Marty Kaplan will present the talk "Hollywood, Health & Society: The Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California" September 7 at the MINTiff "Don't Think It's Only Entertainment..." Conference in Berlin. The MINTiif (Mathematics, Computer Science, Natural Science, Technology and Equal Opportunities in TV Drama Formats) project is funded by the German Federal Education Ministry and the European Social Fund to explore the lack of role models for women on TV in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Also speaking at the conference is Martine Bouman, this year's recipient of the Everett M. Rogers Award for Achievement in Education Entertainment.
THE NEWS
Don't fling your slower-than-ever iPhone 3G out the window just yet: A French company has invented paper board games and folding books that magically use an iPhone as an interactive playing piece or game board. more>>more>>
Can video games help save lives? The trapped Chilean miners just got Sony PSPs to distract them from their reality and keep their spirits up while they wait four months to be rescued. more>>
Blogging & Tweeting. Egypt becomes a model for how social media can spur social change in the Middle East. From NPR. more >>
A group of scientists found the perfect place to study and think about how heavy use of digital devices effects the brain: rafting on the San Juan River in Utah. more >>
Web video shows, like zombies, keep coming back. This time, they might be unstoppable. Venture capital firms are again paying attention to the industry and one show has jumped from the Web to cable TV. more >>
Are today's college students part of Generation P...for plagiarism? In a cut-and-paste era, original thinking and writing take a hit. more>>
Arcade Fire uses social media to start a fire on the Web...for its new album. more>>
The rollout of 3-D films seems unstoppable...or is it? more>>
Hate crowds? Then a growing movement in theater is just for you. Really. Check out Theater for One. more >>
Driving as entertainment? You bet. And not just in Daytona or Talladega. Try Tehran. more>>
Not on Twitter yet? Hurry before your toaster signs up! There's already a new Ford that tweets. more>>
If entertainment is about capturing eyeballs, how does one eyeball figure into that calculation? A new sculpture in Chicago offers a clue. more>>
Busy on July 24th? Why not become a movie star? Hollywood director Ridley Scott wants people to upload a snippet of their daily routine that day. It's a cool idea in user-generated filmmaking. more>>
The social benefits of Internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade, according to respondents to the Pew Internet's most recent survey. About 85% of those surveyed say that the Internet has improved their lives and social relationships.
Saad Mohseni returned to Afghanistan from exile to become the country's first media mogul. His TV and radio programs attract millions, and are forcing change and conflict in this war-torn country. The New Yorker magazine profiles Mohseni in its July issue. more >>>
Afraid you're wasting too much time on social media? Join the Air Force! The new generation of texters and Facebook and Twitter users is deeply at play in the Afghanistan war. more>>
What have computers done to our attention spans and ability to focus on important tasks, like raising a family? Just try to keep reading this more>>
Twitter and Facebook are now used by producers to help shape storylines on Bravo's reality programs. Oh, blurg. more>>
Hate traffic? Of course. But what if it was entertaining? A new art project in LA offers puppet shows from the back of pickup trucks during evening rush hour. The 405 as Sesame Street? more>>more>> Twitter @Superclogger10.
YouTube's biggest hits so far include a Lady GaGa video and a clip of a British baby biting his older brother's finger several times. More memorable in the long run, perhaps, will be the raw footage and sharply-edited clips posted by soldiers in Afghanistan. Welcome to the YouTube War. more>>
Second Life Goes Hollywood! Well, not exactly. Life 2.0, a new documentary, explores the real lives of people who hang out in the virtual world and its effect on their families. more>>
A live, 24/7 video conference between two neighborhoods in the same city? Artist John Ewing's idea is to bridge the cultural distance between the geographically close Brookline and Roxbury sections of Boston. His goal? Reclaim public space for public dialogue. more>>
Still think Twitter is a lark? A new study finds it yields pretty much the same results on politics and current events as well-established public opinion polls. RT that! more>>
What do Snoop Dog, Nelson Mandella, Darth Vader and KISS have in common? They've all rung the bell that opens and closes the NY Stock Exchange. This once stoic setting is now one of the highest-profile red carpets, due to the global blending of corporate interests with entertainment, sports, politics and social causes. more>>
Ready to follow the tweets of a fictional character? A "doctor" on the show Nurse Jackie is already busy with his thumbs between saving lives, and his tweets are timed to the East Coast airing of each episode. more>>
THE CENTER
Bouman Wins 2010 Rogers Award in Entertainment Education
Dr. Martine Bouman, director of the Center Media & Health in the Netherlands, has been named the 2010 recipient of the Everett M. Rogers Award for Achievement in Entertainment Education.
The first woman to receive this prestigious award, Dr. Bouman will discuss her work on Wednesday, September 22, at a special noon lunch colloquium at the USC Annenberg School. That evening, she will be recognized as the sixth recipient of the Rogers award at the Writers Guild of America, West. Download the press release.
2010 Sentinel for Health Awards Finalists
The Lear Center's Hollywood, Health & Society program announced nine finalists for this year's Sentinel for Health Awards, which will be presented in a ceremony followed by a panel discussion with the writers on Wednesday, September 22, 2010, at the Writers Guild of America, West, in Los Angeles.
In its eleventh year, the Sentinel for Health Awards recognizes exemplary achievements of television storylines that inform, educate and motivate viewers to make choices for healthier and safer lives. Five categories of storylines will be recognized - primetime drama, primetime drama minor storyline, children's programming, telenovela, and global health storyline.
The 2010 Finalists are: Primetime Drama
• Army Wives (Lifetime): "Claudia Joy's Diabetes" (diabetes); Written by Karen Maser, Rebecca Dameron, T.D. Mitchell, Elizabeth Jacobs
• Grey's Anatomy (ABC): "How Insensitive" (obesity and patient sensitivity); Written by Bill Harper
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (NBC): "Hammered" (alcohol abuse); Written by Dawn DeNoon
Primetime Minor Storyline
• Private Practice (ABC): "Triangles" (schizophrenia); Written by Steve Blackman
Children's Programming • Sesame Workshop (PBS Primetime Special): "Families Stand Together" (financial stress); Written by Chrissy Ferraro
• Sesame Workshop (PBS Primetime Special): "When Families Grieve" (grief & bereavement); Written by Chrissy Ferraro
Telenovela • El Cartel 2 (Caracol TV): "Larissa's Baby" (folic acid and healthy pregnancy); Written by Jorg Hiller
• Perro Amor (Telemundo): "To Give Folic Acid Is To Love You" (folic acid and healthy pregnancy); Written by Roberto Stopello and Juana Uribe
Global Health Storyline
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (NBC): "Witness" (rape in the Congo); Written by Dawn DeNoon and Christine M. Torres
HH&S News: Zoanne Clack Presents "Truth In Storytelling" at CDC
In mid-August, members of the Lear Center's Hollywood, Health & Societyprogram presented four panels at the National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media at the CDC in Atlanta. As part of their team, they brought Zoanne Clack, MPH, MD, writer/producer on Grey's Anatomy, whose succinct presentation "Truth in Storytelling" proved to be one of the most popular. Click on the PowerPoint image above to advance through her presentation. For a larger version, visit the HH&S program page.
HOT PRESS: New Publications
Lessons from Fashion's Free Culture Lear Center deputy director Johanna Blakley delivered this witty and incisive talk at this year's TEDxUSC.
A Conversation with Shepard Fairey BrandSpace's Sarah Banet-Weiser talks with guerrilla artist Shepard Fairey about art, politics and his take on free culture in this engaging Visions & Voices event.
Raymond Roker named 2010-11 Popular Music Project Distinguished Resident
The Popular Music Project is proud to announce Raymond Roker, Co-Founder and Publisher of URB magazine and URB.com, as its 2010-2011 Distinguished Resident.
Through web, print and events, URB connects with progressive urban explorers and passionate music aficionados worldwide.
While in residence, he will lead a student workshop exploring new avenues and applications that mix music, media and technology. On Thursday, October 7, 2010, at 7 p.m., the Popular Music Project will host an introductory presentation by Roker about his work and the challenges and promises of the new media landscape. The discussion will take place at USC Annenberg's Geoffrey Cowan Forum (Room 207). Read the press release.
Joe Saltzman, director of the Lear Center's IJPC project, will screen his landmark 1974 documentary on breast cancer Why Me? as part of a special USC Visions & Voices event. This award-winning documentary addressed a subject not seen before that time on television; it was viewed by one out of every three women in the Western world, and it has been credited with saving thousands of lives. The event takes place Thursday, Oct. 21 at 6:30 p.m. in the Annenberg Auditorium.
Laureana Toledo's The Limit: Screening & Discussion @ Redcat with Josh Kun
REDCAT will host the U.S. premiere of a new film by Mexico City-based artist Laureana Toledo on Tuesday, August 17, at 8:30 pm, followed by a post-show discussion and Q&A with the artist and Josh Kun, director of the Lear Center's Popular Music Project.
Disguised as a thirty minute fan documentary, The Limit investigates how information and pop culture are digested, what activates our fantasies and expectations, and how the secondary role of women around rock bands is funnily reversed. For more information and tickets, click here.
INTERVENTION
Prime Time for Addiction Issues
The Lear Center's Hollywood, Health & Society program brought together top experts on the science and psychology of addiction to discuss cutting-edge research with the producers and writers from A&E's Emmy Award-winning series Intervention on Monday, August 9 at the Writers Guild of America, West. This briefing was co-sponsored by HH&S, the WGAW and A&E/Intervention and kicked off a new bi-monthly speaker series in which experts will help Intervention's creative team tell accurate and compelling stories about all forms of addiction. Read the press release.
HH&S Transmedia Outreach: Army Wives
The Lear Center's Hollywood, Health & Society program just completed a transmedia outreach effort for the show Army Wives, focusing on a story arc in which the character Joan learns she's suffering from a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Working with Lifetime Television and the CDC Injury Center, HH&S blended old media - PSA's, consultations with show writers - with new media - a CDC Facebook page linked to the Army Wives and Lifetime Facebook pages, along with a Twitter campaign that included Wendy Davis, the actress who plays Joan, tweeting to direct users to the CDC/Army Wives TBI resources. This created a networked space that fans could easily surf across to discuss TBIs in the context of the show. This unique partnership brought new support to Traumatic Brain Injury awareness.
TBI is the leading cause of injury among U.S. forces serving in Afghanistan and Iraq; an estimated average of 1.7 million civilians in the U.S. annually sustain a TBI.
THE BLOG
hitRECord.org
Scott McGibbon
Scott McGibbon is Project Specialist at the Norman Lear Center.
On my recent L.A.-bound vacation, I took the time to check out a Web site I'd had my eye on for months: hitRECord.org , a supremely cool, online collaborative media-making venture started by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It seems to have reached a happy and coherent critical mass lately (I was a bit confused when I first stumbled upon it), most deliciously expressed in a whimsical live action/animated short, Morgan & Destiny's Eleventeenth Date "The Zeppelin Zoo." Aside from the Lewis Carrollish narration and visual razzle-dazzle, what's so remarkable about this film? The credits. Wait for them, because you'll discover that there were 306 online collaborators (58 musicians, 54 actors, 95 visual artists, 95 animal creators and 4 digital engineers) who contributed ideas, music and images and then helped re-shape and remix the film into its finished state.
Scott McGibbon is Project Specialist at the Norman Lear Center.
At the second annual Producer Guild's "Produced By" conference last month, veteran television and movie producer Marshall Herskovitz expressed deep concern that the headlong push of content to every new platform by media conglomerates could end up reducing the value of that content and cheapen the audience experience.
Days later, I watched a YouTube clip of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing in Swingtime on my laptop - already a platform far from the full movie screen the film was originally intended for - and marveled again that this was at my fingertips whenever I wanted it.
The next day, while waiting in line to order lunch, I pulled up the same clip on my iPhone
Scott McGibbon is Project Specialist at the Norman Lear Center.
Despite the cultural popularity of American Idol and continuing sky-high touring profits for artists like Madonna and U2, the recording industry continues to stare into an abyss of vanishing record sales, pirated content and a once-solid business model in tatters. Record company staffs have been eviscerated, and anything like a profitable future looks like smoke in the wind.
The Lear Center's Popular Music Project, which studies popular music in every way you can think of, wrapped up this year with an endeavor that might offer music producers as well as music lovers a few rays of hope. PMP Artist-in-Residence Courtney Holt, president of MySpace Music, asked an undergraduate working group of students from
The Biggest Media Conglomerate You've Never Heard Of
Laith Ulaby
We asked Laith Ulaby - a musician with a PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA - to blog for us about a development in the globalization of entertainment that he's tracking.
While the economic downturn has dimmed Dubai's reputation as a business dynamo and tourism hub, the Gulf region has quietly prospered as a mass-media center. Dubai Media City alone hosts several bureaus of large media companies, including BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, Showtime and Reuters. While international companies have a significant presence in the UAE, a regional one - Rotana - is perhaps the most important.
Remembering Michael Jackson: Moonwalking Between Contradictions
Sylvia Martin
Sylvia J. Martin earned her PhD in anthropology and is a visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Babson College. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Hong Kong for 2010-2011.
As the one year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death approaches, hundreds of fans from as far away as France, Japan, and the Ukraine are expected to converge on his burial place at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Since Jackson was buried there nine months ago, Jackson fans have been steadily making the pilgrimage to his mausoleum. On one of my visits there, an African-American fan told me that she felt that Jackson had distanced himself from the black community over the years. A white fan
Shannon McHugh is a doctoral student of Italian Studies at New York University and Chris Tokuhama is pursuing a Master's degree in Communication at the University of Southern California.
PostSecret, a community art project started by Frank Warren in 2005, represents a fairly simple concept: individuals anonymously divulge a secret on a postcard frequently adorned with a related image, which is then published on the Internet.
Chris Tokuhama
Growing up, I remember watching the first seasons of The Real World and Road Rules on MTV and I was always entranced by the confessional monologues. As a teen, the confessionals possessed a conspiratorial allure, for I was now privy to insider information about the inner workings of the group. Looking back, I wonder if my exposure to reality TV's version of the confessional changed the way I think about my secrets.
Marty Kaplan will present the talk "Hollywood, Health & Society: The Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California" September 7 at the MINTiff "Don't Think It's Only Entertainment..." Conference in Berlin. The MINTiif (Mathematics, Computer Science, Natural Science, Technology and Equal Opportunities in TV Drama Formats) project is funded by the German Federal Education Ministry and the European Social Fund to explore the lack of role models for women on TV in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Also speaking at the conference is Martine Bouman, this year's recipient of the Everett M. Rogers Award for Achievement in Education Entertainment.
Are today's college students part of Generation P...for plagiarism? In a cut-and-paste era, original thinking and writing take a hit. 
YouTube's biggest hits so far include a Lady GaGa video and a clip of a British baby biting his older brother's finger several times. More memorable in the long run, perhaps, will be the raw footage and sharply-edited clips posted by soldiers in Afghanistan. Welcome to the YouTube War. 
Second Life Goes Hollywood! Well, not exactly. Life 2.0, a new documentary, explores the real lives of people who hang out in the virtual world and its effect on their families. 
What do Snoop Dog, Nelson Mandella, Darth Vader and KISS have in common? They've all rung the bell that opens and closes the NY Stock Exchange. This once stoic setting is now one of the highest-profile red carpets, due to the global blending of corporate interests with entertainment, sports, politics and social causes. 
The Lear Center's 
As the 
REDCAT will host the U.S. premiere of a new film by Mexico City-based artist Laureana Toledo on Tuesday, August 17, at 8:30 pm, followed by a post-show discussion and Q&A with the artist and 
Prime Time for Addiction Issues
The Lear Center's 
On my recent L.A.-bound vacation, I took the time to check out a Web site I'd had my eye on for months: 
Laith Ulaby
Sylvia Martin
