I loved this image from Boston Public Library: it was a war poster supporting the farming work done by women. I took off the words and added my own quote from my favorite farmer poet, Wendell Berry.
Category Archives: Media
Postcard A Day for March 2018
A couple creative threads are coming together this month:
First: I am doing a keynote for a couple librarian groups in Virginia and want to spend some time introducing them to the Digital Public Library of America. It is a portal to digital library collections and a wonderful way into primary sources. Plus, because the media comes from many organizations, it is also an opportunity to talk about copyright. But I also want to give the participants some creative ideas for what to do with the media.
Second: I participate sporadically in the work of ds106’s The Daily Create and CLMOOC and love the way they spark my creativity. March is CLMOOC’s Postcard Remix month. Pretty simple idea: Create postcards and mail them to those who sign up.
Put them together and you get my plan for creating a postcard every day of March. I haven’t picked a theme, but it is Women’s History Month so that’s a good starting point.
Postcard #1:
An Abomination?
A couple days ago, a well known figure in the digital world posted a tweet calling it an “abomination” that it took so long to open Google contacts.
I chose not to reply probably because of the celebrity of the poster, but the comment stuck with me. An abomination? I actually tried to open Google contacts. It seemed to go pretty quickly over my 7 mbps DSL connection, but I probably have low expectations. But, honestly, an abomination? Live in the first world much? And even in the first world, where the last 48 hours saw two seemingly senseless police shootings, it’s a ridiculous word to use to describe a slow website.
Maybe I’m also overly sensitive as I just finished reading Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson’s indictment of a flawed justice system where poverty and race have more to do with criminal investigations and trials than actual guilt or innocence.
We really need to get our priorities in order, my friends, when a slow website is considered an abomination. Annoying? Frustrating? Sure, but save a word like abomination for things that really are.
Staging Stories
I’ll start by saying that I am not generally part of the Facebook police. I figure the medium just lends itself to the spreading of misinformation, and I have a limited amount of time and energy to keep people honest. I rarely pursue all the photos and factoids posted by friends.
But, for some reason, the photo of a little girl curled up asleep in the outline of a female figure with the caption indicating she was an Iraqi orphan longing for her mother seemed too heart wrenching to be true. It didn’t take me long to discover that the photo had, indeed, been staged by a professional photographer. The little girl is Iranian and a relative of the photographer who, on her flickr page, has similar photos.
The question asked by Annie at PhD in Parenting is important for all of us to consider: “Does it matter?” She comes down on the side of yes, and so do I. She writes:
I know that in this day and age of the Internet, and especially since I’ve been on the Internet for 22 years now, I should know not to take things at face value. But it grabbed me and then I felt betrayed that it was staged, but presented as photo journalism.
As Annie points out, there are plenty of sad stories of children in war zones. Why make up a story? Maybe because you can? And perhaps the original poster figured it would highlight a tragedy so its verity was not important. But, a quick look at the poster’s public Facebook profile shows a wide variety of posts from silly cats to find the panda so I’m not sure we can give him the benefit of the doubt. I would like to extend that benefit to my friend who shared it…she is a socially conscious individual who really does care about the world.
But, she is also a well-educated woman who should know better. I suspect if I called her on it, she would be apologetic but might also lean towards the side of bringing attention to children in war and be less concerned about what I see as a major digital citizenship problem. If you aren’t willing to check your sources before you post, what other questionable bits of information might you be passing along? Maybe nobody gets hurt…well, except for the photographer whose photo is under standard copyright and the next person who shares it only to find out it’s fake and, honestly, my friend whose reputation is now suspect at least in my mind. These are certainly minor hurts in a larger world of hurting children but scaled up they lead to the kinds of misinformation that make the web the dangerous echo chamber it has become.
The Messiness of Contemporary Media
A fancy title for something that I suspect has been going on for awhile but only really hit home with me today.
I get an email from the Chester County Book Company about books and today’s edition included a link to this amazing book trailer for Mosquitoland:
The description shows the blending of words, music and images: “Book and music written and produced by David Arnold.” No longer does a writer just put words on a page; he is able to create his own imagery as well. I was struck by the power of the video to make me want to read the book. I suspect it would be even more powerful for the young adult audience for which this book is really written.
Video book trailers is not a new idea for educators: they’ve been making them with kids since video became readily accessible. But they seem to have also found their way into mainstream in a pervasive way.
And, for me, it is a reminder of one of the ways I tend to seem old in this very new world. In the old world, books were books, movies were movies, created by different people and often not the same story in the end. What happens when authors “produce” the whole range of their work from written word to soundtrack to video. In this short clip, we get a visual of the main character, something we would normally have to create on our own out of the words themselves. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I am also reminded of the wealth of media resources out there around books from interviews to recitations. This review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book is a great example as it mixes words, images, audio and video into one page. Wonderful and yet, again, I’m not sure how I feel about it. I want to engage with the author at the level of the work he has created. I don’t want to hear too many interviews that ask him to explain it or too many reviews that try to explain it. I’ll check all this out afterwards, but for now, I just want to sit with the book itself.
NB: This is a cross post with my personal blog, In One Place.