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:
For the last 3 years, we’ve been asking young people across the US and Canada to tell us in 2 minutes or less their stories about safe, responsible technology use. They’ve responded with enthusiasm and creativity; they’ve entertained and moved us. This year, the What’s Your Story? video contest continues in the same format that’s worked so well so far. But we’ve changed a few things, hopefully for the better.
To mark Safer Internet Day on February 11, we’ll be joining TELUS in a live webinar discussion of our Young Canadians in a Wired World research. Focusing on our first report, Life Online, our Director of Education, Matthew Johnson, will look at how the online behaviors and attitudes of young Canadians have changed over the past 10 years and what we can do to help keep our kids safe online.
How #Ottawapiskat turned the tables on media coverage of native issues Over the last few months the Idle No More movement has succeeded in bringing Aboriginal issues to national attention. This has been due in no small part due to the movement's use of Twitter, where #IdleNoMore was a Trending Topic in both Canada and worldwide.
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.
We generally think of our kids’ online and offline lives as being two separate things. In reality, they constantly overlap, flowing back and forth face-to-face in the schoolyard and through texts and social networks at home. But on the Internet there are lots of moral and ethical choices that don’t have to be made offline.