Results tagged “media” from Uncivil Society
Carrot Top holding a rabbit on the red carpet of a Las Vegas poker benefit--this quintessential icon of celebrity do-good culture comes from the camera of talented teen-age photographer Nick Leonard, who is using shots of scenes from his hometown to build a killer professional portfolio.
UPDATE: For more on poker & charity, check out Betting on Poker to Change the World.
An iron fence on W. 21st St. in New York depicts the classic image of a rocket crashing into the Man in the Moon from Melies' 1902 pioneering science fiction film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).
The fence is across from the Clinton School of the Arts, and I happened to snap this photo during lunch break. After I was done shooting about 10 or so photos, I noticed that a crowd of kids had surrounded me and continued talking about the image as I walked away.
Soooo, educator that I am, I went back and asked if any of them knew what it was. None of them did, but they agreed that it was "awesome" and wondered if the thing in his eye might be a bullet. I explained about the Melies film, its history, and what the image was supposed to be, all of which the kids said was even more awesome, so they asked me to repeat the title so they could watch the film on Youtube.
Highlight of my day, that.
An Iranian woman in Austin, Texas embodies the role of communications media in mobilizing protests against the hijacked election.
Christianity Today is a "not-for-profit communications ministry." You wouldn't know that, however, from their coverage of the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller by a right-to-life evangelical--i.e., a core part of Christianity Today's demographic. Since the news broke I've been tracking the home page, and the image you see above shows how Christianity Today has chosen to fulfill its mission to help Christians "make sense of the world"--
Namely, opining on the need for Jon & Kate of +8 fame "to confess their sins" . . .
And, of course, the pressing issue of John Calvin's critique of medieval indulgences:
I understand that this must be a rather difficult situation for an evangelical nonprofit such as CT to address, but if communication is your business you only undermine your reputation by burying your head in the digital sand when some kills in the name of the very movement that you claim to represent.
PSYCHO KILLER QU'EST QUE C'EST EXTRA:
If you think the above isn't fair, just be glad I didn't lead with the following alternate frame:
The heroic myth takes on a new form. A commenter explains:
Ganesha is seen as the Remover of Obstacles, so anyone or anything that takes action to remove obstacles can be seen as exhibiting an aspect of the divine, in the form of Ganesh. The people who made this statue are saying that the heroic nature that we admire in the fictitious character of Spider-Man is an expression of the divine within us all, and should be honored. Also, it’s FUN. Bravo!
Thanks, Deborah Elizabeth Finn!
In the last major interview before his death, John Lennon addressed the question of why he refused to join a proposed Beatles reunion charity concert. It's a fascinating inside look at the business of benefits circa 1980:
Via Robot6, this is brilliant stuff--an essential archive for anyone with an interest in the history of charity & public service.
As fate would have it, I had to be out of town at the very time Amazon held its Kindle DX press conference at Pace University, where I happen to teach. Nonetheless, since such a high-profile media event took place right by my office, I figure I might as well jot down my initial thoughts here.
Of course, as per my disclaimer below, I probably should add that that any thoughts here aren't those of Pace etc. etc.--these are just the ramblings of the dork what writes this personal blog.As I noted to my social enterprise class, the arrangement that Amazon apparently has with its five universities--essentially to demo the larger Kindle as a textbook killer--reflects the symbiotic relationship between charities and commercial providers that has been the norm in recent years, particularly in such areas as higher education, health care and museums. The notion that higher education has fallen from an Edenic noncommercial purity may be an appealing myth, but from a historical standpoint it has been misleading since, oh, about the twelfth century.
From a legal perspective, arguably the most critical issue is for the universities signed on to the Kindle venture is that of retaining control over activities expressing their exempt educational purpose. Were Amazon, say, to start dictating textbook choice or the substance of the curriculum, the IRS might question whether a university is pursuing a substantial non-exempt purpose. Judging from what we've seen--and I know no more than what is available to the general public--that won't be the case, so one would expect few if any problems on the legal front.
Still, the relationship between Amazon and its partner universities is bound to raise questions, especially among academics from outside relatively more commercialized disciplines such as law and the natural sciences. Essentially what we have here are universities helping a single company to establish dominance in the market for educational texts.
There are analogues throughout the university--exclusive deals for soda machines and big box franchises running student bookstores--but this venture is more central to the academic enterprise. Given the realities of Amazon's usage policy and proprietary DRM, one could argue that the university's control over its curriculum would be illusory should the Kindle become the academic norm. It's one thing to force an academic community to choose Coke; quite another to create an environment where student must buy Kindles and professors are expected to assign books that are available in the Kindle format.
We can also expect questions as to the ethics and practicality of requiring students to buy an additional, not to mention branded, device in order to pursue their studies. Even with the academic discount that is likely to become available (extrapolating from the deals available from computer & software companies), the Kindle is in the price range of a netbook, low-end laptop, PS3 or an iPhone. As any number of other people have noted, the market is primed to be more receptive to electronic texts that can be viewed in media students already own or would like to have another reason to buy.
Finally, the Kindle venture is also interesting from the perspective of the history of the university as a medium for processing and transmitting information. It's tempting to classify those who favor the Kindle as on the cutting-edge while branding those who question it as hidebound traditionalists, but that would be a drastic oversimplification. In fact, one could argue that the Kindle itself embodies a traditional approach to electronic communications media.
As Marshall McLuhan observed, our initial impulse when dealing with a new medium is to recapitulate more familiar forms--for example, early TV transmitted stage plays and symphonies before developing rhetorical styles that expressed the television medium. At base, the Kindle does little more than replicate the textbook. Sure, the Kindle weighs less and does not cost as much as a many required texts, but that's it. The fundamental model is still one-sided and top-down: the authors write a text that students read.
That's not the environment in which today's students live and work. To be valued in the marketplace--and yes, to live a more meaningful life--students need to do more than read books. They have to become adept at finding useful information from a wide range of resources and communicating ideas in ways that are useful & engaging.
Perhaps a more cutting-edge approach than replicating the textbook would be to shift away from the model of students as information consumers. Instead, we could focus on helping students become more effective and compelling information producers. Rather than requiring students to buy a fixed text, we could focus on creating opportunities to collate resources and to write material that would in turn help future students learn.
In this environment, the professor relinquishes the industrial age mantle of hallowed authority to assist students in becoming professors themselves. By this I don't mean professors in the sense of the contemporary academic guild, but in the classical meaning of the word from which "professor" is derived--the Latin profiteor, "to speak forth." What university professors do is no longer the province of a privileged few; today everyone has the opportunity--and the responsibility--to gather, produce and transform information. The sooner we stop pretending that university professors have a monopoly on expertise, the better professors will be at fulfilling their new social role.
That said, I'm curious to see how this Amazon venture will play out. Among its other functions the university is a place for experimentation, and this is exactly the sort of thing we should try--especially if it means I get a free Kindle!
McCann Erickson Polska designed this PSA series for the Warsaw Metropolitan Police, in which thought balloons protect cartoon riders.
I like the ads, though it does seem that the designers could benefit from this new graphic technology.
NONPROFIT COMICS EXTRA:
Metabunker has details on the formation of the new Danish Comics Council, which promotes comics art & industry in Denmark.
I was taking a break from end of semester class prep--just another Saturday night in April--so I decided to catch up on the latest "social enterprise" tags in Flickr. A series of the recent pictures came from the account of Shivani Mair, a broadcaster, producer and "bright young star" of social enterprise in the UK.
For more on her work in the essential area of youth and broadcast media, check out Creative Careers Surgery, which features the apt slogan, "Life isn't about finding yourself . . . it's about creating yourself!"
A brilliant study in the link between networks and identity: a map that portrays West Superior, Wisconsin as the heart of the nation's transportation system. New York City is the belly button.
An explanatory note proclaims:
"It is an interesting fact that in no other portion of the known world can any such analogy be found between the natural and artificial channels of commerce and circulatory and digestive apparatus of man."
A UK charity has sparked a religious war with a comic strip aimed at promoting tolerance. The latest issue of Who Cares? Trust magazine Klic! features Standing Up For What You Believe In, in which a cross-wearing Christian bullies a Muslim girl for wearing a hijab. The key scene (image above):
In a cartoon strip, a boy wearing a large cross around his neck is shown telling a friend that a smiling Muslim girl in a veil looks like a terrorist.
He later confronts her and shouts: "Hey, whatever your name is, what are you hiding under your turban?"
She replies that the garment is called a hijab and that it is part of her religion "like the cross you wear".
The girl is then shown standing up for another boy, who is being bullied, and her behaviour is contrasted with that of the boy wearing the cross.
Some Christians are in an uproar over being stereotyped as bigots, and the fact that the charity receives a substantial amount of funding from the government is only stoking the fire.
The charity's intriguing response: the cross is not a reference to Christians.
Who Cares? Trust chief executive Natasha Finlayson described the cross as "bling" rather than a religious symbol.
Via Robot 6
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."
Well, not talking about my birthday, but taking on my day of birth about the integrative force of electronic circuitry.
Obama has become a profitable marketing phenomenon. Because he's a government official, merchants don't have to worry about his publicity rights or paying him royalties. In keeping with the public nature of his image, some comic shops have decided to donate proceeds from this week's Obama/Spider-Man tie-in to charity.
In my work I hear a lot about how for-profit/nonprofit cause marketing partnerships. The emphasis is usually on the positive--doing well by doing good, changing the way we do business, and so forth. What we don't see enough of are detailed reviews of how such projects actually work in practice, warts and all.
I especially want to emphasize those last three words. I've read plenty of rah-rah case studies where the critical analysis echoes the oh-so-clever answer every law student gives when a firm inquires as to one's greatest weakness: "I work too hard." But, like people, joint ventures are much more complex, and they'll never reach their potential if we pretend that even their weaknesses are above average.
Case in point: the breaking controversy of the Knight Foundation/MTV Young Creators' Award. The Knight Foundation's News Challenge program has produced a heap o' fantastic work--in fact, in the interests of full disclosure, I personally know and recommended one of the winning teams in a different (i.e., non-MTV-related) grant program.
However, the Knight/MTV partnership has generated a considerable amount of unhappiness among the young people who worked for it. Like Willy Loman, the correspondents in the Knight/MTV community journalist program worked unto exhaustion, long hours (allegedly) without pay--and what's worse, it's pay they were contractually obligated to receive. Since the experience seems to have spawned some disillusionment, attention must be paid.
The lesson now has become so relevant to the news we were covering - and our experience with MTV at the intersection of our nation’s financial crisis, the meltdown of traditional news media - and how the innocent idealism of youth that helped change a nation’s course - was exploited. What happened would wake us all up - on the Street Team, to the Real World.
EricaAmerica has the inside scoop; Gawker is looking for more.
Above: The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel. Music would never be the same . . .
I'm focused on writing & class prep, but as usual my breaks have been equally rich with fascinating stuff. First, on my way back from the events yesterday morning I came across the autobiography of Grandmaster Flash at ye olde NYPL. Music, business, the public good and the higher self--his story brings 'em all together in a poignant and compelling mix.
Do-gooders who ridicule rap and hip hop really should pay more attention, because these communities have done more for social improvement than fifty social enterprise bakeries put together. Don't get me wrong--bakeries and such have their place, but to make such ventures the limit of social enterprise is just another way of saying "Let them eat cookies."
Ever since watching last week's Saturday Night Live, I've also been paying more attention to Beyonce's creation of an alter ego, Sasha Fierce. It's the latest in a long line of pop other selves, winding back through Prince, David Bowie and James Brown to--as this wonderful new bio notes--the pathbreaking professional wrestler Gorgeous George.
As with Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five--along with a host of other noted rap, hip hop and pop artists--Beyonce's Sasha Fierce blends synchronized action with an ethical sense. Consider "Single Ladies," the video below, and how it links marriage and enlightened transformation. There's little sense of marriage as servitude evident in this nineteenth century folk song.
Every so often in NYC, a company sponsors a newspaper for a day. Free copies are handed out by high-traffic subway stops. Today at Union Square: Dragonball Z.
Social enterprise suffers from a serious design flaw: it focuses attention on commerce as the defining trait of a medium ostensibly distinct from commercial values. The peak of a business cycle can mask this--business becomes associated with success, and the relative contrast between types of business helps maintain the integrity of the charitable form. But the economy crashes, the commercial elements become more distinct--the social entrepreneur seems preoccupied by profit, self-interest and the business practices that created the problems we now need to solve.
A sign of the cultural shift to which social entrepreneurs need to adapt: the resurgence of business as the villain in popular entertainment.
