Closing the Digital Divide
With new media come new challenges. In just under two decades, the media landscape has expanded from a world with no Internet and limited media choices, to a world in which the Internet has come to dominate our time with media. The Internet has revolutionized how we search for information, learn about world events, entertain ourselves, and connect with others. Clearly, the Internet has delivered on the promise of bringing the world into our homes.
However, the world that most of us enjoy – a world in which information of all kinds is available at our fingertips – is not the world we all live in. In the United States alone, 21% of the population lacks regular Internet access at home or work. And of those who do have regular access, most do not full understand the messages being delivered. Therefore, people without regular Internet access have a different, perhaps more limited and distorted view of the world.
This concept is known as the digital divide – the inequality that occurs between those who have access to the Internet and who can think critically about its messages, and those who cannot. This disparity has an effect on every aspect of people’s lives – income level, upward mobility, job prospects, relationships, political power, race relations and equality, lifespan, and status in society, just to name a few.
Below are some resources for those researching the digital divide and its effects.
http://www.slideshare.net/newdigitaldivide/the-new-digital-divide-2707247
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/1017/1/MEDIALITERACY.pdf
http://www.understandmedia.com/journals-a-publications/44-scholarly-articles/141-the-ubiquity-myth
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/2768/1/Gradations_in_digital_inclusion_(LSERO).pdf
Dropbox – My favorite new app
I work on the road a lot, and I’m constantly creating and editing all types of files. But between creating files on the desktop, the laptop, the iPad, and my Android phone, things were getting messy.
Enter Dropbox. You sign up for service (you can get a free 2gb account), then download the Dropbox software on all of your devices. You instantly get a shared folder that you can store any file in. I often write TO DO lists on my Macbook, then access the list on my phone through the Dropbox app. I can also access my files on any computer by going to their website and logging in. If my laptop ever dies on me, I buy a new one, install Dropbox, and all of my files are there… I’d be up and running in 5 minutes.
Dropbox has helped make my mobile lifestyle a lot easier, and I highly recommend it.
Link to Dropbox using the links in this post and get an extra 250mb of storage for free.
Student Journal for Media Literacy Education
During the spring 2010 semester, the students in Santa Monica College’s Communications 2 (media literacy) course published the first issue of the Student Journal for Media Literacy Education. Under the supervision of Professor Nick Pernisco, the students wrote articles on the agreed upon theme of Media Literacy in Social Media. The students worked mostly in pairs on a selected topic within the theme, and they conducted their own research and analysis to produce their work. Although Professor Pernisco provided guidance, the students had the final say on the articles, the publication’s layout and logo, and even on the press release for the Journal.
The Spring 2010 issue of the Student Journal for Media Literacy Education is available below for download.
Comm 10 Student Blogs – Spring 2010
Each semester, my Comm 10 students are required to have diversity media blogs. This assignment requires students to make a blog entry each week about their media consumption. The are supposed to analyze media that they encounter, especially media related to race or gender stereotypes and biases. … Continue Reading
Comm 2 Student Blogs – Spring 2010
Each semester, my Comm 10 students are required to have diversity media blogs. This assignment requires students to make a blog entry each week about their media consumption. The are supposed to analyze media that they encounter, especially media related to race or gender stereotypes and biases. … Continue Reading
Failure: The New Success
I’m a big believer that in order to succeed, we must first fail. Sometimes, the more miserably we fail, the greater our success will be. This is why I was especially impacted by this video. It illustrates why we need to fail before we can succeed. The stories are riveting, the visuals are compelling, and the moral of the story comes through clearly. … Continue Reading
Welcome to January
Advertisers know what you’ve been up to over the holidays – gaining weight! They also know that you’ve been making new years resolutions aimed at taking off the weight you’ve recently (or maybe not so recently) put on. So, invariably, after the holiday music and endless marathons of A Christmas Story cease until next December, we begin seeing ads aimed to help us lose weight. … Continue Reading
Kanye West – Idiot, Meanie, or Genius
A debate has begun swirling around the water cooler about Kanye West’s behavior at the MTV Video Music Awards. It’s not about whether he should apologize to Taylor Swift for his actions, or even whether radio stations should ban his music. This debate involves the notion that Kanye’s actions were nothing more than a publicity stunt, perpetrated by Kanye himself, or if he had help from the show’s producers and maybe even Taylor Swift herself. … Continue Reading
Michael Jackson Dies – Why Should We Care?
According to a variety of news reports, Michael Jackson has died. After being found passed out at his Bel Air home, he was rushed to a hospital in Los Angeles, where he was pronounced dead.
But this post is not about the death of Michael Jackson. It’s not even about the life of Michael Jackson. You can read a ton of articles on that, if that’s what you want. This is about the celebrity of Michael Jackson, or more like the celebrity of the death of Michael Jackson.
The news broke at around 2:00pm today. TMZ was the first to report, the LA Times followed suit, and that was enough for every news outlet on the face of the earth to pronounce Michael Jackson dead. Of course, there will be conspiracy theorists who will say he’s not dead, he faked his death, or that he’s been dead for a while not. But that’s not what this blog post is about either.
The real purpose of this blog post? Just look at the title and you’ll know it: Michael Jackson dies – why should we care?
Why do we focus so much on celebrity deaths? When a celebrity dies suddenly, it’s shocking. Take for example, the death of actress Miranda Richardson. She died after a skiing accident. We mourned her loss for a couple of weeks, and then moved on. While we mourned her death, another 2 people died (on average) on slopes in the United States, but we didn’t focus on their deaths. Why focus on this person?
Farrah Fawcett died today as well. She had cancer, and we’ve actually been talking about her impending death for two months now. But 562,340 people in the United States will die of cancer this year. Why doesn’t the news focus on them at all?
The big question is, why should we care? People are born, and people die. Why is it news? Maybe because these people are celebrities. The news organizations will say “people want to know about their beloved celebrities.” Maybe we care because so much attention is paid to them – they’re so in our faces – that we are forced to care. But that’s not the real answer either.
The real answer is that we care because the media has made us care. They put it on TV and online and tell us, “this is what you should pay attention to.” And why do news outlets make things important when they may otherwise be ordinary occurences? Because these stories draw in an audience. When news outlets have an audience, they make money – the bigger the audience, the more money they make. The more sensational the story, the bigger the audience, the bigger the payoff.
So does the news media care because we care, or vice versa? A little bit of both. Afterall, I wrote this blog post because I knew you’d care to read it, and you read it because you care to know more about this story.