We had a house full of children overnight on Saturday, so we really put earth hour to the test. With nine children ages 7-11, we turned off everything, then lit candles placed on high shelves on the first floor.

The kids had a ball playing a board game for half the time, then got restless and played hide and seek for the other half. They loved it, and didn’t want the lights to turn back on at 9:30.

The biggest kick for them? The melted wax from the candles. Go figure.

We grown-ups had fun just watching them from the couch. There was a lot of laughing, a log of negotiating, and some bad feelings.  Well, all that might have happened with the lights on, too.  They’re kids.

I think we should do this at least once a month.

What did YOU do?

The LAMP will be switched completely off during earth hour this coming Saturday evening, March 28^th, from 8:30-9:30 pm.  You’ve probably already heard about this event.  It’s a global initiative of the World Wildlife Fund, a leader in worldwide conservation.  There’s a whole website devoted to earth hour:  www.EarthHourUS.org.  Check it out.                          

We’re participating in this important global event in our own way, by encouraging people to turn off all their lights AND their electronic communication devices for one hour.   We’re all about media and media literacy, and we don’t think people stop and consider often enough how much their lives revolve around the use of the cell phones and computers.  A little electronic media deprivation is a good time to contemplate your participation in the world of electronic communications.

Some organizations are encouraging people to participate in earth hour by turning off their lights for an hour, and suggesting that during that same hour people use digital communication devices to talk about earth hour with others.  

Huh?  What about the carbon emissions from that use of electricity?   I think we need to be really serious  about earth hour.  

We’re going all the way.  We’re encouraging everyone to go without electronic lights and communicate without their electronic devices for one hour.  We believe this will raise our collective awareness not only about how much we all participate in carbon emissions production with our use of electricity, but also about how much we rely on electronic communication media, like cell phones, the Internet, and PDAs, to connect with others.  We want people to turn it all off and communicate for awhile in other ways:  discussions, storytelling, reading aloud by candlelight…

Then, when it’s all over, by all means, come back here to our blog and add a comment about how you spent earth hour.  Or send us a tweet, or visit us on Facebook. We’d love to hear how you and/or your family participated, your thoughts about the earth, electronic communication, and anything else related to earth hour.

I, personally, will be hosting a 5th grade birthday sleep-over with 9 children total on Saturday evening.  How will we do it without electronics for an hour?  There will be food and candles and probably lots of silliness.  And I’ll post here how it all went.

We are delighted to be a part of this event, and hope you will be, too.

Don’t forget to turn it all off for a little while.

 –Katherine

Facebook’s done it again.

In the five years since its inception, Facebook has undergone many different transformations. It opened up from a Harvard-only service to colleges and universities all around the country. Then when it added high schoolers, people got angry. When it opened to the general population, people got angrier. It started the news-feed, an aggregation of our Friends’ various activities–if they RSVPed to an event, joined a group, or, the most scandalous, started or ended a relationship. People got angry then, too. At the end of last summer, when Facebook debuted their most drastic layout changes to date, people rejected Facebook’s claims that the site was now more streamlined and neater, instead insisting that the new site was complicated and hard to navigate.

Every time Facebook changes, there’s an outcry. Groups are formed–like Petition Against the New Facebook and The New Facebook Layout Sucks!–and people whine and moan endlessly until about a month passes, and we all adjust. While there is no real way to tell, I’ve always suspected that Facebook knew what it was doing when it made these changes, that they actually served some sort of greater purpose that ultimately made the website better. 

But when I logged into my Facebook and saw these most recent changes, I was a little peeved. Not to beat a dead horse, but the new layout sucks.

I won’t go through every minute change that’s been made (like the fact that Facebook now automatically assumes that I want to comment on every single thing any friend of mine has ever done or the increase in font size, which just makes everything look sloppy to me), but the biggest change is that the newsfeed is now called a stream. And it’s live. So as your friends change their statuses, add photos, RSVP to events, your stream is updated; you can see these changes in real-time. 

If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because it is. Facebook’s new layout is a pretty obvious rip-off of Twitter. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Twitter is a great site. But Facebook just can’t work in the same way. Twitter is about a constant flow of information, but the information is capped at 140 characters. Facebook has so much more going on. Trying to create a constant flow of information that includes events, photos, notes, wall posts, status updates, application additions, and more–it’s just too much.

I’m all for growth and development, and I realize staying fresh is of the utmost importance in such a fickle and fast-moving industry, but old adages ring true for a reason, and in this case, I can’t think of anything more appropriate to say than, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”

The “fake” news man is anything but fake.  The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is, in fact, one of the most media literate programs on television.  On a number of levels.  This past Thursday night Stewart proved, once again, his journalistic chops by chopping off another journalist at the knees.  By now many people have seen or at least heard about Stewart’s recent verbal whipping of CNBC’s so-called finance guru Jim Cramer in a long interview on Stewart’s late night program.  With his usual deft logic, verbal acuity,  solid grasp of the big picture and the details–not to mention charm-coated persistence–Jon Stewart relentlessly plugged Cramer with accusatory ammunition.  

Cramer, exposed as a liar at best, and big finance fraud whore at worst, squirmed a little bit as he was forced to watch clips of himself  admitting on camera–though not on his program–to understanding various back-room financial shenanigans, and to misleading audience by leaving out crucial pieces of information.  Those clips and his actual on-air admissions to Stewart laid bare what the agenda of “Mad Money” has been all about.  Under the guise of financial journalism, Cramer’s been shilling for finance biggies like Bear Stearn’s and their ilk while pretending, on CNBC, to be looking out for the best financial interests of us little guys who rely on information from financial “journalists” to give us the information we need to not only understand the financial markets and economy at large, but also to make good decisions about our personal finances.  But no one’s blamed guys like Cramer for contributing to the financial dump we’re in except Stewart.

Who else but Stewart goes after this kind of stuff in journalistic interviews?  The Daily Show is media literate in one sense because Jon Stewart understands how to use the format of news programming, the conventions of journalism, and the attitude of journalists themselves to uncover and critique the same.  But he does it in such a way that it’s both funny and brilliant.  And, on top of that, he interviews better and bolder than almost all other journalists on television. He understands the form, shows us the form, and improves on the form.  He’s making us more savvy news watchers.  This is a valuable form of media literacy.

So why did Cramer agree to go head to head with Stewart on The Daily show in the first place?  My guess is that his ego couldn’t take the beating Stewart had been giving him for several nights before he went on.  He was smart enough to understand that an invitation from Stewart, who’s cultural cache is as solid as his following, was to be jumped at.  But he wasn’t smart enough to get that Stewart is smarter than he is, and he doesn’t get the purpose of the program, which goes way beyond news parody.  Watching Cramer perform on the Daily Show, you’re convinced that the guy is used to having to dance around a bit, lie at the drop of a hat, and keep acting as if he’s without responsibility, even seconds after he’s admitted fault.  A guy like that isn’t going to understand the world empathically, the way Stewart does.  He just may not understand what happened to him on the program the other night.  He’s just not smart enough.  

But Stewart is smart enough, and clearly concerned enough about how the rest of us get and use information about finances and markets.   We can’t get down to Wall Street everyday, and the vast majority of us don’t have insider information on trading.  By exposing this face of the financial mess, Jon Stewart is giving us another dose of media literacy–on the finance front.  He’s not afraid to show us that CNBC isn’t doing it’s job, that they’ve not been reporting the whole thing, that lots of news organizations are guilty of the same thing.  It’s not just bad mortgages that have created this financial mess.  It’s bigger than that, deeper than that.  In the end it reaches back to the quality and the format of information we get. 

Our only safeguard is understanding how the media operate.  And that includes why, when, and for whom.  That’s a big chunk of media literacy.  Thank goodness someone in media gets that.

–Katherine G. Fry

Our friends over at Grassroots.org invited us to write an entry for their blog on one of our favorite things they’ve given us…the WorldLingo Translation tool at the bottom of our website. Click here for the post!