Digital Culture Studies

….that pagan holiday where we consume ceremonial depictions of men, in ginger, to celebrate the tauroctony. I love December 25th! You non-classics majors may have another use for that day.

It doesn’t take a genius (good thing!) to see the heavy-handed marketing aimed at children, who already see 40,000 advertisments a year and have a difficult time differentiating between advertising and media content. Speaking of which, I am a big fan of the Commercial Free Childhood.  Nonetheless, it is heartwarming (dare I say that, since ’tis the season for heartwarming acts?) to know that other people share my abject horreur of the Bratz phenomenon. Best of all, that post lead me to a great op-ed on the Bratz movie, which is really about all movies aimed at pre-teen girls, and how those movies all have the same elements, and virtually interchangeable frames.

 If you think the sexualization of little girls via marketing isn’t really a problem in America, well…can you tell me how the marketing goals of these two images differ?

Ben can see, without eyes.

• School of ‘tall studies’. Really?
• Faces in Places - once you see this site, you start seeing faces everywhere.

• Future Me. While a fun idea, it makes me wonder how many people have the same email account three years in the future. I know the Gmailers are reading that and laughing, but remember when a Hotmail account was cool? a Yahoo account? Here is what my letter to my future self would read: Dear Kristin - stop playing around on the internet and get back to work. I don’t need an email from the future to tell me that! How necessary is this at all - isn’t this what people blog for - to write letters to themselves in the future (and show of pictures of their cat)?

After clearing out more than 10,000 spam comments, although the email for this site is still non-functional (thanks, spam!), this site may or may not be working again. New design to come, but in the meantime, the last 3 things I looked at online:

• Top 87 bad predictions about the future. I will let you make your own flying car joke.
• iPhones ad parody, via Kottke.
• Flock - the ’social web browser’.