I have just finished my final project for Media Literacy entitled, “Are You Media Literate?”

Are You Media Literate?

Check out the project →

During his visit to the Google campus, Conan ended up speaking on digital participatory culture and how the power of the online masses has affected his life, his live show, and his future as an entertainer. He gets it, and he embraces it. It’s a great talk, really funny, and Conan gives some insightful remarks.

The section I’m referring to starts about 17 minutes in, but you really should watch the whole thing. It’s hysterical.

@Google & YouTube Present: A Conversation with Conan O’Brien

I loved the original. Really happy to see it updated.

On YouTube

That earlier re-blog I did of Brad King‘s Shut Your Digital Native Piehole (52 of 90) got me thinking about the differences in literacy levels. And as I followed the line of reasoning it came around to one thing: class struggle. I think this works.
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Some insightful observations. Why should we teach media literacy? Right here is a good reason.

These children have grown up with digital technologies, but in a very limited way. They know a few things quite deeply, but they – as we did at their age – have no great appreciation of the subtleties of the tools. The expanse and use of the tools. The possibilities for tools that don’t yet exist.

They can push buttons, but they can’t make them.

Brad King: – Shut Your Digital Native Piehole (52 of 90).

Definitely poignant. How do we increase the literacy of kids? This is why we need media and digital citizenry taught in school. Kids grow up with computers, but they don’t know how to really use all the tech that’s out there. There is also Henry Jenkins’ position of ethical standards not being learned in an always-on world. Being native doesn’t equal being literate. And literacy has changed.

Where do the lines stand? We now live in an age where borrowing, copying and reusing creative works is the rule. From music remix culture to the more current trend in lifting authored written works for use in new publications, the boundaries of fair use and appropriation are blurred through the lens of this new participatory culture.

As the debate stands, there are quite a few sides to join. In this essay we will examine the scope of the copyleft movement and identify the beneficial aspects of adopting a Creative Commons-style approach to appropriation. In doing so, we will gain support from original copyright provisions in the United States Constitution as well as current real-life examples of the benefits. In appropriation of others’ works, it is important to respect the copyright holder’s rights. At the same time, in order for creative culture to progress, creators must be open to allowing their works to be referenced, used, and incorporated into new art forms.

Modern copyright law is a far cry from its roots, and provisions on fair use are not so fair. The United States Constitution declares,

“The Congress shall have Power…To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; (Article I, Section 8, emphasis mine)”

Today, copyright provisions last too long and in turn stifle the “Progress of Science and useful Arts.” In 1998 the time limit became the life of the author (or creator) plus 70 years with the passing of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. As Marc Garcelon (2009) points out, this is far longer than the “original 14-year limit that copyright established in 1790 (p. 1308).” In doing so, Congress further blurred the distinction between ideas and expression that Thomas Jefferson originally intended in writing the constitution (p. 1308). ¶ Read More…

Seen from a historical perspective, examples [of the Other] abound: think about the cold war and the mutual demonization between USA and Russia. Or take the anthropological literature which is replete with examples of aboriginal people either dehumanized and treated as animals or idealized as specifically pure, being-in-touch-with-nature, unspoiled creates (see Gaugin above). Whatever the image and values projected onto the other, it reflects usually not just a mirror image of our own identity but constitutes something that essentially withdraws from our grasp.

In this exercise of examining “the Other”, I’ve chosen three subjects – an Individual, a Group/Sub-culture, and an Action. The goal is for these to be foreign to me either negatively or positively. I attempted to choose subjects that affect me in way, which will be explained with the photographic representations I’ve chosen. The first step is to identify these subjects. ¶ Read More…

Recently I wrote about Google Buzz and some of its shortfalls, detailing what it does and doesn’t do well, along with some speculative scenarios that could see Buzz becoming a dangerous infraction on privacy. I think this did well to give a very basic overview of what Buzz does and, hopefully, help us be on the look out as responsible media users for things that seem just a little bit fishy in the Google world.

What that little project didn’t do is look at the inner workings of Google the parent company or how Buzz was birthed. Now, I’m not an insider and Google itself isn’t the most vocal about its trade secrets. However, with a little bit of research and the help of people who keep track of acquisitions, I think we can start to get a pretty good picture of what makes up Buzz.
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Rettberg, J.W. (2009). ‘Freshly generated for you, and Barack Obama’: how social media represent your life. European Journal of Communication, 24(4), 451-466.

The primary point of this article is that the information we give to social media, be it personal, travel-oriented, photographic, or anything, combines to create a narrative surrounding us.  The author uses a personal example of Dopplr.com’s 2008 Personal Annual Report to show the ways location, contacts and chronology intertwine to tell a story. It is argued that the ways in which we document our lives in ‘personal media’ contributes to a type of cultural template that shape these narratives. Included in these templates are the ways in which this information is organized and presented. The media itself shows its users information about their travel, search history, or reading tastes generating what the author calls filtered self-portraits. The author suggests that this may be good as it allows us to see our place in the the cultural templates and larger stories of the world.

Stolley, K. (2009). Integrating social media into existing work environments: The case of
Delicious. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 23(3), 350-371.

This article provides an overview of the social bookmarking site Delicious.com and its functions. The professional use of Delicious is described in terms of activity theory and interaction design, making a case for specific and limited datatypes being particularly useful for technical communicators. The author argues that RSS and APIs allow technical communicators open up a centralized system, but these functions must be integrated into common use applications in order to gain widespread adoption into business workflows, with one proposed solution being the use of third party browser add-ons such as have been made for Firefox. The article then details the technical processes needed to achieve a useful level of integration, effectively opening up that centralized system.