On Saturday June 20th Mike and I performed Thus Spoke The Spectacle at Saint Louis University for the Media Ecology Association's 10th Annual Convention.

photo by Robert Francos

We must say that hanging out informally with these people is as entertaining and intellectually stimulating as the actual panels, screenings, and performances, which were themselves top-notch.

photo by Robert Francos

The issues raised in the official conference presentations carried over into vibrant discussions and debates at meals, parties, and informal gatherings around campus.

photo by Robert Francos

This is the second MEA convention I've attended, following on the heels of last year's convention in Santa Clara, California, where we were honored to receive the MEA's John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology.

photo by Robert Francos

This convention was even more exciting for us as we got to do a full TSTS performance for an audience as packed with kindred spirits as any we play for. Among what other group are people like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Guy Debord, and so many other influences of ours not only recognized but meticulously studied and debated?

It was a great honor to meet Marshall McLuhan's son and collaborator, Eric McLuhan, and to talk to him at length about our project and media ecology in general. And the conference being held at the university of Father Walter Ong gave us the opportunity to learn more about this media ecology pioneer as well.

photo by Robert Francos

If you're interested in media, media studies, media literacy, media reform, or the interaction between media, technology, and society, then media ecology is for you. Look into joining the Media Ecology Association, participating on its listserve, and attending its next convention in Maine, June 10-13, 2010.

Thanks to the MEA organizers who invited us to perform, including Sara van den Berg, Paul Soukup, Janet Sternberg, and Lance Strate. Special thanks to Abigail Lambke and Dan Frierdich for securing a great performance space and managing all the tech issues; Robert Francos for his many excellent photographs; and all of our MEA friends and supporters for making this performance of Thus Spoke The Spectacle truly one to remember.

Previously, I wrote about Day 1 of the media literacy conference at Pratt Institute in my posts Media Conversations Part I and Media Conversations Part II. This installment concerns the screening of the film Consuming Kids.

Consuming Kids, subtitled "The Commercialization of Childhood," is a must-see film put out by the Media Education Foundation documenting the pervasiveness of marketing to children. Here's the description from the film's website:

Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world. Consuming Kids pushes back against the wholesale commercialization of childhood, raising urgent questions about the ethics of children's marketing and its impact on the health and well-being of kids.

The film documents the history of the deregulation of children's marketing, bringing us to where we are today. Most countries still have laws against pervasive marketing to children. Bowing to corporate pressure, the U.S. government began dismantling such regulations in the 70's, and killed them altogether during the Reagan years.

According to the film, while children account for something like $40 billion in direct sales of children's products, they influence $700 billion in overall sales to adults. The upshot is that marketers know that the real money is in finding out how to get kids to influence their parents' overall purchasing decisions and habits, not just their purchases of kids' products.

With these goals and the absence of regulation, it's hardly surprising that corporations employ an army of psychologists, sociologists, scientists, marketers, childhood development experts, etc., to train kids in nagging, to study the eye movements of three year olds sitting in from of the TV, to discover what shapes and images appeal to a three year old as opposed to a five year old, and so on - basically, to dissect the childhood psyche to find out how to turn kids into lifelong, brand-loyal consumers. The movie also discusses the invention of the category "tween" as an enormous marketing ploy, and hits on many other angles of the issue such as gender-based marketing differentiation, violence, product placement, and more.

What we do about this is up to each of us individually. At the very least, I think it's worth noting that there are people out there looking to take possession of the eyes, ears, hearts, minds, and souls of our kids. No, not in an "Excellent, Smithers!" Mr. Burns rubbing hands with maniacal glint in eye backroom conspiracy theory sort of way:

Just average corporate Joes and Josephines looking to make a buck or trillion. Which in the long run is probably scarier in the Hannah Arendt "banality of evil" sense.

In his intro to the movie, David Walczyk asked something like "what truth is a scientist recording the eye movements of a three year old looking to find?" Good question...

In my previous post about the Media Conversations Conference at Pratt Institute, I discussed my TSTS screening and discussion, which was followed by a short presentation by conference organizer David Walczyk. David is a professor at Pratt Institute's School of Information and Library Science. Much credit to him and Lance Strate for putting together a coherent set of presentations for this night (no small order at events like this), and Mike and I are quite glad to have these guys as TSTS allies.

David described the event flow like this: Thus Spoke The Spectacle would lay out the disease of our times on a grand scale cultural level; his presentation would view the problem from a psychological standpoint; then a specific example of the Spectacle, the unethical, unapologetic pervasive marketing to children would be exposed by the film Consuming Kids; and finally a talk by Tom de Zengotita would top things off, highlighting his experience teaching media literacy to kids. The event was thus intended to proceed via a narrowing of the theme from a large-scale societal analysis down to grassroots education to deal with the problem of media manipulation. I think that was achieved.

David screened a short video of a young girl, discussing in a very grown-up manner the psychological effects of living in a world of incoherence and information overload. A poignant moment from his presentation was his flat-out assertion that media literacy in its standard form only treats the symptoms of the problem, and that he's tired of treating the symptoms, and wants to treat the disease. Agreed.

In the next installment I'll talk about the screening of the important movie Consuming Kids.

Thanks to Angie from www.WhatNewsShouldBe.org for sending this tidbit along. Maybe Nader and Kucinich should take note? Although those guys are kind of skinny to begin with...

June 4, 2009
Italy: Party Starts a Hunger Strike
By REUTERS

About 150 politicians from Italy's small, liberal Radical party have begun a hunger strike to protest what they say is a lack of television coverage ahead of an election for the European Parliament. The party said on Wednesday that it wanted RAI, the state TV company, to rebalance its coverage. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls most of Italy's mainstream television, through his ownership of the private broadcaster Mediaset and his indirect influence over RAI.

Thus Spoke The Spectacle led off the Media Conversations conference at Pratt Institute on Thursday June 4. Thanks to organizers David Walczyk and Lance Strate for inviting us to participate.

Here's the flyer for the event. Notice how grandpa's into books, mom and dad dig TV, the child is hooked on computers, and the dog is dreaming of Twitter... I began with some brief comments laying out our current thinking on "radical media literacy." In a nutshell, we at TSTS believe that media literacy needs to extend beyond its traditional framework into more activist, political territory, and to be viewed in the context of the creation, exercise and perpetuation of power. Our goal is for our videos, website, screenings and performances to open up space for this kind of dialogue.

I noted that radical media literacy is nothing new, as it's the form of media analysis practiced by social critics ranging from Henry David Thoreau to Noam Chomsky. However, as many at the conference lamented, media literacy has been watered down and used as a blanket term covering everything from teaching people how to make Powerpoint presentations to landing journalism jobs to recognizing "quality" and "trustworthy" media sources such as the NY Times (ha!) as opposed to "unverified," "unreliable" sources such as blogs and wikis (the latter effort sponsored, as you'd probably guess, by the dying print publishing industry itself).

I argued that the skill of decoding media messages and motivations should be applied in the context of understanding and confronting the authority of the Spectacle. The need for a deeper media literacy was echoed by David Walczyk, and I think somewhat by Tom de Zengotita in his address, although unfortunately he didn't see my presentation so couldn't make the connection between our analyses. My sense is that some of the audience members did, though.

Following my introduction I screened and discussed:

More to come on the rest of the conference. . .