Media Education Foundation

Reflect on the website.  What interested you most?  What surprised you?  How does this relate to the three anchors of our course?  
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    While browsing the videos on the site, I was drawn to the Byron Hurt document Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes which I notice is on tap for tomorrow's class.  As I watched, a line from the T.I./Rihanna song "Live Your Life" came to mind: "I got love for the game but hey, I'm not in love with all of it."  Though Mr. Hurt and some of his interview subjects admit to embodying destructive aspects of hip-hop, the film does not emanate from a locus of apology.  Instead, his mission is to grapple with, "...those limited and ultimately self-defeating ideas about manhood that hurt men as well as women."  Less about answers than about exploration, he closes by restating why he set out on the project in the first place, "I longed for a broader vision of manhood in the music i grew up with - the music that I love."  The three quotes below are from the film.  

"I jokingly say that I'm in recovery from hip hop.  It's like being in a domestic violence situation - your home is hip-hop and your man beats you." 3:50 - Sarah Jones, performance artist.  

"There's a whole lineage of black men wanting to deny their own frailty." 12:47 - Dr. Jelani Cobb, Ph. D., Spelman College.

"Men who have more power - men who have financial power and workplace authority, and forms of abstract power like that, don't have to be as physically powerful because they can exert their power in other ways." 16:31 - Dr. Jackson Katz, Ph.D., anti-sexism activist.

    One thing that surprised me was the website physical layout and component parts.  I don't have a real clear idea of what I thought I might see, just something (more) digitally sophisticated.  The site is traditionally organized and utilitarian, which probably hews closer to their mission statement than anything with bells and whistles.  I think I was looking for a Twitter feed, maybe?  I also think the graphic would look better if it were the full width of the screen.  I'm sure they are very busy and cash-strapped, and I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but to criticize the form and content of media on an underdeveloped Website comes off as irresponsible.  I doesn't even really look fully legitimate, not any more so than a well-done blog anyway.  On another, less whiny note, I was not surprised to learn that The Media Education Foundation is headquartered in Northampton, MA.    

    As to how the site fits into the anchors:
I think that Anchor #1 is sort of like reading travel brochures for your home town - you have an intimate experience of it, but perhaps don't understand how it fits into a larger scheme. The Media Ed. site is a good resource for digital natives to get knowledge and perspective on the environment in which they are reared, but perhaps haven't had the time or occasion to observe with objectivity.

This site, in light of Anchors 2 &3 suggests that time can authentically be spent on looking critically at popular culture and the effect of its various vehicles upon us.  A sort of digital epidemiology which has much to say about how our conception of, "...equity and inclusion..." have historically been heavily influenced by what is considered, "...'normal,' 'natural,' and 'good.'"   

Full version of Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes