Results tagged “entertainment” from Uncivil Society

The complete article from 1939 is available at Animation Archive.

Via Gothamist & Kinetic Carnival, video of a 1905 school outing to Coney Island. So much of interest here--the fashion, the barrel roll, the mechanical horse ride and, of course, the "charabang."

A meditation on the long-term educational & cultural impact of Guitar Hero, in the current Atlantic:

Greg LoPiccolo was at pains, too, to point out the educational component. “The game does set you up, in a way, to be more receptive to learning about how to create music,” he said. “You learn about time, you learn about what the parts are … There’s this natural, intuitive knowledge about how songs are composed and arranged that the game totally gives you. My guess is that in five years’ time there’ll be an explosion of garage bands.”

My background today has been Turner Classic Movies, which has been playing a series of films and short subjects from the 1930s. There's quite a bit of fascinating stuff here re the interplay of technology and culture, particularly in relation to an economic crisis.

The cliche that "Americans flocked to escapist entertainment" is enticing, but wrong--there's nothing escapist about it. It's all quite strategic, even at its most playful.

I'll explain this more here & elsewhere once I finish a hard-deadlined project, but for a glimpse of what I'm up to just check out an old Robert Benchley mock-educational short. Stuff like this sounded a death knell for the professoriate as a profession with authority--when everyone has access to rich data and mass communication, someone who claims to hold the information franchise becomes inherently ridiculous.

Does that make the academy obsolete? Not necessarily. However, with seventy+ years more of technological development, the need to adapt becomes even more urgent.