Kids and Media: Kaiser’s M2 Report

Posted on January 20, 2010 at 6:40 pm

The highly respected Kaiser Foundation has issued the third in its series of reports on children and media, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18-year-olds. They found that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth.
Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours. The amount of time spent with media increased by an hour and seventeen minutes a day over the past five years, from 6:21 in 2004 to 7:38 today. And because of media multitasking, the total amount of media content consumed during that period has increased from 8:33 in 2004 to 10:45 today.
It will not come as a surprise to anyone that the increase in media use is driven in large part by ready access to mobile devices like cell phones and iPods. Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in ownership among 8- to 18-year-olds: from 39% to 66% for cell phones, and from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players. During this period, cell phones and iPods have become true multi-media devices: in fact, young people now spend more time listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on their cell phones (a total of :49 daily) than they spend talking on them (:33). For the first time, however, actual TV use declined.
The study pointed out some racial differences. Black and Hispanic children consume nearly 4½ hours more media daily (13:00 of total media exposure for Hispanics, 12:59 for Blacks, and 8:36 for Whites). Some of the largest differences are in TV viewing: Black children spend nearly 6 hours and Hispanics just under 5½ hours, compared to roughly 3½ hours a day for White youth. And the racial disparity in media use has grown substantially over the past five years.
It is also not a surprise that the study found that the heaviest media use was associated with poor grades. But what I found particularly distressing was the failure of parents to exercise any oversight. According to the report, only about three in ten young people say they have rules about how much time they can spend watching TV (28%) or playing video games (30%), and 36% say the same about using the computer. But when parents do set limits, children spend less time with media: those with any media rules consume nearly 3 hours less media per day (2:52) than those with no rules.
Worst of all, about two-thirds (64%) of young people say the TV is usually on during meals, and just under half (45%) say the TV is left on “most of the time” in their home, even if no one is watching. Seven in ten (71%) have a TV in their bedroom, and half (50%) have a console video game player in their room. I strongly recommend that parents not allow televisions or other media except for music in bedrooms or at mealtime. Connections are nourished by silence and it is time to remind families that there is no connection via texting, ims, Facebook, phone, blogging, tweeting, or anything else requiring a charger that is as important as in-person, looking-at-each-other conversation. In law school, we learned about “demeanor evidence,” the things you can learn from watching and listening to the way someone says something. Teaching kids how to understand this is more important than all the LOLs and POSes ever typed.

Interview: Bruce Faulk of ‘Soul of the Church’

Posted on January 18, 2010 at 12:00 pm

I was able to speak to the man behind the Black History Collection: Soul of the Church DVD, Bruce Faulk, who assembled a treasure trove of gospel performances into this stirring and inspirational collection. It even includes some of the vintage commercials.
Tell me how this production came together.
This was a syndicated mid-60’s television series called “TV Gospel Time.” It was the idea of a Chicago advertising agency. Their idea, which was rare at the time, was to go from town to town and record local gospel choirs and feature singers with the hosts being some of the best-known gospel singers of the time. The premise was unique. There were many many many many shows and we have just about all of them. This first release has sixteen of them and we were able with bonus material to include six songs from “Mahalia Jackson Sings.” It is an amazing array of the icons of the golden age of gospel. In many cases these are the only visual recordings of these artists. It’s just totally amazing. Just on this release we have James Cleveland, Sally Martin, the Blind Boys of Mississippi, Ernestine Washington, the Dixie Hummingbirds, Alex Bradford, Clouds of Joy. The Highway QC’s a group from Chicago was founded by two people you don’t think of as gospel — Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls. One of the celebrities is Ruth Brown. You don’t think of her as gospel; you think of her as a pop and R&B singer. But she’s here. This is an amazing look at Americana and gospel as an American form of music. It gives me chill bumps! Gospel means good news and this is certainly good news.
What a treasure trove! And it is history as well as music, culture, and worship.
It’s amazing that these survive; it’s amazing that they were recorded to begin with. Even though the show was sponsored by, recorded for, and broadcast to the African-American market, it crossed over to the Caucasian market. It was broadcast during church hour and it opened the music up to an entire new demographic.
Where did these come from and how did you come to them?
My background is in children’s programming. I worked in television animation and produced some well known seasonal pieces. I met a gentleman at CBS, a controller there, and to save room they were throwing away some old shows and he started buying. He now has the largest privately help film library in the world. These are kinescopes, camera pointed at the camera as it was broadcast live. Even though we’ve digitally enhanced it, it is still kinescope.
Growing up, a lot of these songs, I immediately wanted to see how they were handled by these singers. How did Marie Knight treat “Jesus Lifted Me?” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” or Tommy Browns doing “Keep Trusting.” I wanted to know how they did with the songs that were my all-time favorites and they were just amazing.
It’s like any other type of music — but jazz and gospel are American music. Gospel was the call and response put to music for an era when so many did not read. Over the years it’s been changed, augmented, tampered with, but you still find that line almost like a jazz riff that goes right through it. These recordings are like those early Sun recordings with Elvis. To see them work, to see their enthusiasm and spirit is something to behold.
Is there one performance that really is special to you?
Ernestine Washington doing “Down by the Riverside” just tears me up! She is the quintessential queen of gospel. The six songs from Mahalia Jackson, especially “Walk On” and “Just as I Am.” She was President Kennedy’s favorite singer and performed at his inauguration. She was Dr. Martin Luther King’s favorite singer.
What’s next?
We are working on a separate Mahalia Jackson release and we have enough for several more collections.
To order, click on Black History Collection: Soul of the Church

More Thoughts on ‘Avatar’ (Spoiler Alerts)

Posted on January 7, 2010 at 10:20 am

Many thanks for the very thoughtful comments on my post about the commentary that “Avatar” has inspired. I was particularly glad to be directed to some thoughtful assessments of the film I had not seen.
Thanks to Sheherazahde and Cheryl Anne for suggesting John Crowley’s commentary.

As to the story — it was astonishingly standard, every element, every twist, every emotion having been seen a thousand times before. It was nearly identical to both Disney’s and Terence Malick’s Pocohantas, but more Disney — the heroine even closely resembled Disney’s. But it also took from John Ford cavalry epics and a dozen other sources. It also was a derivative of Ursula LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest, one of her lesser and more platitudinous all-life-is-sacred-and-women-know-it stories, up to and including interconnected wise trees and brutal uncaring corporate and military types. Hilarious, actually, rather than lowering.

James led me to Carl McColman’s commentary on the film as a Christian parable.

I think it’s interesting to breathe through the obvious contours of this story and consider it as a parable of the intersection between sky-god and earth-goddess spiritualities. Here’s the key: one of the main characters is named Grace Augustine. Can you get any more heavy-handed than that?…

So in the end, wisdom proves greater than either might or avarice — and the “Christian” wisdom of grace and justice joins together with the “Pagan” wisdom of the goddess-as-the-web-of-life. And this integrated wisdom proves to be too much for the “sky people.” Quaritch dies at the hand of Neytiri, felled by the very arrows he laughed at throughout the story. Selfridge, meanwhile, is marched ingloriously onto a ship that is sent packing. Only Grace’s team is allowed to remain on Pandora, and the movie ends with Jake finally solving the problem of his paraplegic body.

Indeed, I think the fact that Jake is disabled is as central to understanding Avatar as is the symbolism of Grace Augustine (“grace pre-destined”?). Jake comes from a disabled planet. As he mournfully tells Eywa, “our home has no green on it; we’ve killed it all.” Both he and Grace experience a death-and-resurrection; but where hers is more classically Christian in tone: she, the sinner (smoker) is felled by sin (a gunshot wound) and dies, only to find new life in the post-corporeal, beatific vision of Eywa — whose name seems to be a möbius-strip inversion of “Yahweh” suggesting that she encompasses both earth goddess and sky god. Jake, on the other hand, undergoes a more explicitly Pagan death-and-rebirth, reincarnating in the healthy body of his avatar.

Sheherazahde also pointed us to this response from Druid blogger Ali, showing, as I said before, that the spareness of the story allows each of us to bring our own perspective (and bias) to it.
And I am grateful to Andy Culpepper for giving us a link to his “Avatar” commentary at The Hollywood Beat.

The electronic game and cyber worlds have given us a skewed definition of what an avatar represents, but the original meaning from the Sanskrit translates “one who crosses over….”

Not since 1999 and “The Matrix” (http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9903/31/matrix/) have I come across such an accessible major motion picture so rich in mythological, literary and Judeo-Christian references. Like “The Matrix,” “Avatar” expands expectations of what a feature film can offer an appreciative audience.

Early on, Cameron lets us know that we’re following a protagonist who represents much more than what meets the eye. The Sanskrit definition – one who crosses over – refers to a deity who comes to Earth in body form. Is his Jake a Christ figure? No – he isn’t sacrificed. Does he undergo apotheosis? Oh, yeah.

Both Jake and his dead brother, Tom, have been named with a nod to the Bible. Thomas was also known as Ditimus, the original “doubting Tom,” and Jake is short for Jacob, a second-born twin whose name translates from the Hebrew as “the foot catcher.” Jacob was born in a breach birth – his hand clasping the heel of his slightly-older brother, Esau. In “Avatar,” Jake is a metaphorical foot-catcher: Becoming an avatar allows him the chance to walk on two feet again, if only during his cross-over or dream state.

Just as Jake in the movie “crossed over” to literally connect to the wisdom of the Pandorans, it seems to me that Cameron, in releasing his film, has opened up his story to the wisdom of the audiences. This discussion has enriched the experience of the movie for me. I loved jestrfyl’s reference to the ewoks! And his very wise conclusion that “These films, like Jesus’ parables, favor the characters who have no authority and have yet to realize their own power.”
A rabbi once told me to keep in mind that the only difference between a mirror and a window is a coating of silver. Some people want movies to be a mirror, to reflect back to them what they already believe. They can feel threatened or offended by any story that does not explicitly validate or reinforce their beliefs. Others look to movies as a window, to give them a sense of something they have not seen or thought of before. They cherish other views, even those that contradict their own, as a reinforcement of their notion of freedom and humanity, and an opportunity for deeper understanding and greater connection.

Movies Increasingly Feature Spiritual Themes

Posted on January 3, 2010 at 10:40 am

In today’s Washington Post, Robert W. Butler writes about the increasing number of wide-release films that include themes of religion and spirituality.

It’s everywhere at the multiplex these days: religion. Or if that word makes you uncomfortable, you can go with the more general “spirituality.”

In movies as varied as the dead serious “The Road,” the uplifting family picture “The Blind Side,” the biting comedy “The Invention of Lying” and even James Cameron’s sci-fi opus “Avatar,” issues of faith and morality and mankind’s place in the universe are all the rage.

Not all of these movies embrace religion. Some question human gullibility. Some ask for evidence of a higher purpose in what often seems a random universe. But whether they encourage prayer or doubt, they’re all part of the zeitgeist.

Butler asked some thoughtful observers of the influence that religion and pop culture have on each other to comment on this trend, but, as usual, everyone forgets that it takes many years for a movie to be made — twelve years in the case of “Avatar” — and so it does not make sense to try to tie them to current economic conditions. It may, however, affect the audience response to those themes. “Up in the Air” is mentioned in the article as not specifically religious in its themes but compared to “A Christmas Carol” as a story of a man who finds that there is more meaning in personal connections than in money. It benefitted from the timeliness of its character’s job, flying from company to company to tell workers they were being laid off. But it was based on a book that was published nine years ago.
The portrayal of religious themes I have found the most meaningful this year was in “The Blind Side,” with its unabashed and explicit acknowledgement that Christian faith was a guiding inspiration and base of support in the real-life story of a wealthy family who adopted a homeless teenager. This — and the box office success of “Fireproof” and other modestly-budgeted films with Christian themes targeted to a Christian audience — should address some of Hollywood’s traditional skittishness about portraying people of faith in a positive way.
Upcoming films with themes of religion and spirituality include “The Lovely Bones” (told by a murdered girl from a sort of heavenly waiting room), “Legion” (a battle between angels for the future of humanity), and “The Last Station” (about writer Leo Tolstoy’s religious conversion and its effect on his wife).

Can You Guess the Celebrity Voice?

Posted on January 2, 2010 at 8:00 am

Slate has a great collection of ads with celebrity voiceovers. How many can you identify?