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Posts Tagged ‘Katherine Fry’
Happy new year from everyone at The LAMP, and a very special thanks to all of you who donated during our December fundraising campaign! Your donation will support many activities in 2010, including upcoming workshops with 
This month 
Our Latest LAMPlit: Check Out The News!
Friday, December 18th, 2009
The LAMP has added another LAMPlit resource guide to its library! Check out the news! is written by Katherine Fry, Ph.D., Education Director and Professor of Media Studies at Brooklyn College. Dr. Fry has spent years studying news literacy, and recently has been traveling to conferences to speak on the subject to other communications professionals.
So, what is news literacy? It’s the ability to think critically about the news, and the way you find out about what is reported in the world around you. It helps you form your own opinions, and become a more active media consumer. Instead of believing whatever a news outlet tells you, you’ll be thinking for yourself about how, why and where you get the news that shapes your life and your everyday decisions. Download Check out the news! for free today, and you’ll never see news in quite the same way again.
Kids as Super-Consumers: Creepy!
Friday, December 19th, 2008
I highly recommend a video called Consuming Kids which has just been released by the Media Education Foundation. You can see a 5-minute trailer by clicking here.
We know kids are attracted to television commercials, and are, for the most part, impressed by catchy ad messages, wherever and whenever these ads catch their attention. I see the attraction in my own children, though I try my best to point out to them the flaws in the messages every chance I get. As a result, my 10 year-old has become a bit cynical. Good for him.
What most people may not know is the lengths to which marketers go to shape children into consumers – even going so far in their “research” as to visit the homes of these malleable little spenders, talking to them about what they eat, what they wear, and what they like to do, all in the interest of figuring out the best way to sell to them. The marketers also get the wee friends involved, since it’s best for marketing practitioners to witness kiddie group think. The worst part is that not only do the marketers talk at length, and intensely, with these burgeoning consumers, they also just sit and watch them—with the video camera running. As one critic featured in Consuming Kids aptly explained, it’s just absolutely creepy!
The video is a must-watch for parents. It reminds me of a kiddie version of “cool hunting,” a practice explained in the PBS documentary Merchants of Cool, where marketers penetrate the minds of urban youth trendsetters, looking for ideas to steal so they can brand their sodas, sneakers and other products using techniques that continuously associate those products with the latest, hippest trends.
The irony is that it’s just so uncool to shape children into consumers. I realize it’s been happening for a long time, and that it’s virtually impossible to steer clear from it. After all, how did we get into this financial mess in the first place? But thank goodness for a video like Consuming Kids, which lays it out there–cynical marketers, cutesy advertising, the resulting eternally dissatisfied children slathered in advertising–all of it.
Truth be told, kids need to watch this, too. I’ll get my 10-year-old to sit down and watch. Maybe we’ll get a viral anti-marketing thing going at his school, for the kids and the parents.
–Katherine Fry
Will the Internet limit free speech for students?
Monday, December 15th, 2008
How far should freedom of speech and the press extend, anyway? It’s a question that keeps coming up in this country whenever we develop new ways to communicate.
The First Amendment to our Constitution was written when speech and print were the predominant means available for political and social discourse. But as each new communication technology–first broadcasting and now the Internet and other digital means–has developed, we take another look at what freedom of speech and the press ought to mean when a new environment for discourse is created. Whose rights should be curbed, and under what circumstances? Underpinning these new inquiries is a fear of the social implications of the new communication technology/environment,especially where young people are concerned. How can we control them?
The Philadelphia Inquirer just reported that the Hermitage School District in western Pennsylvania is appealing a judge’s decision that a high school student had not violated a school’s civility code by things he posted in a MySpace profile. The profile, first posted in 2006, was bogus. It was a parody profile that the student, Justin Layshock, made up, attaching his high school principal’s name and image. The student was making fun of his principal, and was, according to the attorney representing the district, being vulgar about it, thus violating the school’s civility code.
The school district wrought heavy discipline on Justin who was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union in a suit Justin’s parents brought against the school district. That judge ruled in favor of the student, and now the decision is under appeal in a Federal Appeals Court in Philadelphia.
Without going into all of the details here, it seems the Appeals Court will uphold the first judge’s ruling. What I really mean to say is, if I were a judge hearing the appeal, I’d uphold the decision. Why? Because the comments were made on MySpace and, as the first judge declared, that’s not in school, and it’s out of the jurisdiction of school.
Now, there could possibly be a libel case in there, if the principal could sufficiently prove malice, irreparable harm to his reputation, and a host of other things, but this was a case about a student saying something kind of nasty about a school authority figure—which happens all the time. Except this time it was on a social networking site where young people post lots of things that they used to just say to each other face to face or on the telephone. And it wasn’t posted on a school computer, using a school’s server. It was away from school, on his grandmother’s computer, no less.
Understandably, the whole incident is upsetting to the principal and other school figures, and probably lots of other people. But the big issue here is preserving freedom of speech. Even if it’s not pleasant speech, and even if it’s speech by a minor who probably deserves some kind of reprimand.
Maybe the reprimand could come by way of giving this young person—and all young people—a better understanding of the ramifications of speech on the Internet, particularly via social networking sites. Who wants to go through all of this kind of legal wrangling, anyway?
Instead of fearing this medium, these social networking sites, it’s best to take a breath, accept that we, all of us who use the Internet for a host of things everyday, are part of a new communication environment. And it’s challenging us while it’s changing us. That’s what environments do. We’re being shaped and it’s sometimes frightening, and we want to protect young people from this thing we don’t understand.
It’s best to offer measured guidance about wise uses of social networking sites—maybe uses that aren’t depraved. But let’s not censor anyone anew just because of the new means of communicating. And let’s listen to those—many of them students–who use the sites without fear. We can probably learn a lot from each other.
–Katherine Fry, Ph.D., LAMP Education Director
Fair Use is More than Fair – So Let’s Use It!
Saturday, August 30th, 2008
When advising MFA students producing video documentaries, faculty members in the Dept. of Television and Radio at Brooklyn College have, for many years, cautioned strongly against copyright infringements within student works. They discouraged use of any part of previously produced media work, from a few bars of recorded music, to still images, to a few seconds of news footage. For the most part students were commanded by lawsuit-fearing faculty members to steer clear of anything that might possibly be questioned at any point in the future by absolutely anyone interested in scrutinizing not-for-profit, student-produced films.
I always felt the fear factor was higher than it needed to be, and that fair use provisions of the U.S. copyright code were not examined and discussed as widely as they should be among the students and faculty. In part this is understandable because, as the Utne Reader’s recent online article, “How Fair use Got its Groove Back,” points out, fair use provisions are vague, and most of us in media education are encouraged to fear for our legal lives. As a faculty adviser myself, I’ve been more liberal in my encouragement that MFA students include those few seconds of footage or that still image where it would help make an important point in the documentary. After all, as author Julie Hanus suggests in the Utne piece, how can you engage in (very necessary) media criticism if you cannot invoke the media productions themselves? It really can’t be done.
Educators need to be bold, and need to challenge media producers as well as outdated copyright law itself. After all, media scholar and producer Sut Jhally boldly challenged big corporate media when he produced his first video in the Dreamworlds series with the Media Education Foundation. The Dreamworlds productions use clips from years of televised music videos to scrutinize the sexualized images of girls and women. At first MTV went after Jhally, but their legal case essentially went nowhere. It was a gigantic coup for media educators and critics, but it didn’t quell the fears of most media educators. Too bad. Someone needed to take this on as a full-time project. Especially now that digital media are fodder for so much more media, and so much more media criticism.
Now we have that project. American University’s Center for Social Media (see their document “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use”) is taking on the whole issue of fair use and copyright law on behalf of media educators and artists. People like the Center’s Patricia Aufderheide and Temple University’s Renee Hobbs are taking bold steps on behalf of those of us who are impassioned by the need for media literacy, which includes the need to use examples of media language to critique that language, with the goal of developing critical faculties among the youth and adults we’re committed to educating. And that’s our commitment at the LAMP.
There’s a lot at stake here, and in this media saturated environment, we’ve got to be bold, not cowed. We’re media literacy educators. If we can’t take on big media ourselves, how can we possibly teach others to do the same?
–Katherine Fry
A summer road trip
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
As our Education Director, Katherine, heads out of the city on a long car-saddled road tour of our western landscape, it brings to mind the storied tradition of the assignment that usually awaited students on their first week back into school:
An essay describing what they did on their summer vacation.
When I authored these reports in my youth, they were exclusively written down on a sheet of paper, and then read in front of a classroom. I might even bring with me small trinkets and mementos that I could display for my audience that would aid in illustrating my adventures, but that is as fancy as i would get. Nowadays, there are so many incredible ways a student could tell the story of their summer. I’m curious if there are in fact teachers, parents or even students who spend their months off by capturing them via a blog, or a video camera or even a digital sound recorder, who will then later share this interactive presentation with their classmates.
Man, just thinking about that kind of report makes me wish I was on summer vacation.
p.s. Let us know by e-mail if you give or receive an assignment like this: dc@thelampnyc.org Happy Summer!
Carlin, the FCC, and Finding Our Way
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Sadly, one of our most brilliant and insightful comics has died. George Carlin, who dared to be political and outspoken in his scorn for the establishment, was also a looming media presence for most of his career. Carlin was one of those personalities who showed us where the invisible lines are drawn because, thankfully, he overstepped them routinely. Cultures need such characters to not only point out their flaws, but also to help induce change. They make us uncomfortable for good reason.
What I remember him for, here, is the part he played in helping to establish federal broadcast policy regarding indecent speech. His famous 7 Dirty Words broadcast on WBAI radio in New York City, which led ultimately to the Supreme Court case, Pacifica v. FCC, established community standards as the yardstick to measure the extent to which the federal government can sanction broadcast indecency, particularly during periods of time when children could be in the audience. Before Carlin dared to say what could not be said on TV and the radio, the FCC was able to fine stations for what it considered indecent speech, not taking into consideration what was and is acceptable in different parts of the country, and at different times during the day. It took someone to (boldly and offensively) start that conversation and bring about policy change that is still the legal blueprint used today for broadcast stations. Even though now we have content carried via cable and the Internet, both of which are outside the strict confines of the FCC’s content restrictions, broadcast television and radio remains a staple for millions of Americans. When we no longer have free over-the-air broadcasting, if that day ever comes, I wonder how a counterculture curmudgeon like Carlin will be able to wake all of us up—no matter our age, income, ethnicity or digital abilities–when we’ve gotten too sleepy?
–Katherine G. Fry
Library Porn, First Amendment, What to do?
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
The buzz around the neighborhood here in Brooklyn lately has been about patrons of the the local branches of the Brooklyn Public Library visiting porn sites on the library computers. No doubt this isn’t the only place where wrangling of the issues is happening.
The issues in our local discussion have run the gamut from the importance of access to information for all, to how can we shield young children from seeing this in the library?, to why don’t the pervs (term used in local parents discussion list) do this at home?, to why should only those who can afford a computer at home be able to access porn, while those who can’t afford one be denied access to it?, to watching porn leads to masturbation in public and/or to rape, which allegedly occurred in one library branch, according to someone from www.SafeLibraries.org, who was interviewed in a story published this week in the Brooklyn Paper (www.BrooklynPaper.com).
Wow, and that’s only a sampling of the issues that comes up. There’s more. What about accessing controversial information in a public place that receives government funds? Where do you draw the line when vulnerable groups (children) could be harmed? Who gets to decide? What about free speech and freedom of the press? All of these questions have been raised in the past with regard to hate speech. So far, unless a direct link between the speech act and a harmful (i.e. illegal) behavior can be proven in a court of law, the speech must be protected.
Hard to swallow? Well, that doesn’t mean, in this particular case, that children in libraries must be forced to view porn. Actions can be taken to sequester computer terminals in such a way as to make them hidden from view. And underage youth can be (and are) monitored closely by library staff when on the computers. All good ideas, and great compromises.
I hate to use the cliche “slippery slope,: but that’s just what you’re on when designated deciders start deciding which speech acts in which venues to protect and which to bar altogether. We’ve got a Patriot Act that closely monitors us now; we’ve got a sometimes much too cozy relationship between the press and government which leads too often to prior restraint. We need to maintain our freedoms as much as we can as often as we can. Thank goodness we have media forums that allow us to get the discussions going and keep them going, even if we don’t agree with each other.
Don’t like porn? Hate the use of women in many of the images and narratives? I don’t blame you one bit. I’d much rather talk and write about what I don’t like out there than call for censorship. I do it already with my two very young children. I think they appreciate it.
Katherine
