Popular culture, news media, and the way we consume violence on social media all play significant roles in shaping and reinforcing narratives of violence against women and diverse communities.
Traditional media like film, print and music still have a significant impact on young people’s body image. Research has found that even news coverage can promote weight bias by how it portrays people in larger bodies, both in photographs and in how it frames weight and health.
The new movie Zero Dark Thirty, which tells the story of the tracking and eventual killing of Osama Bin Laden, has received several Oscar nominations (including Best Picture), but it's attracting another kind of attention as well: several writers, including Jane Meyer at The New Yorker and Peter Maass at The Atlantic, have accused it of condoning or even glorifying the use of torture by US intelligence agencies.
As the Internet has become more and more central to our lives, our online and offline identities have become less and less separate. Where the Internet was once a place where nobody knew we were dogs and we lived Second Lives as customizable avatars, today we mostly surf the Web as ourselves.
Is technology drawing us closer together, or pulling us apart? When it comes to TV and digital media, the answer may well be "yes" to both.
When Marlene Kane's sixteen-year-old son Andrew asked her to drive him to the nearby town of Midland last December, she was surprised to hear that he wanted to meet with someone he had met while playing the online game World of Warcraft – and even more surprised to learn that the person he was meeting was a 42-year-old mother of four from Texas. Experts on sexual solicitation of youth online were less shocked however. In fact, for them the only surprising thing was Lauri Price's sex. Everything else about the scenario – how they made contact, Price's openness about her age, Andrew's willingness to meet her, and the lack of deception about her intentions – all fit the evolving picture of how youth are sexually exploited online.
With the tremendous success and spread of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, along with home-broadcasting sites such as YouTube and Flickr, many people have become concerned about what effect they will have on our attitudes towards privacy. Now a new question has arisen: whether Facebook postings violate the Youth Criminal Justice Act if they identify suspects or victims covered under the act.
www.media-awareness.ca site traffic up by almost 2 million unique visits a year
Site traffic jumps 139%. Now attracts more than 3.2 million visitors a year.
OTTAWA, March 31, 2004 — Media Awareness Network (MNet), Canada’s leading Internet education organization, is celebrating new levels of success for its bilingual media education Web site, which has attracted more than 3.2 million unique visits since its re-launch in March 2003. This represents a dramatic 139% increase in unique visits in one year.
The Nova Scotia English technology education curriculum includes expectations that incorporate digital literacy. The curriculum document Foundation for the Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum: Technology Education (2001) includes a section that demonstrates the complementary relationship between digital literacy and technology education:
Many curricular expectations in Ontario Computer Studies courses relate to media and digital literacy. The following excerpt from Computer Studies, Grades 10 to 12 (2008) detail how media and digital literacy have been integrated into the curriculum: