Younger people are getting pretty good at this already. What I suspect they — and almost everyone else — lacks in this regard is understanding how communications are designed to persuade, and how we can be manipulated. We need to teach ourselves, and our children, about how media work in ways that go far beyond knowing how to take a snapshot with a mobile phone or posting something in a blog.
* Keep reporting. No one with any common sense buys a car solely based on a TV commercial. We do some homework. It’s the kind of research and follow-up that journalists do. So let’s call it reporting. We need to recognize the folly of making any major decision about our lives based on something we read, hear or see — and the need to keep reporting, sometimes in major ways, to ensure that we make good choices.
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MediaShift, a decent online column by Mark Glaser about new media hosted by PBS, features a nice article about a youth media conference in NYC that has been going on for a few years, The Overseas Conversation Series, created by filmmaker Jordi Torrent. I was fortunate to be on its panel a few years ago and it was fun to see some sparks fly between academic notions of media literacy and the practical. My friend, Kathleen Tyner, who has written a great primer on media literacy in the digital age, “Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information (LEA’s Communication Series)”, complained that getting bogged down with literacy definitions is like counting the angels on the tip of a pin. She was calling on participants to just accept the notion that “literacy” can be used for books or digital media. I tend to agree, but feel that it’s also necessary to acknowledge that the reality of print media is substantially different than that of new media. As McLuhan argued, print represents a linear form of thinking, and new media is more multidimensional, or “acoustic.” An acoustic space comes at you from all directions (such as a forest).
Anyhow, I like Glaser’s overview. I wish I could have been there!
MediaShift . Digging Deeper::New Media Literacy as Important for Educators as Students | PBS:
For so long, the focus of media literacy education has been on helping students understand the media they consume. What are the biases? Who owns what outlet? How are news reports produced? But with the rise of new media, perhaps the focus of media literacy education should shift to educating the educators — and other adults — about blogs, podcasts, social networking, mobile content and virtual worlds. That way, adults could relate better to students and help them understand the world in which they are digital natives.
Technorati Tags: McLuhan, media literacy
Bridging media literacy with ecoliteracy, this blog features various meditations and musings by Antonio Lopez, an old school dharma punk and media educator. He is the author of:
