Citizen Game

Today's medianote is from a National Public Radio story about the continuing evolution of video games and other interactive media as an art form. The growth and development of this emerging mass medium is compared with the establishment of movies a hundred years ago. Just as movies went through a time when they were thought of as mindless diversions and little more, the NPR commentator argues that interactive media will slowly become accepted as a media art form. As with movies, which run the gamut from mindless fluff to the subject matter of university classes, video games (or at least some of them) will go artistically and intellectually upscale.

MWF classes only

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #31

Point 'n Click TV

YouTube is just one more challenge that the television networks have to face. If it isn't bad enough that television watching is down among young adults, it's even worse (from a network executive's standpoint) when young adults watch whatever it is they watch on YouTube. The programming is detached from its advertising, which is good for the viewer, but bad for the network that originally aired the program.

Viacom is dealing with this the old fashioned way: they are suing YouTube for copyright infringement (RIAA vs. Napster, only this time both sides have deep pockets). News Corp. (Fox) and NBC-Universal are trying a different approach. They are creating an online rival to YouTube that will carry shows from a variety of networks without the copyright problems and, presumably, supported by advertising. We talked about this move after listening to a National Public Radio story about it.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #30

Why Wi-Fi?

Municipal wireless Internet access has been embraced in Philadelphia and San Francisco, among other places, and now Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaragosa wants to bring it here. A recent commentary in the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times asks whether free or low-cost citywide Wi-Fi would turn public places into places that the public would really inhabit. Also, the commentary asked whether the mayor's proposal could do much to lessen the "Digital Divide," the gulf between Internet haves and have-nots.

Some interesting discussion on this medianote in the MC101 classes.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #29



***EXTRA ATTENDANCE CREDIT OPPORTUNITY MC101 students can pick up an hour of extra attendance credit by attending the Science Lecture on Tuesday, March 27 during the noon hour. Entitled "Doctors on TV--Making It Right," the lecture will feature Dr. Walter Dishell who was medical advisor or M*A*S*H and other television shows. If you attend, be sure to sign the sign-in sheet.

Smokescreen

Today we discussed a recent scholarly study of 735 adolescents that found that boys and girls who watched a lot of R-rated movies with attractive, young characters that smoke are much more likely to take up smoking themselves, even when the results were adjusted for having a friend who smoked, lack of parental guidance and doing poorly in school. An interesting sidelight of the study, which was summarized in this Reuters article, was that white children were persuaded to smoke by watching R-rated films while Black children were not.

MWF Classes Only

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #28

The High Court

Whoa, Dude! Wouldn't it be, like, totally twisted if this went to the Supreme Court?

The 1970s were a strange decade. The Vietnam War ended. Drug use didn't. Quite a few people found religion during that decade, and then just had to tell everyone about their discovery.

So the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case now before the U.S. Supreme Court has a very 1970s vibe to it, at least for me. On the surface, the case is about a young man who had his silly and irreverent banner torn down, and then was suspended by his high school principal.

Big deal.

But in this case it really is a big deal because the Supreme Court's ruling in this case could easily change the level of free expression that students can engage in on public high school campuses.

We discussed this case after listening to a National Public Radio story about it.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #27

Journalism Without Journalists

Bloggers aren't really journalists, yet a blogger broke the story that may take down U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. Bloggers really don't get the exposure that reporters for large metropolitan daily newspapers get, yet they get far more feedback from readers.

These are odd but exciting times for journalism. For generations, it has been newspapers (usually large dailies like the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times) that have broken to the American public the investigative stories that really mattered. In part, that was true because only the big newspapers had the resources to keep teams of highly-trained investigative reporters on a potentially large story for weeks or months.

But that model of investigative journalism may be changing. In the case of the firing of numerous U.S. attorneys for partisan reasons, the story was first broken by a blogger helped by bits of information sent in by readers.

Reporting by the Talking Points Memo and contributions from its readers may soon take down the Attorney General of the United States. Apparently, bloggers have become a major force in journalism, as discussed by this Los Angeles Times story.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #26

A Sweet Little MediaNote...

Today's medianote comes from a recent Los Angeles Times article about the use of graffiti art as a marketing tool. Graffiti Bars are chocolate confections wrapped in reproductions of 1970s New York "graff-scene" art. The $4 candy bars will be sold online and, locally, at the Hollywood Bowl and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and a few other hip other places.

This led to a conversation about whether graffiti art has a future as an advertising and marketing tool.

MWF Classes Only

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #25



All the beautiful and glamerous people were at the William S. Paley Television Festival in Hollywood on March 13. The attendance of Mass Comm 101 students raised the glamour level of the event considerably.

***GREAT TURNOUT Quite a few MC101s (I don't have an exact number at this time) and some guests made their way to the Directors Guild Theater last night for the William S. Paley Television Festival event for Jericho. We got to see an episode before it aired on CBS and hear a light-hearted panel discussion by the stars, writers, and director of the show. They took a lot of questions from the audience, too.

Saving the World, One Audience at a Time

I finally was able to present an article that was in the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago. Entitled "Movies Shoot for Change," it discusses the trend toward movie documentaries that drop any pretense of even-handedness or even coy, subtle social messages in favor of full-blown advocacy. Think Supersize Me or An Inconvenient Truth or March of the Penguins or anything by Michael Moore. The article points out that, increasingly, the driving force behind these documentaries is wealthy individuals turned "filmanthropists" who use their deep pockets to get selected political and social issues in front of audiences. Profits are secondary.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #24




***JERICHO UPDATE I faxed in the rather long list of MC101s and guests who signed up for the Paley Television Festival event on Tuesday evening. I followed up with a phone call to my contact at the Museum of TV & Radio and all appears to be well. I think we'll have a nice turnout; my guess is about 60. The program will be built around the CBS drama Jericho.

Cell Phone Zombies and Your Best-Forgotten Past

We've all got someone in our past who we'd rather not meet again. That obnoxous person you once dated. That friend who found way too much pleasure in others' pain. The co-worker who just couldn't stop talking to you about how cool fire was.

We've also seen people I think of as "cell phone zombies." They stumble around campus at all hours, phone jammed up to their ear, not really looking where they're going, listening endlessly and looking forlorn. I often wonder if an all-controlling boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse/keeper is on the other end of the line spewing endlessly and it is the zombie's role to silently listen. Forever.

Today's medianote comes from a recent Los Angeles Times article that discusses the notion that always being findable and reachable via email, text message and cell phone is not necessarily a good thing, especially for young people. (MWF classes only)

***THEN: PHONE TAG ... NOW: PHONE TOSS I forgot to mention in the audio post that students in both MWF classes said they know people who throw their cell phones when upset. Wonder what that sounds like when you're listening on the other end?

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #23

FDA to Marlboro Man: Shut Up!

The First Amendment is designed to protect political speech and, by extension, journalists. Authors, artists and others in the creative community have won extensive First Amendment protections, too. But advertisers, do they have First Amendment rights? Some, but the right to advertise stuff is less protected by the First Amendment than the right to give your opinion on political and social issues.

Within the world of advertising, what about the right to advertise products that are legal, but not to everyone, and that are clearly harmful: cigarettes, for example. Cigarette ads have not been allowed on American television for 35 years, but now there is a proposal in Congress to clamp down on other forms of cigarette advertising. A National Public Radio story discusses the proposal.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #22

Virtual Revolutionaries, Real Passion

We had a great pair of Downtown field trips last Friday, and our history walk on the way to the afternoon field trip wasn't bad either. Here are some MC101s in the lobby of the historic Bradbury Building.

It's pretty easy to imagine spending a lot of time on Second Life or some other virtual world. It's even easy to imagine people spending real life money on things that might make their virtual lives better. But virtual revolutionaries who detonate digital nukes that blow unsustecting users into motionless limbo because they don't like the way the (real life) technology company is managing the virtual world? Well, yup, it's happening according to a recent Los Angeles Times story.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #21



***PILOTLESS DRONES AND DRONING READERS ... Student newspaper reporters and editors sometimes have to deal with negative feedback over what they write, and sometimes the complaints come from faculty and administrators. But complaints about newspaper stories are a cutting-edge art form on the San Francisco Chronicle, where some readers are quite clear about their dislikes. (This isn't a medianote, but I had to put it in anyway.)