Gender Remixing

While researching visual remixes, I stumbled upon a website that combines the visuals and audio of toy commercials targeted at girls and commercials targeted at boys. The result shows how ridiculous gender difference is within the toy industry. Commercials aimed at males had masculine, loud voice-overs and girl commercials used high pitched, bubbly voices. Male visuals are dark, with sharp shapes and various shades of blue, while female visuals were almost all pink and filled with smiles. I know this sounds too stereotypical, but you have to go on the site to see just how ridiculous these commercials are.

Visual remix artist and "pop culture hacker", Jonathan Macintosh created the website in 2010 and 2011 to inform and entertain people of all ages of how traditional gender roles are being exploited and reinforced by corporations.























 



Moving Forward: 
Check out these sweetish Toys R Us ads!






I sincerely appreciate Mr. Macintosh's efforts to exploit the exploiters by using their ads against them in a campaign to free gender stereotypes. He also places the remixing capabilities in the hands of the public so they can better understand the power of visuals, audio and media in general.

Image Manipulation in Mass Media

After reading Photoshop Semiotics: Research in the Age of Digital Manipulation by Michael Emme and Anna Kirova, I did some research about digital editing within news articles. I think it is important to understand that image manipulation can be used in sources that reach thousands, even millions of people. Images that exaggerated or that don't tell the entire story can have an impact on how we perceive events. 

I found two stories that document how altered images that depicted violence created a public uproar. 

The first image was a photo of fighting in Lebanon. It was poorly manipulated by freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj and published in a Reuters news article. Hajj used the Photoshop cloning tool to make the smoke from burning buildings seem darker, larger and more intense. He also Photoshopped another image with an Israeli Jet fighter dropping three flares (the original photo only showed one flare)

The other image was printed in the New York Daily News paper and depicted an image of Boston bombing victims. One of the victims legs was doctored to cover up her wounded leg. Many people believed that this undermined the severity of the event by not showing hurt victims, while others suggested that the newspaper should not have chosen that image if they felt they had to "fix" it. The papers spokes-person, Ken Frydman stated that the New York Daily News chose to edit the photo out of respect for the victims and their families.

I personally feel like the first image was intentionally altered to promote a certain viewpoint about Israeli- Lebanon conflict, where the Boston Marathon image recorded events accurately. I believe that the New York Daily News had far better intentions than the photographer from Reuters. 

Media Education

Media Education is becoming increasingly popular in elementary and high schools across the country. According to a 2010 report from the National Educational Statistics, there is one computer with internet access for every three children.

BUT, an article in the Huffington post brings our attention to the fact that not all public schools are receiving the same technological benefits as others, and the technology gap between schools is growing. Bronzeville school in the Chicago public school system has fallen behind other schools in it's district in the number of computers offered within the school. In addition, the computers are not updated, and they do not run well. Students in the area come from low income households and therefore do not have adequate computer access at home either. The school noticed that it's students are struggling with tasks like typing and saving due to their lack of computer access.

This inaccessibility to technology is not random. According to a 2013 government census on technology usage,  Black and Hispanic populations fall far being White and Asian populations in terms of both technology use and access. Low income households also suffer. Because certain populations within the US are so obviously disadvantaged in terms of media engagement and education, the cycle of poverty and discrimination will continue unless action is taken to give all our students the same opportunities.

Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling

 Digital storytelling is the composition of personal stories into a digital format. The video, audio, and graphics are found or recorded and combined using hardware and software. The compiled result is then shared using forms of web distribution like youtube and podcasts (or offline as compact discs).

Click here to learn more

Digital storytelling is gaining ground in education because it's a great tool for teachers to use to grab students attention and interest.

Digital Story Lesson Plan

Examples:

Bullying

Art as a way of thinking

Ice Cream 

Media Literacy

The Media Literacy Project is an organization and a business that aims to teach Americans how to interpret the vast array of media that surrounds us on a daily basis. 

 

Their main focus is media justice for underrepresented groups. You can hire employees to teach media literacy in the classroom or buy educational material ranging from $5 to $390, however their online information and resources are protected by created commons so others may share and remix the material as long as the original publishers are credited, the remixed material must be licensed under creative commons, and there must be no commercial gain in the process. 

The project also claims to receive no funding from media corporations.