PressThink: The People Formerly Known as the Audience
Great commentary from Jay Rosen about old and new media…

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From Chapter 3, Virtuality: From virtual antiquity to the pixel zone, Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture:
Mirzoeff points out, that despite its claims to equality and access, the web is really a place for the upper classes.  He also discusses the idea of desirable Internet addresses such as MIT’s Media Lab.  An AOL address […]

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"The shift is one from the mass to the molecular media." (Tapscott, Growing Up Digital, p. 300).
One important "new" media literacy skill is organization. In the late 70s, when I was in high school, someone else had done the organizing. We learned how the card catalog worked, how to use indexes to search […]

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Doing some notetaking before I return Growing Up Digital (Don Tapscott) to Swem.  I marked this quote as related to media literacy:
"They accept little at face value, probably because there is a medium to challenge things.  Unlke the TV generation which had no viable means to interact with media content, the N-GEneration has the tools […]

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Here's a random thought about old media versus new media: the space issue.  I just filled two grocery bags with printed copies of three different journals to which I subscribe.  All of them are available in digital format online to subscribers as well as through the databases at William and Mary.  Besides browsing through them […]

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Greek Art: Laocoon and his sons
In his introduction to The Introduction to Visual Culture, Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses this statue as an example of a typical sublime work of art.  It immortalizes the story of the Trojan warrior and his children fighting with a serpent that will ultimately kill them.  Mirzoeff defines the sublime as "the […]

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Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy - New York Times
"I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was," recalled Ms. Walsh. "You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly."
And there, in a nutshell, is the […]

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Started reading An Introduction to Visual Culture and A Visual Culture Readers by Nicholas Mirzoeff.  I was reminded of both this morning when I read Mark Glaser's comments at MediaShift about "astroturf" blog commenters.  Unlike grassroots comments, astroturf comments are placed by those either encouraged or actually paid to post comments that support particular points […]

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From Growing Up Digital:
"Dr. Idit Harel…argues it is senseless to talk about being addicted to technology–you have to examine the function. 'Holding power is not because of the technology,' she says.  'It's because the media enables them to do things which they care about–which are attractive and enjoyable.  Kids with a Nintendo joy pad are […]

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Hobbs, R. (1998). The seven great debates in the media literacy movement. Journal of Communication, 48(1), 16-32.
Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you. New York: Riverhead Books. 
Definition:  Hobbs uses Aufderheide's 1993 definition of media literacy and then expands on it: "It is a term used by a growing number of scholars and educators […]

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