three recent media appearances:

January 16, 2009 The art of Obama, Dave McGinn

http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=1185377

Jan 13, 2009 INAUGURATION HYPE: Buying into Obama, Andrea Gordon

“It’s all part of an era of rampant consumption, viral online marketing, cheap mass marketing”

http://www.thestar.com/living/Shopping/article/569834

January 16, Global TV News Hour
The Presidential Inauguration

http://www.globaltv.com/globaltv/ontario/video/index.html

Just witness some of the major respected U.S. news outlets including the Chicago Tribune as part of the Tribune Company filing for bankruptcy, the San Jose Mercury News as part of MediaNews facing deep cuts, The Denver Post facing the axe, and eminent news feeds like Reuters forced to join with online upstart Politico Network while print, broadcast, and cable news shrink their news staff and news rooms, putting thousands of journalists out of work…

perhaps the fate of newspapers will be to do good not through informing citizens but warming them, as in this story of making coats for homeless people with shredded newspaper lining.
One Man’s Vision for Newspapers’ Future, as Insulation

Keep up to date on the latest through this useful index of NY Times news stories on the fate of news and technologies:
Times Topics: Newspapers

http://www.utoronto.ca/csus/speakers/index.html

This event is free & open to the public. TO REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT, PLEASE GO TO http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=6582

Thursday, October 16 | Doors: 7 PM | Program Begins: 7:30 PM
Chewing and Spitting Elections: Media and Elections Around the World
Featuring Todd Gitlin, Megan Boler, Ilan Danjoux, Greg Elmer and Gary Clement
MaRS Centre, Collaboration Room 3 (CR-3) | 101 College Street, Toronto, Ontario
$20 Suggested/PWYC (at the door)
The series launch of One World, Double Take delves into the timely topic of the multimedia explosion around elections. Marshall McLuhan’s words ring true today more than ever – the medium is the message. With expertise on the United States, Canada, and Israel, panelists will uncover how the campaigns, critics, special interest groups, and the public are shaping the dialogue around elections. It’s a new spin on “the spin” – looking beyond the mainstream media to viral videos, blogging, political cartoons, and the impact of user-generated content.

Featuring renowned media analyst and cultural commentator Todd Gitlin from Columbia University together with leading experts on media, politics, and social networking: Megan Boler (Associate Chair, Theory and Policy Studies, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, author of Digital Media & Democracy), Ilan Danjoux (Centre for International Politics at the University of Manchester, his current project uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to examine the insight political cartoons offer to the study of security), and Greg Elmer (Director of the Infoscape Research Lab, Ryerson University). Moderated by Gary Clement, the daily political cartoonist for the National Post.

A Video Contest to Illustrate Democracy

Frank Sinatra once asked the musical question: What is America to me?

On Monday, International Democracy Day, the State Department will announce that it will be asking the world to create three-minute videos that answer a broader question: “Democracy is …?” as part of a contest timed to mark the occasion.

The Democracy Video Challenge represents an unusual government-private sector educational research group partnership, with YouTube acting as the host of the submitted videos (youtube.com/democracychallenge) and NBC Universal, the Directors Guild of America and Motion Picture Association of America agreeing to screen the winning submissions and meet with the winners as they spend a week visiting New York, Washington and Hollywood. The winners will also meet with government officials and democracy-advocacy groups in the United States. The deadline for submissions is Jan. 31, 2009.

“We are creating opportunities for using emerging technology to engage in a discussion of democracy,” said Jonathan Margolis, deputy coordinator of the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs, who helped organize the contest. He added that he was excited that the contest would harness so-called Web 2.0 principles in the service of promoting democracy. “We are a convener for other people to speak. It is a networking approach. Answers can come from any kind of sources.”

Part of the network, however, connects private enterprise with the State Department, and media companies in particular tend to shy away from being directly involved in projects that receive support from government.

“We were told that there has got to be some incentive to enter this thing,” Mr. Margolis said. “The answer is we’ve got to come up with some prize that is really unique.” He added: “If the State Department did this on its own, we couldn’t put this prize package together. You would go to the State Department, go to Congress and then go to sleep.”

Representatives from the film schools at New York University and the University of Southern California and as well as organizations like the Center for International Private Enterprise, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, will be part of an outside jury to narrow down the submissions. The public will vote on the winners, the State Department said.

Asked what role the State Department would play in making the contest a success, Mr. Margolis said the department’s sponsorship “does add a sense of legitimacy and gravitas to what we are trying to do.”

And with more than 70 embassies around the world, he said, “we also bring a pretty healthy distribution network.” NOAM COHEN

“In an interview last week, hard right U.S. running mate Sarah Palin talked a lot about blinking.

“You can’t blink” and “we must not blink,” the Alaskan Republican told ABC News in response to questions about her readiness for office and the fight against terrorism.

Now a study in the journal Science says people with strong right-wing views blink much harder than liberals when confronted with threatening stimuli.

The University of Nebraska study suggests people who hold conservative views on such issues as foreign policy and gun control are more frightened than those with a more left-leaning bent.

“What we’re introducing to the field of political science is this notion that there is a physical basis to these beliefs,” says lead author Doug Oxley…..”

read more

Is ‘fake news’ informative? Study tests fun vs factsUpdated Sun. Sep. 14 2008 8:31 AM ET Andrea Janus, CTV.ca News

[i am posting the second half of story...for full version see link below]

In a study of about 85 people, Kim and Vishak found that fake news show viewers:

• Retain more information about a political candidate’s personal life and less about their positions on political issues.
• Retain less information about political issues and processes compared to viewers of network news.

Mock news shows may not be the best way to learn about political candidates and issues because viewers watch the programs to be entertained, Kim said. So they may not be paying attention to all of the details.

Are comedy viewers also news consumers?

Megan Boler, a professor of media studies and philosophy of education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto, disagrees and points to other studies.

A 2007 Pew Research Center study found that fans of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report rank high in surveys of public affairs knowledge, she said.

Viewers of the shows are already informed before they tune in, Boler said.

“The Daily Show is not watched to the exclusion of other sources,” Boler said in an interview with CTV.ca. “In order to appreciate satire you have to have background knowledge. You’re not going to have pleasure watching The Daily Show if you haven’t been talking to your friends about what’s going on, following other kinds of news sources.”

Boler argues that Kim’s study, which showed viewers 20-minute video segments from either NBC and CNN or The Daily Show about a Supreme Court nominee, fails to take into account how viewers gather news.

More people are getting their news from a variety of sources, including blogs and Internet media outlets, in an attempt to be more politically engaged, she said.

Therefore, reaction to a single news clip cannot accurately evaluate a subjects’ political knowledge because it does not reflect the fact that people rarely gain that knowledge from a single source.

And the study ignores the fact that many viewers watch the programs online, which has spurred a whole online, user-generated media industry.

“Through that online watching there’s a level of citizenship engagement where people can comment on it, they can link to it on their blogs, they can talk to their friends about it online, so there’s an intense kind of community building,” Boler said.

At the end of the day, the role of satirical news shows isn’t to be a single source of information for viewers.

“Most people are aware that part of the pleasure of watching the Daily Show or Colbert is that it’s making fun of news formats. It’s doing that both in content and form,” Boler said.

“It’s doing that by pretending to be news and it’s doing it by using clips from actual news and then making a joke about how straight news is doing its job. And it’s urging you to ask questions about the role of media in a democracy.”

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080912/news_feature_080912/20080914?hub=TopStories

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/09/08/chantelle-vs-mansbridge/

way to go chantelle…one of the only ones interviewed to address actual social practices of and myths about how users engage google!

Chantelle also works as a blogger for Walrus Magazine, her blog titled “Web 2.0 Museum”

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/category/web20/#blogs_top

We have now presented our research findings at national and international conferences and published our analyses in journals and books. Through close analysis of online productions, an online survey to 157 online author/producers, and interviews with 35 digital media artists/writers, our findings include that:

• increased online engagement requires that we redefine what counts as political citizenship
• online web-based practices do NOT take away from offline organizing or activism
• digital media does impact practices and industry of journalism
• people from all sides of the political spectrum are frustrated with media and politicians, and that this skepticism and lack of faith is a key factor in motivating online political expression
• satire and “fake news” has extreme appeal in an era characterized by crises of truth, evidenced by the flagrant lies and abuses of media by politicians which are now daily “evidenced” through digital media practices such as remix.

For more on Rethinking Media, Democracy, and Citizenship, see our conferences papers, publications, and findings under “Projects“.

“A quick PSA from my DC outpost inside Fortress North America:

Over the past months, many of you have asked me, “How can we watch the show you’re working on?” or “How can we get Al Jazeera English,” or “Prove that you actually do something, and you’re not just ignoring me.” I usually mumble something about charging a monthly subscription to RealPlayer to your credit card, or watching the lo res stream on the AJE website. But now there’s a good answer! You can download Livestation, and watch Inside USA and every other show and news bulletin on AJE — as well as France 24, Russia Today and a range of other international news channels — for free. And I’m told the quality is really great.

So if you’re interested or procrastinating, go here: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

Then click on the “Watch Now” button next to Livestation, and follow the instructions to download and install…

Hopefully Livestation will keep you all tuned into the only global news channel in the world that claims to be the voice of the voiceless, until we get every angle and every side of it some decent cable carriage in the US and Canada. (Residents of Canada, feel free to call the CRTC any time and make your thirst known…)

This message has been brought to you by andrea, with love and rage. Feel free to forward the tip…”

Since we began the Project examining digital dissent in 2005, much has changed in the online world of social web.  YouTube, for one, has spiraled into its massive orbit, while Facebook colonizes attentional economies across the web.

Our blog posts will amplify the research questions of our SSHRC project—but given the rapidly changing uses of the Social Web, some of what we will track will now includes not only “political” uses of the social web but the increasingly convergence of independent or alternative uses of these social media, with commercialized cooptation (ranging from corporations phishing Facebook, to Oprah running her own YouTube channel, etc.)

One frame for all the questions and posts is: how long will we see equal access to the net?  Given the increasing urgency for advertisers to profit from online media, struggles over equal access to the net (so-called Net Neutrality) will be reflected in the new blurring of corporate and participatory user-generated cultures.