Perceptions of Youth and Crime
In this lesson students develop an awareness of the ways in which public perceptions regarding young people have been affected by media portrayals of youth violence and youth crime.
Crime in the News - Lesson
In this lesson students explore the commercial and ethical issues surrounding the reporting of crime in televised newscasts.
Celebrities and World Issues - Lesson
In this four-day unit, students will examine the role of popular culture celebrities in creating awareness of world issues.
Police in the Media
This lesson helps students understand the different perceptions of the police force portrayed in the media. Students will learn about the differences between the constructed reality of media and law enforcement in real life and then create their television “cop shows” that provide a more accurate picture of policing.
Bias and Crime in Media
In this lesson students are introduced to the key media literacy concept that media are constructions that re-present reality and consider how representations of crime in news and entertainment media may influence how we perceive members of particular groups.
Sexting and youth: Confronting a modern dilemma
It’s hard to think of a recent digital technology issue that’s captured the public imagination more than sexting. This may be because it combines elements of the classic moral panic with more modern “technopanic,” provoking worries not just about the morality of our children – and, in particular, young girls – but also about the possible effects of technology on how we grow, think and behave. As with most panics, of course, the issue is substantially more complicated and less sensational than we perceive it to be, and while it’s unlikely that our worries about sexting will ever seem in retrospect to be as absurd as our grandparents’ fears about crime comics, MediaSmarts’ new data shows that many of our beliefs and assumptions on the subject need closer examination.
Sexuality and Romantic Relationships in the Digital Age
There’s a long-standing relationship between sex and the Internet. As far as back the 1980s, Usenet and local bulletin board systems were used to share pornographic text files and crude (in both senses) graphics, and people have been using digital media to form and carry out online relationships at least as long. However, just as estimates of how much online traffic and content is made up of sexual material tend to be exaggerated[1], our new report – Sexuality and Romantic Relationships in the Digital Age – from MediaSmarts’ Young Canadians in a Wired World survey of 5,436 students, shows that for Canadian youth, sexuality and romantic relationships play a fairly small part of their online lives.