A recent article on YPulse covers the rising industry of Tween salons, specifically one suburban salon called Sweet & Sassy Salon and Spa, where girls are encouraged to be “Diva for A Day.” A quick search on Google and you’ll find similar tween salons and spas that offer any spa service you could possibly imagine. These businesses are capitalizing on a manufactured girlhood that centers on beauty (this one even relies on gossip rhetoric). The YPulse article claims (bizarrely), when you’re a tween, “as Britney put it, you’re not a girl, not yet a woman.” I disagree on so many levels, and not only because Britney was twenty years old when she came out with that song.

When I first read the article, and after discussing it with LAMPpost editor Emily Long, we talked about how problematic it is to encourage girls to emulate the “diva” mentality. “Having fun with the way you look and expressing yourself doesn’t need to mean you’re a diva, or pretending to be a diva or celebrity, and adheres to this message that caring about fashion/beauty equals vanity, snobbery and brattiness as opposed to things like creativity and identity,” points out editor Emily Long, “This salon is clearly funneled toward one very narrow brand of beauty.” In fact most of the tween spas and salons I found were pretty unadulterated about this diva shtick. Yet many of them offered services for children younger than tweens.

Sadly, these salons think they’re providing a positive service. The narrow brand of beauty they’re selling is misinterpreted as empowerment while they claim they’re providing spaces for bonding between girls and their mothers. Yet girls need empowerment and female relationships that run much deeper than the vanity of red carpet fashion show and pop karaoke that comes with the Sweet & Sassy salon packages. These salons are selling the same poisoned Kool-Aid as the problematic beauty industry while masking it with a facade of pink and glittery girl-power. In the end, all they learn is that looking good matters more than anything else.

This photo of Sweet and Sassy Salon is courtesy of TripAdvisor

Through the rhetoric of tweenhood, the beauty industry is reaching girls at alarmingly young ages. With it comes the struggle to figure out how to manage expectations of beauty that encourage these children to act much older than they are. The video (top) for Sweet & Sassy salon eerily reminds me of TLC’s infamous show Toddlers and Tiaras, with young girls prancing down the red carpet and nervously eyeing the camera taping their fashion show. This practice of self-display feels contrived for most adults so it’s especially bizarre when 7-year-olds are doing it. Peggy Orenstein  discusses the princessification and girlie-girl culture of these salons in her book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter. In her first chapter  she explains, “In one study of eighth-grade girls, for instance, self-objectification — judging your body by how you think it looks to others — accounted for half the differential in girls’ reports of depression and more than two-thirds of the variance in their self-esteem. Another linked the focus on appearance among girls that age to heightened shame and anxiety about their bodies. Even brief exposure to the typical, idealized images of women that we all see every day has been shown to lower girls’ opinion of themselves, both physically and academically.” This is not surprising, yet places like Sweet & Sassy create entire business images that–to their credit, probably unknowingly–profit off of these depressing realities.

When I see places like tween salons that conflate the diva mentality of fashion with self-empowered creativity I get really frustrated. It’s difficult enough for girls to negotiate issues of beauty without an entire industry driving it. Don’t get me wrong, I think self-expression and dress-up play is really important. If kids (read: all genders) enjoy colorful nail polish or dress-up, they should have the space to explore these things. But this sort of play doesn’t come without implications. Parents must help their children to contextualize it through the scope of self-empowerment instead of through this snobby, celebri-fied diva mentality. While the issue isn’t exactly new, it appears to be growing ever more dire.

–Emily Breitkopf

Emily is a contributing writer for The LAMPpost. You can find more of her writing on her blog, “Kids and Gender.”

Marketing beer in Russia has been a special challenge since at least 2004, when the Russian Parliament banned beer ads on television between the hours of 7am and 10pm. The use of people and animals in ads is also prohibited, as well as sending the message that beer will somehow improve your health, intelligence or social life. Sound confusing and vague to you? I thought so as well, especially since a search on YouTube for Russian beer commercials turns up plenty of examples using people and implications that beer = some kind of happiness (like the examples above). But starting in July of 2012, television ads for beer will be banned altogether in Russia. So I guess that clears the whole thing up, or at least makes it a moot point.

Citing an epidemic of alcoholism in the country, President Medvedev signed the bill into law as part of his effort to cut the amount of alcohol consumed yearly per person (18 liters) by over 50% as of the year 2020. If you’re like me, you read this and think, “If you want to address alcoholism in Russian, why go after beer? Don’t they all drink vodka?” Not so. As a product, beer has been classified as a “foodstuff,” meaning it can be sold and consumed in much the same way as we Americans enjoy our soda—openly, frequently, in public, and available to buy or sell at any store or kiosk. This is one factor making Russia one of the world’s top beer-drinking countries in recent years, beating out even Germany in 2007 for billions of liters consumed (see table above). It’s also notable that growth spiked sharply even after the 2004 restrictions were put in place, indicating that the advertising changes weren’t enough to decrease beer consumption. A tripling of excise taxes on beer in 2009 brought volume down about 10% in 2010, but apparently the Kremlin thinks the Russian people still have not been adequately sobered and so further measures are necessary.

I’ve written before that regulation on its own is not enough for a public shift in perspective towards advertising; education is also required. Fortunately, media literacy in Russia is alive and relatively well—it faces many of the same challenges as in America, like lack of funding, the bureaucracy around education and teachers that are already overworked and underpaid. However, unlike in the United States, Russia also has its history of communism as part of the mix; the country’s first efforts at media literacy in the 1920s were shut down by Stalin, and a free Russian press has yet to be realized. But thanks in part to efforts from UNESCO and UNICEF, media literacy and media education is growing in Russia. (Click here for an excellent library of English-language documents on media literacy in Russia.)

Particularly given the current state of Russian politics, it’s hard to imagine that President Medvedev will endorse media criticism as a tool for fighting misleading and harmful advertising, but without it, his anti-alcoholism work will continue to be undermined. The Russian beer industry will look to new avenues like digital media, which is more difficult to regulate, and will probably sharpen its already tight focus on building brand loyalty, thus shutting out smaller brewing companies that lack the budget to pursue aggressive, out-of-the-box advertising. The best hope lies in the fact that Russia is finally acknowledging beer as an alcoholic beverage; the shift in classification will be another interesting road for Russian advertisers to navigate. But in the months leading up to full implementation of the new restrictions, the people of Russia can expect a last gasp from advertisers eager to take advantage of their relative freedom. And once the ban is put in place, advertisers will surely get creative and find loopholes to reach and retain consumers. In both cases, media literacy is the best weapon the Russians can have to fight the onslaught.

–Emily Long

Follow The LAMP on Twitter: @thelampnyc

Follow me on Twitter: @emlong

CBS News Reporter Lara Logan

January 1 – March 31: “Sexual Assault Reporting: Post-Lara Logan, Business As Usual”

When CBS News reporter Lara Logan revealed she had been sexually assaulted while covering the Arab Spring in Egypt, several people in the media were criticized for their victim-blaming reactions. It seemed a wake-up call for mainstream media, which frequently take this approach in reporting on violence against women, until The New York Times hit the snooze button with their story about an 11-year-old girl who was gang raped in Texas.

April 1 – June 30: “TEDxTeen 2011: Just one of many highlights”

The LAMP reported back from the TEDxTeen conference, putting a spotlight on stories of remarkable young people making a big difference in their communities and the world.

NYC Subway ad for "The Change Up" as photographed by the author

July 1 – September 30: “Double Trouble: Women and Babies in ‘The Change Up’ Ad”

Summer popcorn movies aren’t known for being especially thought-provocative, but an ad for the comedy The Change Up made many people think twice.  Especially when they compared the online version to the ad shown everywhere else. (Confession: We geeked out a little when this piece got some love from Rachel Maddow’s blog.)

October 1 – December 21: “An Open Letter to James R. Trebilcock and the Dr. Pepper Ten Marketing Team”

Screenshot from Dr. Pepper Ten Facebook app

Lots of ads disparage women, but when the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group blatantly encouraged misogyny and gender stereotypes as essential cornerstones of their Dr. Pepper Ten marketing campaign, we got especially angry. LAMPpost blogger Emily Breitkopf broke it all down in her what-the-hell-were-you-thinking letter to the people responsible for the heinous marketing.

And the most-viewed LAMPpost article for all of 2011 is…here!

Support another year of outstanding media criticism when you give $11 for 2011!

From Go Daddy's first Super Bowl ad spot

Super Bowl 2012 is just under two months away, but the ad buzz has already started. While the rest of us are still wading through the current advertising barrage (also known as The Holiday Season), marketers are hard at work prepping for the next one. The biggest story so far? NBC approved a GoDaddy.com commercial–on the first draft!

Since 2005, we have been able to depend on sleazy, cheesy commercials featuring Danica Patrick and, more recently, Jillian Michaels–women who are otherwise pretty solid material for role models—putting on their best sexyfaces in the service of selling domain name registrations. And they’ve made a strategy of pushing a network’s level of decency, so that many of their television ads end with a message directing viewers to an “unrated” Internet-only version. It seems to be working out for them; last year, within just 15 minutes of GoDaddy’s Joan Rivers ad, business spiked a whopping 466%.

So, in the wake of that success, I was surprised to read that GoDaddy is changing its game plan and kicking sexy down a notch. For the first time since it began buying Super Bowl ad time, the network hosting the game (this year, NBC) has approved preliminary GoDaddy ad scripts. The reason? “We’re starting to get a little more aware of what they’re looking and what will pass and what won’t pass,” said Barb Rechterman, CMO of Go Daddy. Wow, it only took them six years.

GoDaddy Girl Danica Patrick in a previous Super Bowl ad

However, Go Daddy is not planning to change its ways entirely, and become responsible about its marketing practices—Rechterman confirms the upcoming Super Bowl ads are still “hot.” Which means GoDaddy is still uniting the disparate worlds of sex and domain name registration, in ads which blatantly insult the intelligence of potential customers. GoDaddy will probably continue to tell offended parties that they’re overreacting, as they more or less told author Lara Zielin when she wrote to them protesting last year’s Super Bowl ads. As GoDaddy pointed out in their response to her letter, what they’re doing is okay because not all of their commercials are sexist, and we should be more understanding that they need to reach “multiple customer demographics.” They must think pretty poorly of these customers if they think the only way to communicate with them is through sex.

The business of controversy is a profitable one, and the practice of advertisers creating and submitting commercials which they know will be rejected is not entirely new. PETA ads are banned on a fairly regular basis; if anything, it seems a point of pride for them. But lots of ads (even the ones selling something other than omnivore guilt) are rejected as well, and experience new lives online. As with the Joan Rivers ad, the company can still win. The commercial itself may not get the same number of eyeballs as it would from a TV set, but the company gets a chance to make hay from having been banned, and people who otherwise wouldn’t care about a Bud Light ad flock to YouTube to see what was too hot for television.

Why, then, would a company like GoDaddy have any interest in playing by the rules from the get-go? Maybe they’re still smarting from losing thousands of customers last April after their CEO posted a “vacation video” of himself killing an elephant, then tried to convince us it he was just trying to help a poor Zimbabwean village. When I read the news, I thought for a split second that perhaps GoDaddy is shifting gears to make commercials that are actually creative, rather than cheap and raunchy for the sole purpose of ruffling feathers and making money. GoDaddy commercials have always drawn fire for being offensive, but that’s been exactly their point. Until now, any negative response from the public was ignored at best, or, at worst, fuel for the GoDaddy publicity machine. Maybe, just maybe, this is a case where one shock jock realized it pays more to listen to media consumers rather than belittle them.  I’m not ready to declare victory for a critical mass just yet–there’s no proof that GoDaddy is directly responding to the people who stand up and demand more ethical media–but even a small demonstration of media adapting towards responsibility brings me hope.

–Emily Long

Follow The LAMP on Twitter: @thelampnyc
Follow me on Twitter: @emlong

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Word cloud of how teens describe the way people act online, from Pew Research Center's "Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Networking Sites"

Bullying is a problem. Not just cyberbullying and not just bullying among teens; nor is bullying the unique provenance of any particular social, racial or gender demographic. At least, that’s what I’ve gleaned from “Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites,” a report released today by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The report that 88% of the surveyed teens said they had witnessed some kind of online bullying activity us certainly cause for alarm, but also of great concern is that 69% of adults using social media also reported seeing meanness and cruelty online. While 8% of the teens reported that they been bullied online, 13% of the social network-using adults in the survey reported that they themselves were the target of mean behavior within the last year. Cyberbullying: It’s not just for kids anymore.

Not that it ever was, which brings me to one of the most fascinating aspects of the report—the term ‘cyberbullying’ is used exactly once throughout the entire document. As noted by the study authors in the introduction, “Understanding bullying and what we call ‘social media meanness’ has gotten more complicated even since we began this project just under a year ago.” It certainly has. Amidst a tragic sea of teen suicides, ‘cyberbullying’ has become a hot term in the news media and among advocacy and policy groups, but as the conversation widens, the distinction between cyberbullying and bullying becomes pretty redundant. Is bullying on a social network any more or less hurtful than bullying on a playground? More importantly, why bother qualifying feelings of humiliation and pain? Using the ‘cyberbullying’ term implies a newness to the behavior, but the notion that new media somehow makes it slicker or more newsworthy is damaging. Just ask those 13% of harassed adults—bullying is a practice we have formed and tolerated, if not encouraged, for generations. The Internet may offer a new avenue for the cruelty, but so did the telephone, and I’ve (thankfully) never heard anyone refer to tele-bullying. Nor am I aware of any policy roundtables about crank calls, egged houses, rumors, flaming bags of poo on doorsteps, wedgies or swirlies, all of which are staples of the bully’s toolkit. The report’s choice not to use the ‘cyberbullying’ term, together with its inclusion of findings related to other forms of bullying, shifts focus to the issue of bullying altogether. This offers a more balanced–and, in my opinion, truer to life–snapshot of bullying in our society, which can hopefully lead to a more holistic approach to an evolving, complex issue.

Going through the rest of the report, I was relieved to read that parents are getting more involved in the digital lives of their children. 98% of parents with online teens have discussed what is and is not appropriate behavior online, and 87% of parents talk with their teens about what they do on the Internet. This suggests that more and more, parents and their children are adapting and growing together in a digital landscape, rather than becoming more isolated. Whether someone spends ten minutes or ten hours with the Internet on a daily basis, the presence of a perceived role model and confidante is integral to dealing with the experience of cruelty and meanness.

So, as before, bullying is a problem, for young people and for adults. Perhaps the Internet has made it easier to measure, by quantifiable counts of profiles taken down, photos posted, occurrences of fraud, YouTube fight videos, ‘likes’ and thumbs-down votes. I hope the study helps people realize that we can’t ask our kids to treat each other nicely online if we aren’t equally vigilant about how they treat each other offline. As anyone who has been bullied can attest, being told that “it gets better” is not so very helpful, and as the study shows, it’s not necessarily true. We have to demand, from ourselves and others, to be better.

Check out The LAMP’s free Guide to Developing Healthy Digital Relationships.

–Emily Long

Follow The LAMP on Twitter: @thelampnyc

Follow me on Twitter: @emlong

Protestor image from ritholtz.com, as found on occupywallstreet.tumblr.com

One month into the Occupy protests and I’ve been fascinated with the media coverage of the movement. From the media stations set up by protesters at Occupy Wall Street to the media blackout-turned-circus surrounding the protests, there is so much -and at times so little- being discussed. Case in point: Internet coverage versus television coverage of the protests.

A few weeks ago Emily Long posted a piece about the Pew/Knight Foundation report findings on how differently people interact with the media. The research tells us, “people younger than 40 are more likely to use the Internet for more news on a wider variety of topics” whereas “people 40 or older are more likely to begin with newspapers, then go to TV stations and then to the Internet.”  The 99% over 40 who are largely affected by the issues addressed through the Occupy Wall Street protests are the ones turning to television, not the Internet, first. Surprisingly, TV networks aren’t offering the most well-rounded coverage of the movement for their viewers.

From Fox News to CNN, it’s as though the same conversation is happening again and again: What is this movement about? The responses range from “nothing” to “hippies” to “the economy” and while some pundits and guests have offered important critique, it is often framed in opposition. There have only been a few people following the protests that have taken them seriously and offered them some sort of depth on television: Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell.

The Internet, especially Twitter, Facebook and various civic action organizations, have helped the movement spread globally and inspired global conversations and criticisms of the protests. There are various Livestreams, independent news organizations, and even The Occupy Wall Street Journal. Still, it’s not surprising that network television stations are engaging a much more superficial discussion; one which seems to show so little of what the movement is really about. This is the coverage that much of our country is watching, and there is so much they’re missing because of it.

As many critical voices point out, this movement against Wall Street is a symbol for larger inequalities that have long existed for people in our society. Poverty is racialized and people of color in the U.S. have experienced class discrimination since the founding of this country. From the issue of gay marriage to the Prison Industrial Complex, all of these social issues directly affect and are affected by the economy, and perhaps this is a movement where all of these issues can be addressed. This conversation is long overdue and while the Internet is the place for it to happen, I wish it was more accessible to those citizens who, as the Pew/Knight Foundation points out, turn to TV instead of the Internet for their nightly news.

–Emily Breitkopf

Emily Breitkopf is a contributing writer to The LAMPpost. You can read more of her work on her blog, Kids and Gender and follow her on Twitter @emilybreitkopf.

Report confirms Marshall McLuhan's claim that "the medium is the message."

Released today, the report “How People Learn About Their Local Community” reveals findings from a joint survey between the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Internet & American Life Project, with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It seems that, as a whole, when people want information about the day-to-day items concerning their immediate lives, they turn to local television first (this includes the corresponding websites of local television stations). However, most people tune in to local TV primarily for weather updates, traffic reports and breaking news. When they want analysis or coverage on a more specific topic like social services, crime or local government, they go to their local newspapers. (As with television, when referring to newspapers, the survey includes both the physical newspapers and their websites.) For information on restaurants, local businesses, jobs, schools and housing, people are more likely to turn to the Internet.

But all of this changes when you break out the survey results by age group. People younger than 40 are more likely to use the internet for more news on a wider variety of topics. After the internet, this same group will probably go to newspapers, then TV, then radio and, finally, word of mouth. People 40 or older are more likely to begin with newspapers, then go to TV stations and then to the Internet. Furthermore, according to the report, age is the most influential factor when it comes to how people get their local news—not gender, not race, not income level.

And so we see the future, and the enduring wisdom of Marshall McLuhan’s mantra that the medium is the message. Younger generations are relying on more varieties of media, and as such it is increasingly important that we understand how a message is determined by and changes with the vessel in which it is delivered.

As detailed in the report, when people are looking for news on a particular topic, they choose different media depending on its capacity to offer detail and scope. For example, weather and traffic are pretty objective, so television, with its limited timeframe, is a popular outlet regardless of age—44% of people age 18-39 go to TV for weather, compared to the 41% in this group who turn to the Internet; 67% of people age 40 and older look to TV for weather, as compared to 27% who go to the Internet first. But for political reporting, which generally involves more opinion, point/counterpoint and complexity, the 18-39 age group is more likely to go first to the infinite medium of the Internet. Those age 40 and older start with newspapers (however, we don’t know how many begin at a printed page or the paper’s website).

Younger generations will probably continue to vary their news diets as more media, technologies and platforms are developed, and as this happens, it will be more and more important that we understand how a piece of news is different when it comes from a radio versus a website versus a television. It’s not enough to teach just media literacy—we have to teach medium literacy as well. This has always been true, but the Pew/Knight report demonstrates a looming urgency to proactive media engagement and critical thinking in a multimedia world.

–Emily Long

Follow The LAMP on Twitter: @thelampnyc
Follow Emily Long on Twitter: @emlong

Was this your cell phone ten years ago?

Recollections and thoughts on the pending 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks are everywhere. It’s hard to visit a website, open a newspaper or listen to the radio without hearing about that fateful day which forever changed the United States and, in some way, the lives of millions around the world. All of this reflection is cathartic, healing, binding, and, fairly natural for our time, a lot of it is being done with the help of social media. But ten years ago, we didn’t have social media. Our collective grieving process is largely dependent on media that looked very different in 2001–and many didn’t exist at all.

How would 9/11 have been different if we had social media? The question is partly a lazy game of What If, but also points to a reassessment of how and why we respond to disasters and tragedies in an era of media saturation. In 2001, we didn’t live in a society where cell phones were a given, and even laptops were pretty novel. Now, smartphones are everywhere, making it easy to snap photos, video and audio and then post it all somewhere for the world to see. We tag photos on Flickr to make a crowd-sourced photo album, we can tell people we’re safe by updating a Facebook status, we can quickly spread both information and misinformation with Twitter. We get news and emergency alerts on our phones, GPS can help us locate someone, and you don’t need to paper a wall in Greenwich Village seeking information on missing persons. And then, we can easily support rescue and recovery efforts just by making a donation via text message, grieve together with online memorial spaces, and much more.

In contrast, when I was a college student at the University of Illinois back in 2001, I didn’t learn about what happened until at least an hour after the towers fell–and that was okay. I didn’t need to know everything instantly, as I feel I do now. For someone like me, who had never been to New York City or the Twin Towers, I was disconnected from the personal stories and the nature of the city. Today, how many thousands of faces, stories and voices would I have to choose from to help me understand 9/11 and the aftermath?

At the same time, I wonder what is lost by not knowing. In a way, I think that what happened inside the Towers, the Pentagon and the hijacked planes was something more complex than I could understand from an outside view, adding an air of sanctity to those experiences. Yet on the other hand, many remaining questions of what really happened should be answered, and, as we are reminded by recently released audio tapes, media can help.

I don’t know if the existence of more cell phone calls, texts, pictures or video would close the books on every 9/11 mystery or conspiracy theory, but based on how we react to news today, people would still be interested. Whether they would satisfy a voyeuristic curiosity, yield valuable information or do something else entirely will never be known. Of course I want answers about many things that happened that day, but, unlike ten years ago, there are some things I’m okay with not knowing.

–Emily Long
Follow The LAMP on Twitter: @thelampnyc
Follow me on Twitter: @emlong

The LAMP Shines Light on Media Literacy: NAMLE Recap

Aug. 5, 2011 In internet time, the couple of weeks that have passed since NAMLE (the Nat’l Assoc of Media Literacy Educators’ conference) may SEEM like a virtual eternity or ‘old news’ as digital educators scurry about to start up a NEW school year having picked from an infovore smorgasbord of critical thinking workshops…

…But that’s part of the problem in our quick click culture. The 165 content rich workshops in the NAMLE feast may have been consumed, but they’re still not fully digested, that takes time. (check out the breadth/depth in this 36pp pdf)

Important presentations of colleagues may already be fading into a flash stick of a memory blur…The sheer overwhelm of the massive mental floss leaves people tucking swag bags stuffed with resources, slideshares, prezis, digital posters and media decks back into briefcases with “I’ll revisit the ones I missed later” and then they never do. Am I right?

Seems weighty media topics and expert speakers are getting clipped, churned up and mowed down faster than a summer lawn… It’s like the NYT article about “Long-form storytelling in a short-attention span world.” I say let’s enable the content to shine by taking the time to not just scatter seeds but to get our hands dirty and dig deeper into planting and embedding ideas enabling the fluid of the mind to nourish them.

Whether it’s NAMLE 2011 or the recent live-streaming 140EDU conference recap (great video archives) or this weekend’s BlogHer 2011. Just because an event is ‘over’ it’s far from finished. And I’m not talking about just the glad-handing follow-ups and schmoozefests of these mega-media events.

There’s far too much effort and collective human intellect to slapdash 140 character live-stream citizen journalism coverage or a rushed ‘who posts a recap first’ urgency…The rapid-fire delivery of digital age content means all too often people ‘move on’ too fast to the next big ‘thing’ without letting the depth and layers of rich content seep into the brain, especially when there’s copious quantities of high volume content and resources to nosh upon.

So this will be a multi-part ‘work in progress’ recap beginning with this overview guest post by The LAMP, a worthy grassroots org of fun and clever youth-driven media makers eager to impart hands-on knowledge through free public events instilling vital critical thinking skills for 21st century young minds.

AND…btw, for the record…THIS is also why the purported demise of long form blogging is bupkiss. We need it for digging deeper.

Before you go on to ‘the next big thing’ (or conference, or any cool tool or dandy device) think about whether you’ve DONE something with what you’ve learned already.

Digital distractions and shiny pennies can usurp the core elements of knowledge building. We need to USE collaboratories like NAMLE to further all our work in critical thinking…

As internet pioneer and humanist/hero thought leader Douglas Engelbart would say, it’s all about raising the collective IQ. Onward!

Fabulous K-12 Media Literacy from The LAMPcamp!

Guest Post: Young Media Minds at The LAMP Sum Up The NAMLE 2011 Experience as Both Presenters and Attendees

Critical Thinkers Who ‘Get It’– The LAMP on NAMLE

by Emily Long

It’s exciting when any group of people with a specific shared enthusiasm come together, but when that group of people is as (relatively) small as the media literacy community, it can be incredibly affirming.

This was what I found at the conference for the National Association of Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) held July 22-25 in Philadelphia. Even in the media mecca of New York City, me and my colleagues at The LAMP(Learning About Multimedia Project) often have to explain to elected officials, foundation representatives, community leaders and fellow non-profiteers not only what media literacy is, but why it is such a crucial need.

There is a certain type of eye-rolling–usually manifested by a deep sigh–that happens for me whenever I have to justify the importance of education. So, it’s invigorating to be in a room full of people who get it and act on it and keep on with the sometimes Sisyphean labor of advancing media literacy at a time when our country’s education system is being stripped to a skeleton.

Just as galvanizing as the communal spirit was the sheer number of presentations. NAMLE attendees chose from 165 workshops, screenings, panels, demonstrations and more, covering a range of topics like faith-based media literacy, Internet in rural Peru, digital storytelling, policy, media literacy in China, theory…and I could go on.

I was only able to attend the conference on Saturday and Sunday. Plus, The LAMP, represented by myself and co-founders Katherine Fry and D.C. Vito, did two presentations (one on working with elected officials, another on our LAMPlatoon ad-busting project) so although I could attend only a fraction of what I wanted, it did help to narrow down my choices.

Emily Bailin from Temple University’s Media Education Lab did a great presentation about her work with teachers at a charter school in Philadelphia, and talked about the practical realities of integrating media literacy in a diverse, urban school. I got an update on the fantastic work being done on the West coast to build digital citizenship in youth and teens (credits on this one go to Bobbie Eisenstock from California State University, Northridge; Kelly Mendoza with Common Sense Media; Meryl Alper from USC Annenberg and Erin Reilly, also with USC Annenberg).

As a news junkie, I enjoyed a primer from Paul Mihailidis of Emerson College and James Cohen of Hofstra University about the latest tools for news aggregation and literacy.

Keynote speakers Mohammed Bilal and Douglas Rushkoff were still another highlight. I was among perhaps a handful of people in the room who closely followed Bilal on the San Francisco season of MTV’s The Real World, so hearing him talk about what went on behind the scenes while making the sausage of reality television was particularly fascinating. But I was also captivated by how he combined his celebrity with his passion for peace, diversity and hip-hop to build on his experience in a positive way.

After a long night of drinking and debating with other NAMLE attendees, Douglas Rushkoff was the only reason I got up as early as I did on Sunday morning. He did not disappoint–his energy and humor was so infectious that he negated whatever need I had for coffee. I left with his “Program or be programmed!” mantra ringing in my head, a conviction that media literacy is the key to all of our problems, and the reminder of how much I still have to learn.

After our obligatory cheesesteak sandwiches, we packed up our things and headed back to Brooklyn. For The LAMP, the NAMLE experience was extra special, because it was our first. The conference is held every two years, and with The LAMP at not quite four years old, we were honored to present twice on our first trip. Still, for me, the main highlight was the media literacy community…The ability to finally meet the people behind the blogs and Twitter feeds I follow was exciting, but meeting new people and hearing about their work was inspiring as well. Meeting once every two years is definitely not enough.—Emily Long

About Emily: Emily earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Dramaturgy and Script Development from Columbia University in 2006. While at Columbia, she edited and catalogued hundreds of interviews and transcripts for the Oral History Research Office, focusing primarily on their 9/11 Project. From 2006 to early 2009, she was also the Resident Dramaturg at Electric Pear Productions where she designed and facilitated their playwriting workshop, as well as production dramaturgy. The LAMP is pleased to have Ms. Long on board as Communications Director, offering her extensive experience with numerous media through her work with Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Atlantic Theater Company, Sesame Workshop and Cine Mosaic to name a few. She also wrote for the Independent Film Channel’s Make Media Matter blog.

Follow The LAMP on Twitter: @thelampnyc

Follow Emily on Twitter: @emlong

Follow Amy Jussel, Shaping Youth on Twitter: @ShapingYouth

Amy’s Note: The LAMP first came to my attention at Shaping Youth with their culture jamming/ad spoofs created by their “LAMPlatoon”…They literally put ‘ads on notice’ with backtalk that makes you do a doubletake…Love ‘em. Great deconstruction of what’s ‘really being said’ in a straightforward, kid-friendly manner. Here are a few recent favorites of mine…

LAMPlatoon: General Mills “Big G Cereals”

LAMP Student Violet Creates Critical Thinking Around The Highly Sexualized Bratz Dolls (I need interns like this! Go Violet! Could you do Monster High Dolls next please?–Thanks, –Amy)

LAMPlatoon: Bratz

Enter Fabio, world-renowned Italian model and bird catcher, with his hulking pecs and lustrous locks to challenge Mustafa with a bid to be the next Old Spice Guy. Each made videos in their respective pleas to continue selling deodorant, with over 100 videos posted between them on competing YouTube channels. Viewers voted during the week-long campaign by ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ videos, and the challenge was cleverly titled “Mano a Mano En El Baño” (which translates roughly to “Head to Head in the Bathroom”). And vote they did. Mustafa, inevitably, won, but not before the videos garnered a total of 22 million views in one week.

While the viewing statistics are impressive, one thing in particular jumped out at me about this campaign–namely, the aforementioned hulking pecs, prominently displayed in each video. To the credit of ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, who designed the campaign for Proctor & Gamble, they officially titled the challenge with a nod to comedy rather than appearances, but perhaps because the title was a bit lengthy for Twitter, at some point along the way the challenge became known as the “Hunk Off.” Which, in some ways–fine. Though both men are funny in their own way, it’s clear that neither were chosen solely on the basis of their comic timing, and you can easily make the argument that their physiques are sources of comedy in themselves.

But in other ways, the leap to calling it a “Hunk Off” is totally degrading for boiling it all down to a contest of “Hot or Not.” As much as looks played a role in casting, men and women alike continue to engage with the videos mostly because they’re funny, not because Mustafa or Fabio are hot. And I also wonder about if the tables were turned, and instead of two beautiful men competing, it were two beautiful women, and the whole thing was reduced to a “Babe Off.” For my part, I’d be unhappy. In that case, the suggestion would be that women aren’t funny, humor isn’t attractive in women, media producers rely too heavily on female objectification and are once again reducing women down to their looks. And yet, I don’t hear the outcry of sexism that I would expect if marketers built a campaign that was so overtly based on people voting between two beautiful women. So why is it okay for media to play this game with men? Or did media just call a spade a spade by calling the whole thing a “Hunk Off,” and any problem lies in the campaign itself? What do you think?

–Emily Long
Follow The LAMP on Twitter: @thelampnyc
Follow me on Twitter: @emlong