[ culturologist.com ]

so, great class…fun, open, informed, and participatory…very cool for a summer class.  it is amazing how much media is in our veins…our students’ veins…our consciousness and formation of our knowledges.  it is hegemonically in the dominant culture’s interest to keep us media illiterate…perhaps that is why media literacy is not on education syllabii, in core curricula, and on our radar.  how different would a critical media curriculum be?  we would not have to alter our content, merely add another lens in which to read media. Freire advocates us to teach our children and youth to read the world–that reading the word is not enough–being functionally literate is still being culturally illiterate.

and so we begin two weeks exploring the effects of media, and critically understanding the multiple meanings in a mediated society.  i am looking out the window at a large Chevron filling station in the middle of the bay…a signifier of corporate consumerism even in the water…that is a symbol i remember from my childhood, laden with red, white, and blue, the gas company remains an american icon–i am interested in your symbols, the symbols of our students…what do these symbols mean?  how do they inform our consciousness?

in the language of Mike Myer’s Linda Richmond….discuss

Ok, great weather…found a music station on TV featuring a Reggae Christian band, Ganja something…watching MTV Totally Gay after schlepping around the redlight district wondering how much I would have to be paid to stand gyrating in a window???? Men seemed especially skanky today, especially the ones hanging out of the hotel windows with bunkbeds in the background. go figure…Hemp museum was a bit scant, feeling somewhat taudry today. On the whole better dressed people, a bit more trendy, and the calf muscles are amazing on the population who is obsessed with biking–we should be so healthy. However, met by a huge fiberglass statue of Ronald McDonald in the airport, first thing we spied…many more McDonald’s in the past few years, that is the most Americanized portion of Dutch culture I have seen.

Do you remember when we used to sing that as kids, and thought we were saying a dirty word? So, off to The Netherlands, Spain, and Spain again, this is the good part of writing and teaching. Wonder if the Dutch kids consume as much as North Americans? Is Hannah Montana big? Paris? Lindsay? These questions haunt me…

Glad to get off North American soil for awhile. Been a long month. Ironic that someone who teaches media got hacked, and identity stolen from my personal email. Huge ramifications, the reality is once someone poses as you, it is hard to convince them that it wasn’t you, even with police reports. Would like to hear from people who have had cyber identity theft in regard to personal relationships (not bank accounts).

Will write from a cafe.