Declare Yourself, the non-profit youth voter registration organization, along with the Pearson Foundation and the National Student/Parent Mock Election, honored New Jersey schools as national winners for their voter education and mock election campaigns last fall with a special exhibition of an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. This rare document, one of 25 remaining copies printed by John Dunlap when Thomas Jefferson finished his final draft on July 4, 1776, is owned by Norman and Lyn Lear and remains the only touring copy of the Declaration of Independence. It will also visit six other winning schools across the country.
THE NEWS
Would watching the entireLord of the Rings trilogy keep you off the streets and politically cowed? The Iranian government is hoping LOTR does the trick this week to quiet the mass unrest over the recent, questionable presidential elections. Entertainment as...riot stick. more>>
Thirty-five thousand years ago, what made living in a cold cave a little bit better? A Little Ice Age Music. Last fall, archeologists found a bone flute with five finger holes in a cave in Germany. Entertainment seems to be in our genes.Read the article, which includes an MP3 of what Stone Age music might have sounded like.
Dangermouse has just released his new CD, Dark Night of the Soul, but a sticker on it warns "For legal reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.” Huh!? Old recording contracts and IP issues aside, the music can at least be streamed here. Read more. And check out what Dangermouse said about his first CD, The Grey Album, and its unique journey to market at our Ready To Share event. Full RTS transcript is here.
What's the latest high-tech tool to fight human trafficking in China? Anime. MTV China will debut "Intersection," a new animated film voiced by some of China's top movie stars. more>>
What junk news did you find hard to digest in the last year? Check out the top ten Junk Food News stories as compiled by Project Censored at Sonoma State University. more>>
Science as entertainment: Can the same channel that brings you Ice Road Truckers shine a clear light on peer-reviewed research work involving a recently discovered, possibly revolutionary "missing link" in human evolution? They're darn tootin' gonna try! OMG. more>> and more>>
Social networking comes of age...in Guatemala, and it may remake that country's political landscape. A murdered lawyer leaves a "in case of my assassination" video which details the involvement of Guatemala's president and first lady in the murder of one of his clients; the video hits YouTube; protests of his death are live-streamed from laptops in the streets of the capital; Facebook groups are calling for the president to resign; one 96-character Tweet about the crisis causes the Twitter user to be arrested and charged with "inciting financial panic." His bail is raised from around the world via Twitter. And that's just the beginning. more>>
Like all those crows in The Birds pecking at Tippi Hedren, Twitter is starting to nip at the livelihoods of professional film critics and the complex, costly marketing plans of studios. In a world of constant connectivity, word-of-mouth (tweet-of-fingers?) about a movie can spread across the globe before the opening credits are even over. more>>
The rabid fanbase behind comic book characters and Star Trek films is a key reason for studios making the next sequel or prequel in a beloved series. But do they also inhibit the creative chops of filmmakers? more>>
Do you like Brando or Bogart? Not the movie stars -- the floor plans. Apartment owners and condo developers are using Brando's name to, well, brand a lifestyle, even as trustees of the actor's estate try to figure out how to monetize whatever he might mean to consumers now. more>>
Live music concerts, like this month's Coachella Music Festival, now lead double lives, separated by mere seconds: there's the concert in real-time, then the immediate dissemination of it throughout the world via cell phone, Twitter and Facebook. A tree can't fall in the forest without social networking these days. more>>
AMC's Breaking Bad hired a real narco-ballad band to sing about its fictional meth-dealing lead character in a music video. Viral-narketing? more>>
Plus ça change....well, not exactly. The Louvre, assisted by a generous grant from the Annenberg Foundation, is installing kid-friendly, multi-media displays and other hands-on, decidedly un-French elements as part of an educational outreach program to make museums more attractive to kids. more>>
Not a fan of Battlestar Galactica? You are so not cool. Guess where the cast was last week? That's right -- at a major think tank panel at the United Nations. Now dry your tears and add BG to your TiVo. more>>
Remember when scripted TV shows were built around a singular star with talent like Mary Tyler Moore, Roseanne, Seinfeld? Now producers hope to start with a product -- soap, soda, cereal -- and build a show around it. Anyone want to watch I Love Lather? more>>
Women are forbidden to sing in public under Sharia Law. What happens when a woman on Afghan Star, an American Idol-styled TV show, sings -- and dances to -- her final song? Read what Pat Mitchell, CEO of the Paley Center for Media, has to say about media's power to change lives, the course of history, and the future. more>>
On the Origin of Species is not known for its laugh-out-loud jokes. But Richard Milner, a science historian, has added showbiz success to his CV with a comedic musical about his idol, Charles Darwin. To read more, use your flippers-turned-hands and click here or watch this delightful video.
What do you call advertising packaged as news? In Las Vegas, it's called the "More" morning show on KVVU-TV. more>>
Eggs have always been considered a nearly perfect food. Now an American media company has worked its brand magic on them and made them completely perfect. Behold: Disney eggs. more>>
"Who could say 'No' to Nicole Kidman?" asked one of the eminent professors of international relations assembled recently for a conference to dissect the new phenomenon of "celebrity diplomacy." What happens when everyone -- from academics to diplomats to world leaders -- is starstuck. more>>
Have't we all decided TV commercials are an evil blight in our living rooms and on civilization in general? Well, we might be wrong. A new study reveals that viewers actually enjoy a show with breaks in it more than a show with none. The break helps extend the appreciation of the novelty of the show. It's called the disruption of adaptation effect. more>>
Death & Taxes, Part 27: For all you hot girls and guys flying around in Second Life, here's a heads up that the IRS has it's eye on all the virtual money you're earning there. The taxes will probably be very real. more>>
Think "Tetris" is just a dumb, old game? New research suggests playing it after traumatic events can lessen PTSD flashbacks. more>>
For years, the Army has used video simulators to train soldiers and pilots. Now it's hoping a $13 million war video arcade will boost its success signing up new recruits in urban centers, where typically the pickings are lean. more>>
An icon is an icon is an icon...Oxford scientists, using MRIs, have discovered that the brain reacts the same to images of powerful consumer brands as it does to religious icons. In Marketing We Trust? more>>
Is product integration in TV shows a new craven low for American media? More like a blemish present since TV's birth: read the guidelines for writers on a 1949 Camel cigarette-sponsored show. more>>
What kind of new technology does it take to out-smart the TiVo generation from blowing through ads? Rub your eyes and look at the white text on black title cards that now appear before every commercial on AMC's Mad Men. This show about advertising is changing the ad game. more>>
More than ever, the world loves American pop culture. CSI is now more popular in France than it is here. So why does the image of the United States still take a beating in polls? more>>
Death as Entertainment? Nothing new, considering the crowds that gathered at hangings and guillotine executions, not to mention snuff films in our own era. Yet the recent live webcam-broadcast suicide of Abraham Biggs, Jr. -- who was watched and even egged on by his fellow posters on BodyBuilding.com to take the pills that ended his life -- prompts as many questions about the human heart as the it does about the distant, anonymous lives that new technology sometimes offers us. more>> more>>
Video games have been touted as educational or beneficial for years, but now there's a game that actually promotes healing. Snow World is a new virtual reality game designed to take burn patients' minds off their pain during therapy and wound-cleaning. It allows doctors to reduce the amount of pain-killers used, which speeds physical and emotional recovery. more>>more>>
With "narrative" being a component of just about everything now, from political campaigns and advertising to college essays and weddings, do we really need M.I.T.'s new Center for Future Storytelling? Yes! say former Hollywood executives and media experts who have partnered on this effort to study if traditional ways of telling stories -- those with a beginning, middle and end -- and their ability to deliver meaning, are being eroded by the tsunami of media technology hitting audiences now. more>>
The world can't seem to get enough of our TV shows and movies. But a new poll commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League reveals that nearly 60% of American respondents agreed that "the people who run the TV networks and the major movie studios do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans." Focus group, anyone? more>>
At last, Los Angeles takes the threat of a major earthquake seriously -- by throwing a party! The guest list has 5 million people on it. more>>
It looks like the latest amusement ride, but it just might help save lives: the Quake Cottage gives LA citizens the bump and shake feel of a real 8.0 earthquake. more>>
Dreading the next week of 24/7 campaign coverage? Tune out cable news and tune in...vintage sit-coms that all feature an election storyline. Joost, the online video channel, offers a collection of "special" episodes from Maude, Dynasty, Bewitched and Welcome Back, Kotter, that may help to cool your fevered political head. more>>
THE CENTER
A World of Stories
A Conversation With Top Hollywood Writers and Dr. Tachi Yamada, President of the Global Health Program at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Lear Center's Hollywood, Health & Society program and the Writer's Guild of America, West, invite you to this special event to hear compelling global health stories from experts in the heart of the action overseas, and meet TV writers who have turned stories on global health topics into top-rated television shows.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is in touch with heroes on the front lines of health and medical crises worldwide, and our keynote speaker Dr. Tachi Yamada oversees the largest health portfolio in the world.
Roundtable Discussion Moderator: Neal Baer, MD, Executive Producer, Law & Order: SVU Peter Blake: Writer, HOUSE Larry Barat, MD, MPH: USAID, Senior Malaria Advisor, Presidential Malaria Initiative
This event is a presentation of Hollywood, Health & Society's Global Health Initiative.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Dinner – 6:30 p.m.
Remarks and Q&A – 7:00 to 8:30 p.m.
Writers Guild of America, West
7000 W. Third Street, 2nd Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Please contact Courtenay Singer with any questions crsinger@usc.edu or 323-782-3321
The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture
The Lear Center's Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture project, directed by Joe Saltzman, is delivering more remarkable work this year. Founded in 2000, IJPC investigates and analyzes the conflicting images of the journalist in film, television, radio, fiction, commercials, cartoons, comic books, music and art to explore their impact on the American public's perception of newsgatherers.
This year's highlights include:
The first issue of its peer-reviewed IJPC Journal will be published in July and presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention in August.
It's newest research project, "The Image of the Gay Journalist in Popular Culture," will produce a bibliography next year and be the subject of a panel at the AEJMC conference in August.
The 2009 IJPC Video has grown to a four-hour, two-disc set: Volume One, "The Image of the Gay Journalist in Movies and TV in the 20th Century, 1929-1999," features more than 60 clips; Volume Two, "The Image of the Gay Journalist in Movies and TV in the 21st Century, 2000-2009," features another 60 clips.
The Hollywood Health & Society team, led by director Sandra de Castro Buffington, will travel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July to conduct the first round of judging for the tenth annual Sentinel for Health Awards. The Sentinel for Health Awards recognize the exemplary work of daytime and primetime TV shows that inform, educate and motivate viewers to make choices for healthier and safer lives. Submissions will be considered in six categories for the period July 1, 2008 - June 30, 2009; winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on September 23, 2009 at the Writers Guild of America, West. Learn more about the Sentinel for Health Awards here.
Norman Lear on the Craft of Writing for Film and Television
The Writers Guild of America, West, interviewed Norman Lear in early June about his experiences as one of the most creative and successful artists in the history of sitcoms. Read the article here.
Call for Entries for 5th Annual Everett M. Rogers Award
HH&S administers the Rogers Prize, which commemorates the work of Everett M. Rogers -- one of the nation’s most influential communication scholars -- whose research broke new ground in health and entertainment communication. Download the Call for Entries here. Normination packets are due Friday, June 26th.
Beyond Broadcast 09
Join leaders in social and digital media and public service broadcasting from around the world as they share knowledge and best practices on innovations in communication and media.
Since 2006, the annual Beyond Broadcast conference has explored the evolution of participatory digital public media. This year's conference, titled "Public Service Media from Local to Global," brings this ongoing conversation to the world stage, examining these issues from a global perspective.
Sandra de Castro Buffington, Director of the Lear Center's Hollywood, Health & Society project will serve on the "That's Entertainment! Or Is It?" panel with Neal Baer, executive producer, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Zoanne Clack, executive producer and writer, Grey's Anatomy.
This panel will examine the role of TV shows in spreading helpful information and the ways network television serves the public in areas of critical importance, such as safety and health.
June 3rd - 6th
Annenberg School for Communication
University of Southern California
3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089
To register for the conference, please click here.
Remix America: New Video
What does it mean to remix America? Take a look at this cool, new video and find out!
USC Center on Public Diplomacy Workshop: Celebrity Diplomacy
The Norman Lear Center and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School were proud to host a workshop on Celebrity Diplomacy, which explored the intersecting themes of the UN celebrity programs, the "soft power" of Hollywood celebrities, and public diplomacy.
Workshop Program
Panel Discussion: The Effectiveness and Value of Celebrity Diplomacy
Moderator: Chris Smith, Clinical Assistant Professor, USC Annenberg School for Communication
Panelists:
• Andrew Cooper, CPD Fulbright Visitng Research Chair in Public Diplomacy and author of Celebrity Diplomacy
• Douglas Kellner, George F. Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair, UCLA and author of Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy
Roundtable: How Insiders View the Issues Facing Celebrity Diplomacy
Moderator: Martin Kaplan, Director, Norman Lear Center
Panelists:
• Donna Bojarsky, Director, Foreign Policy Roundtable
• Eric Falt, Director, Outreach Division, UN Department of Public Information
• Rene Jones, Director, UTA Foundation
• Rob Long, writer and producer
At UC Irvine's Department of Women’s Studies' quarterly roundtable series on keywords -- contested terms with overlapping, sometimes catachrestic, meanings -- Lear Center deputy director Johanna Blakley discussed how new communication technologies have transformed the public sphere, exponentially expanding the public stage and obscuring its connection to the physical world. What are the consequences of taking our private lives public in this virtual space?
Other speakers included Professor Christine Balance, Asian American Studies, UCI; Professor Dana Collins, Dept of Sociology, Cal State Fullerton; and Raquel Gutierrez, performance artist and the co-founding member of the performance art ensemble, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan.
Moderator: Professor Jeanne Scheper, Women's Studies, UCI
One of the more pernicious enclosures of the commons is the enclosure of time and consciousness. It’s pernicious because it is so subtle and rarely discerned. When commercial values such as productivity and efficiency become so pervasive and internalized, they crowd out other ways of being. Our very sense of humanity — full-bodied, spontaneous, spiritual — leaches away.
All of this was brought home clearly in a provocative lecture that I attended yesterday evening. It was called “No Time to Think,” by David M. Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington. Levy gave a chilling historical overview of how American society has become enslaved to an ethic of “more-better-faster” and is losing touch with the capacity for reflection and intuitive thinking. In an overweening commitment to constant doing and making, analyzing and thinking (which, let us note, are important human activities), we can too easily close off access to an entire realm of consciousness that is at least as important, our capacity for reflection.
Levy’s research is focused on why the technological devices that are designed to connect us also seem to radically dis-connect us. As Levy puts it, “We now have the most remarkable tools for teaching and learning the world has ever known. How is it that we have less time to think than ever before?” Although our society supposedly prizes creative thought, it in fact gives little respect to the intuitive and the contemplative.
Andrew White is a second year Masters Student in Critical Studies in the USC School of Cinematic Arts and an intern for the Lear Center's BrandSpace project.
BrandSpace, led by USC Annenberg Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser, is an interdisciplinary project that examines the way in which new practices, imaginations and politics are being created within the parameters of commercial brand culture.
Real estate mogul Donald Trump received a BA from the Wharton School of Business. Hip hop artist Jay-Z (aka Sean Carter) got his MBA from the Marcy Projects. What do these two popular icons have in common? The endless search for the almighty dollar.
It is no mystery that capitalist ideology drives our current socioeconomic system. For years now, cultural studies scholars have acknowledged the impact of capitalism on our everyday lives, focusing specifically on the production of cultural artifacts and the discourse surrounding systems of representation. Cultural studies has emerged in recent decades out of a liberal humanist tradition, offering a critique of art and culture through a particular analytical framework that focuses on close readings and textual analysis. Through this analytical lens, scholars and critics tend to approach popular culture with a certain distance, acknowledging the impact of capitalism while dismissing the underlying implications of what it means to participate in a culture of consumption.
The casual visitor to cyberspace might understandably consider free software, Wikipedia, Facebook, remix music and "open textbooks" as wildly different phenomena. But as author and Senior Lear Center Fellow David Bollier explains in a series of video interviews with Director Marty Kaplan, they are all instances of the commons, a new paradigm for creating valuable things on the Internet.
A commons arises whenever a community decides it wants to manage a resource in a collective manner, with a special regard for equitable access and sustainability, said Bollier. His describes how people share photos on Flickr.com; how scientists collectively manage their published articles and research databases; and how Grateful Dead fans created and curated their own archives of concert performance tapes -- a precursor to the type of sharing that is now common among Internet enthusiasts.
"Sometimes the commons works in competition with markets, and sometimes it collaborates with them," said Bollier, "but in either instance, the commons is demonstrating that online communities can self-organize themselves to produce some remarkable types of shared wealth. It will increasingly be a sector of economic production."
Bollier's video interviews with Kaplan were produced by Brave New Studios, an affiliate of Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films project. Check them out!
In some ways we love being watched – or at least we love the results. Not only are Nielsen ratings essential to the entertainment and advertising industries, they also make for entertaining content. Who hasn’t perused within the last week at least one list of the highest grossing movies, the most downloaded songs, the most emailed articles? Most likely, you consumed that content in a place that’s selling ads – a newspaper, magazine or a web site – and so, ironically enough, the audience data that those outlets use in order to figure out what content they should provide to you ends up becoming part of the content mix that you consume.
What might this mean? Well, not only are we exhibitionists (consult your national TV listings), we are also voyeurs, greedily consuming and exchanging information about what we like. There’s entertainment value, certainly, in reading one of the “most emailed stories” that catches your fancy, but there’s also a certain delight in reading the top ten list itself – even if you have no interest in nine of those stories. Far from simple navel gazing, the drive to understand what our social group cares about is actually something worth knowing. It’s a survival instinct, no doubt, to understand what the club thinks is cool . . . especially if you’re a member of the out-group. Although we usually suggest it’s a guilty pleasure, I would argue that our seemingly insatiable interest in the pop culture zeitgeist is worth satisfying.
Of course, our mission at the Lear Center is to understand precisely this, how it is that entertainment and leisure, the stuff we do when it doesn’t matter what we’re doing, affects us in profound ways. As a media researcher, I want to make substantiated claims about how people are consuming popular culture and the significance of that activity. That means I have a ravenous appetite for any information about audiences that I can find – ratings, focus group data, social science experiments, survey results – but most of this research is proprietary and very expensive to purchase. This is miserable news for academics who want to try their hand at entertainment studies, but it certainly increases the pleasure of the hunt. Just like the marketers who commission most of this research, I too am trying to find the key to unlock the mind of the consumer, the voter, the TV watcher, the Web site visitor. Though I’m not trying to sell a product, I am there, hot on their trail, surveilling them to the best of my ability and trying to figure out what it all means.
USC Annenberg clinical professor Christopher Holmes Smith explored the emergence of a new type of American celebrity -- the hip-hop mogul -- in the Lear Center's Celebrity, Politics and Public Life project, and he's now exploring the limitations and possibilities of brands, advertising, celebrity advocacy and consumer philanthropy in our interdisciplinary faculty seminar BrandSpace.
With the wisdom of hindsight, future historians may identify "bling" as an essential protein source at the deficit-financed economic banquet we're now staggering away from. While the middle class binged on cheap credit—barely pausing to acknowledge catastrophic events like 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, and Abu Ghraib—hip-hop’s mavens of extravagance provided the guilt-free soundtrack for the feast.
Coined exactly ten years ago by underground rapper BG and his colleagues in the New Orleans-based collective “Cash Money Millionaires,” bling has become hip-hop’s single greatest contribution to the mainstream American lexicon.
A few web crawls for the term turn up over 23 million hits on Google, 500-plus profiles on Facebook and more than 13,000 lots for sale on eBay. While most of the auction booty falls in the categories of jewelry, watches, and apparel, there is also a long tail of cell phones and PDAs, wedding and party paraphernalia, electronics, automotive details, toys, sporting goods, pet supplies, and random kitsch like “pimp cups” -- outsized chalices embedded with precious, semi-precious and costume gems from which to enjoy your alcoholic "crunk" of choice.
Declare Yourself, the non-profit youth voter registration organization, along with the Pearson Foundation and the National Student/Parent Mock Election, honored New Jersey schools as national winners for their voter education and mock election campaigns last fall with a special exhibition of an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. This rare document, one of 25 remaining copies printed by John Dunlap when Thomas Jefferson finished his final draft on July 4, 1776, is owned by Norman and Lyn Lear and remains the only touring copy of the Declaration of Independence. It will also visit six other winning schools across the country.
Would watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy keep you off the streets and politically cowed? The Iranian government is hoping LOTR does the trick this week to quiet the mass unrest over the recent, questionable presidential elections. Entertainment as...riot stick. 
Not a fan of Battlestar Galactica? You are so not cool. Guess where the cast was last week? That's right -- at a major think tank panel at the United Nations. Now dry your tears and add BG to your TiVo. 
Women are forbidden to sing in public under Sharia Law. What happens when a woman on Afghan Star, an American Idol-styled TV show, sings -- and dances to -- her final song? Read what Pat Mitchell, CEO of the Paley Center for Media, has to say about media's power to change lives, the course of history, and the future. 
"Who could say 'No' to Nicole Kidman?" asked one of the eminent professors of international relations assembled recently for a conference to dissect the new phenomenon of "celebrity diplomacy." What happens when everyone -- from academics to diplomats to world leaders -- is starstuck. 
Is product integration in TV shows a new craven low for American media? More like a blemish present since TV's birth: read the guidelines for writers on a 1949 Camel cigarette-sponsored show. 
Death as Entertainment? Nothing new, considering the crowds that gathered at hangings and guillotine executions, not to mention snuff films in our own era. Yet the recent live webcam-broadcast suicide of Abraham Biggs, Jr. -- who was watched and even egged on by his fellow posters on BodyBuilding.com to take the pills that ended his life -- prompts as many questions about the human heart as the it does about the distant, anonymous lives that new technology sometimes offers us. 
A Conversation With Top Hollywood Writers and Dr. Tachi Yamada, President of the Global Health Program at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Lear Center's 
The 
The Writers Guild of America, West, interviewed Norman Lear in early June about his experiences as one of the most creative and successful artists in the history of sitcoms. Read the article 
The Lear Center’s 
Join leaders in social and digital media and public service broadcasting from around the world as they share knowledge and best practices on innovations in communication and media.
USC Professor 
The casual visitor to cyberspace might understandably consider free software, Wikipedia, Facebook, remix music and "open textbooks" as wildly different phenomena. But as author and Senior Lear Center Fellow 
USC Annenberg clinical professor 
A few web crawls for the term turn up over 23 million hits on Google, 500-plus profiles on Facebook and more than 13,000 lots for sale on eBay. While most of the auction booty falls in the categories of jewelry, watches, and apparel, there is also a long tail of cell phones and PDAs, wedding and party paraphernalia, electronics, automotive details, toys, sporting goods, pet supplies, and random kitsch like “pimp cups” -- outsized chalices embedded with precious, semi-precious and costume gems from which to enjoy your alcoholic "crunk" of choice.
