I don’t usually like to link to things Slashdot has already covered, but Tim O’Reilly has written the most eloquent, well-supported, coherent and complete defense of P2P sharing I have seen yet. Everyone should go read it, and then quote it to the next person you hear calling P2P “piracy.”
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The examples they use are compelling and should really wow the kids, even if a few are slightly out of date (kids are going to know they’re not in the target audience for Nash Bridges — is that still on the air?!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.
You can tell I’m home, because I have waaaay too much time to post things… Anyway, I was reading an interview with Joel Hodgson, which is what I do when I’m depressed about my job prospects, because I’m so fascinated with how he’s managed to reinvent himself a million times… and in this particular interview, he mentions he was influenced by the TV show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. The family legend, if I remember it correctly, is that my great-grandfather, Jules “Tony” Herbuveaux, was one of the people who helped get this show on the air, and I’d been under the impression it was a kids’ show. However, Joel’s reckoning of the show doesn’t jive with what I know — he says the puppets on the show helped introduce international films, and that the show was on CBS, while I know Tony worked for NBC. Anyone have an explanation?
No, wait, I think I do… the specific show he’s speaking about appears to be a spin-off of the main K F and O show. Sorry. Anyway, it’s an interesting interview with Joel (though pretty old, I’d bet), as is this one.
In other news, blogging is what I do to fill my brain with protective fluff which keeps me from realizing how much my life sucks. Further updates on my inexorable slide into the tar pits of the kind of blogging everyone else does as events warrant.
How could I pass up a BBC headline that read Congo’s Jive Grannies? When are you gonna see an American news outlet air a story on sexagenarian rhumba dancers in Africa? I mean, c’mon! In addition to the Lynda Barry-esque quote in the title, here’s another great quote:
“Now that I’ve grown older, and since I married and had all my children I found out that if you want to dance calmly, with dignity and serenity, you have to dance the Rhumba.”
“He has been left with some permanent reminders of the project with some erratic early tattooing attempts.”
If *I* was inventing a tattooing robot, I don’t think I’d let it practice on me… I’d find some tattoo fiend and give them the option. Well, maybe he is one, who knows. As a sidenote, I find it sort of surprising that Ananova is still around.
