MediaThink's legacy

More than a decade ago I signed up to be part of a new non-profit called the Northwest Media Literacy Center. Because the name was a mouthful, to say nothing of slightly pretentious, we changed it to "MediaThink."

Over the years we put on dozens of presentations, primarily for parents worried that their children were being "media-napped" by texting, product placements, video games and cartoons.

But MediaThink's numbers never expanded beyond a core group of about six. Over time, the group couldn't sustain itself even though the need for critically assessing media became bigger and more complex than ever.

At least a couple of us felt that the rapid, overwhelming changes in media technology were simply beyond the mastery and understanding of our generation. Then too — surprise, surprise — we never got the attention of the media.

So at the end of last year, the group decided to call it quits. Its one active project was a self-directed, Northwest Earth Institute-style course for parent groups. We called it "The Media Mindful Family" and parceled it out to The Media Literacy Project in New Mexico. MLP has promised to carry it forward.

There's still a huge need for a media literacy organization in Portland (and everywhere for that matter). Several organizations have taken an interest locally: Kaiser Permanente, the state PTA, the Oregon Council for the Humanities, The Oregon Pediatric Society and the Heart Association. Yes, there are health consequences to a "bad media diet." Start with one word: "addiction."

One of the legacies of our our now defunct group is a contact list of national media literacy organizations. Their web sites are worth exploring. Sharing the contacts with you seems to be a fitting farewell to MediaThink.

ACME Coalition
http://www.acmecoalition.org/

Media Literacy Project (formerly NMMLP)
http://medialiteracyproject.org/

Center For Media Literacy
http://www.medialit.org/

Just Think
http://justthink.org/

Media Awareness Network
http://www.media-awareness.ca/

Media Education Foundation
http://www.mediaed.org/

Media Literacy Clearinghouse
www.frankwbaker.com/default1.htm

Media Education Lab
http://mediaeducationlab.com/index.php

Media Literacy Online Project
http://mlop.proscenia.net/

A Scary Test

Here is a scary test. Name the product associated with each of the above fonts.

If you need help, ask a child. Adults usually can name only four or five of the fonts, but children identify most of them, particularly those that belong to highly sugared food.

For both adults and children, the results are sobering because they tell us about what our children are learning and how it shapes their awareness.

In light of the results, who or what are the most persuasive and pervasive teachers in the lives of our children?

If the objects to be identified were leaves, could our children name the tree each leaf comes from?

Those of us who teach media literacy through Media Think sometimes use this exercise as part of our presentations. As the school year begins, consider inviting us to present to your school's PTA, or to your congregation or service club.

Arguments with advertising

My Sunday Oregonian arrived on the driveway this morning stuffed in an Ikea wrappper ad that read in big letters, “Home is the most important place in the world.”

Call me a crazy, but to me the most important place in the world is … the world. Without it we would not have our homes. And if we continue to fill up our homes with junk — even elegantly designed Swedish junk — we won’t have the world.

***

Consider this quote from a Friday New York Times article carrying the headline “Product Packages Now Shout To Grab Your Fickle Attention.” The quote is from a chief executive of a “brand agency” in Cincinnati who thinks off-beat packaging is a hot advertising medium.

“The media is fragmented, and we can’t find people — we can’t get them to sit down and listen to our argument on a television spot.”

Argument on a television spot?

Since when do television spots present arguments. The whole appeal of television as an advertising medium is that it short-circuits reason and goes for gut emotion.

If you look at the new glitzy packaging — Kleenex in oval boxes, Mountain Dew in graffiti-inspired bottles — none has anything remotely to do with making an argument.

***

Last spring the University of Oklahoma agreed to sell the naming rights to one of its premier campus schools. Voila! Conoco-Phillips School of Geology and Geophysics, the university is only the most recent institution to sell a respected name for corporate money. In this case, for $6 million.

Could it be that one day, public institutions will be so financially starved that this city, this state, and even this nation will sell their names to corporations? I once thought I would be spared such travesty in my lifetime, but now I’m not so sure.

Here’s an idea. Let’s name our major environmental disasters after corporations. Hurricane Exxon Mobil? Chevron Global Warming?

And why not name our wars after those for whom they are being fought? Isn’t the Iraq War really Big Oil War?

Credit where credit is due.

***

Finally there’s the Oregonian front page story this morning about the explosion of billboards in the state since the passage of Measure 37. The story quotes folks who are rightfully offended by the blight caused by the new signs.

When I ran The Connection newspaper, I launched an editorial campaign to fight a huge sign that went up at the corner of Shattuck and Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, right across from Albertson’s.

My approach was simple and I wish it had been mentioned in the Oregonian story (I’ll write a letter to the editor tomorrow, which may or may not get printed). The solution: Get readers to call the companies advertising on the billboard and tell them that their ads are counterproductive. As in, we don't do business with outfits that blight our community.

As an editorial service over several months I provided readers with CEO names and phone numbers.

After a few dozen calls, the advertisers got the message. The billboard company (now Clear Channel) literally couldn’t give away the space. They tried. When the Oregon Zoo was offered free space and took it, we complained to Metro, which runs the zoo.

The Zoo ads came down and then the sign came down.

The bottom-line message is this: Businesses should be judged by the ways they advertise.

If ads are intrusive (Portland Trolley voice sponsorship ads for instance), if they offend (ever see a sexist ad?), if they blight the Commons (billboards or illegal signs on public roads, for example), if they slap their names on public institutions (buying naming rights — PGE Park and the Conoco-Phillips School of Geology and Geophysics), then we, the public, should openly and repeatedly vow to take our business elsewhere.

Privacy and other internet lessons

For the first time since I started this blog some nine months ago, I’ve pulled a posting off the site. In it I had discussed changing the name of the Northwest Media Literacy Center to, well, something else.

The something else turned out to be a “pretty good name,” in the opinion of a “naming consultant” who wandered onto the posting after his search snagged one of my search engine tags. He suggested that we protect the proposed name by registering it before someone else did.

The problem is that our organization hasn’t agreed on the name, but the response from the naming consultant increased our interest in the name, and gave several of us pause.

I decided to go private with our seemingly valuable thinking about names. I deleted the post and its comments.

The experience with the naming posting is just the most recent to raise my awareness of the huge promise and troubling pitfalls of this medium.

I’ve had an Italian T-shirt merchant comment on a post, in Italian. His pitch to get you to his site was deleted. Interestingly enough, he too was responding to our proposed name.

Only a couple of other spammers have tried to lure Red Electric readers to commercial sites. They were likewise deleted. Alas, I'm certain that won't be the last of them.

The Red Electric’s site meter has provided interesting data. The site averages 40 visits a day. When I wrote about the Portland Timbers recently, visits shot up to 60. In fact, my choice of topic and resulting search tags drive up (or down) numbers of visits markedly.

I’m often surprised by the topics that attract the most attention. For instance, a post on the misuse of apostrophes was a magnet for grammarians far and wide. So if you want grammarians, tag a post, any post, “apostrophe.”

Attracting hordes is not my goal here, but responses provide insight into how audience surveys like the Nielsen ratings can drive media content. If TV producers and magazine editors feel even a nibble of interest, they’ll yank on the topic in hopes of landing a big audience — which, of course, drives up advertising rates.

Think Paris Hilton and the observation about her being famous for being famous. Or is it being famous for being cute or coy or sexy or incarcerated or rich or all of the above….

And no, I won’t tag this “Paris Hilton,” but it is tempting.

TV hurts 'tweens as well as tiny ones and toddlers

This morning The Oregonian went big with a story out of Seattle that parents are mindlessly plunking little ones in front of TVs, a practice that pediatricians warn can hamper brain development and lead to attention deficit problems, aggressive behavior, obesity and later problems with math and reading.

Turns out that "Brainy Baby," the latest fear-factor trend in programming to toddlers and their parents, produces brain-deprived baby, not the "Baby Einstein" or "Baby Mozart" promised to parents by TV hucksters. Visit their web sites and weep. Reminder: The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no (zero!) TV for children under two.

(This just in, parents! Neither Einstein nor Mozart watched TV!)

Those of us at the Northwest Media Literacy Center have been sharing information like this for for the past six years. It's nice to get help from The Oregonian. Let's hope today's front page story is the beginning of a front-page trend.

One story worthy of the front page, but missed by The O, was in the Christian Science Monitor on Thursday. This one was about a study showing that if a 14-year-old watches three or more hours of TV a day there's a much greater likelihood of poor performance later in college.

The study was published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Psychology.

So if you want your kids to to make the dean's list, or just have a better chance of getting a BA, teach them to turn off the TV.

Of course there are plenty of other reasons to hit the off button, not the least of which is that time in front of screens is time away from life and the real world. The average American living to 80 will have spent 15 years of 24-hour days in front of television.

Someday you might want that time back.

"Screens" redefine human experience

For the past three years I have helped organize TV Turnoff Week activities in Southwest Portland as part of my involvement with the Northwest Media Literacy Center.

During that time, though, our concerns have extended beyond television—so much so that the national TV Turnoff organization has changed its name to “The Center for Screen-Time Awareness.”

Our society is now at the point where we are subjected to screens literally from cradle to grave. No one has actually started to market casket screens for the departed but anything is possible, especially if there’s a buck to be made.

Last year I stopped shopping at Albertson’s when the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway store hung screens over the check-out lines. “Enough with the screens already,” I wrote “corporate.” A PR functionary wrote back that it was all an experiment and, anyway, I was the only person to complain.

I responded that I had other choices for where to spend my money, and in the future I would shop where I wasn’t treated as just another captive in a media demographic to be exploited. Moreover, I wrote, I would urge others to do the same. (You can complain to Albertson’s by calling 1-877-932-7948.)

Within the last few days three “screen” stories have appeared like separate dots in the mediascape. Connecting them is an exercise in screen-time awareness.

Two were from today’s newspapers. The first, on the front page of The Oregonian, reported on young teen “Party Boys” performing dancing so obscene that it drove girls subjected to it to tears and led to arrests for sexual abuse. The grotesque behavior by the McMinnville boys was modeled on a scene in the movie “Jackass.”

After the boys were arrested, one of their fathers complained that the arrests and incarcerations in the juvenile home were unnecessary. “I could have handled it myself. He listens to me,” said the father, who, like millions of other parents, obviously didn’t have a clue.

The New York Times business section today ran a story about how the Albertson’s experience has metastasized to malls, Wal-Marts and even shopping carts and gas pumps—any place drawing mass “audiences.” One mother is quoted as saying that that screens in malls captivate her children. “If it’s showing a preview of a movie they want to see, I can’t get them away from it.”

“…can’t get them away from it”? Welcome to parenting in the 21st Century. Who’s in charge here?

Finally, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that 43 percent of babies under the age of one are watching TV, and that programmers at Disney and Sesame Street are actively targeting them. Media marketeers are told by their researchers that brand-awareness and bonding is possible before infants even learn to talk.

As reported in the Washington Post, there is an entire 24-hour network aimed at babies. It’s called “BabyFirstTV,” and it blatantly counters the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics that children younger than two should watch no—that’s zero—TV.

Any expert in child development will tell you that the very young need the warm sensory interaction they get from parents. They also need to freely explore three-dimensional space in order to connect with the real world.

Hour upon hour of ubiquitous screen time is literally redefining, and confining, what it means to be human. It is blocking us from seeing and experiencing the world as it is.

Screen-time awareness, indeed! We absolutely must get a grip on our media consumption. We must consciously limit screen time and critically assess the time we and our children spend with media.

Finally, I have submitted media literacy legislation to State Senator Ginny Burdick and State Representatives Mary Nolan and Larry Galizio. It calls on schools to teach media literacy to our children.

I urge you and your friends to write these three lawmakers to support the legislation.