Working for a Living (part two)
This is the second part of a two-part blog. The first part looked at some of the more straightforward ways of making money online such as sales, fee-for-service, subscription and brokerage.
This is the second part of a two-part blog. The first part looked at some of the more straightforward ways of making money online such as sales, fee-for-service, subscription and brokerage.
The hottest media story in the past week has been the instantly infamous New Yorker cover portraying Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as terrorists. Though the Obama campaign has been measured in its response, media outlets – and particularly bloggers – have been vocal in their disapproval. Some have suggested that the cover crosses the line from satire into hate speech, while others accuse TheNew Yorker of giving ‘aid and comfort to the enemy' by visually depicting the smears and misconceptions that have been aimed at the candidate.
Ads like the one above have been appearing in public transit systems in Ottawa, Toronto and other Ontario cities over the last month, supposedly promoting a drug called “Obay” which prevents teenagers from having their own thoughts, hopes and dreams. It's a classic example of viral marketing: an ad campaign that doesn't actually name the product or service being promoted, but rather tries to get people talking about it in the hopes that when the product is finally unveiled the effect will be greater than a traditional ad campaign could have managed.
Three well-known companies – Xerox, Starbucks, and the Gap – have recently made changes to their most public face, their logos. Each change has met with varying degrees of success, giving media educators an opportunity to look at just what makes a successful logo work.
This is the first in a series of blogs looking at the history and future of Web 2.0. From Facebook pages to viral Barack Obama speeches, the latest boom to hit the media is the rise of user-created content. Services such as Facebook and YouTube have created a new business model: rather than selling content to consumers, as media companies traditionally have done.
Media educator John Pungente's series Beyond the Screen, airing on Bravo!, now has its own Web site, where teachers can find resources and tips on integrating the series into their classrooms. Father John Pungente, a longtime media educator and founding Board member of MNet, planned the series as a follow-up to his acclaimed Scanning the Movies. Like its predecessor, Beyond the Screen is intended as a way of teaching viewers to “read” movies. In Beyond the Screen Pungente uses clips from current movies and interviews with cast and crew to shed light on filmmaking techniques, genre, and theme. The Web site offers showtimes and previews of upcoming episodes and links to teachers' guides. (So far the only guide that's been posted is for Speed Racer, but the guide for The Dark Night should be up shortly; upcoming episodes on Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince should be popular as well.)
A recent issue of Entertainment Weekly was devoted to a list of so-called “new classics,” a top one-hundred list of the best movies, books, TV shows, and so on, published since 1983. The lists themselves are liable to provoke discussion (Die Hard is #9, ahead of Goodfellas, Schindler's List and Unforgiven?) but perhaps a more interesting question is whether, in the Media Age, the very idea of a “classic” still means anything.
I was recently asked by Jane Tallim to write a guest blog and seriously wondered what suggestions I could offer that would appeal to high school English and Media Studies teachers. We all know that teaching media is like trying to hit a moving target, and education lags behind revolutionary changes in new media forms. However, over the past decade of teaching both Media Studies and high school English, I have spent much time considering the intersection of new media forms with traditional English forms and have tried to build a bridge of understanding across time for my students regardless of the target. By focusing on the skills of deconstruction and construction, I believe the form of the text, or the new medium, becomes less relevant to comprehension.
It's been widely said that attention is the currency of the 21st Century. In an age where media occupy an increasingly central role in our lives, the need to have that media focused on you becomes intense. For no-one is this more true than for children and teens, who now expect to be connected twenty-four hours a day and for whom the Internet and cell phones are essential parts of their social lives. An interesting Facebook page, amusing Tweets, outrageous YouTube videos, even shocking photos sent by cell phone -- most of us are aware of the ways that young people seek their peers' attention. In today's media environment, is it still possible to teach young people the value of privacy? What, indeed, does the idea of privacy even mean to today's children and teens?
It's a persistent phenomenon: the faster we move into the future, the more we find it embedded with the bones of the past. Why else, for instance, would we still talk about “dialling” a phone, and later about “hanging it up”? Few people remember the early TV remote controls that worked by sending high-frequency sounds, but we still call remotes “clickers.” We still say “stay tuned,” “CC” (carbon copy) e-mails, “rewind” DVDs, and “post” online messages. Even new media darling YouTube contains an old-media artefact of this kind: the name is obviously meant to make us think of television, the “boob tube,” but few TVs have tubes in them anymore.