"Awkward Black Girl" Issa Rae

Inspired by the misrepresentation of women and girls in the media, the new PBS series Women and Girls Lead was announced just as the DGA declared that “white males direct 77% of all TV shows.” The series looks promising, with documentaries on Little Rock supporter Daisy Bates, a chronicle of 300 lb American Champion Weightlifter, Charyl Haworth, and another of girl wrestler Tara Neal whose story met controversy when she played on her all-male wrestling team. Gender is diverse within womanhood and hopefully this series show its diversity in a space that is consistently lacking it. I’m interested to see how Women and Girls Lead navigates First world/Third world power dynamics that come up during the shows, as many of them cover stories of women in Third World countries, but it’s particularly exciting that various stories document women in the U.S., as this is, indeed, a country full of diverse women.

There are many others shows out there that demonstrate the diversity of social identity in the U.S. that are only available with a bit of digging but are equally rewarding to watch. Feeling inspired myself, I decided to make of list of some of my favorite shows offering critical perspectives and much needed representation in the media (some comedic) that I think should be seen regularly on television. There are plenty of other sources I’m missing, but this is a short list of the ones I’m currently enjoying that, collectively, are feeding me as a critical viewer:

1. In The Life Media, a privately funded organization airing on public television throughout the U.S. Their mission statement proposes that “visibility in media is vital to achieving equality and social justice for LGBT people…In The Life Media counters injustice and misinformation with dynamic, responsive and compelling use of traditional and new media, including social networks, video sharing, online community organizing and blogs.” There are some really great critiques on the intersection of gender, sex and sexuality through the stories of people they follow.

2. These Current TV Infomania shows aren’t running anymore, but has all of its past episodes online. My favorite skits are Bryan Safi’s That’s Gay and Sarah Haskins’s Target: Women; two smart comedic critical voices about gender stereotyping and homophobia in the media.

3. Awkward Black Girl is an awesome web series created by and starring Issa Rae. It’s funny, endearing and really, really smart.

4. Logo’s The Big Gay Sketch Show is funnier than SNL has been in the past few years and it’s full of interesting and funny queer people.

When engaging with media of any sort there are resources (like these) that can be plucked from various places so that, when put together, they create a collective critical voice that work against stereotypes. As an active guilty-pleasure viewer of bad reality TV, these shows offer a good balance to my weekly viewing of The Real Housewives of New Jersey that remind me that smart, witty, original television full of people of all representations can exist.

–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.

I think it’s pretty cool because it grabs my imagination. (I have to confess that it has the word “media” so prominently in the middle is somewhat validating)

Would love to hear what you guys think!

Kids under the age of 18 may not be able to vote, but that doesn’t mean they can’t participate in the election. There are numerous online sites out there that provide activities to try to engage youth in the presidential election. I’m skeptical of the aims behind some of these sites that come from major media companies, as I am with most things that come innocuously packaged from media corporations (NBC’s olympic coverage has been the single, greatest branding exercise of any one event and period of time). That being said, I think that some of the election web portals for youth have a real opportunity to engage our children about the election as well as explore the ways media are used to wage presidential campaigns.

Enter scholastic.com.

They have launched an interactive presidential election hub that invites both educators and youth to discuss, explore and critique the 2008 Election. I invite you to do the same. I particularly enjoyed the Create a Campaign Poster under Games and Quizzes, where students are asked to use images and text to convey a political message.

Now that’s right up our alley…

Alisa Miller from PRI did a video report on the way news is reported in the US. To say the least, it is illuminating. I encourage all of you to visit the link and watch. I know I plan on going back and rewatching it as soon as I post this.

The video can be found here.

This is a “Wordle” cloud. Also known as a ‘cloud tag’, which is a way to label posts on a blog or pictures in a Flickr account and provide readers/viewers an easier way to navigate to content that matches their interest.

Wordle is a site that allows you to take your own blog, any website that has an RSS feed, or a bunch of text and create a cloud. The larger the word, the more instances of it in the blog/feed/text. They also have amassed a gallery of all the clouds that others have created. The one at the top of this post was created by an anonymous user on the term “media literacy”.

I’m fascinated by the use of these clouds. They deliver a message in a very interesting way, boiling down what someone says to content. It completely disregards context, dispatching with any notion of perspective or world view the author may have.

Does it present information in an important, revealing manner? It certainly presents it in an interesting and new way. To demonstrate this, the cloud on the left was generated when someone took Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia and the one on the right was generated from the text of President George Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address.  I think it’s interesting to compare the two. Eye-opening, no. But definitely a new way to engage someone in the discussion.

*due to technical difficulties, I was unable to create a wordle for The LAMP’s website – bummer!

I like this one a lot because it captures my memory of the very famous shot that i’ve seen reproduced multiple times on postcards and posters. But, there is one aspect that’s missing, which i think makes this stream of historical photos revisited brilliant. Because they are Lego toys, the dangerous feat that makes the original photo so dramatic is missing. Those men dangling their legs off the steel girder suspended in the air were tempting fate, however these toys are not in harm’s way. You don’t have quite the same reaction to the successor as you do with the predecessor.

When we take a look at another photo redux of his that focuses on a much more violent moment captured on film, we can really see the effect toys as substitutes has on the overall experience of the viewer.

On February 1st, 1968, General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executed a Captain from the Viet Cong army. Eddie Adams’ photographic capture of it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Balakov’s reproduction does not evoke the same vivid angst and terror of the original. While the Lego figures share the same manufactured smile, it withholds the painful grimace of the Viet Cong soldier in the original image. This is an excellent exercise in how images influence our emotions, how they tell stories, and more importantly, how they define history.

I invite you to check out the rest of the series he put up, where he also has links to the originals he is paying homage to.

I myself am not a particular enthusiast of typefaces and fonts, but a very smart review of FontStruct recently appeared in slate.com by Jason Fagone, who is a typeface enthusiast.  The article is well worth reading, commenting as it does on the role of typography in history and the power of how letters are designed, not to mention yet another Web 2.0 community that may one day be comparable to YouTube.

And if you ever doubted the power of typeface to send a subliminal message, take a look at this–if nothing else, it’s good for a chuckle.

TVshowcomplaints.org is a portal to both submitting complaints about content on television shows, and seeing examples of complaints filed by other individuals.  A few of the complaints are bound to make you chuckle, others will make you wonder how much of the general public is aware of the television rating system.  In all seriousness, reading the complaints raises some good questions about the role of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC): Does the agency exist solely to “protect” us from profanity, or does it have any other purpose?  Where does free speech come into play?  If so many complaints are being lodged about using swear words, is the FCC doing its part to educate the public on what the rating system–or is that even the responsibility of the FCC?

Whether you’re up for a laugh, a perspective different from yours,  or just a peek into incredibly poor writing and grammar skills, be sure to check out the website.