Is it ok for high school students to “<3 Boobies”?
Yes. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal from a Pennsylvania school district that wanted to stop two young women from wearing “I <3 Boobies” bracelets to promote breast cancer awareness. According to Philly.com, several teachers had expressed concern about the message the bracelets were transmitting to students at the school, so the district banned the use of the word “boobies” on bracelets. The courts at each level supported the students’ right to free expression in school.
Can you censor a censor’s speech on censorship? You can if you are China. Law professor Jonathan Turley discusses how a Chinese party official spoke candidly about vulnerabilities in the country’s Internet censorship system and how censors then tried to censor the comments.
Here’s a great scene from Singing in the Rain that illustrates the difficulties in moving from silent to talking films.
Gone With The Wind staircase scene
During the Code period, you could make movies about controversial topics like abortion as long as you were coy about it. Here’s Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood in Love with the Perfect Stranger. A couple of scenes to illustrate my point.
Trailer for Midnight Cowboy, the only Best Picture winner with an X-rating.
Lots of different songs and raps being mixed together there. Let’s take a look at what’s happening. Here’s a link to a visual breakdown of “Oh No,” the first track of All Day.
One of the big questions that get raised here is whether mash-ups are “stealing” the work of other artists. I can’t answer that question directly, but let’s get started here with the first episode of of Kirby Ferguson’s brilliant series, Everything is a Remix.
Class today was devoted to looking at great/controversial magazine covers from the 1960s to the present day. In a number of cases we looked at modern covers and the older ones that inspired them.
But, as always, I ran out of time long before I ran out of slides.
So here are links to several collections of great/memorable/controversial magazine covers from the last few decades. You will notice that theres a lot of overlap between these lists:
ASME’s Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Last 40 Years This list was published back in 2005, but it holds up well, with Annie Leibovitz’s John Lennon and Yoko Ono cover of Rolling Stone finding the top spot.
AdWeek’s 10 Recent Controversial Covers
A more current list that starts off with the New Yorker cartoon cover of the Obamas matching every early conspiracy theory.
Daily News Controversial Magazine Covers
While many of the classics are here, there are also some great recent choices such as the Rolling Stone cover that featured a glamour shot of the accused Boston Marathon bomber.
Today we have a guest blog post from the UNK forensics coach Aaron Blackman (who is also my Nintendo video game mentor) about a big group of video gamers who are playing and watching a play-through of the old Nintendo game Pokeman Red. Here’s his post:
Something extraordinary is happening on Twitch.tv right now.
An anonymous gamer has modded the original Pokemon Red video game to be played exclusively by the viewers of the stream. By inputting the controller commands to the channel’s chat feature (a, b, left, right, up, down, start, select), the game is played by several people rather than just a single person. As of this writing, there are 75,000 viewers, and potential players of the stream “Twitch Plays Pokemon.”
(Editor’s Note: As of my posting this, there are 73,833 current viewers and a total of 9.49 million total views.)
The commands entered into the chat have a lag of about 20-40 seconds, making the stream equally frustrating and entertaining to watch. Here is the link for the channel itself. The stream is interesting because it successfully combines the popular sport of watching someone play a video game on Twitch.tv, and actual participation in guiding the progress of the game.
The stream has become so popular that individual button inputs have taken a backseat to what has essentially become a hive mind. There are players who want to see progress in the game, and many others “trolling” the game by intentionally blocking progress.
For example, due to an abundance of random button presses, the in-game Pokemon Trainer continually attempted to use a key item in the game, the “Helix Fossil.” This item cannot be used until the end of the game and cannot be discarded. Those watching the channel have essentially made the fossil a deity in the fictional lore of the game. The players do more than simply pray to the “almighty Helix,” they actually assign nicknames to the Pokemon kept in the trainer’s team. The strongest Pokemon, a Pidgeot, is nicknamed “Bird Jesus.” Another Pokemon, Flareon, is nicknamed “False Prophet.” This fascinating piece of fan art showcases this deep religious theme the stream has adopted:
Religious art from the the Twitch.tv play-through of Pokemon Red.
A self-described social experiment, “Twitch Plays Pokemon” is an interesting phenomenon that is certainly rising in popularity. The channel does give some support to the idea that video games can create and foster communities. Will the hive mind be able to finish the game? Only time will tell.
This morning in class we’re going to be talking about the connection between body image and how our media portray beauty.
I asked my students to take a look at some of my earlier posts about media and body image, and come to class prepared to talk about how these images might affect us. Here’s the link:
In class today, we’re going to look at this video:
Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches
This video was reportedly viewed more than 114 million times the month it was released (through the many places it was posted) , making it one of the most viral videos ever. In the video, Dove compares how women see themselves vs. how other women see them, seen through the eyes of a police sketch artist who never actually sees the woman.
What was the result of these drawings? Why has this video been so popular? It resonates with women who tend to view themselves negatively
One critic points out: “Out of 6:36 minutes of footage, people of color are onscreen for less than 10 seconds.” (I might want to take a stop watch to it, but it certainly is less than 30 seconds.)
Ann Friedman of New York Magazine points out that this video still holds that one of the most important thing is to be beautiful in our own way. Friedman suggests that the message instead should be: “It should be to get women to do for ourselves what we wish the broader culture would do: judge each other based on intelligence and wit and ethical sensibility, not just our faces and bodies.”
Back in November of 2013, the rumor started circulating that cable giant Comcast was going to try to buy Time Warner Cable (TWC). This was news because Comcast, in addition to owning NBC Universal, is the nation’s largest cable provider and Time Warner Cable is the nation’s second largest.
(Before we go any further, let’s make one thing clear. Time Warner Cable is a company that provides cable TV and Internet services to subscribers in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, North Carolina, Maine, and Ohio. It is not the general media giant Time Warner that owns the Turner Broadcasting properties and Warner Brothers movie studio. So why the Time Warner in Time Warner Cable? That’s easy. Time Warner the media company owned TWC up until 2009, when it spun off the cable/Internet provider into its own company.)
Then on Thursday, February 13, Comcast announced that it had reached an agreement to purchase TWC for more than $45 billion in stock. If the transaction is approved by the FCC and the U.S. Justice Department, Comcast would have control of the programming going out to as many as 33 million cable subscribers. (Why is that number in doubt? There are roughly 100 million cable subscribers in the US. If Comcast controls more than 30 percent of those subscriptions, it could run into regulatory problems. So if the merger goes through, Comcast is likely to sell off approximately 3 million subscribers to fall below that magical 30 percent figure.)
More subscribers would give Comcast more negotiating power with both television program providers and Internet program providers.
It would give Comcast access to TWC’s powerful video-on-demand service that lets consumers have access to programming they want to see without being able to skip commercials.
Is it ok for high school students to “<3 Boobies”?
