Visual Literacy & Political Analysis

For my two hours of television programming this week, I've been watching Comedy Central videos for the from A Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It's slightly educational, I suppose, but after Carol pointed out this study on teens and news in her links post and these shows came up frequently, I thought it would be fun to watch and think about from their perspective. The study talks about teens liking these shows but sometimes having to look up more information to understand why their parents were laughing.

I wanted to think about the role allusions play in the information teens get from humor, since many teens do depend on shows like these for their news. Obviously allusions are pretty important to comedy in general - the Simpsons is always packed with them - because they help make the content work on several levels, making it funny to both those "in the know" and those who might not get every detail. But that applies to more than just references to previous events - it also applies to the visual jokes that just don't make sense unless you pay attention to the conventions that surround us in the mass media.

Here's a clip of Jon Stewart looking at some of the standard visual metaphors used in the Super Tuesday coverage last week:



This NY Times article compares the websites of Obama and Clinton to the Mac vs. PC ads:

Is Obama a Mac
and Clinton a PC?
By NOAM COHEN
Published: February 4, 2008


That reminded me of this video from LisaNova on YouTube (also on MAD TV), which takes the visual metaphor one step further:



How do the use of visuals and visual allusions in these pieces add or detract from the points being made? Do you need to have a certain level of visual literacy to understand the points being made or are the article or videos themselves a form of visual literacy instruction?

All About Blogs

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has an article that reviews 10 different books about blogs & the effects of blogging:

Blogs, by Sarah Boxer
The New York Review of Books · Volume 55, Number 2 · February 14 2008

If you're interested in learning more about the history of this phenomenon, or thinking about the differences between this medium and traditional print media, it's an interesting read.

Note: I'm not sure how long that link will work without a subscription. I can't find online access through UIUC, so if you come back to this in a couple weeks you may not be able to read it.

MySpace Evolves... Facebook games in court

Last week I posted some links to new security controls added to MySpace as part of a deal with 49 state legislatures.

Today I saw this article in the New York Times describing the push for MySpace to continue updating its site design and features as part of the ongoing push to keep at the head of the social networking sites pack: From MySpace to YourSpace by Brian Stelter

MySpace is in a funny position - many people (kids especially) like it because it's so easy to customize and MSM industries like it because its easy to use to promote products (especially music & video). But other users are leaving because they dislike the cluttered pages, anarchic social contacts and pushy marketing ("MySpace refugees," the article calls them).

With new security settings protecting kids and increased privacy controls on the horizon, will MySpace keep its loyal fanbase and draw in new users? MySpace's answer to keeping people engaged with their website has been more and more media content. But how long can they continue to compete with YouTube and the hordes of other video and music sites that provide content more flexibly and with more interactive features? The article mentions new celebrity content guides, but will that compete with IMDB and AllMusic.com, which are easier to browse and have giant databases of information?

Facebook, the lead competitor with MySpace in the U.S., tries to keep its users loyal by providing more and more content to keep them in the site. The "applications" approach has been a mixed bag - some people object to them as "cluttering up" the previously pristine profile pages, so they've added a way to minimize their appearance while you browse through your friends sites.

For the most part, though, their hands off approach to letting outsiders create content and add it to their website has been very successful. But how long will they keep up this approach? Scrabulous, one of the most popular apps on facebook (there are over 46,000 people using it to play "asychronous" games with friends) is facing challenges in court from Hasbro.

Will legal challenges force them to take a more direct role in managing the content on their site? Will their marketing strategies that rely on "word-of-mouth" connections between friends take off, or will people migrate to yet another new social networking site that hasn't been infiltrated by commerical interests?

Mass Media and a "Virtuous" Society

I saw this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today and thought it connected well with some of our readings on the effects of mass media and the value of encouraging media use.

The article is titled Creative Class, Dismissed and written by Laurie Fendrich, a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University

In her class, she has undergraduate students read Rousseau's Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre (1758) and discuss modern media saturation - Is entertainment good? What effect does it have on society? What effect does it have on our personal satisfaction with life? What effect does it have on our relationships? Is his view of gender relationships pure chauvinism, or does he have a point about the ways women are taught to present themselves in society?

The link above will work fine for non-subscribers for 5 days. After that, you'll need to search for the article using this link, where you can log in as a UIUC student to get access.

If you already have a subscription, you can use this permanent link.

Musings on "meaningful content"

I think the point of discussions in class is to make us think in new ways about old ideas or issues. If so, our first class has already succeeded. What it made me think about was how enormously complicated it is to measure information flow and media use, as well as to internalize why we measure these things in the first place. This may sound a bit confusing at first, so let me elaborate.

The studies by the Kaiser Foundation and Pew's well-respected annual reviews of media use are important indicators of how people use new and old communication technologies very generally. They are also used as one basis of many for numerous contentious arguments amongst the public and between some activist organizations on what types of media content are considered "legitimate," "good," "educational," and so on.

My initial response to these arguments has up to this point been that they should be of our main concern. Controlling media content, as far as I can tell, has never been a good idea in itself, what with the First Amendment and all. Coming from a background in the political economy of communications, I have been more interested in looking at who owns the media outlets, who pays the journalists, who employs the producers of news and entertainment shows, etc. I have even worked on a project to study whether corporate ownership in fact increases indecent media content on various outlets.

But today's discussion has really laid out some important aspects of the indecency debate to which media policy and political economy do not relate. These include the ways children choose to use the media that is available to them. Why choose certain content over others? Why are Myspace and Facebook so prominent? Yes, Merchants of Cool points out that there are actual individuals, companies studying how they can create products to advertise to young people, ultimately looking for ways they can profit off the creativity of youth. And that is definitely related to economics, to market forces, to the pressure for companies to compete through sales.

But the lines do blur when we think about what is or is not educational, informational, useful. Not only is it questionable why TV is singled out as more trashy and stupid than other media forms (as discussed in class), but one is also unsure about what portions of media content are creative and important. As I watch the CNN coverage of caucus after caucus after primary, I am struck by the lack of useful information that reporters are giving us about the candidates. It's just like any other trashy media content.

And what about what people consider to be entertainment? Who says reality TV in itself is bad, if it just distracts people from their lives for a little while?

(OK, I wholeheartedly disagree with the previous sentence. But others might not.)

But the point is, it is simply impossible to define what the public wants. I really wish I didn't have to feel this way, but I do. I think everyone has their own opinion of what public needs are, what is quality entertainment and news and what isn't, and when indecency and morality in media content isn't defined by corporations, it is defined by communist or dictatorial regimes.
Is there really a good way to measure these things?

The best way to go forward, I guess, is to try to figure out ways for people to become educated about their media system, media production, media content analysis, media policy, and then allow them (through stringent legislative means, if necessary) to have the ability to create media content that expresses their own viewpoints. If it's about trash, let it be. As long as it's personal, it means something.

I may change my mind about all this tomorrow.

Are we going to stop reading?

“What will life be like if people stop reading?” asks Caleb Crain in a December 24, 2007 New Yorker article (“Twilight of the Books” – available via UIUC’s Online Research Resources). His essay is an extended review of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, which combines historical and biological research related to reading. Wolf suggests that fluent readers use less of their brain than those who have difficulty reading, thereby freeing their mind to think about and analyze what they read.

Moving on to a discussion of media, Crain cites studies indicating that “a small amount of television seemed to benefit children; more hurt.” So some Sesame Street is good for your child, but hours and hours is not. Internet use, however, does not lower reading scores, although Crain wonders whether this will change as the internet becomes more video-based and less reading intensive.

Crain returns to his original question of life without reading, describing a voter watching a debate on television rather than reading a candidate’s platform. This voter bases decisions on a candidate’s personality and his or her own emotions rather than the candidate’s position on healthcare. Crain argues that readers can distinguish “differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information,” but that viewers cannot. “Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.”

Is the world really in danger because of the invasion of media, or are we simply adapting to changing methods of receiving information? Is reading an endangered habit that will soon be practiced only by a few hobbyists? Crain seems to think that it is. How do we, as librarians-to-be, maintain an excitement for reading from childhood through adulthood? Here we are in a Media Literacy class – what does this really mean? Are we, by promoting the use of media, encouraging children to leave books behind? Or are we encouraging children to engage in critical thinking through media which will also encourage them to want to learn more – by reading? This is definitely something to think about in the course of the semester, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about, and responses to, this article.

Mainstream Media Commercial

Or here's an embedded version (testing)

A Commercial for the Mainstream Media?

Who knew they needed one! Comedian John Lajoie's commercial-spoof is provocative and funny. If you're not familiar with Adbusters, check them out as well; they've been jamming the commercial media for almost 20 years.