Spitting in the Wind

Sometimes when teaching my class I have my doubts. Am I the only one that thinks this  material is important? I’ll mention books in class that none of my students have heard of, then the next day find them on a list of important books that the Library of Congress has put together. When I first asked my class about Twitter, no one had heard of it. Now Twitter has half a billion users, including many of the students I teach. For years I have been showing the films of George Melies in class, then Martin Scorsese creates the movie “Hugo” and wins five Oscars.  I’ve been showing the photographs of Lewis Hines in my class for several years now. I came across this item from CBS. It made my hair stand on end.

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

The man who captured one of the most powerful images of the Vietnam conflict has passed away. Malcolm Browne, 81, died on August 27th at a New Hampshire hospital. His timeless image will live on. Mr. Browne was a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The New York Times. When he took the famous picture in 1963, it shocked the world, and its power reached all the way to the White House where President John F. Kennedy began to reevaluate the role of the United States in Vietnam. According to an interview in Time magazine Mr. Browne described how he was able to capture the image:
"The monks were telephoning the foreign correspondents in Saigon to warn them that something big was going to happen. Most of the correspondents were kind of bored with that threat after a while and tended to ignore it. I felt that they were certainly going to do something, that they were not just bluffing, so it came to be that I was really the only Western correspondent that covered the fatal day."

Republican and Democratic parties say, "Please Like Us".

 

The upcoming Republican and Democratic National Conventions will be more intertwined into the fabric of Social Media than any other political conventions in the nation's history. If you doubt that then consider this - Google is the "Official Social Media Platform" at the Republican National Convention. Got your attention? Yahoo! will team with ABC to stream live coverage of the event online. There will not only be a media "War Room", but a "Social media Green Room". Teams from Facebook and Google will be roaming the floor to help people upload content and interact over the internet. Does this bode well for the American political process? I'll Google the answer and get back to you.

They are Keeping a List and Cheking it Twice

Santa Claus knows who has been naughty or nice. I have it on good authority that he keeps a detailed list of all your activities both online and in real life. We have grown to expect that, but did you know that Companies like Target also have a list of your activities, purchasing history, along with likes and dislikes that is so detailed they can tell if you’re pregnant by the second trimester. Yikes!

According to Charles Duhigg of the New York Times –

For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Read on for more.

2012 World Press Photo Contest



Chieko Matsukawa shows her daughter's graduation certificate

 World Press Photo is an independent, non-profit organization based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Founded in 1955 the organization is known for holding the world's largest annual press photography contest.
The contest creates a connection between the photographic professionals and the general public. Through the publicity the contest generates the inspirational role of photojournalism brought to an audience of hundreds of millions.
All the prize-winning photographs are assembled into an exhibition that travels to 45 countries over the course of a year, and published in a yearbook. Over two million people go to a hundred different venues to see the images, and the yearbook is published in seven languages and distributed worldwide.
The great thing about this type of photography is it can give us a window on the world we might not see otherwise.

What's Your News IQ?

In our class we spend a great deal of time discussing why journalism is important in a democracy. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” In essence for a democracy to work to its greatest potential, it needs an informed public. The public has a right to know the issues of the day, but for a democracy to function properly the public not only has a right, but a duty to be as informed as possible.

Take the Quiz Provided by the Pew Research Center