In
Publishing: The Revolutionary Future, Jason Epstein posits "The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future does not arise from fear of disruptive literacy, but from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them... The unprecedented ability of this technology to offer a vast new multilingual marketplace a practically limitless choice of titles will displace the Gutenberg system with or without the cooperation of its current executives."
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Mar 3, 2010 -
19 comments
Vogue Italia relaunched their website last week
(in Italian and English / pictures on the site may be NSFW,) with three new subsites catering to specific fashion industry demographics: Vogue
Curvy (focusing on plus-sized models, actresses and celebrities,) Vogue
Black (men and women of color,) and Vogue
Talents (veteran and up-and-coming designers. "Talents" also encourages hopeful designers to submit their work for review.) "Curvy" and "Black" in particular have received some
positive and
negative attention and some
wonder whether
separating those two fashion categories
is truly inclusive. Vogue
responds.
posted by zarq
on Mar 1, 2010 -
31 comments
"..when a victorious chief minister openly
admits that he himself approached the leading newspaper of his state with money for “positive stories” after learning that the newspaper had signed a “package deal” with his rivals to print
negative stories, you had better sit up and take
urgent notice"
posted by Gyan
on Feb 12, 2010 -
4 comments
"The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility."
"The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News" by Chris Hedges.
posted by AugieAugustus
on Feb 2, 2010 -
51 comments
Ever made fun of a commercial, a TV show, or a romantic comedy? Of course you have. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. But even shooting fish in a barrel can be done with style. Check out Info Mania’s Sarah Haskins’ Target Women spots in which Haskins dissects how the media types depicts we women types, especially when it comes to those matters so dear to the lady brain, like
Botox,
birth control,
chick flicks,
female political candidates,
number two,
cleaning,
jewelry,
diets,
aging,
skin care,
the Oscars,
Disney Princesses,
vampires,
The View,
Michelle Obama’s arms,
Lifetime programming,
chocolate,
lady parts,
laundry,
security,
weddings, and of course that official food of women,
yogurt. You can find a complete listing of Target Women spots
here.
posted by orange swan
on Jan 20, 2010 -
72 comments
An Omnivorous Google Is Coming. "Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world’s websites," she says. "And then invoked the translation software a second and third time – to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translated those sites in full when you clicked through.”
Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for search products and user experience, shares her unparalleled insights into the future of internet search engines.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Dec 14, 2009 -
65 comments
Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper. "Newspapers have become deadweight commodities linked to other media commodities in chains that are coupled or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and executive vice presidents and boards of directors in offices thousands of miles from where the man bit the dog and drew ink."
posted by chunking express
on Dec 10, 2009 -
91 comments
Corey Arcangel is perhaps the internet's most
infamous hack,
masher-upper,
digi/net artist.
His work stands for a
growing culture of artists who
run wildly through
animated GIF landscapes populated with corrupted
data-compressed bunny rabbits and tinny, MIDI
renditions of Savage Garden ballads. As the
Lisson Gallery, London, opens its archives to Arcangel's curatorial eye, could digi/net
art be set to
infect the real,
fleshy world, like a rampant
Conficker Worm? Has
YouTube become the truest reflection of our
anthropological selves? Are we destined to roam the int3erw£bs like the
mythic beasts of yore, hoping,
in time, that
digi art can free us from the confines of this fleshy void?
[...
previously]
posted by 0bvious
on Dec 8, 2009 -
20 comments
TV and Parables of Our Times: Speaking of Faith ( a weekly radio program about "religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas") looks at how tv deals with issues in contemporary life. A link to the main episode (MP3) is on the page along with various support media.
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Nov 18, 2009 -
6 comments
Interesting article at Slate,
In Defense of Jaywalking, where the author describes how the media and others often slant coverage of pedestrian vs auto accidents--examples include
San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe , and
New York Post columns.
Police, who are typically car-bound, are often
biased in favor of other drivers.
Not unexpectedly the Federal Highway Administration has
curious language regarding walkers--"Still, almost no one can avoid occasional pedestrian status". Even the term
jaywalking is commonly
misused.
Solutions? More money towards safer walking (including a reversal of
funding policies that favor cars), better places to walk, pedestrian-friendly engineering, lower urban speed limits, harsher penalties for drivers that violate pedestrian's rights, and critical reading of the often
selective and sensationalized media coverage of traffic crashes.
posted by aerotive
on Nov 10, 2009 -
100 comments
Michael Surtees latest photo experiment is called #walkingtoworktoday. The rules are simple and open to anyone—while walking to work take a photo. From there the photo needs to be pushed to Twitter via Flickr while containing the hashtag #walkingtoworktoday somewhere in the tile. But there wasn’t one dedicated space outside of Flickr to see the photos, and even then it was only seeing it through one medium—you didn’t get to see the tweets. So that’s why he decided there needed to be a site. Surtees created
#walkingtoworktoday using Daylife tools that contained Flickr and Twitter moduals. The main modual streams photos from Flickr while the right rail shows the tweets. It’s an interesting redundancy that works.
posted by netbros
on Nov 4, 2009 -
35 comments
"I leave with a heavy heart as part of the changes that have, in my humble opinion, destroyed the station that I helped to set up 29 years ago."
Radio Fail documents (mostly UK) radio bloopers and cock-ups.
posted by hnnrs
on Oct 21, 2009 -
11 comments
... one wonders why [Goldman Sachs] and [JP Morgan] were so eager to provide "rescue" financings to virtually the entire distressed media space: both companies knew too well that sooner or later they would end up with full equity control over essentially the most coveted industry: thousands of TV stations, radio channels, newspaper and magazines.
(via) (previously)
posted by Joe Beese
on Sep 23, 2009 -
16 comments
"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
A new documentary by a Swedish-based Italian filmmaker examines how media mogul turned two-time president Silvio Berlusconi's 30-year grip on Italian television has shaped the country, its politics, its culture and society. Erik Gandini's
Videocracy, which screens at the Venice Film Festival, starts 30 years ago, when Berlusconi introduced a quiz show whose female contestants stripped for the camera, and charts 30 years of showgirls, celebrities, reality TV shows and Berlusconi's rise to political power, and interviews characters of the system, including a talentless but fame-hungry TV contestant, a fascist-sympathising media fixer, and a paparazzo/extortionist turned celebrity. More details
here and (with a trailer)
here.
[more inside]
posted by acb
on Sep 5, 2009 -
14 comments
" There were lots of small children in the audience. I thought about asking one little girl if she had voted for the paddle, the rod or the cattle prod." In 1995, a company called
Interfilm revolutionized the movie industry.
Oh, no, wait, it didn't. Audiences at Mr. Payback, "the first interactive movie," pressed buttons on a joystick attached to their seat to vote on the actions of the characters on-screen -- for instance, what kind of physical abuse a captured thug should undergo. Despite the pedigree of director Bob Gale (writer/producer of
Back to the Future) and co-star Christopher Lloyd,
critics were not impressed. The company folded a week after releasing its third interfilm, "I'm Your Man," scored by Joe Jackson, which did, a few years Interfilm was the brainchild of "conceptualist" and guy-with-gigantic-glasses Bob Bejan (
Dateline NBC interview), who now works at a
next-generation, data-driven marketing agency that delivers strategic, multi-channeled communication solutions designed to cultivate and sustain relationships between brands and their audiences. Watch:
Clips from "Mr. Payback."
The making of "I'm Your Man." (warning: A. Whitney Brown.) Read: the New York Times
on the 1998 DVD release of "I'm Your Man." Booklet copy from the "I'm Your Man" DVD.
posted by escabeche
on Aug 31, 2009 -
43 comments
Healthcare reform has agitated right-wing extremists and moneyed interests in the United States for some time — during the presidencies of
FDR and Truman as well as Clinton and Obama, most recently — but where do the objections originate from, and particularly those which are known to be based on complete untruths? Some of these lies start with or are repeated by
well-known right-wing media personalities, but there are other people who get the ball rolling, who are perhaps less well-known.
Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey originated one of the current myths more commonly known as
"death panels", but despite her attempts to market herself as a folksy voice fighting for the well-being of senior citizens, she has been an effective advocate for the interests of private health insurance companies since the early 1990s.
[more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 22, 2009 -
167 comments
Personas is a part of the MIT
Metropath(ologies) exhibit that scours the web for information and attempts to characterize a person based on an entered first and last name, showing visualizations of the process as it chugs along.
[more inside]
posted by juv3nal
on Aug 20, 2009 -
55 comments
It was the media party of the decade. It was planned by the
king of parties, Robert Isabell, who died last month. Although thrown to celebrate the birth of Talk Magazine, little did the attendees know, that this was the night print media began
to die.
“I was aware it was a historic night,” Ms. Brown said. “We were on a boat and I was with Natasha Richardson. We were talking and laughing, looking at the lights of the twin towers. And then a big wave came over the side of the boat and soaked us both. Now Natasha is gone, the towers are gone. It’s very, very sad, but I am very excited by this new world we are heading into.”
posted by Xurando
on Aug 3, 2009 -
22 comments
Caijing (财经) is an independent, Beijing-based magazine devoted to reporting on business in China. The publication's title means "Finance and Economics."
[more inside]
posted by KokuRyu
on Jul 26, 2009 -
6 comments
Wow, what a great discovery I made tonight! You may have heard of "Oblique Strategies" (
previously mentioned on MeFi). Subtitled "over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas," it is a deck of cards first created in 1975 by
Brian Eno and
Peter Schmidt to help jump start creative thinking by having the users draw, read and react to a card bearing an abstruse aphorism. There are by now plenty of online versions (easily googled!) as well as an
iPhone app. (More info available at the
Oblique Strategies fan page!) I just discovered today, however, that "Oblique Strategies" was not the first in its genre, but rather was following in the very footsteps of Marshall McLuhan!
[more inside]
posted by Misciel
on Jul 19, 2009 -
16 comments
