Emily Breitkopf, LAMPpost Contributing Writer

Meet Emily Breitkopf, contributing writer to The LAMPpost and an expert on youth, gender and media. You can also read more of her work on her blog, “Kids and Gender” and follow her on Twitter with @emilybreitkopf. Emily spoke with us about how gendered media impacts young people, awareness and what we can all do to promote gender-positive representations in media.

What got you interested in the issue of young people and gender representation? I spent my undergrad working as a caregiver while earning my degree in Women’s Studies. The equation was inevitable. I started to frame my relationship with the families I worked for through my studies and became increasingly aware of the politics of caregiving and family life. One of those aspects was gender development, as the kids I cared for began to ask questions about their bodies and others’, and about gender itself, and to engage with gender stereotypes, especially outside their home. They (and their parents) gave me the freedom to ask them about sex, gender, and their socialization. Their answers and experiences inspired my interest in both gender development in young children and in what gender discrimination looks like today.

What are some examples of the most common “mistakes” you’ve seen recently in how media portray gender? The gender binary is so ingrained in our society that it permeates every part of it, especially via media. The media industry capitalizes on gender stereotypes so that finding anything subversive is like finding a needle in a haystack and pointing out the “mistakes” is almost the same as pointing out the media industry. While active voices against gender discrimination do exist, nobody’s running advertisements on them.

How aware do you think most young people are of the way males and females are treated differently in the media? There are so many layers of gender stereotypes that I think many young people are aware of the fact that men and women are treated differently in the media but I’m not sure they think it affects them. In Feminist theory, we use a word called “intersectionality”, which is used to analyze how institutions work together, systematically and inextricably, to create oppression. These institutions–sexism, racism, classism, transphobia, and homophobia-are so intertwined that it’s hard to talk about them if you don’t have the verbal framework to do so, and most kids don’t. But there are plenty of young people very aware of these institutions and who are doing great work to fight them. Plenty of generations have had movements related to gender issues and it has always felt like the young people driving the movement are treading water. In our generation, those young people are out there and you can see their solidarity and activism throughout the Internet, especially.

From your experience, how concerned are parents about the way girls and boys are portrayed in TV, movies, games, etc? As a caregiver and a Feminist, I’m constantly engaging in this conversation with parents, either through my own observation of their families or through meaningful discussion with parents who are interested. Many parents are superficially troubled by portrayals of gendered children in media but I think even the most aware parents become so overwhelmed with parenthood that gender seems like a secondary issue. It takes a lot of work to be a parent in the first place; to be a socially active parent seems a huge task for those not usually inclined to do so. There are always parents active in this dialogue but as media show us, society is pretty adamant about gender roles.

Do you think media are making progress in representation? How is it having an impact in real-life, if at all? Though the Internet is quickly becoming capitalized upon, it has proven to be a vast window of opportunity. For now, at least, a large majority of young people in the U.S. have access to the Internet in some way or another. While it can be troubling, the Internet can also be a liberating space where voices otherwise not heard in other media can gain some visibility. Progress is always slow and it’s easy to be cynical about it. But as long as conversations around gender discrimination exist, we know that progress does too.

The media industry is a huge machine and it can be tough to change. What can we do to help discourage media reinforcement of gender stereotypes? The media industry is impossible to change entirely, which is why media literacy is so important. Media literacy creates spaces that discourage media reinforcement of oppressive institutions, like those that enforce gender stereotypes, through accessible education. There are very few spaces where children of any background are given the tools to critically assess institutionalized oppression and media literacy programs are one of them. Looking at the entire machine can be overwhelming, but I think the best I can do is to be active in my community, even with my own family, to inspire a critical dialogue around identity, self-expression, and representation in the media.

Meghan McDermott and Rayhan Islam accepting an award from Michelle Obama

For The LAMP’s April Spotlight interview, we sat down with Meghan McDermott, the Executive Director of Global Action Project (G.A.P.). She is an expert on youth media and social justice, and has seen a lot of change both in technology and the young people who use it. Read on to learn more about G.A.P., her thoughts on the development and production of youth media and much more.

What is Global Action Project, and how did you come to be Executive Director?
G.A.P. is a youth-media arts organization with a social justice mission. We’re just about to celebrate our 20th anniversary. We were originally formed as a project of Global Kids, and over time established our own roots. I joined the organization as Executive Director eight years ago, having been on the board for a year. I just really loved the work.

Media have changed a lot since G.A.P. got started twenty years ago. How has that impacted the organization and work?
That is a huge question. The short answer is yes, media obviously has changed, but more than that, approaches to youth development have changed. And youth media as a field has actually emerged–ten years ago it was just a ragtag of collective initiatives. There’s much more clarity. On our end at G.A.P., we’ve seen a rise in people who are doing organizing work and are incorporating media into their activism, so that’s a shift. But probably the most talked about and least understood shift is the role of social networking. We just don’t know what it means yet. For those of us who do see media as a collaboration process, social networking is still about individual, raw, unmediated monologue, and we’re trying to figure that out. It’s so fluid and new. The Internet as a form of public access is less than twenty years old, so I think we’re still trying to understand what that has done for our lives.

What do you think makes media production such a uniquely powerful tool for youth empowerment and education?
Not everyone is going to agree with me on this, but for me it is the fact that it’s really well-suited for collaborative work. And you could say, “Well, what about theater ensemble or sports?” But there’s something about building a story together, and doing it with the media arts craft and tools that makes it different. I think theater ensemble is actually very similar, but the power of theater is that it’s live, and the power of media is that it goes on and on to reach vast audiences over time…it is the production means of our time. It’s a currency. It’s about developing a language and an ability to communicate. Media production with a purpose that is creatively engaged can be really amazing for opening people up to their own potential, and I do think media are unique because of the craft and audience and analysis. Ideally, it’s about pushing a person’s sense of potential beyond themselves, and not as an individual.

What would you say are some of the biggest differences between students twenty years ago and your students today?
Twenty years ago when G.A.P. was founded — and this is especially true because of how we started as a leadership organization — young people were really excited to gain access to these tools, just as they are today. And I don’t think the desire to communicate was any different. What may be different now is an immediacy, an urgency to their efforts; twenty years ago they had to sit down in front of a giant SHVS or 3/4 inch deck to edit and now it’s non-linear. Then, the cultural context was about addressing diversity, tolerance and multiculturalism…the context now is that there is more talk about young people as artists who are shifting both the aesthetics and demographics of the country, or being “social agents of change.” In some ways now, the youth development field may be more polarized with a focus on either social justice/change work on the one hand and strict academic achievement on the other, as if we have moved from a discourse of multiculturalism to workforce or 21st century literacy, for example. But fundamentally, what has not changed, is a real desire from young people to be respected and acknowledged by adults and peers for what they have to say, and for them to witness their own power and potential.

How have your students become more involved in their communities as a result of working with G.A.P.?
We haven’t done any real alumni tracking, except anecdotally. The thing I struggle with in answering this question is whether it means they get involved in their community now or community in general by moving on, going to college, becoming a teacher or whatever it is they want to do. So there are individual achievements over time to take into account. We have tried to make the direct connection to community much more concrete and real, where young people are making media to address a campaign or as part of a community movement. For example, we recently partnered with a great organization in the Bronx called Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice to help their young organizers produce a video in support of their restorative justice campaign. Restorative justice is an innovative youth-centered approach to addressing conflict in schools that is a direct response to zero tolerance policies. The focus is on being very peer-to-peer as opposed to punitive. Now YMPJ is using the video, called Breaking the Pipeline, as a central part of their campaign. You can find out more about the design of our partnership here, because we were featured in the Citizen Active series exploring Next Generation leadership strategies. So, in that sense we are working to make our links and impacts to community concrete, measurable and real. But young people are engaged in so many ways–whether it’s by screening their work, sitting on panels, going to conferences or bringing their sisters, brothers, cousins, parents to our programs and events—we have to work across tiers of impact.

G.A.P. recently received an award from Michelle Obama. What was that like?
That was really wonderful. Last year, we were one of fifteen organizations across the country to receive the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program award, which is a gold star from the President’s Committee on Arts and Humanities. What was exciting was that one of our students, Rayhan Islam, came with me, and he got to meet Michelle Obama and other people from around the country, and he learned about other the programs being honored at the White House that day. When you’ve worked so hard for so long, it is really gratifying to get noticed at that level.

Alejandra Ramos

What is Always Order Dessert, and how did it get started?

Always Order Dessert is my home cooking and entertaining blog where I share original recipes, cooking tips, do-it-yourself tutorials, entertaining ideas, and lots of personal anecdotes.

I started Always Order Dessert in January 2008 when I realized that what I really wanted to be writing about was food. I loved to cook and entertain, and had been to culinary school; it really was my passion, but for some reason I’d never really written about it on any of my other blogs up to that point. I didn’t think recipes fit within the structure of Sent From My Dell Desktop (where I was writing at the time) so I decided to start a new site devoted entirely to food. It was a time when I was feeling quite a bit of creative frustration at my day job, and launching Always Order Dessert became a way to work through that. Through my food blog I found that I was suddenly able to share my two passions–cooking and writing–with a like-minded community on the web.

You’ve been working with new media for a long time through your
work facilitating LAMP workshops, teaching librarians with Americans for Libraries, editing with Hearst Magazines International and writing your first blog, Sent From My Dell Desktop. Over the years, how have you seen new media influence the culture around food and cooking?
The proliferation of new media food content has really had an incredible effect on the way we cook and eat. From the hundreds of thousands of food bloggers sharing their recipes, photos, product and restaurant reviews, we’re are all getting an inside look at the way that the world eats. We’re learning about new ingredients and techniques, and encouraging and teaching each other. If I ever have a question about something, all I have to do is post it on Facebook or Twitter and within seconds, I’ll have responses and advice from fellow cooks around the planet. Some people think of cooking as a solitary activity, but it really doesn’t have to be. Cooks are no longer stuck standing in their kitchen alone wondering “what’s to make for dinner”; inspiration and guidance is available at the touch of a button.

We’ve also seen a number of new culinary stars rise out of this world–you no longer need a television show or fancy restaurant to make a name for yourself in the world of food. Anyone with talent and drive can get online and start sharing–there is room for all of us.

And on the flip-side of that, new media has afforded all of us access to celebrities and high-profile chefs that we would never have been able to chat with in this way. I think it’s pretty cool that I can have a great meal at Landmarc and then chat with Marc Murphy via Twitter about how good it was. Or that I can ask Dorie Greenspan or Amanda Hesser or the Real Simple magazine editors for a clarification on a recipe, and have them reply within seconds.

With your recent decision to work full-time on Always Order Dessert, what changes can we expect on the site?
So much! As of April 4th I’m going to be posting daily on the site–a big change from the current schedule of updating 1-3 times a week so it opens up a lot of doors in terms of new content. The number one change will be the increase in the number of new recipes I post. I’m going to be spending my days developing and testing recipes so that I have more to share and can keep the site updated daily with fresh content.

There will also be more quick kitchen tips and tutorials, DIY ideas, etc. I’m hoping to now add more video content to the site (something which I loved doing, but which was always too time-consuming to produce on a regular basis), and I am going to be including more longer, informative articles on topics like menu planning, building and stocking a pantry, and designing and executing parties.

Being able to work during the day on the site will make a big difference in terms of photography as I’ll be able to take advantage of gorgeous natural light (until now I’ve been using external flashes and lighting equipment to take shots at night or cramming multiple dishes into the weekend). I’m also going to partnering with other creative (and self-employed!) friends to create editorial styled stories and shoots.

What are you most looking forward to about co-producing this year’s Best Desserts?
I am really excited about this year’s local and seasonal angle, which I think is going to inspire some incredible entries, especially in June which is such a great month for local produce here in New York.

In terms of the actual production and coordination side of it, I think that coming into it with the experience of the first year under our belts has given us the knowledge and contacts to create an even more successful event.

Just a taste from Always Order Dessert...

There is a lot of advertising about food that we often accept without thinking. Slogans like “The Other White Meat,” “The Incredible, Edible Egg,” and “Got Milk,” have effortlessly become part of the national lexicon. Deliberately folksy advertising campaigns, like Ocean Spray with their cranberry bog “growers,” (two very charming actors that I actually met at a recent industry event) or Betty Crocker (who is redesigned every so often to appeal to that year’s average woman). The Corn Refiner’s Association is currently in the process of a blatant re-branding campaign in favor of high-fructose corn syrup (renaming it “corn sugar” and running constant commercials with kids talking around the breakfast table about how “natural” it is) that is so appalling it’s almost difficult to believe it’s not a spoof SNL ad.

I’m not saying that everything we read or hear is automatically bad or wrong or a lie (Lord knows I love bacon and dairy products, and Ocean Spray, which is one of the largest agricultural co-ops in the country, is actually a company that I really admire), but it’s about recognizing that we are all constantly being subjected to messages about food in all forms of media and educating ourselves as much as possible so that we can make the best choices for ourselves and our families.

One of the reasons I strongly believe in the importance of media literacy is because it provides people of all ages with the tools to identify and process these messages all across the spectrum, whether it relates to food, world events, consumer products, medicine, etc. Media literacy is a life skill that we all need to become better consumers and humans.

If you were submitting one of your desserts to compete in Best Desserts, which would you pick and why?
I’m presently deep in the throes of a year-long love affair with bundt cakes so I’d probably go with some kind of bundt cake highlighting some of that great summer produce. Known as “plain cakes,” I actually love those simple cakes that can be made in about an hour on an average weeknight and then left in a cake dome all week long for slicing as a craving hits. There is nothing better in my book!

What is the best way for people to keep up with news from Always Order Dessert?
Facebook and Twitter are great ways to keep in touch and find out what’s happening. Readers can “like” my page on Facebook where I post multiple times daily, updating about new recipes, projects I’m working on, photos, and snippets from my daily life. I’m also very active on Twitter: http://twitter.com/nandita. Feel free to connect and say hi so that I can follow you back! Readers can also sign up for my free newsletter, which goes out once a week with an update on what’s new on the site, plus invitations to events (like Best Desserts!)

Michael Weinberg

Public Knowledge works in Washington, D.C. to protect the public’s right to control their digital lives and experiences. We do that by making sure that the Internet is an open platform that allows anyone to communicate and express themselves. We also protect the checks and balances in copyright law to avoid free speech and expression being stifled by claims of infringement. In practice that means talking to members of Congress, people who work at federal agencies, and other policymakers in Washington, D.C. to make sure they take the public into consideration.

How do you define digital rights?

To me, digital rights are the rights that allow you to freely express yourself in the digital world without having to get permission from gatekeepers. That means being able to communicate online without getting permission from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), use the digital media you purchase in a way that is convenient for you, and being able to comment on culture without getting a copyright waiver from content owners.

How did you get interested in digital rights advocacy?

I was always impressed with all of the new technologies that computers and the Internet enabled, but grew increasingly frustrated that restrictive laws and policies prevented some of them from fully developing. We get to live in a time where so many new things are possible to do. Unfortunately, in many cases, laws that never imagined these new things prevent them from reaching the public. I love that part of my day is spent finding ways for innovative people to bring their innovative ideas to the public.

What are some of the most urgent threats to the average person’s digital rights?

One threat is automated copyright infringement detection systems. While these systems are often pretty good at determining if two works match, they cannot tell if the use of the works is legal or not. A computer cannot do a fair use analysis. That means that many times these systems flag fair uses as infringements and take them down unjustly.

Another is what it means to own a digital thing. Historically when you purchase a physical object you had ownership and control over it. That gave you rights – the right do modify it, or give it away, or use it in a way unintended by the person who sold it to you. Once you purchased it the person who sold it to you lost control over the object. That is increasingly untrue for digital goods. All of those agreements that you click past when you buy something digital online usually say that you are “licensing” the digital object, not purchasing it. The sellers do this in order to prevent you from exercising those traditional rights of ownership. This should be an incredibly worrying development to anyone who ever purchases anything digital.

Who have been some of your favorite guests on your podcast (other than The LAMP folks, of course)?

Well, no one compares to LAMP folks. I tell people that the podcast is kind of a scam for me. It gives me an excuse to get in touch with anyone I want and chat with them for half an hour about the interesting thing they are doing. Because I get to choose all of the guests, I kind of like all of them. But that’s kind of a lame answer, so I will say that all of the 3D printing people have been a lot of fun. It was also great to talk to the person behind Musopen, a site that makes public domain performances of classical music available for free. It is a great resource for people who make videos and need high quality scores.

Why is understanding and exercising fair use so important?

Fair use is important because it prevents copyright law from interfering with free speech. At its core, it makes sure that no copyright holder can block speech that he or she does not like or agree with. Also, fair use recognizes that our culture builds upon itself. Copyright law might not recognize this as much as I would like, but fair use does provide a way for creators to incorporate existing culture into new creations.

From your perspective, what potential does LAMPlatoon have to impact the practice of and dialogue around fair use?

LAMPlatoon is fantastic because it teaches kids that there is nothing sacred about the media that is presented to them. If they think that something is wrong, or misguided, or does not make sense, they are free to point that out. It also teaches kids to turn media back on itself. The commercial breaks would be much less effective if they were just descriptions of the commercials interspersed with commentary (and then the doll turns. and then stars come out of its eyes. and then the girl smiles. …..) Instead, LAMPlatoon participants turn the commercial against itself, and use the commercial itself to prove their point.

Once kids understand that they are free to use media to comment media they will see the world as a two-way place. Hopefully they will also recognize that fair use allows for that two-way dialogue because it prevents the owners of the commercials from silencing their commentary.

How did you get started in documentary filmmaking? Before exploring documentary film, I studied journalism and bounced around the country working as a newspaper reporter. I loved it, mostly because I think in my heart, I just want to tell stories. Everywhere, all the time. But I felt slightly limited in my own skills as a writer when it came to expressing these stories. I’ve always been a visual person, and a lover of documentary films, so I decided to take a short break from the news world and I headed to NYC for a graduate program in documentary film at The New School.

What inspired you to make “In Bed with a Mosquito”? The inspiration to make my short film came from the main subject herself, Betty Brassell. She is a true character and such an incredible woman, I couldn’t believe there were not already five films about her. She’s incredibly politically active, even though this came late in life for her. I met her in late 2007 when it seemed like the ’08 presidential election was still light years away – though the campaigning had been ongoing for months already. I think people (myself included) were really not yet excited about the election and had a general sense of apathy. Betty and her fellow activists, however, were in the streets several times each week, protesting the war in Iraq. I was very inspired by their refusal to just sit and wait for things to change.

How do you decide what stories you want to tell in your films? I think character trumps everything. I find the pieces I’m most happy with don’t always have the most beautiful shots or seamless editing, but they have compelling, endearing, characters who can tell their story, sometimes better than I can. So when I find an interesting character, I try to find a way to tell their story. And in reverse, when I know what story needs to be told, I try to find the best subject to tell the story through.

What is the most challenging part for you about making a documentary? When it comes to the edit, it can be difficult (even with a very short piece) to try and remove myself from the experience of recording or filming the story. A lot of times, video makers fall in love with the “making” of the video or film and documentary and as a result, aren’t always able to discern whether there’s a real story there. I try to look at my footage and think to myself, “Why should someone else care about this?,” and go from there.

What have been some of your favorite experiences in working with The LAMP? I absolutely love the students’ excitement about technology. They are so savvy, that they take to videomaking very naturally. And they are not afraid to experiment, something I think grownups unfortunately sorta grow out of. We had a young man in our summer workshop who had never shot or edited video before. By the end of the summer, he had been the cameraman on 2 group projects and the screenwriter and director for a pretend commercial shoot. Oh, I shouldn’t forget to mention that he learned Final Cut Pro in a single morning and edited down about 20 minutes of audio into a radio documentary by the end of the class period! Impressed isn’t even the proper word here.

What are you working on now? While I’d like to eventually work on a feature length documentary, right now I’m trying to document my friends and family as a way to just be creative with people I love, in my spare time.

Growing up in Anchorage, you did a lot of work with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. How did you move from your work there to an interest in journalism and publishing? Actually, Anchorage, U.S. Fish & Wildlife and journalism are all interconnected. I had moved up to AK just before high school–you know, that point where you’re supposed to decide what you want to do with your life. After discarding the idea of being a fashion designer I got involved with Anchorage’s very active youth journalism projects. One was Perfect World, a weekly section in the Anchorage Daily News written and edited by teens. The other was Alaska Teen Media Institute where teens report stories about what they care about in a monthly radio show. As a result of these two opportunities I decided to major in convergence journalism at the University of Missouri.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service was a chance to see the other side of the interview. I wanted to see how public relations and educational outreach worked. So on and off through college I volunteered with the External Affairs department, which was an amazing opportunity with great people. Actually that can be said for all of the programs I’ve worked with.

But of course in college I found my interests shifted from the immediate and constant reporting of news to publishing. In short I’m a book nerd who likes technology.

What are you working on right now? Right now I’m working in the eBooks and audiobooks. Most specifically enhanced eBooks, which takes the reading experience beyond just the text. We include extras such as in depth video interviews with the authors, text extras, and photos not included in the print book to name just a few of the possibilities.

In your experience as a journalist, what have been some of your greatest challenges working in an increasingly digital landscape? I love the digital landscape in both journalism and publishing. For me it was never a challenge so much as an opportunity. Well, other than the hours I spent cursing at the computer/video camera/camera/recorder/pen when it didn’t work how I thought it should. However, one challenge I did see while working in newsrooms as a student was training reporters at an outlet to gain the skills they need to branch out of their traditional form of story telling. The other was digitally reaching rural communities who didn’t have broadband. There are a lot of cool things you can do digitally, but on a dial up connection they simply don’t work.

Ten years from now, what do you think the publishing industry will look like? I have no idea, and that’s exciting.

Do you have a preferred mode of reading–paper book, Kindle/iPad, audiobook? Why? That’s really dependent upon what I’m doing as I’m reading. If I’m traveling or cooking, I love audiobooks. If I’m commuting, I love reading on my iPod Touch- I just can’t afford a dedicated device. Meanwhile when I’m curled up at home I’m typically reading a traditional book.

How do you decide what you want to read in your spare time? I’m a genre junkie. If it’s YA, science fiction, fantasy or a comic book/graphic novel I will most likely jump on it. Especially if the narrator is a strong, sarcastic female character. Typically what I’m actually reading is dependent on what I can swap with my friends, so a lot of it is due to word of mouth. Oh, and the cover, I’m a sucker for a good cover.

What got you interested in volunteering with The LAMP?
Honestly, by its mission and its goal to work on a grassroots level with kids to teach them about all forms of media. I was in a similar program in high school and I can honestly say it had a huge impact on what I studied in college and even what I do now. I wanted the chance to give that back to someone else.

What were some of your favorite LAMP workshop experiences? So far I love working with so many enthusiastic members and volunteers. Everyone I’ve met has been incredibly passionate about The LAMP and its ideas and goals. They all seem to be constantly looking for new ways to expand and new ways to reach more people. It’s so easy to just get swept up in all that positive energy and think, “Oh yeah, I want to be part of this. This is going somewhere!”

Want some of that positive energy? Get involved with The LAMP!

October 9, 1985: Rupert Murdoch announces his plan to form Fox Broadcasting Company. Murdoch’s News Corp. had just completed purchase of 20th Century Fox along with television stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., Dallas and Houston. As a result, News Corp had acquired an extensive film library, the rights to several television series and access to 20% of households with televisions in the United States at that time. The “big three” networks–ABC, NBC and CBS–now had true competition. The network went live exactly one year after the announcement, airing on 96 stations and reaching more than 80% of American households with TV. It has been the home of several hit television shows such as The Simpsons, Married…With Children, Arrested Development, 24, The X-Files, American Idol and Beverly Hills, 90210. These shows and others have left an indelible mark on American media and popular culture, and today Fox Broadcasting Company is the leading network among adults between the ages of 18 and 49.

October 18, 1985: Nintendo brings its Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Mario Bros. to the United States. Mario first appeared in Donkey Kong in 1981, but it wasn’t until 1985 that he became the star of his own game. First introduced in Japan on September 13, 1985, Super Mario Bros. was in the original bundle of 18 games offered with the North American launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which was launched on the same day. Although it was not the first home video gaming console (the Magnavox Odyssey of 1972 holds that honor), the NES was the first true hit in video game consoles. Over 90,000 units were sold in New York by the end of 1985, and at the time Nintendo was the company to beat in terms of video game console sales. Since the first NES, Nintendo has had its share of ups and downs but continues to put out top-selling products; last August, Nintendo’s Wii passed the 30 million sales mark in the US, and over 73 million consoles have been sold worldwide since it was launched in late 2006. As for Mario, he has appeared in over 200 games since 1981. As for Mario, he has appeared in over 200 games since 1981. It’s hard to imagine video games (or for some of us, childhood) without-a him.

October 26, 1985: The very first Blockbuster Video store opens in Dallas, TX, and home entertainment has never been the same since. As the first video rental chain, Blockbuster’s success lay in using technology to streamline the video rental process, making it easy for stores to carry and manage thousands of tapes, titles and memberships at an affordable price. Previously, video rental stores were mostly mom-and-pop stores which carried a limited number of movies, and renting a movie could be both time-consuming and expensive, especially if a tape was not returned by its due date. But with Blockbuster, movie fans had the freedom to choose from a wide variety of genres and titles at one store. 25 years later, the way people watch movies has changed and, unable to keep up, the company has just filed for bankruptcy. The increased availability for on-demand viewing has increased dramatically with TiVo, the Internet and on-demand features in cable packages. Of course, the advent of Netflix has also played a large role: Renting a movie is so efficient now, you don’t even need to leave your couch. Never mind rewind the VHS tape.

Sarah Brown

This month, we sat down with Sarah Brown, the latest addition to The LAMPpost blogging team and student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Look for Sarah’s posts here every other week, with another one coming up this week. In the meantime, check out her previous posts!

First, the classic: What did you do during your summer vacation? My husband and I went to Alaska. It was something we had been planning for a long time. It was pretty much the exact opposite of being in NYC. I read a novel and saw icebergs, eagles, and bears. It was amazing, but it is also good to be home.

How did you decide what you wanted to study in school? Well, I made the not-enormous leap from being a literature student to being an American studies student focusing on copyright. I don’t think there is any such thing as the lone genius with the totally original idea. We all build from one another and copyright restrictions don’t always reflect that reality or encourage cooperative innovation. It bugs me that we all seem to understand that on some level, yet the myth persists and affects how we view ourselves as participants in a creative process. In order to really talk about contemporary copyright I need to know more about new media, so that’s what I am working on.

Why did you want to volunteer with The LAMP? Last spring I interviewed this great young artist and teacher, Jennifer Jacobs. We met to discuss her artwork as part of the research I am doing for my thesis and ended up talking about education. She told me that one of her biggest challenges as a media teacher at Hunter College is convincing her students that technology isn’t just for consumption–-that they can use it to create. That really struck a chord with me. Some time after that I looked online for non-profit media education programs in NYC and here I am.

What are you most looking forward to this school year? As a student, I have a lot of reading ahead of me. I also get to do more interviews which I love because I get to hear people talk about work they are passionate about; it’s very motivating. As someone who works at a college, I am really excited about a website we have put together as a way to make resources for students and teachers in my department more accessible. I hope people will take advantage of it and help us to make it better.

What do you plan to write about on the blog? I wish I knew. So far, I have been going with whatever catches my eye, which can be a bit unwieldy as a strategy. I know that I am always interested in who is being left out of conversations about media. Especially when it comes to new technology, I feel like so much of what you read/hear assumes that everyone has an iPad on their nightstand and a BlackBerry in their pocket. Maybe approaching how the changing landscape of media affects those of us shy of the cutting edge could be a goal of mine. I am also always open to suggestions!

Bike Box takes to the street

What effect does the work have on the way you perceive or use such technology? For example, does creating or participating in bike box change the way you look at what an iPhone can do? SG: Developing an application on a cell phone presented some difficulties. In many ways, we felt limited by the off-the shelf technologies out there. For example, it is virtually impossible to create an application that works on more than one type of cell phone. Initially we were much more interested in developing an application on the Android, but we made a connection with David Gagnon of the Games Learning Society at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and he had already developed an open source software called Aris for the iPhone that we used as a blueprint for Bike Box.

During this process we have learned that there are a lot of people trying to capitalize on these types of mobile media applications. The competition in this industry restricts software developers because there is no standard operating system. Also, the learning curve is such that it reinforces boundaries between creators and users.

BB:This project came out of our shared interest in mobile media, and how GPS and wireless technologies can be used to enhance or complicate the experience of the spaces we encounter. When we began building the Bike Box iPhone app, we were constantly pushing back against the technology. An iPhone can do just about everything, and this is very seductive. But we didn’t want it to do everything. We wanted it to do just enough.

Though we’re excited to have discovered a technology that allows our project to work, we always hoped that the technology would be secondary to the project. That is to say, we’re far more interested in the audio content, and in how the audio relates to specific spaces. Although Bike Box is a screen-based application, we made it so that there is very little to interact with onscreen. We want people looking at the world, not the screen.

Why bikes? Do you see a relationship between bicycle travel and open source software or the practice of aural archival? SG: We were thinking of the bicycles as mobile recording and playback machines, creating a space for participation and discovery.

BB: We both like to ride bikes. We commute on our bikes, and we’ve gone on a couple long distance bike tours. But bikes are also a good technology for navigating through urban space. You can cover a lot of ground on a bike, but at the same time, it’s also easy to pull over and have a fine-grained experience of a place. Bikes also neatly straddle the public and the private, allowing for the autonomy and freedom of private transit without sealing your body in the private space of a car. On a bike, you still have a public body and a public presence, and you still have access to public space. Since the bikes are wired with speakers, even the act of listening to audio has been made public. Passers-by can eavesdrop on the same audio you’re listening to. So bikes allow for a physical exploration of the public sphere, and the app allows for a conceptual or intellectual or poetic exploration of the public sphere.

Can you give me an idea about some of what I might hear en route? Is there a contribution that particularly alters the landscape? BB: There are a lot of great audio contributions. Stephanie Rothenberg and Joan Linder contributed a series of audio tags they call “Brooklyn Beijing Babel.” Stephanie and Joan are Brooklynites currently working in Beijing, and they found a number of sites in Beijing that are in some sense analagous to sites in Brooklyn. For instance, they recorded street sounds from a hip, happening district of Beijing that they “placed” along a hip, happening stretch of Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. Listening to the audio, you experience both spatial displacement and continuity.

SG: Paul Lloyd Sargent‘s “Hydronym: Erie Basin Meets Erie Basin” traces the network of historic waterways connecting New York’s Erie Basin in Red Hook to the Great lakes region while leading you through the newly constructed shopping destinations there. His project collapses Erie canal history and the physical remnants of the shipping industry in a way that alters our contemporary experience of Red Hook.

What do you feel bike box might offer to student who is learning about creating and understanding the types of technology used for the project? BB: Bike Box hopes to model a relationship to technology that is interactive, investigatory, and productive. We hope it will also encourage an engaged relationship to space, and an interest in the geographical extension of our lives, our histories, and our memories. Given the current tendency toward virtualized human contact, we hope Bike Box will bring bodies into the street, that shared space of community and collision.