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Aug 22, 2008

Youth Privacy Online: Take Control, Make It Your Choice
Posted by: Matthew Johnson

It’s been noted more than once that for young people, the Internet is an essentially social environment: besides activities such as social networking, other popular online pastimes such as multiplayer games and even file-sharing all have social components. With all the information youth are sharing online comes concerns about online privacy – and concerns, among parents and educators, about how little concern youth often have about their privacy.

Youth Privacy Online: Take Control, Make It Your Choice is a conference presented by the Information and Privacy Commissioner/Ontario, to be held in Toronto on September 4^th, 2008. The conference, of which Media Awareness Network is a supporter, is aimed at anyone who is concerned about online privacy issues: educators and school board staff, youth counsellors, lawyers specializing in youth or information technology areas, concerned parents and anyone else who would like to help youth protect their privacy online.

A growing amount of evidence suggests that young people are simply not aware of the privacy issues that they face while online, with consequences that may range from jeopardizing future job prospects to being targets of cyber bullying (making private information public is one of the most common forms of cyber bullying). Youth Privacy Online: Take Control, Make It Your Choice will provide an opportunity to learn and share concerns and approaches to educating youth about privacy issues and helping them to take charge of their own privacy.

Speakers such as Ontario Minister of Education the Honourable Kathleen Wynne and Doctor Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario, will shed light on the government response to the issue. The IT industry will be represented by speakers including Bruce Cowper, Chief Security Officer for Microsoft Canada and Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer for Facebook. The academic side is well-represented as well, with presenters including Doctor Valerie Steeves, of the Department of Criminology and Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa and Doctor Faye Mishna, Associate Dean of Research at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto. (A full list of presenters, with a brief biography of each, is available at http://www.verney.ca/ypo2008/speakers.php.)

For more information about the conference agenda, visit their home page at http://www.verney.ca/ypo2008/agenda.php. To register call (613) 226-8317 or visit the Web site at http://www.verney.ca/ypo2008/registration/ypo2008.php.

Comments | Category: Professional Development | Print

Aug 06, 2008

Games peoples play
Posted by: Matthew Johnson

In ancient times the Olympics were a time when all nations – all Greek nations, anyway – would put away their differences and compete in almost every human activity, from poetry to the ferocious, no-holds barred combat sport called pankration. Being the very best that humans could be was seen as the best way to honour the gods of Olympus.

Though we’ve dropped the poetry and the blood sports (not to mention the nudity), our modern Olympics retain much of the spirit of those games. No longer religious in nature, they nevertheless still have relevance. It’s a relevance that’s changed over time: from the internationalism that inspired de Coubertin, to its opposite, fascism, as exemplified by the 1936 Berlin games, and the Cold-War-by-proxy of the later 20^th Century, the Olympics have always meant something.

Relevance

This summer’s Beijing Olympics will be no different, and governments, journalists and activists have already begun trying to determine just what they will mean. For some, this will be the Olympics of new media: NBC, the network with American broadcast rights to the games, has stated that they will use the event as a “billion-dollar research lab” to experiment with different media platforms. For NBC, the Olympics represent an opportunity to establish what they call a Total Audience Measurement Index, which will determine how the viewership is divided between a variety of media such as streaming online video, mobile phones and of course TV screens. If successful, the TAMI may be adopted for use in measuring total viewership of TV shows and other content that is split between different platforms.

Of course, once people are online there’s no reason they have to go to NBC to get their Olympic coverage. NHK in Japan and CCTV in China will also be putting Olympic footage online, providing a wide variety of options for audiences. It’s a safe bet that much of this will wind up on YouTube and file-sharing sites, perhaps making the time difference between China and audiences in Europe and North America less of an issue. As well, this promises to be the first program-your-own Olympics: "Modern technology has the ability to deliver results or feeds of what people want to see, rather than the viewer seeing only what the broadcaster decides you want to see," Danyll Wills, a Hong Kong-based technology consultant, told Agence France-Presse.

Controversy

The choice of Beijing for the 2008 games was a controversial one, and this remains a part of both the news coverage and the games themselves. The most prominent story on this subject was the series of protests that accompanied the journey of the Olympic torch, aimed at drawing attention to China’s occupation of Tibet. This, too, points to the new-media aspects of these games: the protests were organized using tools such as social networks and text messaging, and footage of the protests were distributed on YouTube and Flickr. Despite the protests, however, China has cracked down more heavily on Tibetans leading up to the Olympics, not to mention other groups such as Uighurs and the religious movement Falun Gong. For the Western media, these events provide an extra angle to their Olympic coverage, beyond the games themselves. As John Walsh, an executive vice president of the American sports network ESPN, told the Aspen Daily News, “It is the most interesting Olympics in I can’t remember how long because there are so many possible stories. You have human rights versus sportsmanship, you have ... the people who are sponsoring, or putting up the dollars for the Olympics, and what will be their statement about human rights and China, and what will the story be outside of the venue.”

Censorship

It’s worth asking, though, how much coverage of such topics reporters will be allowed to do given China’s poor record of press freedom. The Organizing Committee has promised a “zero refusal policy” for media interviews, according to The China Post, but foreign journalists were denied access to part of the torch’s route that past through Xinjiang and Tibet. Melinda Liu, a reporter for Newsweek, received death threats for her coverage of the Tibetan riots in March, and Reuters correspondent Chris Buckley was beaten and robbed while investigating a citizen protest in Beijing.

In China, meanwhile, there are increasing signs that people are finding a voice online. Global Voices, a Web site that samples and translates blogs from around the world, has been publishing excerpts of Chinese opinion about the Olympics. These show a diversity of voices that may be surprising considering the prevalence of censorship in China. Despite a ban on unlicensed blogging about Olympic events, for instance, several citizen journalists have promised to provide coverage of the events. Other bloggers have reported on the forced evictions of Beijing residents in order to make room for various Olympic facilities.

What proved too much for the Chinese government, though, was the suggestion that there might be a curse associated with the five Olympic mascots, or fuwas: each of the images was thought to have heralded some disaster or crisis – the torch, protests around the Olympic torch; a Tibetan antelope, riots in Tibet; the panda, earthquakes in Sichuan (associated with pandas); and torrential rains associated with the final fuwa, a fish. These posts, however, quickly disappeared from the Chinese blogosphere, as censors moved to delete any suggestions that the games might be ill-omened.

While it’s too early yet to say how these games will be remembered, it’s safe to say that these will not be among those lost to history: whatever happens, these Olympics will mean something.

Comments | Category: Events | Print

Jul 25, 2008

Hooked on classics
Posted by: Matthew Johnson

A recent issue of Entertainment Weekly was devoted to a list of so-called “new classics,” a top one-hundred list of the best movies, books, TV shows, and so on, published since 1983. The lists themselves are liable to provoke discussion (Die Hard is #9, ahead of Goodfellas, Schindler’s List and Unforgiven?) but perhaps a more interesting question is whether, in the Media Age, the very idea of a “classic” still means anything.

The term “classic” has had any number of meanings, but it’s useful to go back to its origins: as a way of describing the art, and particularly the architecture, of the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. It was first used in this sense during the Renaissance, where it became a byword for certain aesthetic principles: harmony, simplicity, symmetry and elegance. Based (sometimes inaccurately) on “natural rules” of art derived from the ancients – the Golden Ratio, the three dramatic unities – classical art aspired to be timeless and universal, and it is from that quality that our modern idea of a classic has emerged. A classic is something that retains its value; that may be used as a touchstone or a template for things that come after it. Simply put, a classic is something that lasts.

That’s one definition, anyway. Fairly often “classic” is used with a negative connotation; Mark Twain famously defined it as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Sometimes it’s used in a face-saving way: when New Coke failed, its manufacturer, rather than admit defeat, kept it on the shelves while bringing the original back as “Coke Classic.” (The latter product soon went back to being simply Coca-Cola; New Coke was re-branded as Coke2 and slowly phased out, though for whatever reason it remains available in Micronesia.)

Probably the best example of the word’s flexible connotation is “classical music.” Originally used to describe the period where composers such as Mozart and Haydn applied classical values of simplicity and harmonious structure to music, in the 20^th Century it came to mean all pre-modern music. As a result, depending on the user’s point of view, it could mean “good music,” “longhair (intellectual) music,” or, perhaps most often, “boring music” or “music that’s supposed to be good for you.” (The series of Hooked on Classics records, which remixed works by Mozart and other pre-modern composers over a disco beat, was one of many attempts to get young people to listen to classical music.)

A classic, therefore, is something with enduring value: something that everyone agrees is good even if they don’t personally like it. The question is: does anything still fit that definition? Mike Dover, in his Wikinomics blog, points out that the very things that make something a classic to one audience can make it anathema to another: The Big Chill, a cultural touchstone for Baby Boomers, is presented in the Generation X movie High Fidelity as being so loathsome as to taint all the music on its soundtrack. His post led to a lively discussion about whether there are any classic movies that span the generations, or if each generation has its classics. What’s interesting about that discussion is that while a number of movies came up several times, there really was no consensus for any of the generations represented: some posters mentioned movies that had aimed to capture their generation’s experience (The Big Chill, Reality Bites, Juno), while many others suggested ones that spoke more to their own personal history: the Harry Potter series, Say Anything, and The Matrix were each referred to as having been important influences at different ages. Even the Bob and Doug McKenzie vehicle Strange Brew received a few votes, as did Entertainment Weekly’s #1 choice Pulp Fiction. One of the posters’ suggestions isn’t a theatrical movie at all: Star Wars: the Phantom Edit is a version of the first Star Wars prequel, re-edited by fans, that was distributed online.

What once were “cult” movies may be tomorrow’s classics. Poster Tammy Erickson described the Baby Boomer movie experience this way: “We ‘played’ at cult movies, ‘wasting’ as much time there as Xers later would on Dungeons and Dragons or Ys on World of Warcraft. I must have seen The Harder They Come nearly a hundred times. Others dressed up for and shouted along to The Rocky Horror Picture Show over and over again.”

With more and more choices available, with the expansion of the cable universe in the 1980s and the arrival of the Web in the ‘90s, movies – indeed, any single medium – became less important, as “narrowcasting” replaced “broadcasting.” Instead of being a work whose value is accepted, if not necessarily appreciated, by a broad population, a classic now may come to mean something that is deeply loved by a small number of people. When even a throwaway line from a Will Ferrell movie can inspire merchandise – you can buy T-shirts that illustrate Steve Carrell’s classic non-sequitur from Anchorman, “I love lamp” – “classic” may come to mean nearly the reverse of what it once did: something exclusive and esoteric, rather than universal.Perhaps that’s how we should read the Entertainment Weekly “new classics,” where Pulp Fiction is #1, Titanic is #3 and Blue Velvet is #4: not as being a ranked list, with each entry being slightly better than the one after it, but as being based on how noisy and vehement each movie’s fan club is.

Questions for classroom discussion

List two or three books, movies or TV shows you consider to be “classics.” What makes you think of them that way? Do you think that your friends would agree with you? How about your parents or teachers? Why or why not?

Is there anything you can think of that everyone might agree is a “classic”? What makes it that way?

How often do you think “classic” is used in a negative way? Why do you think it has both a positive and a negative meaning?

Do you think anything will be widely regarded as a “classic” in the future? Why or why not?

Can something be a “classic” if only a small group of people consider it to be one? Why or why not?

Comments | Category: Consumerism | Print

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MNet News

August 28, 2008

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Gaming a big part of family life: study

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Marketing to children: Report looks at companies' campaigns, spending

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