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, which takes the “circuit of culture” approach by looking at how representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation are recursive. We need to update this model to incorporate a sense of social justice, as the above video is pushing for, and also the ecological dimension of production. It’s not just that conflict minerals are a problem in the supply chain, there is also disposal and externalization of the toxic byproduct resulting from built-in obsolescence (you know, what happens to your computer or iPod after you upgrade it).

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):

ATTENTION

We have received copyright complaint(s) regarding material you posted, as follows:

• from Sepracor Inc. about Lunesta butterfly – worldbridgermedia?Video ID: hQTexs-__Dg

Please note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos you have uploaded. Please delete any videos for which you do not own the necessary rights, and refrain from uploading infringing videos.

If you are unsure what this means, it is very important that you visit our Copyright Tips guide.

If one of your postings has been misidentified as infringing, you may submit a counter-notification. Information about this process is in our Help Center.

Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material was disabled due to mistake or misidentification may be liable for damages.

For your reference, a copy of this message has been sent to you via email, and can also be located in your Account Warnings page.

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.

Produced by Anybody

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.

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

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