One Laptop Per Child

To continue on with the discussion we had about global digital media and internet, I wanted to share a non-profit organization called One Laptop Per Child that's mission statement is "to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future." The idea is to give children computers who would not normally have the opportunity to experience the internet and use it resources. This would build connections with one's own nation but also internationally. It would provide cultural awareness and knowledge of the world outside these children's small, isolated communities. It would also provide access to news and educational resources where these children can develop ideas concerning various educational topic and allow them to perform research.

If you click on the link below, it will take you to the One Laptop Per Child website. There are two videos on the page presented. The first video explains more the mission statement of OLPC and how the organization works. Emphasizing how "kids are the mission, not the market" and detailing five binding principal: 1. Kids get to keep the laptops. 2. Focus on early education. 3. No one gets left out. 4. Connection to the internet. 5. Free to grow and adapt.

The second video (which is fairly long at 16 or 17 minutes) feature a conference where Miguel Brechner speaks about the CEIBEL plan which is a social inclusion, equality plan that will allow children and teens to have a real opportunity at life and solve educatuional problems. This plan includes using OLPC in the discussed South American countries. Brechner identifies the difficulty to find cures for social problems and possibility of loosing generations of children if nothing done to improve education. There is a need for economic growth which lies in the future of the children of those nations.

I believe OLPC has created a great way for children to have educational opportunities they would not normally have access to, allowing not only national growth but also global growth and connectedness. However, I would like to raise a couple of important questions addressing OLPC's organization effectiveness:

1. Will teachers, parents and communities fully support the mission of this organization and give children participating the guidance they need to fully take advantage of this program and benefit from it?

2. Will parents lack the knowledge to aid their children when they bring theses laptops home to complete assignments or explore the internet themselves or with this subsequently teach and educate parents at the same time?

http://laptop.org/en/vision/index.shtml

BORDER BATTLES: el caso de la guerra narcotraficante.

Cultural Studies Theory and Agenda Setting Theory of the Mexican Drug War

Sarah Berger, Thanh Pham, Lauren Benner, Alexandra Gardner

Research Question: How has the media coverage of the Mexican drug war shaped power relations, attitudes and perceptions between the Mexican and U.S. governments, the media, the drug cartels, and the general public?

Summary of Background: Mexico has seen escalating violence and censorship as a result of the battle between seven major drug cartels and the government in a conflict, which has been developing since President Calderon’s frontal assault on the cartels in December 2006. The worsening situation has garnered media and policy attention abroad, with the United States most directly implicated since it is U.S. drug consumers who fuel demand and American guns which are being used by the drug gangs. Additionally, US has given a $400 million package to support Mexico’s fight against drug cartels, which could have negative or positive implications as the efforts towards a solution progress.

To date, over 28,000 people have been killed (over 7% have been police officers), and media censorship is on the rise after several journalists have been kidnapped, threatened and/or murdered by the drug cartels. In March 2010, after over three years with little progress, Mexico and the US have refocused their counternarcotics strategy away from heavy military assistance and instead toward strengthening civil law enforcement and rebuilding communities crippled by poverty and crime. In August 2010, after a spike in drug-related killings, Calderon called for a series of high-level forums of Mexico’s entire political establishment to evaluate the current state of affairs and to discuss new proposals on how to win the drug war. In October 2010, the government announced a strategy to unify the local and federal police forces in an attempt to weed out corruption in the enforcement agency. Recently, ‘El Diario,’ the biggest newspaper in the city of Juarez published a front-page editorial asking the cartels how they should avoid further violence towards journalists. This pivotal event was soon followed by the US granting political asylum to a Mexican journalist for the first time since the cartel war exploded. The stress on the mainstream media has brought about a growing reliance on social media in spreading knowledge about the violence. These events have put issues surrounding the Mexican media in the international spotlight.

Brief Description of theoretical approaches:

Cultural Studies seeks to understand the creation of different meanings understood by and assigned by different subcultures that make up the producers and the audience, by analyzing how cultural texts are variously produced and subsequently consumed. In the case of Mexico’s drug war, we aim to understand how perceptions and attitudes of the war, in addition to power relations between major actors, are shaped by the different ways in which news articles, editorials, videos, blogs, tweets and announcements related to the war are encoded by editors, federal government , citizen journalists, and even cartel members. Furthermore, we aim to understand how the decoding, or consumption, of these cultural artifacts has influenced the “meaning” of the war locally and internationally.

The concept of agenda setting in our society is for the press to selectively choose what we see or hear in the media. The media determine our mental image of the larger world of public affairs that we never directly experience. We don’t respond to the real world but to the limited pictures of the world that are constructed by the news media, often incomplete and distorted yet we come to regard them as true reflections of the real environment. Media is the bridge between the world outside and the pictures in our heads. When applying agenda setting theory to the case of the Mexican drug war, we seek to show how the media are not the only agents setting the agenda as there are many other agents (i.e. policy-makers, cartels, and public) who are determining the agenda in Mexico. The interaction among these agents has created an agenda-setting web where each agent’s actions affect the other’s agenda.

Discussion Questions:

1. What are some of the encoded values and ideologies evident in the news articles? To what extent are the interests of the government, cartels and the public expressed in these texts? Are any of these interests overlapping?

2. Who do you believe has the majority control of the agenda in the case of the Mexican drug war? Why?

3. What are other possible theoretical approaches that might be helpful in the analysis of this situation? Why?

Links:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130087939

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/mexico/drug_trafficking/index.html?scp=1&sq=mexico%20drug%20violence&st=cse

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/26/twitter-blog-mexico-drug-wars

Example of Framing

If anyone has been keeping up with the news in South America I’m sure you know that on September 30th there was an attempted coup in Ecuador. The coup was triggered by the police officers protesting against cuts to public service workers. This short article is an example of how different media organizations can frame a story to lean towards a certain viewpoint. Headlines from The New York Times, Spain’s El Mundo, and France’s Le Monde are used as examples of different ways to frame this event. It is interesting to examine how different nations would frame an attempted coup in Ecuador.

ARTICLE

What is Blackberry?

For most of the people in the world, Blackberry is BBM. BBM, Blackberry messenger, is untraceable. Last week in class someone brought up Blackberry being blocked, which made me want to investigate more. Blackberry is being asked to allow government to have access to messages and email services in India and other countries. If RIM (Blackberry's maker), does not allow traces on there phones, they face being banned. In the Gulf Region and in India, 'everybody' has Blackberry and the region is a huge market for RIM. In the United States we have freedom of speech as one of our constitutional rights. For many countries facing the ban, they do not. Many people use their Blackberry's to speak out, and some are arguing it is being used for terrorist activity and threatens national security to their country, which is why RIM is being asked to allow traces in some countries. RIM is still in talks with these countries and it remains undecided whether or not to allow the bans. Either way, if RIM does or does not allow the ban, their business would be greatly impacted. We also spoke about the butterfly effect in class, which is when something small occurring can lead to large impact. In the case of RIM, Blackberry and countries asking for traces, what will happen next if this expands across the globe?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10998549

The changing sphere of influence

In the beginning of our discussion about globalization, we talked about the origins of the IMF and how the US lent money to developing countries that a few years later could't possible pay it back. As we know, it is currently impossible for these countries to pay back on their loans, which translates into the world power structure. (The central countries own the debt of the peripheral countries who owe on the debt.)

The rise of China's power and influence, gained in part by buying US debt and loaning money to the US, is a major theme in the media today. To me, it seems like essentially the same transaction- China is lending money to a country that they know won't be able to it pay back. I might be going out on a limb and oversimplifiying a huge issue, but it seems frighteningly similar to me.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/us/politics/10outsource.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

Japan has fewest digital friends??

Japan has fewest digital friends

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11501625

This article from the BBC is an interesting follow-up to last week’s cultural discussions with regards to nations and their digital interactions with the world. In class we considered what effect a country’s blogs and other new mediums of digital communication can have economically, politically and socially on their nation and the world. Statistics about these new forms of communication can also be interpreted to share another dimension of cultural interaction. It is interesting to consider how a country’s on-line behavior can be symbolic of the country’s daily societal interactions. For example, in Japan, most users have few Facebook friends compared with other countries. In the article, Matthew Froggatt suggests that Japan could be "a culture that embraces fewer but closer friendships." What other societal interactions are demonstrated through digital communication statistics?

The article is based on a study by Discover Digital Life. Discover Digital Life claims to have performed, “The largest and most comprehensive study of the global digital consumer - ever.” This may be a useful link for anyone interested in writing their final paper about digital media usage.

http://discoverdigitallife.com

Juggalo Agenda Setting

I opened up the Onion newspaper and in the AV Club's "real" news section in the back there's an interview with Violent J from the Insane Clown Posse. I've been following ICP since the Tia Tequila incident at their Gathering of the Juggalo's Music Festival this summer so I gave the article a read. Violent J very eloquently, albeit with a peppering of four-lettered words, explains classic media framing theory.

They had their minds set on the story they were going to make before we even did the interview. It really didn’t even matter what we said. The whole reason they even did an interview with us was looking for lines or something to come out of our mouth that we can say to further make their point. We might have sat down for that hour, and we might have actually changed Martin Bashir’s opinion of us, but he wasn’t going to let that show. They knew the picture they were painting before we even fucking did that interview... They took what we said, and they turned the interview to make it to their point. But we filmed the interview as well, and we posted the whole thing up on our website... They talked about crime happening and about how some Juggalos have committed these crimes. We made the point that millions of people bought our albums, and out of millions of people, there is going to be some bad apples. I’m sure Barbra Streisand fans have committed crimes as well…. Things like that we talked about, and he just kept rephrasing the same questions. They were going for what they needed. They needed some blue in their picture, and they needed some green. No matter what we said, they were going to get what they needed to paint that picture...

J appeared on the news program Nightline with his rapping partner Shaggy 2 Dope earlier this year.  J accused Nightline of taking an agenda setting approach in producing the piece for air.  J says that Nightline edited the video of the interview so that his words were portrayed out of context.  Nightline alleges that ICP's violent lyrics cause its fans to commit murder.  ICP's view is that they are entertainers who are only interested in theatrical violence like professional wrestling or Stephen King novels.  However, as you can see from comparing the final report and the rough interview below, Nightline edited ICP's explanations out of their story.


Here's Nightline's final segment that aired:




And here is the full interview with ICPs opinions intact: