"What if America wasn't America?" That was the question posed by a series of ads broadcast in the wake of the September 11th attacks, ads which depicted a dystopian America bereft of liberty: Library - Diner - Church. Together with more positive ads like Remember Freedom and I Am an American, they encouraged frightened viewers to cherish their freedoms and defend against division and prejudice in the face of terrorism (seven years previously). The campaign was the work of the Ad Council, a non-profit agency that employs the creative muscle of volunteer advertisers to raise awareness for social issues of national importance. Founded during WWII as the War Advertising Council, the organization has been behind some of the most memorable public service campaigns in American history, including Rosie the Riveter, Smokey the Bear, McGruff the Crime Dog, and the Crash Test Dummies. And the Council is still at it today, producing striking, funny, and above all effective PSAs on everything from student invention to global warming to arts education to community service.

Additional resources: A-to-Z index of Ad Council campaigns - Campaigns organized by category - Award-winning campaigns - PSA Central: A free download directory of TV, radio, and print PSAs (registration req'd) - An exhaustive history of the Ad Council [46-page PDF] - YouTube channel - Vimeo channel - Twitter feed
posted by Rhaomi on Sep 11, 2009 - 69 comments

"What you're looking for as a retoucher is a broom, something that covers your tracks, some way of obscuring where you've been. The first thing [most] people take out is bloodshot eyes. That's the last thing I take out—the last thing I'd, like, just wipe, because that just makes it look retouched." -- from Jesse Epstein's video op-ed for the NY Times, based on her film Wet Dreams and False Images ("I know that's not airbrushed. I could put a million dollars that's not airbrushed."), one of three related short documentaries on physical perfection. "Each head has to be identical to the other head, so we don't want anybody putting sandpaper to the head." -- from 34 x 25 x 36. Via the latest installment of Shakesville's Impossibly Beautiful series. (Previous posts on retouching.)
posted by maudlin on Apr 3, 2009 - 51 comments

Vague Terrain is a web based digital arts publication that showcases the creative practice of a variety of artists, musicians and scholars. Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE is their freshly launched project on urban representation that catalogs how cartography, infrastructure and locative media shape perception in the contemporary city. An example is Joyce Walks, a Google maps mashup which remaps routes from James Joyce's Ulysses to any city in the world, generating walking maps. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by netbros on Mar 17, 2009 - 2 comments

Circuits are flipping on in the nation's attic. A couple of weeks ago, 31 "digerati" -- like Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, and George Oates -- dropped in to the Smithsonian Institution for the invitation-only conference "Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age". Dan Cohen of the Center for History and New Media provides a great summary (and continues to pose provocative questions) on his own blog. Those whose invitations were somehow lost in the mail can play fly-on-the-wall by watching the keynotes, paging through the Flickr pool of envymaking glimpses of their behind-the-scenes lab and collections tours, reading the blog (where Bruce Wyman of the Denver Art Museum lays out a succinct road map for museums using social media), and poking around in the SI's website gallery. Want to cheer on the USA's favorite 163-year-old "Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge" without taking the trip to DC? Thanks to their recent efforts, you can now follow the SI on Twitter, listen to its podcasts, watch its YouTube channel, visit the Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life, or use the FaceBook gifts page to send your best friends their very own pair of Dorothy's ruby slippers, Hope diamond, Negro Leagues baseball, or coelocanth.
posted by Miko on Feb 27, 2009 - 13 comments

In defense of suburbs: "Revolutionary Road," based on Richard Yates's 1961 novel of the same name, is the latest entry in a long stream of art that portrays the American suburbs as the physical correlative to spiritual and mental death.
posted by kliuless on Dec 29, 2008 - 172 comments

Generation WE: How Millennial Youth Are Taking Over America And Changing Our World Forever (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Oct 28, 2008 - 111 comments

Saddam's Confessions - Given Saddam Hussein's central place in the American Consciousness over the last couple decades and particularly in recent years, I found 60 minutes' interview with FBI interrogator George Piro pretty fascinating.
posted by kliuless on Jan 27, 2008 - 24 comments

Old Magazine Articles Neat little database of .pdf copies of vintage magazine articles like Gilbert Seldes' 1922 review of Krazy Kat in Vanity Fair, a 1910 look at "Horse Versus Automobile," early nose jobs, an interview with James Joyce and more. [via ResearchBuzz]
posted by mediareport on Sep 13, 2007 - 14 comments

The Shame Game. Perverted Justice (prev.) and Dateline NBC's series of To Catch A Predator specials are of questionable-at-best morality and have received much flak, particularly on the part of the former party. At the Columbia Journalism review, Douglas McCollum shares the case of Louis Conradt Jr., who killed himself upon being pounced upon by police and Dateline's cameras. McCollum also takes issue with NBC's paying of Perverted Justice for their services. And, for the other side, PJ's rebuttal.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me on Feb 10, 2007 - 163 comments

The history of emotions has yielded substantial studies on love, anger, fear, grief, jealousy, and many other discrete emotions. However, there is no particular study of cheerfulness, a rather moderate emotion, which, for reasons that I will discuss further, has remained unnoticeable to the scholarly eye. Based on much of the historical literature on emotions, some primary sources and some other areas of cultural history, I outline here the social use and conceptualization of cheerfulness over the last three centuries. I argue that, in the modern age, cheerfulness rose in value and became the most favored emotion for experience and display; as such, it was individually sought and socially encouraged until it became the main emotional norm of twentieth-century America.

From Good Cheer to "Drive-By Smiling": A Social History of Cheerfulness
And the Taxonomy of Emotion Terms there is of interest on its own.
posted by y2karl on Mar 13, 2006 - 10 comments

NOISE is a global youth arts initiative (under 25s) that develops and profiles artists and their work across television, radio, in print and online. Requires Flash. [MI]
posted by sjvilla79 on Nov 15, 2005 - 3 comments

Foreign Exchange TV with Fareed Zakaria - I'd heard about it, but thought it was only showing on OPB; checked again and lo and behold all the episodes are online! Watched a couple episodes so far; they're pretty good, esp if you're into foreign policy and stuff :D
posted by kliuless on May 26, 2005 - 4 comments

Steven Levy and Mark Pesce on the future of television. Oh and Conan O'brien! :D [via]
posted by kliuless on May 23, 2005 - 6 comments

Culture by the people, for the people. We all know that there are a gazillion blogs out there, with people talking about anything and everything, frequently to an audience of one. Those same text based blogs are incorporating video as well. People are beginning to organize their internet not through search engine algorithims, but by their own tags. There's also a dedicated cadrey of partisan and non-partisan "amateur journalism" sites. Then you have full fledged communities focused to specific subjects, holding an unbelievable depth of knowledge and opinions. With entire encyclopedias available online, and with smaller topic-centric wiki's available, can the creation and dissemination of audience authored content be far behind? Witness the growth of Flickr, the probable success of Vimeo, people programming their own radio stations and/or shows, the increasing awareness and use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by plain ol' citizens, the courting of TiVo by Google and Yahoo (to share homemovies and pictures, perhaps?), open source news sites like Take Bake the News, NowPublic (for royalty free images to accompany content), Downhill Battle, Our Media ( a place to store your content), and open-source sounds and sights. Could there eventually be enough worthwhile content to break us free of a corporate-delivered culture?
posted by rzklkng on Apr 25, 2005 - 35 comments

Studs Terkel: Conversations with America (in Real audio).
posted by nthdegx on May 9, 2004 - 1 comment

The Digital Journalist: Features. The Digital Journalist: Features. Photojournalism features on a spread of human life, from Afghan child labour, the Dalai Lama and the Soviet Union to Marilyn Monroe, jazz and Smalltown USA. (Warning - adverts).
posted by plep on Jun 1, 2003 - 3 comments

French culture in crisis ? After the Vivendi Universal french CEO Jean-Marie Messier fired Canal+ chairman Pierre Lescure yesterday, many questions arise in France. Will Vivendi, through Canal+, continue to help French cinema the way Canal+ did in the past ? Is this the last straw in a long series of acts and declarations from Vivendi's CEO against "Franco-French cultural exception" ? Has The Man finally won in France ? What's to happen in all the other countries were Vivendi (or any of the BigCo) basically owns the culture through local companies ?
posted by XiBe on Apr 17, 2002 - 10 comments

Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures is one of the best readings on the interactions between artists, technology, and culture I've found so far. I found a quote here by Sir Isaiah Berlin which is very appropriate to my experience and perhaps those who search for sites like Metafilter:

Loneliness is not just the absence of others but far more living among people who do not understand what you are saying.

posted by Taken Outtacontext on Jul 3, 2000 - 1 comment