Secret History of the Credit Card
On March 17th (in most markets) PBS's Frontline will feature The Secret History of the Credit Card, a documentary that looks at how credit cards came to be a nearly ubiquitous part of our lives.
On March 17th (in most markets) PBS's Frontline will feature The Secret History of the Credit Card, a documentary that looks at how credit cards came to be a nearly ubiquitous part of our lives.
The Super Bowl has long been seen as the “tent pole” of American consumer culture: an annual game that routinely pulls in viewers at a scale otherwise achieved only by one-off events like series finales and celebrity car chases. It actually drives sales of TVs: the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association reports that 2.5 million people plan to buy a new TV for the express purpose of watching the game, part of an overall $8.7 billion in Super Bowl-related consumer spending.
Why is a movie about a young boy learning kung fu called The Karate Kid? For most of the film's young audience, Jaden Smith's break-out movie doesn't explain the confusion. Their parents and older siblings, however, may recall the earlier installments in this series which started with a young Ralph Macchio learning karate from Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, a movie which started as the hero's quest to learn karate to overcome his tormentors and evolved by film's end into a coming-of-age story about the bond between mentor and student. The first Karate Kid struck a chord with audiences, becoming the fifth-highest grossing film of 1984.
The Web is full of great online resources for teachers and students, with new material appearing every day. With the arrival of National Media Education Week, teachers may be looking for fresh ideas to bring media education into the classroom. Here’s a quick overview of recently created (or recently discovered) resources that may help:
Snapchat, the mobile app that lets users send "self-destructing" photos, has the distinction of being the only digital tool that does not have a single redeeming feature. While the moral panic associated with blogs, cell phones, social networks and online games has largely faded in grudging recognition of their more positive uses (indeed, research shows that many parents have actually helped their children lie about their age register for Facebook accounts), Snapchat is seen as the Q-tip of the digital age: its sole function is to do the thing that you're warned not to do on the box.
Despite what many adults believe privacy matters to youth. More and more, though, youth are finding that their actions online are monitored – by parents, teachers, and corporations. A high school principal creates a fake Facebook profile page and adds over 300 of her school’s students as friends; a Texas middle-school plans to introduce ID cards with microchips that its students will be required to carry at all times; an Indiana high school student is expelled after a profane tweet (sent in the middle of the night from the student’s home computer) alerts his school’s monitoring system.
One of the most famous images of online life is the New Yorker cartoon captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.” The cartoon, published in 1993, was hugely influential in fixing an image in the public imagination of the Internet as a place where anonymity reigned. It did not take long for that humorous view of anonymity to take on a darker cast, as parents began to fear that Internet predators would use this invisibility to lure their children in the guise of twelve-year-old girls. It's instructive, though, to realize just how long ago this cartoon was published, and how much the Internet has changed since then.
One of the most unusual things about Internet-based businesses is that few of them try very hard to make money. Of course, with a very few exceptions (such as Wikipedia) making money is certainly in the business plan, or there wouldn't be all that venture capital floating around, but in general the approach has been to come up with a good product or service first, and only look for ways to make it profitable after it's acquired a steady clientele. Hugely important and successful ventures like Google, YouTube and Facebook all started out operating at a significant loss. This pattern continues today: it's already hard to imagine the Internet without Twitter, but so far that service isn't earning its makers much money (though you can be sure they're looking for ways to do that.)
New York's Gramercy Park is a curious institution: two acres of fenced-in greenspace that is accessible only to those who own the houses surrounding the park. (Non-residents must either stay at the Gramercy Park Hotel or join the Players Club or National Arts Club if they want to visit, and each of these institutions has a limited number of park keys.) Private parks like it are the exception, of course, not the rule: since the days of Frederick Law Olmsted, who campaigned for and designed city parks across North America (Central Park, in New York, and Montreal's Mount Royal Park among them) we have come to expect most of our recreational spaces to be public. Cities and neighbourhoods are routinely rated on both the quantity and quality of their parks, and any suggestion that these services should be cut back always receives violent reactions from taxpayers; playgrounds, too, are public by default.
Schools are supposed to be public spaces, but more and more advertisers are using them to target youth. Corporations know just how much time kids spend at school, whether in class, in after-school activities or just hanging out with their friends, and they don’t want to pass up a chance to reach them there. A school setting delivers a captive youth audience and implies the endorsement of teachers and the education system.