Lear Center

HOT PRESS: New Lear Center Publications

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:02:42 -0800

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.

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:08:09 -0800

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>>

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:04:44 -0800

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>>

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:11:41 -0800

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>>

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:09:26 -0800

Gangs have moved into surprising new arenas lately: Facebook and Twitter. more>>

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:06:31 -0800

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>>

The Social Media President?

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:14:49 -0800

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?

David Suisman - USC Annenberg Research Colloquia Series - Sounds and Cents:

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:49:43 -0800

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

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:03:48 -0800

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. February 1, 2010, 7:30 p.m. FREE | 310 Royce Hall, UCLA

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:16:01 -0800

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>>

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:10:38 -0800

What do you get when you mix money, a broken romance and the power of advertising? Humiliating billboards in NY, SF and Atlanta. more>>

Joystick Nation: A LAIH Lecture

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:03:42 -0800

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

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:59:39 -0800

Got some time on your hands? Logon and help curate a museum show. more>>

LEAR CENTER TURNS TEN

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:44:34 -0800

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.

Thank You, Norman Lear

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:50:08 -0800

Marty Kaplan 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 conquering news, 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.