Framing the Election

In part as an effort to move away from my opinions about the current US election and moving the discussion towards a more neutral ground that includes some of my interests such as media literacy and young people, I offer the following link. Henry Jenkins provides a sustained analysis of the two presidential candidates bio videos. (By sustained I mean too long but it is worth touching down in a bunch of places). He uses George Lakoff's theory of how the two nt parties "frame" their presentation in such a way as to appeal to two different types of people. What I like about this piece is that Jenkins is using it specifically to talk to young people about how the media shapes our vision of the world.

I think that we often confuse being technologically savvy with being media savvy. There are always young people who are skeptical about the media that they consume but there are a larger number who are not as critical as they should be. Take for instance, Jenkins comment that his students typically view these bios as objective history and do not inquire into who and why they were produced. I look forward to the next installment which deals with the Vice Presidential candidates.

Clustering online

As I work through some research methodologies I came across the idea of "clustering" as a quick way of getting the writing juices working. Reminded me of a little online tool I've used a couple of times that mindmaps.

Facebook growing up

I'm not a fan of MySpace because of the chaos. I can't read people's pages. I know some like creative anarchy but not me. That's why I'm a Facebook guy. I'm also a fan of new changes that are apparently coming regarding the spamming of apps and the amount of information that goes out on my feeds. Seems like it isn't real yet but you can preview here.

This should be a boon for folks like me who want to be friendly with my students and youth in my congregation but who also want to be an adult. Controlling these features will allow me, and them, to protect themselves while still interacting.

The Printing Press

In line with the last post, for the geeks out there fascinated with the rise of the book as a model of how new media emerges in society, there is a series of videos on Gutenberg. I found them at Tall Skinny Kiwi. They aren't short bits so prepare to spend a little while watching them. Give up a re-run of something to watch a documentary.

Re-mediated

Marko put me onto this website

Besides being quite cool in their own right, these images remind me of the remediation effect of old media being transformed by new media so that the old is not exactly the same but the new still depends on the old. When print first came into existence the type faces all looked like cursive writing because readers were not used to fonts such as Times New Roman. New, the printing press, transformed old, hand writing, into something that was different yet the same. For me, this is especially pronounced in video where the first standard TV shows looked like plays. Now, the old medium of plays has been sufficiently remediated to come into its own as a new form. Web 2.0 is further remediating that new form. The cycle continues.