Marketing Violence to Young People
No one knows better than communications industries that children and youth represent a huge market, due to both their own spending power and their influence on family spending decisions.
No one knows better than communications industries that children and youth represent a huge market, due to both their own spending power and their influence on family spending decisions.
As concerned adults, we also need to recognize when our anxieties about media violence are used to sell us on blanket censorship, ideology, and a variety of products.
Intellectual property - Anything that comes into being through invention or artistic creation. When an intellectual property is also real property, it is possible to own one but not the other – so that owning a painting (real property right) does not automatically give you the right to make copies of it (intellectual property right).
In Canada, consumers have certain rights to use copyrighted material without permission or license from the owner of the copyright. These rights are defined in the Copyright Act as Fair Dealing exemptions and were redefined in the 2012 changes to the Act. A good knowledge of Fair Dealing can be extremely helpful in understanding what you and your students can do with media in class. It's important to note that the Copyright Act provides very little definition for many of these terms; instead, most of the specifics of Fair Dealing have come from court rulings, and the new exemptions and other changes done in 2012 will likely also be further defined in the same way.
What colour is an Airbender? If this question is not at the top of your mind, it's because you haven't been following the controversy surrounding the casting of the film The Last Airbender, set to premiere in early July. The question of ethnicity in the film's casting casts a valuable light on many of Hollywood's decisions when it comes to race and gender – and the attitudes and assumptions that underlie them.
In this lesson, students explore the gratuitous use of violence in sports.