3quarksdaily

MySpace and culture of fear

Danah Boyd writes about how youth culture is treated in the US and examines the connections between Columbine and banning MySpace:

"I'm tired of mass media perpetuating a culture of fear under the scapegoat of informing the public. Nowhere is this more apparent than how they discuss youth culture and use scare tactics to warn parents of the safety risks about the Internet. The choice to perpetually report on the possibility or rare occurrence of kidnapping / stalking / violence because of Internet sociability is not a neutral position - it is a position of power that the media chooses to take because it's a story that sells. There's something innately human about rubbernecking, about looking for fears, about reveling in the possibilities of demise. Mainstream media capitalizes on this, manipulating the public and magnifying the culture of fear. It sells horror films and it sells newspapers.

...The effects are devastating. Ever wonder why young people don't vote? Why should they? They've been told for so damn long that their voices don't matter, have been the victims of an oppressive regime. What is motivating about that? How do you learn to use your voice to change power when you've been surveilled and controlled for so long, when you've made an art out of subversive engagement with peers? When you've been put on drugs like Strattera that control your behavior to the point of utter obedience? "

More Here

What's on the 22nd Century News-stand

Futurist Andrew Zolli on the imaginary cover stories from the future created by members of industry body Magazine Publishers of America:

What's particularly interesting is not just the consistency of themes (robots, cloning and climate change are heavily represented) but a kind of consistent visual rhetoric of technology used by the editors. The "future" is still conveyed with a kind of cliche'd visual language that's all about shiny, hard, quantitative, often 'consumable' technology gadgets...

...None of the participants envision a future of integrated, organic technologies that are likely to appear, or new political and personal realities, for instance.

More on Zolli and the business of predicting the future from the March edition of I.D. magazine.

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