Traditional 10th Anniversary presents are tin, aluminum and diamonds. (Who comes up with this stuff?) But please, no gifts - except a share of your attention.
The Lear Center was launched a decade ago when Norman Lear made an extraordinary gift to the USC Annenberg School to support a unique center of research and innovation.
As you'll see here, the Lear Center's work is more relevant than ever. And as you'll see here, we've been on quite a roll. Thanks for letting us keep you posted during the decade ahead.
THE NEWS
There's a new way to prepare soldiers for attacks in Afghanistan: I.E.D. Battle Drill. Hollywood's wizards have built a high-tech system with amusement park hydraulics to simulate a Taliban roadside bomb. more>>
A new Kaiser Family Foundation study shows that kids 8 to 18 spend more than seven-and-a-half hours a day using a smart phone, TV, computer or other electronic device. And with youthful multitasking, they pack almost 11 hours of media content into those seven-and-a-half hours. more>>
Of course you tweet. But what about your clothes? Award-winning singer Imogen Heap wore a "twitdress" to the Grammys, complete with LED collar for text and a purse with a screen to stream Twitter pics sent by fans. more>>
Gangs have moved into surprising new arenas lately: Facebook and Twitter. more>>
The blending of social media into TV accelerates: Bravo TV has partnered with Foursquare, the location-based social networking mobile game where users "check-in" at real-world venues to update friends as to their location and win points. Bravo has selected 500 locations across the country that correspond with its hit shows. When viewers visit these sites, they can win special prizes and Foursquare badges. more>>
Not quite "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind," but the first tweet from space is just fine. Read it, then PLZ RT to infinity and beyond. more>>
What do you get when you mix money, a broken romance and the power of advertising? Humiliating billboards in NY, SF and Atlanta. more>>
Got some time on your hands? Logon and help curate a museum show. more>>
Imagine a country where pop music is the vehicle for vibrant political debate and keeping the public informed. Welcome to Sierra Leone. more>>
Thinking about going back to school to get another degree but not sure what to study? Try a TV show. The creators of LOST have teamed with USC and UCLA professors to offer real online classes based on fields of study the drama has touched on: Lost University. more>>
Looking for a new bubble in Washington to lift your spirits rather than make you cry? The Hirshhorn Museum is working on a blue, building-sized bubble that could turn the museum itself into a work of art every bit as entertaining as any art it contains. more>>
This year, experience New Years Eve in Times Square without leaving home via the 6 1/2 hour Web cast of the event. Facebook and Twitter are in the mix, too, and want your realtime tweets and posts about the event. Hello, 2010!more>>
Disney sticks with the tried-and-true voice for its new high-tech animatronic Abe Lincoln, though historians claim it misses the mark. Audiences made their voices heard; they love the Disney version. more>>
So flushed cheeks and pleasure aren't enough, now our lovers' SKIN must entertain us? Really? Behold electronic tatoos.
What's more fun than watching people lose weight? What if they use unsafe methods that can damage their health or even cause death? Is that Must-See TV? more>>
Looking for a job field with solid growth opportunities? Try reality TV participant. more>>
Ever find a piece of furniture at the curb and bring it home? A cool experiment in NYC adds GPS and social media to the fun, following the journeys of 25 sleek new chairs dropped all over the city, free for the taking. more>>Follow the chairs on Twitter!
Some big companies make civic improvement a part of their brand, while others seem happy to just steam-clean their logos into dirty city sidewalks. more>>
Who owns your house, your property, your island in Second Life when you die? Virtual worlds now must struggle with this real-world issue. more>>
Someday, will everything HAVE to be fun? Disney teams up with Raytheon to spark kids' interest in math and engineering by giving them math tools to design their own theme-park ride and then the chance to experience the ride via robotic simulator. more>>
A new film about disturbing conditions in French prisons, “Un Prophète,” is having a powerful effect on pending government reforms, the first attempted in France since WWII. more>>
Who needs Frank Gehry when you've got Google Building Maker? Well, maybe still keep Frank in your rolo. more>>
The new Walt Disney Family Museum has opened in San Francisco, offering items from his personal archive as well as historic materials owned by the Walt Disney Company. When Lear Center Senior Fellow Neal Gabler published his biography of Disney in 2006, the Lear Center hosted a roundtable discussion with some of the people who'd worked most closely with Walt. Read the transcript of the fascinating conversation Gabler had with Disney Legends Harriet Burns, Alice Davis, Blaine Gibson and film critic Richard Schickel.
The latest big deal Hollywood marketing tool? Your phone. more>>
Does real-world copyright and trademark law apply to Second Life’s creators? A lawyer (real) is making a case they do. The product? A sex toy (virtual). more>>
THE CENTER
HOT PRESS: New Lear Center Publications
Advertisers are in hot pursuit of the people formerly known as the audience, who have migrated to the internet and become creators of content themselves. The result? A business economy, a gift economy and an attention economy. It's laid out graphically in The Business & Culture of Social Media, a presentation made to the Barcelona Media Center by Lear Center director Marty Kaplan and deputy director Johanna Blakley.
Hollywood, Health & Society hosted an enthralling conversation with public health experts at the front lines in global health as well as top Hollywood writers who have turned stories on global health topics into top-rated television shows. Tachi Yamada of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was the keynote speaker.
David Suisman - USC Annenberg Research Colloquia Series - Sounds and Cents:
Reflections on the Past, Present, and Possible Future of the Music Industry
Josh Kun, director of the Norman Lear Center's Popular Music Project, hosted this must-see talk by University of Delware Professor David Suisman who analyzed the changes taking place in today's musical culture in relation to the formation of the modern music industry at the dawn of the twentieth century. Read more about the event.
THE ADVENTURES OF ABIE THE FISHMAN: A Lecture by Author and USC Professor Josh Kun
STARRING THE MARX BROTHERS & BOB DYLAN
With Special Appearances by Willie Howard, Belle Barth, Doc Pomus, Jerome Robbins, Speedy Gonzales, Kiss & More
Popular Music Project director Josh Kun presents this entertaining and intriguing talk under the auspices of The Naftulin Family Lecture on Studies in Jewish Identity and The UCLA Center for Jewish Studies.
Lear Center director Martin Kaplan moderates a discussion titled Joystick Nation: Theater, Film and Interactive Gaming in 2020 as part of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities lecture series. Kaplan, an LAIH fellow, will be joined by another LAIH fellow Richard Schickel, along with REDCAT executive director Mark Murphy and Tracy Fullerton, director of USC's Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab.
Monday, March 29, 2010 4 to 6 p.m.
USC's Doheny Library's Intellectual Commons
3550 Trousdale Parkway
University Park Campus LA CA 90089
The Death and Life of American Journalism: An Annenberg Research Colloquium
In their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols demonstrate that the crisis in American journalism precedes the Internet and the current economic turbulence stems from the hollowing out of journalism under corporate control, which has increased dramatically since the late 1970s. They argue the problem is rooted in the longstanding tension between advertising-supported, profit-making media and democracy-sustaining journalism, and they debunk notions that old media firms can successfully migrate to the web or that the blogosphere will magically meet our journalism needs.
McChesney and Nichols will discuss the future of American journalism and take questions from the audience at this special Annenberg Research Colloquium.
Monday, April 19, 2010, 12 noon :: Geoffrey Cowan Forum
Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
No RSVP is necessary. Lunch will be provided.
Lincoln Bicentennial 1809-2009
Lincoln & King's Unfinished Work
The Norman Lear Center was pleased to be a co-convener for the Los Angeles Abraham Lincoln National Town Hall, part of a series of national events celebrating the life and legacy of our 16th American president. Andy Anderson, chief historian, Wells Fargo & Company; actor Richard Dreyfuss; Assemblymember Warren T. Furutani, (CA-55th); Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr.; historian and Professor Emeritus, Claremont McKenna College, Henry V. Jaffa; Reverend Eric P. Lee, president and chief executive officer, SCLC-LA; playwright Suzan-Lori Parks; Dr. Darlene Robles of the Los Angeles County Office of Education; writer/director Gary Ross; Tom Schwartz, Illinois state historian; and Ronald C. White, historian and author of A. Lincoln discussed President Lincoln's significant role in expanding the nation's definitions of freedom and equality of opportunity and Dr. Martin Luther King's work in that tradition. Motivational speaker Stedman Graham moderated.
Sunday, January 17, 2010 :: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
Art, Culture, Politics: A Conversation with Shepard Fairey
Known for his iconic images like the Obama "Hope" poster, Shepard Fairey joined Sarah Banet-Weiser, USC Annenberg professor and director of the Lear Center's BrandSpace project, for a candid, illuminating conversation about art, politics and consumer culture. View the full-size video here.
Josh Kun on KABC
Josh Kun, director of the Lear Center's Popular Music Project, is featured in an ABC-7 report on black/latino music exchange airing Dec. 20. Kun notes that popular music has shown that these two groups contain the other in their music. Watch the video:
Reading the 2009 Black List
In this LA Times Op-Ed, Elizabeth Currid, project director of the Lear Center's Star Maps project, analyzes why the Black List -- a ranking of the most popular unproduced screenplays -- is such a respected decision-making tool in Hollywood, despite the thin commercial success of scripts on the list that get made.
True Words + Well Spoken = Lives Saved
Thirty years ago, Lear Center director Marty Kaplan was chief speechwriter for then-Vice President Walter Mondale when Vietnam began forcing hundreds of thousands of its merchant-class families to flee the country, most often in small, unseaworthy boats.
The Carter-Mondale administration asked the U.N. for a special refugees conference in Geneva in July 1979 to solve the growing tragedy. Kaplan's task was to build an argument that would rouse the staid and disinterested UN delegates to action. In background materials, Kaplan found a chilling account of a previous U.N. refugee conference, in Evian near Geneva, just as World War II was breaking out. Delegates at that meeting had failed to agree on a rescue plan for Germany's Jews.
"At that conference, if every nation had agreed to accept something like 15,000 Jews, there would have been no Jews left in the Third Reich to send to concentration camps," Kaplan said.
Mondale spoke to his Geneva listeners: "The civilized world hid in the cloak of legalisms, and the result was the Holocaust." Kaplan and Mondale said the audience snapped to attention, as Mondale framed the humanitarian crisis in Vietnam as a world problem needing a world solution. "We all know the grim statistics, the toll being taken among those refugees forced out by Vietnam in inadequate and unseaworthy boats." He closed by saying, "History will not forgive us if we fail. History will not forget us if we succeed."
Those present recall a moment of silence after Mondale finished, before the delegates rose as one in a standing ovation. Read a more detailed version of this story here.
THE BLOG
The Social Media President?
Veronica Jauriqui
Veronica Jauriqui is Special Projects Manager at the Norman Lear Center.
Behind Ashton Kutcher's and Brittany Spears' Twitter feeds, President Barack Obama's is the fourth most popular feed, with more than 3 million followers. Is it any wonder, for a candidate who made social media a pillar of his successful bid for the presidency? It also made his admission last November all the more disconcerting when in front of a crowd of Chinese youth, the President admitted he had never used Twitter.
Much to-do was made of Candidate Obama's social media strategy to reach out to untapped constituencies and raise millions in political contributions. He had presence on scores of social media sites - MySpace, Facebook, BlackPlanet and Eons - with his my.BarackObama.com site hailed as the embodiment of online grassroots campaigning. The result was more than half-a-billion in donations, the majority made online and in amounts of $100 or less.
We can credit this success both to Obama's media savvy as well as to his crack team of social media strategists who appreciated how leveraging the technology and plugging into the digital dialogue could build momentum, especially with younger voters.
President Obama began his first day in office signing an executive order for all White House departments to create a "system of transparency, public participation and collaboration." Technocrats celebrated it as the dawn of a new era in politics. Then what?
A year after Obama's swearing in, it's been a lackluster showing by the administration on the social media front. Months after taking office, his Twitter feed remained surprisingly silent. No mention of what Bo the dog was up to, not even what the White House chef was making for lunch. Time magazine followed up on the White House social networking strategy in May 2009, calling President Obama's technological transformation "very much a work in progress." What happened?
It's just about perfect that the week that LA Gang Tours launches is also the tenth anniversary of the start of the Norman Lear Center.
At $65 a head, lunch included, the LA Gang Tours bus trip through South Central is cheaper than Disneyland, and the prospect of seeing real Crips and Bloods out the window is surely less lame than dodging Terminator blanks on the Universal Studios tour.
Ghettotainment, as this kind of dark tourism has been called, was made in heaven for the Lear Center, which tracks how entertainment has been steadily conqueringnews, politics, policy, commerce, justice, religion and pretty much the rest of reality.
But the point isn't to lament that we're amusing ourselves to death (though there's enough trivialization, vulgarization, sensationalism, celebrity worship and ADD-inducing distractions around to make you fear for the future of civilization). It's also that the power to grab and hold attention - the Lear Center's big-tent definition of entertainment - can be harnessed to do good.
Consider Alfred Lomas, the guy behind LA Gang Tours. He isn't Arthur Frommer's evil twin; he's an ex-member of the Florencia13 gang who'll be putting ticket revenues into "saving lives, creating jobs, rebuilding communities" in some of the worst parts of the city. His bus, he says, has been given safe passage through a gunfire-free safety zone that he negotiated among three gangs, and he intends to build on that ceasefire. He is leveraging our voyeurism and our appetite for thrill rides in order to rescue some broken souls.
Entertainment matters. When Edith Bunker, on Norman Lear's All in the Family, was nearly raped, and when Bea Arthur's character, on Norman's show Maude, had an abortion, Americans across the country felt enabled by fictional characters to grapple with taboo topics, in their own ways, at their own kitchen tables. In the weeks after cool bad boy Fonzie, on Garry Marshall's series Happy Days, got a library card, the number of Americans getting library cards increased by 500 percent.
The Hollywood "dream factories" have always utilized themes from dreams and nightmares, and there's no doubt in my mind that this compelling stream of screen imagery insinuates itself into our own personal dreams and nightmares. So I was riveted by a recent New Yorker piece that provided an overview of the state of nightmare research.
Apparently, certain themes tend to dominate certain historical periods. German dream researcher Michael Schredl found that "bogeyman" dreams were popular in the 1920s; the 1950s and 60s were dominated by ghosts, devils and witches; and in the 1990s, movie villains became central elements of nightmares. Currently, the chief baddies are Voldemort and Freddy Krueger, who, in the classic movie franchise Nightmare on Elm Street, actually wrecks his knife-fingered havoc inside people's dreams. Wasn't it inevitable that he would slice his way into our dreams as well?
Current research does not clearly indicate that watching more TV or playing more computer games contributes to having more bad dreams, but children's nightmares often reflect the imagery they soak up while glued to the tube. British psychoanalyst Susan Budd actually argues that pop culture has not only affected the content of our dreams, but it has also affected their length: dreams tend to be shorter and more fragmented now than they were at the turn of the century. And it is very creepy to hear that there is a strong correlation between whether people report having black and white or color dreams, and their access to black and white or color TV and movies. It's no wonder that people get so riled up about television and film and its impact on society. Screen images literally worm their way inside our heads and help shape the stories our brains tell ourselves.
With the Comcast/NBC merger on the horizon, Hollywood has been abuzz about how all this is going to affect the beleaguered TV industry. Now that the biggest Internet and mobile-phone provider in the U.S. is buying a vast vat of premium TV and film properties, will audiences finally be able to watch what they want where they want it?
As we fret about whether we'll still get to watch The Daily Show for free on Hulu (Comcast will scoop that up in the deal, too), we may not notice the quiet revolution that's taking place in the murky world of online-only Web series. "Webisodes" have been around since the late 90's, but ever-increasing broadband penetration rates, and destination video sites like YouTube have made it much easier to distribute original, scripted video content online. As media conglomerates wring their hands about monetizing online content, some creative industry insiders decided to throw caution to the wind and put their stuff online anyway.
For film and TV writers, who are often deeply insulated from audience feedback, it can be pretty bracing. Web series are a relatively new creative outlet, and they're often cheaper and easier to produce than plays. Written By, the magazine of the Writers Guild, dedicated an entire issue to digital media issues, including a long article about TV industry veterans trying their hand at Web series. Ylse, which is written and produced by a working TV actress, Ruth Livier, airs online every two weeks, along with an intervening sub-series every other week. After developing the idea, Livier realized there was no way her off-color Spanglish creation would get picked up as a TV pilot so she decided to post it online instead. She became the first person to become a WGA member based on writing a Web series.
Last year, Zogby International and the Norman Lear Center surveyed 1,637 American women about their political beliefs and their media, entertainment and leisure preferences. Looking through the data, we realized that there were some stark differences among women of different ages. Not only do they gravitate toward different media and entertainment channels, they also spend their leisure time differently, and they often have widely varying views about the biggest political issues of our day.
Some of the results about political values were not surprising: when it comes to the environment, taxes, guns, affirmative action, war, and business regulation, the youngest group consistently took a more liberal position than older women. (You can see all the data here.) However, there were several provocative discoveries that suggested that we should not assume that women become more conservative as they grow older.
Veronica Jauriqui is Special Projects Manager at the Norman Lear Center.
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.
It’s what you drive, what you eat and what you wear. Is it any wonder that soon where you live will be its own brand name?
In our ubiquitous brand culture, today it is local and international destinations – towns, states and even countries – that are attempting to make a name for themselves. European marketers have developed flashy international campaigns, “I AMsterdam” and “MADrid About You,” complete with jazzy logos and glossy brochures in an effort to tempt both tourism and industry dollars.
And on the domestic side, we all know that what happens in Vegas stays there, right?
But what becomes the fatal flaw for many of these campaigns is the marker’s attempt to brand place using the exact same strategies that have proven successful in product branding. But what’s good for a sneaker or a can of Coke just won’t cut it for Finland.
Last week, the BrandSpace faculty working group, led by Communication Professor Sarah Banet Weiser, invited two experts in the craft of regional branding. Annette Schoemmel and Thomas Sevcik comprise the wife-husband team behind Arthesia, an advertising, branding and creative agency based in Zurich and L.A. They provided case studies that stressed not only the inherent challenges in branding place, but the complexities of brand management within the shifting landscape of media and social technology.
They Talk Back
Ah, social media! Just when brand custodians attempt to get a grip on their brand identities, the consumer now has the means and the platform to undermine the brand itself. And the audience is listening.
“The consumer, the employee, the audience is talking back…it is no longer an isolated dialogue,” Schoemmel said. “Now it is more the question: How ‘open’ do I want my brand to be?”
Traditional 10th Anniversary presents are tin, aluminum and diamonds. (Who comes up with this stuff?) But please, no gifts - except a share of your attention.
What do you get when you mix money, a broken romance and the power of advertising? Humiliating billboards in NY, SF and Atlanta. 
Looking for a new bubble in Washington to lift your spirits rather than make you cry? The Hirshhorn Museum is working on a blue, building-sized bubble that could turn the museum itself into a work of art every bit as entertaining as any art it contains. 
Ever find a piece of furniture at the curb and bring it home? A cool experiment in NYC adds GPS and social media to the fun, following the journeys of 25 sleek new chairs dropped all over the city, free for the taking. 
The new Walt Disney Family Museum has opened in San Francisco, offering items from his personal archive as well as historic materials owned by the Walt Disney Company. When Lear Center Senior Fellow 
STARRING THE MARX BROTHERS & BOB DYLAN
Lear Center director 
In their new book, 
Lincoln & King's Unfinished Work 
In this 
It’s what you drive, what you eat and what you wear. Is it any wonder that soon where you live will be its own brand name?
