Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS, has an excellent website, called Don’t Buy It!, aimed at teaching kids critical thinking skills for dealing with the media! I guess now I can’t complain about how nobody’s doing that…
I am really impressed with the site for a number of reasons. First, it’s slickly designed and functional, which is so rare for educational/nonprofit sites. Second, it encourages kids to think about banner ads and popups as well as print and TV advertisements, which is good; I personally had not been exposed to any lines of kid-crit about the Internet. Similarly, the range of media content it critiques is quite broad, covering everything from how musical acts are packaged, to representations of police and violence, to how food is prettied up for ads, to what exactly “such-and-such not included” and “part of this complete breakfast” mean.
The examples they use are compelling and should really wow the kids, even if a few are slightly out of date (kids are going to know they’re not in the target audience for Nash Bridges — is that still on the air?! — but they’re likely to get a jolly good gross-out from the reference to Olestra causing diarrhea). The interactive parts are a lot of fun, some of them even for us older culture-jammers — you can change the text in advertisements and print them out! (Granted, the one I did didn’t print right, but oh well.) You can design your own cereal box! How cool is that?! There’s lesson plans for teachers and parents and even an action center describing how kids can complain to the FCC, to their elected representatives, and to toymakers. And best of all, the site encourages you to use their banner ads, so I’m going to add one to my page.
Comments 1