via a message to parents from your childs teacher – YouTube.
In this video a teacher schools us about the nefarious influence of corporations on public education. Watch and learn why we need to fight back. For more information, visit christinemccartney.net.
[video link] Yelp: With Apologies to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”
Today is National Day of Unplugging, which obviously I’m not participating in due to a massive deadline (hence the sudden burst of productivity on this blog!). However, in solidarity I’d like to share this terrific video from Tiffany Shlain & Ken Goldberg which riffs on Ginsberg’s “Howl.” It features the wonderful narration of Peter Coyote.
[video link] FOOD FIGHT – Kid Battles Corporate Machine – featuring Stic.Man of Dead Prez
By likening food corporations to drug pushers, this wonderfully conceived hip hop video hits all the right notes. As the rapper intones, “Poor diets kill more brothers than pistols,” Vandana Shiva deconstructs the food industry’s nefarious strategy for population control.
As Treehugger notes:
There’s slavery in our chocolate; drug-tainted horse meat masquerading as beef; obesity and poverty co-existing side-by-side and a food industry that fights hard to keep us in the dark about the correlation between cancer and our diet. And we haven’t even gotten to insecticides killing the bees we rely on for survival, or our meat- and dairy-heavy diet contributing to deadly climate change.
This is usually where someone chimes in with arguments about freedom of choice, free markets and personal responsibility. And this is where the analogy between fast food and hard drugs becomes particularly useful. We don’t allow drug dealers to pedal crack cocaine for a very good reason – and we certainly don’t let them put up billboards, advertise to our kids, or lobby congress.
Sugar is as addictive as cocaine. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
[Video Link] via Creating Critical Thinkers Through Media Literacy: Andrea Quijada at TEDxABQED – YouTube.
My good friend and Wonder Woman of the media literacy world, Andrea Quijada, offers this nice, short introduction to why media literacy is so crucial. She is the Executive Director of the Media Literacy Project in Albuquerque, NM.
It is my hope and belief that media will help people see Earth as a system. Based on the preview for this NOVA trailer, I’m getting the sense that we are getting close to a good example of how it can be done. Unfortunately I’m restricted from watching it in Italy, but if you are in the US, you can check it out here.
Global Youth Media by appl juic – YouTube.
Last year I had the honor to contribute “Practicing Sustainable Youth Media” to an essay collection edited by JoEllen FisherKeller, International Perspectives on Youth Media (Mediated Youth). One of her graduate students put together this fun video based on the book, which combines hip hop and media theory. It may be the first of its kind! Enjoy!
I read sci-fi with the understanding that it’s really about how present contradictions will play out down the line. This is unlike how technology companies visualize the future. They tend to ignore current contradictions by exacerbating everything that is wrong about the present. Here Corning dips its toe into the future stream by promoting what glass technology may look like in daily life. What I find amazing about this video is how it unselfconsciously promotes the integration of consumerism and marketing into everyday life as if it should be totally normal and desirable. Aside from representing an idealized bourgeois family that has somehow survived the current financial and ecological crisis, they seem to enjoy the absolute mediation of their lives without realizing that it is undermining the very future they desire.
Remember, friends, if we don’t envision a future, someone else will do it for us. I’d prefer if it weren’t Corning.