""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."

Part of the movement in media towards virtual reality programming. ""The Sky VR Studio allows us to add a new dimension to storytelling, taking viewers to extraordinary places and offering a unique perspective," says content chief Gary Davey. "

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."

"Adbusters magazine and its editor Kalle Lasn have been at the forefront of the global resistance to capitalism exemplified by the Occupy movement. Their new book, Meme Wars: the Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economies, uses startling images to back up its hard-hitting points. Here are a selection of some of the best."

"Lasn, one of the brains behind the Occupy movement, told me recently from his headquarters in Vancouver that he sees a new movement in the making. To many, the revolutionary spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to recede almost as soon as it arrived in late 2011. For two months, huge numbers of protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park in New York City, and in other cities around the world, igniting a debate over income inequality and financial corruption. Yet the movement was widely criticized for being ineffectual and lacking a coherent strategy or message, and seemed to quickly flame out. Lasn disagrees with that analysis."

"Back in July, an idea by Kalle Lasn and his colleagues at Adbusters, a nonprofit magazine run by social activists, had started to come together. For months, Lasn had noticed among his 120,000 readers an unresolved anger that wasn't finding expression. He observed that young people were starting to say they worried about having a "black hole future" ahead of them, and it suddenly felt, he said, "like a Tahrir moment in America was eminently possible." So the Adbusters team tried something out. They put out feelers for a small protest on Wall Street on Sept. 17. They started a hashtag to go with it, the catchy-sounding #OccupyWallStreet. They ran a poster in the magazine to advertise it (see above). And before they knew it, the protests had taken on a life of their own:"

"In 2013, I found that, over the course of a year, about 25 percent of the people I quoted or mentioned were women. Two years later, a similar analysis yielded discouraging results."

It would seem that for someone like Kim Kardashian West - queen of selfies, breaker of Internets, mother of two - sharing a nearly nude selfie with millions of followers on social media is a pretty ho-hum weekday activity. But her latest racy photo, published last week on Twitter with a mundane caption ("When you're like I have nothing to wear LOL"), quickly drew a mix of young, powerful celebrities into a debate over whether sharing such an image is a symbol of sexual empowerment, or an example of a powerful woman selling herself short."

"This election year, Marketplace will be casting its eyes toward the future, asking how the country can address long term opportunities and threats - the ones that don't fit into a single federal budget or election cycle. We'll imagine and ask you, if the next President were to appoint a Cabinet member to worry about future generations, what would be job one?"

"The New York Times Consumer Insight Group conducted a study using in-person interviews, a weeklong panel, and a survey of over 2,500 online sharers for a report called "The Psychology of Sharing." The results revealed that people shared for five main reasons:"

"It may be tempting to assume that reasonable people are immune to conspiracy theories, but doing so would be a mistake. Research into misperception, rumor, and conspiracy theory suggests that even reasonable individuals can reach conclusions that don't align with the best available evidence."

"In the tests carried out by Ofcom earlier this year, children were shown screenshots of Google search results for the term "trainers" and asked whether the results at the top of the page were either a) ads, b) the most relevant results, or c) the most popular results. Despite the fact that these topmost search results were outlined in an orange box and labelled with the word "Ad," they were only recognized as such by 31 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds and 16 percent of 8- to 11-year-olds. Other tests showed that one in five 12- to 15-year-olds (19 percent) believed that if a search engine listed particular information then it must be true, while just under half of children (46 percent) could say for sure that Google itself was funded by ads."

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?"

"Hollywood tends to trot these stories out right around awards season, but really, how true are they? How true should they be? Asked what goes through her mind when she hears the phrase "Based on a true story," the response by Ann Hornaday, chief film critic for the Washington Post, was, "Hang on to your hat! "Generally if you see 'based on,' you tend to assume that the filmmaker is sending the signal that everything happened," she told Teichner. "When you see 'inspired by,' you get the signal that some more liberties are going to be taken.""

"In the stunning commercial you're about to see, we meet a woman who is responsible for raising her son, working a full-time job, and maintaining her home - while her husband is able to sit back and watch TV. #ShareTheLoad, created by the ad agency of BBDO's Mumbai, manages to turn an ordinary laundry detergent ad into a powerful statement about the double standards that exist between men and women."

"Junk attention is a "mental equivalent of obesity," says Matthew Crawford. He fears a "creeping saturation of life with hyperpalatable stimuli," as companies engineer experiences that only a "freak of self-control" could resist. They're like junk food's killer combo of sugar + fat + salt orchestrations."

How advertising promotes expensive drugs and treatments you may not need.

"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."

"The work is intended to inspire, but it also contains a handy piece of smart wisdom-to avoid the temptation to stop at either failure ... or success. "Neither success nor failure is permanent; they are themselves fleeting and transient. It's because the biggest mistake occurs when we stop at either of these points." "