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" am energized by the idea of creating a framework for learning that weaves my students' interests with the desire to push their thinking around media literacy.  The course began with setting essential questions that would guide our inquiry throughout the semester.  The following questions captures the lines of inquiry students were interested in taking on at the beginning of the course: How does Media affect culture and society? What problems do we see with representation of race, class, gender and sexuality in Media? How do we critically examine popular culture and push back against the biased representation of race, class, gender and sexuality in popular culture?"

Hamleys, which is London's 251-year-old version of F.A.O. Schwarz, recently dismantled its pink "girls" and blue "boys" sections in favor of a gender-neutral store with red-and-white signage. Rather than floors dedicated to Barbie dolls and action figures, merchandise is now organized by types (Soft Toys) and interests (Outdoor). That free-to-be gesture was offset by Lego, whose Friends collection, aimed at girls, will hit stores this month with the goal of becoming a holiday must-have by the fall. Set in fictive Heartlake City (and supported by a $40 million marketing campaign), the line features new, pastel-colored, blocks that allow a budding Kardashian, among other things, to build herself a cafe or a beauty salon. Its tasty-sounding "ladyfig" characters are also taller and curvier than the typical Legoland denizen. So who has it right? Should gender be systematically expunged from playthings? Or is Lego merely being realistic, earnestly meeting girls halfway in an attempt to stoke their interest in engineering?

"Fresh Off the Boat", which was just renewed for a third season, has granted Ms. Wu a steady job and a new perspective. "It changed me," Ms. Wu said. After doing a lot of research, she shifted her focus "from self-interest to Asian-American interests." In the past year, Ms. Wu and a number of other Asian-American actors have emerged as fierce advocates for their own visibility - and frank critics of their industry. The issue has crystallized in a word - "whitewashing" - that calls out Hollywood for taking Asian roles and stories and filling them with white actors. On Facebook, Ms. Wu ticked off a list of recent films guilty of the practice and said, "I could go on, and that's a crying shame, y'all." On Twitter, she bit back against Hollywood producers who believe their "lead must be white" and advised the creators of lily-white content to "CARE MORE." Another tip: "An easy way to avoid tokenism? Have more than one" character of color, she tweeted in March. "Not so hard.""

Perhaps at some point in the past few years you've told Facebook that you like, say, Kim Kardashian West. When you hit the thumbs-up button on her page, you probably did it because you wanted to see the reality TV star's posts in your news feed. Maybe you realized that marketers could target advertisements to you based on your interest in her. What you probably missed is that researchers had figured out how to tie your interest in Ms. Kardashian West to certain personality traits, such as how extroverted you are (very), how conscientious (more than most) and how open-minded (only somewhat). And when your fondness for Ms. Kardashian West is combined with other interests you've indicated on Facebook, researchers believe their algorithms can predict the nuances of your political views with better accuracy than your loved ones. As The New York Times reported on Saturday, that is what motivated the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to collect data from more than 50 million Facebook users, without their consent, to build its own behavioral models to target potential voters in various political campaigns. The company has worked for a political action committee started by John R. Bolton, who served in the George W. Bush administration, as well as for President Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. "We find your voters and move them to action," the firm boasts on its website."

"The commercials are being touted as brilliant marketing. They associate sugary drinks with "happiness, fulfillment, and having fun," says Nancy Huehnergarth at The Huffington Post. But they don't really attempt to address obesity, says Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The soda industry is under siege, and for good reason," he says, and clearly, Coke is trying to control its image."

"To get a closer look at the cohort coming up behind the millennials, CJR in March asked the students in Esther Wojcicki's classes at California's Palo Alto High School how they view the news ecosystem.  As ninth grader Jamie Har put it: "By the time I hear the news, the story has already passed through several people. I cannot know whether the information is completely accurate or how much opinion is in what I hear. Most of the time, the news does not interest me enough for me to go look up more about it." Sounds like a normal teenager, right? All their essays are linked below."

"So how does misinformation start, how does it spread, and what can be done to counteract its effects? A 2012 metastudy from the University of Western Australia, University of Michigan, and University of Queensland published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, "Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing," focuses on how misinformation originates and spreads, why it is difficult to correct, and how best to counteract it. Key study findings include:"

"From summer until the election in November, the King of Beers will be called-and labelled-"America." By way of explanation, an executive declared that, with the upcoming Centennial Copa America, and the Summer Olympics, and, of course, the Presidential campaign, "we are embarking on what should be the most patriotic summer that this generation has ever seen." Interesting word choice, "embarking." I guess it will, in its way, be a bit of a trip. As for "patriotic," it's true that I'm thinking quite a lot about the country these days, and feeling the kind of love for it that can only come through mortal fear and a touch of embarrassment. The new "America" beer can displays a nationalistic commercialism that shouldn't be unfamiliar to any American. The America evoked by the can is an America that I recognize-one that exists only in advertisements. You find it in commercials for pickup trucks and lawnmowers, jeans and mass-produced beer. "

"Last week, I looked around the room and noticed an interesting thing. Maybe you're seeing this at your home as well. We were watching the NBA playoffs on TV. My wife was on her I-pad and so was I. My son was on his laptop. I'm sure if my grandson was there, he'd be staring at a device as well. My wife was checking email. I was tweeting snarky comments about the game. My son was looking at stats from the game. Let's face it. We're all multi-taskers now. Why should TV time be any different? This year, 182 million folks in the US will use the internet while watching TV at least once a month, according to an eMarketer survey. That's 80% of all internet users. So I'm not alone. Or maybe I am because only 25% of those surveyed were using their device to consumer content related to TV. The rest were doing something else, like my wife. Still, 25% were so engaged in the TV programming that they were finding additional information about what they were watching. That's still a big chunk of engaged folks. "

"When Beyoncé's album "Lemonade" was released late Saturday night, it was available only on Tidal, a big win for that subscription streaming service, in which Beyoncé is a part owner. But Tidal's period of exclusivity appears to be quite short - just 24 hours, as the album is expected to be released for sale on iTunes at midnight on Sunday, according to two people briefed on the plans for the release, who, following the usual ironclad rules of secrecy surrounding Beyoncé's projects, were not authorized to discuss them. Apple declined to comment. The brief window of exclusivity for Tidal reflects the growing complexity and fragmentation of the digital music market. For Beyoncé, whose every move is watched intensely by the music business, releasing an album comes with seemingly irreconcilable pressures regarding, on the one hand, managing her business interests and, on the other, reaching as wide an audience as possible. Adele declined to stream her blockbuster album "25" on any service, and Taylor Swift removed all her albums from Spotify before the release of "1989," her latest album, which is available on Apple Music, the company's streaming service. Photo Beyonce with her husband, Jay Z, before the streaming music service Tidal was introduced last year. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times As a partner in Tidal - the service that her husband, Jay Z, bought just over a year ago for $56 million and reintroduced as an artist-friendly alternative to Spotify - Beyoncé faced a strong incentive to release the album exclusively through that outlet, to draw attention to the service and attract subscribers to it. Yet with Tidal claiming just three million subscribers, she would risk alienating the vast majority of the online market if she were to keep the album on that service alone for too long. (Spotify has 30 million paying subscribers, and Apple Music has 11 million.) And the extremely brief window for keeping "Lemonade" -

"The social media build up to Sunday night's Game of Thrones season six premiere was colossal, and the buzz certainly didn't stop while it aired on HBO. We asked a couple data providers for figures around the show, and below are the 6 we found most interesting."

Some interesting short films here for class use or blog material. "At Updoc, we devote time, energy and creative juices to making films that have nothing to do with corporate sponsorships, but while the whoring trend runs rampant, make no mistake about it, we are all bed partners. You will find plenty of reference to products and corporations throughout many of our films. They are included to illustrate what's behind corporate backing, that the majority of the film industry would prefer you didn't know. The difference between Updoc Films and ninety nine percent of the film-making industry is that we refuse to allow product placement to infiltrate our work. We are not a cog in the wheel. We do not hide behind the notion that these expensive and carefully placed advertisements are a natural part of life and should be included on an average of every three minutes for your viewing pleasure. We won't do that to you. We're different; the kind of different that won't leave you groping for your soul in twenty years. We like sleeping at night."

""Haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?" asked an actor in "Media Burn," an outdoor spectacle staged in 1975 by the performance art collective Ant Farm. The answer, 15 years later, is a resounding "Yes!" Now, a generation of artists who grew up with television are beginning to rebel against it. Following Ant Farm's lead, they are kicking a hole -- metaphorically, at least -- in the cathode-ray tube. Some of today's most incendiary artists derive the structure, style and subject matter of their art from mass media. Mordantly funny, frighteningly Orwellian and very much a product of the times, their work challenges the image merchants. Moreover, it constitutes a search for truth in the technetronic age, where, increasingly, perception is reality. These artists are "cultural jammers," exposing the ways in which corporate and political interests use the media as a tool of behavior modification. Jamming is CB slang for the illegal practice of electronically interrupting radio broadcasts, conversations between fellow hams or the audio portions of television shows. Cultural jamming, by extension, is artistic "terrorism" directed against the information society in which we live."

Video News Releases are short broadcast news reports that appear in some news programs as part of the news, but are really created by sponsors or special interest groups. Click on the links below to read more about each VNR, including the client(s) that funded it, the TV stations that aired it, and the techniques that each station used to incorporate the VNR into its newscast.

But the relentless mass marketing of cool has tainted this style of behavior and made it seem inauthentic or contrived to a growing number of individuals. It is almost inconceivable that anything could happen, at this late stage, that would restore to cool the freshness and vitality it possessed in the fifties and sixties. Cool now lacks conviction and energy. Above all, its economic force is diminishing. And this, more than anything, will accelerate its decline. The arbiters of taste - at record labels, in films and TV, in consumer marketing, in media - will respond to these economic shifts rather than lead them. But follow they must, or disappear from the scene. Their successors will not make the same mistakes. Over time, this will transform even the last institutional bastions of cool into promoters of the postcool worldview. One of the most interesting spectacles of postcool society will involve the dominant forces of the old paradigm scrambling to co-opt the new one. Packaged and slick and phony will attempt to become down-home and natural and authentic. We can see this playing out in many arenas - from music to clothing, politics to daily news. But let us take one sector of our economy and show how this works.

"When a little boy asserts himself, he's called a "leader." Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded "bossy." Words like bossy send a message: don't raise your hand or speak up. By middle school, girls are less interested in leading than boys-a trend that continues into adulthood. Together we can encourage girls to lead."

"Teaching Copyright provides lessons and ideas for opening your classroom up to discussion, letting your students express their ideas and concerns, and then guiding your students toward an understanding of the boundaries of copyright law. In five distinct lessons, students are challenged to: Reflect on what they already know about copyright law. See the connection between the history of innovation and the history of copyright law. Learn about fair use, free speech, and the public domain and how those concepts relate to using materials created by others. Experience various stakeholders' interests and master the principles of fair use through a mock trial. Teaching Copyright will require your students to think about their role in the online world and provide them with the legal framework they need to make informed choices about their online behavior."

As your students skim the selections below, they might choose the two or three articles that interest them most, then answer some of these questions: What do these pieces have in common? What patterns do you notice? What do they say about the lives and roles of women and girls? About men and boys? How are ideas about gender changing? What do you think about those changes? What connections (PDF) can you make to one or more of the articles you chose and your own life? Why does any of this matter?"

"Growing numbers of observers contend that the dominant public role of our time has shifted from citizen to consumer. Indeed, respondents in polls typically cite entertainment, shopping, and other consumer activities as their top free time preferences. Commercial media and public entertainment venues offer environments carefully constructed to avoid politics and real world problems that might disturb these consumer impulses. As people in global societies increasingly enjoy the freedoms of private life, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate about many broad public concerns. The personalized society enables people to choose individual lifestyles and identities that often lead to disconnection from politics. Many citizens become receptive only to consumer-oriented messages about tax cuts, retirement benefits, or other policies targeted at particular demographic social groups. Culture jamming is an intriguing form of political communication that has emerged in response to the commercial isolation of public life. Practitioners of culture jamming argue that culture, politics, and social values have been bent by saturated commercial environments, from corporate logos on sports facilities, to television content designed solely to deliver targeted audiences to producers and sponsors. Many public issues and social voices are pushed to the margins of society by market values and commercial communication, making it difficult to get the attention of those living in the "walled gardens" of consumerism. Culture jamming presents a variety of interesting communication strategies that play with the branded images and icons of consumer culture to make consumers aware of surrounding problems and diverse cultural experiences that warrant their attention. "

"IMAGE: AFP/GETTY IMAGES BY KARISSA BELL SEP 24, 2018 For all its behind-the-scenes innovation, Google Search has looked more or less the same for the last 20 years: You type some words in a search box and get back a list of links.  The company's added lots of bells and whistles over the years, but the core concept has remained the same and the experience has pretty much looked the same. But that will soon be changing. SEE ALSO: Google Search gets a slew of new features on its 20th anniversary   At an event marking the 20th anniversary of search, Google revealed a suite of updates that are meant to fundamentally change the way we search, and how search results look and feel. You'll still see lists of links but, increasingly you'll also see features typically thought of as being squarely in the territory of social media companies: news feeds, vertical video, photo-centric content, and, yes, Stories. A quick recap of some of the specific updates: Google's personalized feed feature, now called "Discover," will be rolling out to all mobile users and to its homepage on desktop. The feed surfaces content based on your interests and search history. You can also save stuff from your feed to topic-based "collections." The company is "doubling down," on Stories, which will start to appear more frequently in search results. In addition to the publisher-created AMP Stories (Mashable is a partner on the initiative), Google will now use AI to automatically create tappable Stories about specific topics, like celebrities.  Google Images is getting a total overhaul, including a new ranking algorithm that will emphasize "evergreen content," like recipes and DIY content.  Google Lens will be integrated directly into Google Images so you can search for specific items within photos."