Today, marketers know intimate details about consumers. If marketing companies are using heuristics – or patterns of behavior – to sell products and services, we need to provide everyone with heuristics, or habits of mind, to filter the media messages and be better equipped to decide for ourselves.
In this issue, we explore new notions of identity from a sociological and psychiatric perspective. How we represent ourselves – to ourselves and to others – is essential to our humanity. By better understanding the impact of our mediated selves on our interactions and our self-image, we see how media influences the essence of our being. Includes interviews with two cultural sociologists: Professor Joseph E. Davis explains the commodifying of self, and Dr. Andreas Bernard discusses the changing science of profiling.
The representation of gender in media has long been a subject of fascination as well as critical analysis and change management for those advancing and practicing media literacy. In this issue of Connections, we highlight two organizations addressing these issues worldwide. Promundo, founded in Brazil in 1997, promotes gender equality and violence prevention by engaging men and boys in partnership with women and girls. The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) teams with more than 100 countries to keep accurate data on gender representation in the news.
This issue of Connections looks at how technology and new data are changing the narrative around sports and media, and how that changes our experience as consumers and participants. Sports provide an excellent opportunity to not only learn people skills and health information, but they offer excellent arenas for math and science and algorithmic thinking – and of course, media literacy. And this includes sports cars, too. We have an interview with Wil Cashen, Tesla Foundation.
Television in a Networked Age -- marketing suggests that future television sets will be able to assemble an evening of programming based on individual personal profiles. SportsTelevision and the Networking of Nostalgia -- sports occupy a unique place in the world of TV entertainment. Norman Lear Center at USC released a study of local Los Angeles area TV News offering an in-depth analysis of news coverage in a major metropolitan area. CML’s Tessa Jolls was a guest panelist at The Cable Show 2010 session on digital citizenship.
What is clear is that the majority of media offer images of beauty to young girls which are virtually impossible to attain. Many of those images also offer a hyper-sexualized model of feminine identity for girls to emulate. In this issue, you’ll find reviews of two films from the Media Education Foundation which will help you discuss issues of media, sexuality and gender identity with your students and children.
In this issue of Connections, we examine the ways in which stereotypes and prejudice surface in media, and discuss ways in which media literate citizens can become agents for positive social change. We explore dehumanizing representations of the Other. In our second article, we investigate the connections between use of stereotypes in television news and the social capital of communities.
In our research section, we reveal how reality television producers mine the emotions, bodies and identities of cast members for spectacle and profit. In our second article, we excavate the values and beliefs embedded in reality television with a close examination of American talent and makeover shows. We also discuss lifestyle television as a laboratory for the development of democratic citizenship skills. The University of Rhode Island held a symposium on the Historical Roots of Media Literacy Education, and the Elizabeth Thoman Media Literacy Archive was unveiled.
In our first article, two prominent rhetoricians explain the differences between propaganda and persuasive discourse that stimulates engaged citizenship. Next, we review the premise of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's landmark Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, and, with some assistance from media literacy scholar Renee Hobbs, we discuss responses to forms of propaganda which are more pervasive and indirect.
In this issue of Connections, we draw upon current research to facilitate understanding of the nature of video game play by children, and we provide tools for understanding the messages which video games communicate about the world we live in.