Advertisers are in hot pursuit of the audience that's embraced the Web and become content creators themselves. The result? A business economy, a gift economy and an attention economy. Learn how it works in The Business & Culture of Social Media. Martin Kaplan moderated this discussion that explored the interplay between art and architecture in urban spaces. Panelists included artist Christopher Janney and USC School of Architecture dean Qingyun Ma, among others.]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/08/hot_off_the_press_lear_center.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/08/hot_off_the_press_lear_center.html Center Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:02:42 -0800

Ask any reporter - earthquakes are great for the news business. Gut-wrenching visuals accompany heroic and tragic tales about survivors and victims alike, and the aftermath stories can go on for months. Earthquakes are inherently dramatic, demonstrating as they do the pent up power of a planet we ceaselessly exploit, but fail to predict or properly understand. No matter how much money or smarts we may have, in a minute or two, an earthquake could shatter anyone's life. Last week, when an LA Times reporter (and the next day, a KABC reporter) called to interview me about a report we'd written last year about earthquake preparedness, I knew why: people get interested in how they can survive an earthquake when they catch a glimpse of the devastation one can cause. Give them a little taste of what has happened to people in Haiti, Chile and Taiwan, and they want to know what could happen to me and my family. I told the KABC reporter that I thought it was great that she was doing a piece on earthquake preparedness - it's a public service to do so, as long as there's helpful information in the story - and it's actually good for the news business because earthquakes are (whether we like to admit it or not) entertaining. She quickly agreed, saying an earthquake story is "teasable" - the network can tease the hell out of any quake-related story in California, playing on people's latent fears about when the next one's a comin'.]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/03/local_news_in_earthquake_count.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/03/local_news_in_earthquake_count.html Blog Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:51:17 -0800 The Los Angeles Times quotes Lear Center deputy director Johanna Blakley in this article concerning fears about earthquake preparedness in Southern California, sparked by the recent quakes in Haiti and Chile. The Lear Center conducted an evaluation of last fall's big earthquake drill, the Great Southern California Shakeout, and discovered that the majority of drill participants were still not fully prepared for an earthquake and some retained old and/or useless survival tips. "We were surprised at how many people who had signed up for the drill were still answering those questions badly," said Blakley. Watch her KABC interview about the evaluation. And visit our Shakeout project page for more information.]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/03/lear_center_research_in_the_ne.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/03/lear_center_research_in_the_ne.html FeatureStory Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:59:48 -0800 Facebook and Twitter are GOOD for workplace productivity. more>>]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/lose_the_guilt_facebook_and.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/lose_the_guilt_facebook_and.html News Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:01:15 -0800 High school seniors are now submitting personal YouTube videos as part of their college applications, while college administrators are posting musical videos to promote their schools. Will America will be the first all-singing, all-dancing nation? more>> Watch "That's Why I Chose Yale."]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/_high_school_seniors_are.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/_high_school_seniors_are.html News Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:52:24 -0800 TV and the Internet, once mortal enemies, now find themselves flirting at the water cooler. Why? One in seven people who watched the Super Bowl and the opening Olympics ceremony also surfed the Web at the same time. more>>]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/tv_and_the_internet_once.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/tv_and_the_internet_once.html News Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:40:18 -0800 Medical experts, specialists in drug and tobacco policy, recovered addicts and TV writers who've worked on episodes about addiction all offered compelling stories about substance abuse, treatment and recovery during this lively discussion January 14, 2010 at the WGA, West. Moderator: Dr. Neal Baer, Executive Producer, Law & Order: SVU ; Keynote: Dr. Timothy Condon, Deputy Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse; Dr. David Foster, Supervising Producer, House; Sam Catlin, Supervising Producer, Breaking Bad ; Dr. Karen Miotto, Medical Director, UCLA Addiction Medicine Service; Dr. Jonathan Samet, Director, USC Institute for Global Health. View more highlight clips here. Watch the full video here.]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/2addiction_fact_and_fiction_-_h.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/2addiction_fact_and_fiction_-_h.html Center Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:16:08 -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.]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/lear_center_turns_ten.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/lear_center_turns_ten.html Center Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:44:34 -0800 Scott McGibbon Scott McGibbon is Project Specialist at the Norman Lear Center. At the Lear Center, we've long been intrigued by the idea of a museum of entertainment. No, not some place with weathered props and stars in wax, but an online, comprehensive survey of everything that human beings have considered entertaining. Big idea. This museum could give us a much clearer version of where we've been and, perhaps, where we're going in terms of entertainment and our culture. Maybe it could even help us sequence the genome of entertainment. Then, during a recent staff meeting, it occurred to me that an astonishingly rich, complex, and increasingly complete museum of entertainment already existed - Hello, YouTube! Here's something already in place that offers the promise of nearly every possible recorded example of what has entertained people ever, from Gilgamesh to Grey's Anatomy to Gotterdammerung. But what's really available? I jotted down 60 random pieces of entertainment... and found samples of every one. What breadth! Here's the shortlist: Oedipus. Nat King Cole. Monster Truck Crashes. Persian Sufi Music. Groucho Marx. Nijinsky Dancing. Chinese Opera. The Dude. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? What Would I Want? Sky. Fado. So can we just link YouTube videos to relevant showbiz entries on Wikipedia and cut the opening day ribbon? Not really. Wikipedia is a true encyclopedia - basic info, often a bit dull, sometimes woefully incomplete - whereas a good museum demands deeply-researched and well-written brochures, listening tours and wall plaques to inform visitors and enrich their museum experience. That's what a museum of entertainment requires: everything about a museum of entertainment should be entertaining. What our YouTube-based museum seems to desperately need is some sort of curator(s), maybe just a search engine overlay that allows you to type in "Woody Allen" and view his movies with annotations that link to clips from his inspirations like Bob Hope, the Marx Brothers, Bergman and Fellini, along with links to related reviews, interviews, monographs and academic papers. The piece of entertainment itself, the performance, could be placed on a timeline, linked to the events and entertainments that contributed to it and to everything that flowed from it. Have you ever found anything like this museum prototype in your web browsing? If so, please send me a note (enter@usc.edu) with the link. Or if this is truly fresh territory, doesn't this challenge sound awesome? Any willing collaborators out there? Imagine what crowdsourcing could do in terms of constructing and curating this marvel. It's a big job, but somebody ought to do it.]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/musetube.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/musetube.html Blog Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:48:11 -0800 Need just one more taste of fashion and its magic? Then take a look at the Lear Center's landmark conference on creativity and ownership in the fashion industry: Ready to Share explores the fashion industry's enthusiastic embrace of sampling, appropriation and borrowed inspiration, core components of every creative process. Participants included Danger Mouse, Tom Ford, Guy Trebay, Booth Moore, Kevan Hall, Norman Lear, Sam Phillips, Michael Patrick King, Marty Kaplan, John Seely Brown, Siva Vaidhyanathan and Sheryl Lee Ralph. Watch video of the event. Read the transcript. Request a free copy of the book. ]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/revisit_ready_to_share_as_you.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/revisit_ready_to_share_as_you.html FeatureStory Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:23:28 -0800 Avatar's impact keeps growing and keeps getting...stranger. Palestinians protesting an Israeli barrier painted themselves blue, wore loincloths and long braids to link their struggle with that of the fictional Na'vi characters in the film. more>>]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/avatars_impact_keeps_growing_a.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/avatars_impact_keeps_growing_a.html News Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:12:55 -0800 only historians shaped history. Who gets to write history these days? Sometimes, it's TV writers. Oh, dear...more>>]]> http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/once_only_historians_shaped_hi.html http://blog.learcenter.org/2010/02/once_only_historians_shaped_hi.html News Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:09:00 -0800