Big Media for a Small World

I largely agree with McChesney. There needs to be more awareness of the growing media conglomerates, and then some kind of action could be taken.

As far as awareness goes, give youth some visual aid. McChesney had several good ones in the video. So, maybe we just show the video to classes? I would suggest that Frontline's excellent "Merchants of Cool" also be included. It provides in-depth foci on specific media areas.

I can't begin to suggest an action. We are far from that stage. For now, let them know what their eating first, and then they can decide whether they want to swallow it or not.

The McDonald's Game

You all have probably heard of this before, but it is a game where you essentially have to run a McDonald's store and make decisions about health vs profit and such.

I think it is a nice look at the corporate globalization from this week and the body image stuff from a few weeks ago.

Game: http://www.mcvideogame.com/index-eng.html

Just Do It: Direct Vs. Indirect Media Education Lessons for Men and Women

Hatoum and Belle (2006) pointed out that reading magazines targeted at men often lead males to be dissatisfied with their physique and want to add muscle. Also, men had much higher, usually unrealistic, expectations of female fitness if they regularly read these magazines.

There are at least two routes toward combating this trend. We can put men and women (or boys and girls, but only one age group in a session) in a classroom setting and introduce them to advertisement and magazine images that represent unrealistic human form. We can inform them what makes these images unrealistic (ie. digital manipulation, steroids) and the pervasiveness of the practice in advertising.

This would be the direct route. Normally, I am all for this, but we have seen such studies only attain pieces of the desired results. Therefore, I suggest we come at them sideways.

We are now in a formal setting, and the students are informed that the next project will be worth a significant portion of the grade for class X. We discuss advertising and the strategies that are used to make a persuasive television advertisement, possibly showing some examples. Assured that they are noticing issues like unrealistic body image, we inform them of the assignment. They must produce a short advertisement for a product, using the strategies that they are aware of. The ads will be shown to another class and their grade will be determined by how many of those students would be willing to buy the product advertised.

So now the students scurry off and seek ways to sell their product. What they will soon realize is that they cannot rely on the tactics that soda and car commercials do, because they cannot possibly put those things in front of the camera. The body of Cindy Crawford is not going to help them sell their can of Pepsi because a very low percentage of women have a shape remotely like hers, and it is unlikely that one of those few is sitting in their classroom. They will realize that the bodies of the real, tangible individuals that we interact with daily do not resemble Heidi Klum or Jesse "The Body" Ventura.

Now the students realize that what they encounter in magazines and commercials are less "real" people and more constructions created through dozens of individuals manipulating and producing what is essentially an "effect." The degree of separation between the manipulation of a model in a magazine advertisement and the digital/physical amalgamation of Benjamin Button in David Fincher's film is due to nothing more than a matter of preferred method of production. The digitally "painted on" model and computer generated model of Brad Pitt's head on the body of a 60 year-old actor are equally absurd in their appearance when compared to the reality that is placed in front of the camera.

At least Fincher gives us, the audience, a tell to indicate that this is indeed fantasy. Even the least sophisticated viewer will notice that Button's head (the digital model of Pitt's) is unusually large for his body. The character maintains this proportion until his age is approximately that of Pitt, when he actually does his own acting.

The magazines don't give us this wink of the eye. They would have us believe that what we are gazing upon is reality. It is a disservice that harms the self-esteem of many individuals, and a practice that shows no sign of dissipating.

Practical Classes

I ran across this article about practical classes that should be offered in public schools. Unfortunately, there are only two on there, but I think we can assume there are several more that are certainly needed.

http://bit.ly/cVTulm

And here is one about the poor decision to base education policy on exceptions to the poverty/knowledge gap.

http://wapo.st/9GDpKH

Got Veggies? NOT!!!

Severson's (2010) article has some pretty intense recommendations. And it isn't the first time in our readings that an organization recommended nine servings of fruits and vegetables in a day. That seems like an outrageous amount to me. I thought it was silly when they were talking to people that are intimidated by vegetables, but this intimidates me.

No wonder people don't even bother trying. They are told that this is how much they are supposed to be eating, and it is far from their current consumption, so they tune out. I think we may need to set a more reasonable goal to start reversing some of these troublesome trends.

One idea that I really like is the "edible schoolyard" (despite its weird name). Kids pitching in to produce veggies seems like an easy way to create some ego involvement with their healthy food. Now, Berkeley schools are most likely going to have resources far beyond most public schools, but it is a step in the right direction. Maybe the parents can get their children involved in growing veggies at home and get a similar effect? How do the kids that grow up on the farms of the Midwest fare in the vegetable eating contest?

Maybe we should all get some of those French cooks we saw in the clip last week, who hid the veggies in tasty treats? If America won't listen, we will just trick every single one of them into eating vegetables.

It would be Lex Luthor's lamest, but healthiest, scheme ever.

Food ad

In an attempt to get past the popular ads from the last few Super Bowls, I did some real digging. The result is this gem from Australia or New Zealand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDPnZBezwjw

Especially relevant for those of us who took rhetoric last year.

Ads in High School

I have very little recollection of advertising in any school before high school. The only exception would be the book fair, which Betsy covered already (I agree that it is a "pester power" machine).

In high school, I recall the band selling candy (leave it to the band to corrupt our community ;) ), which Lindsey admitted to doing herself. Other than that, the only thing I can think of is the Coke and Powerade (which is owned by Coke) machines. The interesting part is that they were not available during the school day. They were located in a breezeway between the main gym and the little "back gym," where the training room was also located. However, this breezeway would remained locked through the school day, leaving only one access point between the gyms. After the official school day was over, the breezeway would be unlocked. Therefore, the only people using it were athletes, some of the after school clubs, and faculty members. I don't know what the official line is, but I think the lack of access during the school day makes a major difference. I don't think that, correct or not, anyone would dispute that after school and during school activities fall under different philosophies.

I may be wrong, but after I graduated I think they went to having the machines be accessible all day. They were not making enough money with the current strategy, so they could either remove them or maximize profits on them. Of course, they went with the latter.

Media Literacy in the Heartland

Virginia, where I went to high school, has been covered (twice). So I went to one of the few other states with which I have any familiarity of the education system at all; Indiana. My aunt is a high school guidance counselor* there, and one of the things I distinctly remember from taking the tour of that school is an entire (although miniature) television production studio. Several cameras, room and materials for sets, and editing equipment IN A HIGH SCHOOL. This, of course, blew my mind. There is nothing even approaching this in the high schools in Tidewater, so I spent the day whining about how I missed out on a cool opportunity.

So, I got a taste of media literacy in Indiana through personal experience. But what else is there? In order to start looking, I went to the Indiana Department of Education and found a section labeled "Search." This seemed like a good idea, but searching "media literacy" received no hits and searching "media" received over 300, including a weird one about kindergartners using scissors.
http://dc.doe.in.gov/Standards/AcademicStandards/StandardSearch.aspx

I instead began pouring over the pdf version of the standards for high school and ran across a whole section about "Mass Media and Media Literacy Standards" (why this didn't come up in the search is beyond me; probably a conspiracy against helicopter parents or something). I found the description of the section particularly appropriate. It read,

Students study the importance of mass media as pervasive in modern life at the local, national, and global levels. Students recognize the impact of mass media messages through news, entertainment, and persuasion on contemporary society. Students analyze and evaluate the history, governance, and ethical issues of mass media to gain a perspective of how influential mass communication has become. Students prepare for their roles as informed and engaged citizens in a democracy. They use media literacy and communications skills to become writers, speakers, or media producers who address content issues and the impact of mass communication. They become knowledgeable consumers of mass media information.

So they learn how to recognize, analyze, and produce media messages. Sound familiar? So it looks like the Hoosiers** have the right idea. Students look at the history, nature, and ethics of mass media. There are a dozen standards/goals that relate directly to media literacy, stating that "Students use their comprehension skills, knowledge base, and information from various media sources to develop a broad perspective that enables them to analyze and evaluate the meanings of mass communication messages they encounter." They also learn how to research and write about the media, including a study of media convergence.

http://www.doe.in.gov/opd/languagearts/docs/media_standards.pdf

I'd like to post all of the standards on here, because I think they are really well thought out. But, that would be a big waste of this little media space when I stuck the link to the original source in here already. I highly recommend looking at this, as it is very interesting and laid out in such a way that you can read it in 10 minutes.

What I don't know at this point is whether these standards are all reflected in the tests and curriculum. I will have to ask someone with personal experience to get these questions answered. I also didn't look at the standards for the other grade levels, but due to the attention put into these, I imagine that they are also impressive and ambitious.


*I wanted to interview her and get some thoughts on this, because she probably has some great insights. I have not been able to do that yet, but as soon as I do I will update the post.

**The cool stuff that the school has is a big deal, but everything that you've heard about Indiana high school basketball is true (and thus, a bigger deal). The "basketball hero around here is treated like a god" line from Hoosiers; pretty much the reality of it.

Media Log

Media Log, Sunday, August 29, 2010

8 am: Awake now, but really don’t want to be just yet. The laziest distraction within arm’s reach is the iPod. I plug her in and listen to The Doors for a half hour.

The Doors may seem like an odd choice, seeing as there is little about The Doors that isn’t odd. In fact, I had listened to very little of their music before this summer. What changed? I watched Oliver Stone’s The Doors for the first time and thought that it was awesome. This is not unusual, for me to be drawn to a media artifact due to exposure to it through film or television. I have read books, listened to music, and even visited places because of said exposure.

8:30 am: I make my way to the restroom, which is a gang restroom (in Main Campbell here on campus). In the stall I notice that there is several news articles from the Washington Post website taped up. I suppose someone was doing their homework in here and then didn’t bother to take it with them.

Something I see all of the time is people carrying around printouts of news articles from the Internet. If you’re going to be carrying around pieces of paper with news on them, why don’t you just buy a newspaper?

8:40 am: I begin my daily computer routine. Up first; e-mail. Over the summer I would occasionally skip a day without checking my e-mail, but during the school year that probably won’t happen often. Things happen so quickly and we are normally only notified of changes through e-mail, so we must check it early and often.

Today, I don’t have much spam. Most of the junk comes from my alma mater, George Mason. They send me lots of news updates and such, which are great, but it is usually only a thin disguise for a request for money. I’ve come to ignore most of these.

Next up is Facebook. I don’t use Facebook as much as I did as an undergraduate. I don’t post frequent updates and then look through dozens of profiles to make comments. In fact, I purged my account of a hundred or so “friends” that I really had no interest in reading updates from, nor did I care for their opinion on my updates. By and large I use it to communicate with a small group of people who, for the most part, use Facebook more than I do.

Last year I checked Twitter often. Most people that I follow are those whose comments were rarely public before. In my case, these are authors and filmmakers. For whatever reason they find posting on Twitter convenient whereas posting on a blog is too much work. Over the summer I rarely checked my account, and I have yet to get back into checking it daily.

Next I check Fark.com. Fark is a site which aggregates news stories from all over the world onto one page, groups them into categories based on the type of story it is, and then usually creates a humorous headline to accompany it. I find it interesting to check this page because the news selected comes from all over and from all political leanings. I also check Digg.com. Digg is similar to Fark in that it aggregates news stories, however the top stories on Digg are chosen by the users themselves rather than an editor. Users indicate that they like a story by “digging” it. The stories with the most digs will appear on the front page. Just in the last week, Digg has changed its format. From what I can tell, far fewer new stories appear in a day and the categories have been narrowed rather than expanded. On old Digg, I could go to the entertainment section and then see stories just about films. No longer can I narrow my search, which I cannot at all understand. As far as I can tell, the user response to the change has been very negative. It will be interesting to see if the response will be enough to force Digg into reverting back to its old self.

After going the unusual route for news, I will usually fall back on an old favorite; the Washington Post. I don’t read dozens of stories, but I will get a taste of the big ones in each section. Typically I will come back several times in a day, getting to a few stories every time. I feel like I am moving about too much to sit down and read it all at once, but thankfully just about every location I get to have a computer terminal that invites me back into the news day.

10:30 am: After my extensive computer time, the books come out for awhile. First up is the reading for the class that I TA for, Introduction to Cinema. The book, written by the professor (Dr. Stephen Prince) is very well written, but crams an incredible amount of information into a single chapter. I can just see the looks on the students’ faces when the first test comes around and some of the obscure information in the book is asked about in the first ten questions.

For my part, every time I come across an interesting example in the book I am itching to put that film in to see the example at play and also to see what neat things I can find myself. Since I own a lot of these films, which makes said desire easy enough to satisfy, it can be difficult to actually sit down and read the whole chapter. However, I sucked it up and got through it.

1 pm: After reading about the really neat opening shot of Snake Eyes (starring Nicolas Cage), which is, ostensibly, a 20-minute single tracking shot, I put that book down. Next I took a lunch break, which served as another opportunity to check my e-mail and return to the Washington Post.

2 pm: There was a break, but I can’t escape the books for long. This time I prepared for a marathon with the readings for this course. To avoid distraction, I kept all other forms of media at bay for a few hours.

4:30 pm: I was victorious over the week’s readings, and I thought I had earned a break. Turns out my reward was having to drive over to Radford to drop off some of my brother’s stuff that was left in my vehicle. I put my buds in and began my 20-minute walk over the Duck Pond. I listened to, of all things, an academic lecture. To be fair, it was a neat lecture from a professor at Wesleyan about the Magnificent Seven, so I haven’t nerded out completely.

I don’t have the fancy gizmos to plug into my radio that lets my iPod play through it, so I have to rely on the local waves. I have found one station that is usually decent classic rock, so rarely even touch the dial for fear of losing it.

7 pm: Upon my return, e-mail and Facebook gets checked again. I realize that I need to view the assigned film for Dr. Prince’s class this week, so I dig out my syllabus. I am relieved that this week is Easy Rider, a film that I like and am fairly familiar with. I pop the film in, but before I start it I whip the computer out again.

I don’t know if it is troubling or relieving, but I rarely watch anything without having to look it up online first. How did the film do at the box office? How about critically? Has anyone written about it academically? Who was it inspired by? Who did it inspire? Of course, in the case of this film, there has been decades for these questions to be answered by someone else, so I just see what they observed. The big story right now is that the film’s star and director, Dennis Hopper, recently passed away, which does put a slight gloom upon the experience.

10 pm: Finally, I have earned my reward of not having to do school stuff for a few precious hours. Right now I am filling my free time by watching Joss Whedon’s Angel. Of Whedon’s four television shows, this is the only one that I haven’t watched all of the way through. I am now finishing up season one and I am not as thrilled with the experience as I was with his other shows, but it has been a good enough way to pass the waning hours of the evening.