Prosocial Augmented Reality: Celebrating Youth Achievement Where you look matters. Media producers count eyeballs and show you what you will watch. Let’s celebrate achievement, such as the fifth grade chorus from Staten Island, instead of spending our time and money consuming media about outliers, like LeBron James’ basketball contract, or irresponsibility and bad behavior, like Lindsay Lohan’s substance problems and jail sentence. It's time we started exercising our power through viewing choice and putting the powers of emerging media technologies to work promoting the behaviors we want to see in the media for our kids to emulate--not those we can't help but see or wish we hadn't. Let's use the excitement and engagement of emerging technologies—such as augmented reality—for prosocial ends. We are long overdue to take some responsibility for the media content we choose to support. Let your eyeballs, remotes and wallets do the talking instead of your … [Read more...]
Vote with Your Eyeballs for Positive Media Content
“The Simpsons” Make the World a Better Place
I am always looking for how to put the power of media technologies to work to make the world a better place. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't need to use so much energy hating some other person, group or country? If our lives are essentially the expenditure of energy over time, think about how much energy that would leave left over for stuff we wanted to do! The following is a great example. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a civil rights watch group. CAIR has thanked Matt Groenig of Fox's "The Simpsons" for an episode that challenges negative stereotypes. Shows like this can do a great service because they start to normalize more accepting beliefs. Often efforts to do the right thing are so grim and heavy-handed that they end up preaching to the choir, as the expression goes. If you directly assault someone's beliefs, it is more likely to close their ears than open their eyes. I like to think of effective education as, to quote novelist Nancy Mitford, as … [Read more...]
