Adults, children, fish, and crows all share an affinity for shiny things. While fish and crows are happy with the simple gleam of a metal object, humans often have a more sophisticated palette for visual objects. My friends are often doe eyed over the latest technological gizmos. Children, once enraptured by a jingling set of keys, now become enthralled by the flashy hypnotic screens of an iPhone or tablet. Is the increase in consumption of shiny digital media by our children a problem?

There is certainly little doubt that humans are growing more visual across the board. We are exposed to more and more visual stimulations online and in digital technology. Our screen options are a lot like our shirt size: small, medium, or large. However we choose to digest this media is really up to us, but unless you’re like a Geico commercial and live under a rock, you’re exposed to some form of digital media.

No matter what we think or how we feel about our media use, screen-time for children is on the rise. According to a recent study published by Common Sense Media 27% of the children between the ages of 0 and 8 spend their screen time on a mobile device, tablet, video iPod system, handheld gaming console, computers, and televisions.

Let’s break it down:

• Two-thirds (65%) of 0- to 8-year-olds watch TV at least once every day (ranging from 37% of 0-1 year- olds, to 73% of 2- to 4-year-olds and 72% of 5- to 8-year-olds).
• Forty-two percent also have a TV in their bedroom, and 39% live in a home where the TV is left on all (10%) or most (29%) of the time–whether anyone is watching it or not.
• Computer use is pervasive among very young children, with half (53%) of all 2- to 4-year- olds having ever used a computer, and nine out of ten (90%) 5- to 8-year-olds having done so
• Half (52%) of all children now have access to one of the newer mobile devices at home: either a smartphone (41%), a video iPod (21%), or an iPad or other tablet device (8%).

In a recent publication by the American Academy of Pediatrics media use for children under the age of two is discouraged. Overuse of media has been linked to childhood obesity, poor sleep habits, and attention issues in children over the age of two. Research for children between the ages of 18 and 24 use digital media as an educational tool is still inconclusive, but parents should be weary of marketing from companies for programs to children in this age range.

There is a growing conversation and dialogue occurring right now about the balance of digital media consumption and the potential negative impacts that may befall children and the educational benefits for them. Children need to be exposed to other learning experiences that incorporate play and reading.

It’s all about balance–letting kids explore while offering them options beyond the screen. Taking them outside to experience fresh air while allowing them to map their physical world as well as their visual world. We are busy, I get that. The TV can serve as a powerful babysitter, entertainment vehicle, and educational tool. But at the end of the day (or beginning) we must be able to power down and unplug and we can be the best example for our children by limiting our own media consumption.

Let’s ensure a healthy cognitive future for our children with a balanced media diet and enlivening this conversation about getting children away from their screens even for just a short time.

Now, let’s all go outside and play.

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Sabrina Roach is Brown Paper Tickets’ Radio/New Media Doer. She has worked in community and public radio for the past 10 years at KBCS 91.3 Community Radio and KUOW 94.9 Puget Sound Public Radio in various capacities.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Prometheus Radio Project’s summer interns explain why the radio dial is so crowded, and how the FCC plans to make room.

We have two online community radio stations in the Seattle area: Hollow Earth Radio and Voice of Vashon. I’m consistently delighted to see how they engage their communities and generate creative, hyper-local media. They also invest in organizational and facility development. These are two particular stations I love, but surely not the only ones doing great things. Do you have an online community radio station you love? Post it in the comments.

Both online radio stations have been working on getting terrestrial signals for the past several years. Both have been hopeful in watching the progress of Low Power FM (LPFM), as it traveled from President Obama’s desk where the Local Community Radio Act was signed in January, to July when the FCC released a proposal to save channels for community radio, and opened a period of time when public comments would be accepted. Applications to apply for stations will be due as early as June 2012.

I recently viewed a map of the top 150 radio markets, which showed that some urban areas have room for new community radio stations. Seattle currently isn’t slated to get any LPFM frequencies, though advocates are pushing for more flexible technical rules that should allow a few stations to squeeze in.

To do that, we need to keep the open frequencies in Seattle open. The FCC is taking steps to reserve channels in Seattle for community radio, but they need to hear from you. The Media and Democracy Coalition has created an online form to help you with letters to elected officials and the FCC Commissioners. These letters will be compiled and will go to our representatives in a batch.

Organizations interested in applying for LPFMs or who want to see LPFMs in our city, should write a letter to the FCC. Contact me for information on what should be included.

Next Wednesday, August 10th, there will be a Radio Summer: Seattle event at Hollow Earth Radio’s studio in the Central District (Between 20th and 21st on Union) at 7:00 pm. Jeff Roussett, field organizer for Prometheus Radio Project will be on hand to answer questions about Low Power FM. Register here.

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When I spoke with him, the Internet had been down all day. Cell phone use had just returned but had been down for over 48 hours. Gunshots rang out the night before and the state news was advising civilians to form local brigades to protect themselves and their businesses from looting. Men from his neighborhood began gathering on the street with clubs, knives, broomsticks, bats, and other rudimentary weapons. Greenberg believes his neighborhood is one of the more stable ones, particularly because of the high concentration of ex-military members living there, but told me “there’s no authority right now.”

In media coverage, much attention has been paid to the role social media has played in the uprising. Less than a quarter of the population of Egypt uses the Internet but the median age in the country is 24 years old and I wondered if, like Iran, the majority of the protesters were young people.

“I mean there’s a lot of skepticism toward the Internet being the medium because its seen as a Western medium and only wealthy people have access to the Internet…but the message of the first demonstrators appealed to everybody.”  Said Greenberg, “This has definitely become a movement against corruption, against dictatorship, against the unemployment, and it is definitely a popular movement.”

Indeed, the crowds of protesters in Cairo have swelled from an estimated 15,000 on Tuesday to 250,000 on Friday, January 28. In other Egyptian cities, like Suez, Alexandria, and Port Said, tens of thousands of protesters have been reported.

In Greenberg’s first-person account for the Common Language Project, published January 26, his neighborhood seemed unaffected by the protests. But by January 29^th Greenberg said, “It’s evolving so quickly. They turned off the Internet, and the demonstrations got ten times larger. Tuesday was quiet. Wednesday was big, Thursday bigger, and Friday exploded after the Friday prayers.”

When pressed further about the role of social media, particularly Facebook, Greenberg responded, “definitely Facebook sparked it, there’s no doubt about it. And a lot of people are referring to the ‘youth’ in abstract terms as being the leaders. I’m hearing government officials on State TV saying ‘we need to defer to the youth.  We need to go on Facebook, and ask them what they want.’ …But what happened was that most people in the crowd didn’t have Twitter, they were printing out pages from Facebook and distributing them through the crowds.”

Our interview ended when Greenberg heard breaking glass and shouts from downstairs. Reports now confirm a nighttime curfew for Cairo and the US State Department plans to evacuate 900 Americans from Egypt starting today, January 31^st.

Greenberg has been contacted again and is safe, though he plans to leave for Cairo with his fiance at the end of the week.

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According to Al Jazeera, Egyptians began organizing protests through Twitter and Facebook on Tuesday morning. In an attempt to quell the unrest, the Egyptian government blocked Twitter around 6pm Tuesday night, but by then protests had begun in several Egyptian cities, including Cairo, Suez, and Alexandria, among others. A Facebook group garnered 80,000 members pledging to protest on January 25.

Protests turned violent after sunset Tuesday night as police used tear gas and powerful jets of water to contain the crowd, and the crowd threw rocks at police. Police chased an estimated 15,000 people off the Cairo streets around 1am Tuesday night. Dozens of alternative news sites have popped up in response to the Egyptian government’s blocking of Facebook and Twitter. According to some news outlets, Twitter was unblocked today around 8pm Egyptian time, and unblocked Tweets are becoming available to the world.

At this point, four people are confirmed dead, hundreds are locked up in jail cells, fires are burning throughout the city of Cairo, and despite government warnings of severe repercussions, the protests continue.

The Economist ranks Egypt 138^th out of 167 countries in their annual Democracy Index, and between 20%-30% of its people live below the poverty line. In an interview for Democracy Now, Egyptian independent journalist and blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy called out the influence of Egypt’s “Tunisian brothers,” for without their courage and social documentation Egypt may never have organized the protests. Furthermore, “Hacktivists,” or hackers devoted to social activism, have called for “cyber attacks” on websites run by the Egyptian government. For more information on that story, visit http://bit.ly/fQjwKJ.

Follow the hashtags #Jan25 and #Egypt on Twitter for breaking news on the protests via Twitter.

For more information on the Egyptian uprisings, Al Jazeera English (http://bit.ly/ekJYJV), Democracy Now (http://bit.ly/gq8xDI), and the BBC news (http://bbc.in/eJeJC4) are all providing good, up-to-date coverage and blog posts.

Flip the Media will continue reporting on the Egyptian protests as more information becomes available.

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I have a journalism degree and daily newspaper experience, but I’m also a digital media nut and a huge Husky football fan. Imagine my euphoria when I first saw the Seattle Times was launching a Husky football app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Their Husky football blog is like the Bible to me, and an iPhone app sounded too good to be true.

But how useful would it be? Would I trust the content? How about the functionality? I didn’t want this to be a giant advertisement for the Seattle Times.  I wanted it to be all Huskies all the time. One season in, I’m happy to report this is purple and gold nirvana. It’s the most immersive, accessible and, of course, portable Husky football experience I have ever known. Thank you, Seattle Times!

OK, OK. Enough gushing.

I respect this app. It’s a big step for journalism and the newspaper industry in general. Readership is down across the country. Revenue is shrinking, and newspapers are struggling to reach new audiences in a digital age that crippled their business model long ago. Enter the niche app. This is a new dawn for newspapers.

I could already find the information and stories featured in this app on my iPhone using mobile Safari. But I don’t always want to tap dance through various bookmarks and zoom in to the content I want to read. The app puts it all in one place. It costs $2.99 for a one-time download, but I would pay $2.99 a month for this. I’m not the only one, either. Managing Editor Heidi de Laubenfels told Lost Remote the app reached “20 percent of our total expected sales in the first two days and continues to do quite well.” The Times’ latest app, one for the Husky men’s basketball season, currently ranks on the iTunes list for top paid sports apps.

My question initially was whether or not I would trust a similar app released by a non-objective news source. The UW Athletic Department did just this, releasing a Coach Sark app not long after the Seattle Times released its football app. The content, not surprisingly, was not as deep. The interface was wonky, and it wasn’t objective in the slightest. Not even the fact that proceeds from the $2.99 purchase went to charity could rescue this app from the bottom of the league standings.

Time and trust are in limited supply these days. The Seattle Times is an organization I trust and provides me with content I believe in. Newspapers everywhere should take notice of this endeavor. Find a market—foodies, concertgoers, American Idol-lovers—and meet them where they are. Smartphones are growing exponentially and apps such as this are, hopefully, a sign of things to come.

I love free stuff, but this is the kind of content I want and will pay for. Are you listening, newspaper executives? I would pay for this. I would pay monthly. And I would pay a lot more than $2.99.

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The Politico newsroom inside News Channel 8

Every time that I step into a newsroom, I remember what it was like to live off of that electricity in the air when I was at NBC News.  It was the human buzz of stressful inquiry as events incessantly unfolded before our journalistic eyes.

We’ve come to believe that this buzz is much diminished in the waning days of traditional journalism.  But I’m seeing some signs of life as I travel around the northeast this month.

Local TV (Americans’ number source for news) has long been criticized for considering their web presence as an afterthought.  At Washington D.C.’s Newschannel 8, they’re launching a new website in June that will merge their cable news channel with their local station.  And rather than having TV feed the web, the station manager, Bill Lord, told me that the web will feed TV.  It will be text plus video plus citizen journalism all in one place,” he said.  They’ll also be hiring 100 local bloggers.  “We’re flipping the model.”

Lord has a head start in enlightened thinking about journalism’s new business models.  The successful political news blog Politico operates out of his newsroom.  Three years into it existence, the site (owned by the same family that operates Lord’s station) is making money.

Ironically, a good portion of that profit comes from the daily print edition of Politico.  The newspaper is delivered to 25,000 subscribers in the Beltway area.  Print ads still command higher prices than their online counterparts, especially when they’re the centerfold spread for the Boeing aerial fueling tanker.  I can’t imagine we’d ever see an ad like that in a Seattle newspaper (where the tanker will be made).  But Washington DC has the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress and the President as potential Politico readers — in other words, powerful influencers that allow media outlets to demand an advertising premium.

“People want to hold it in their hands,” Lord told me.

So Lesson #1?  Digital can fuel analog (and vice-versa) where news has value, and where advertisers see a plausible ROI (and analog still brings in big bucks).  Heck, in the nation’s capital, news is a always-in-demand renewable resource, kind of like solar energy, which will never go away.

That value proposition leads to Lesson #2: you can put up a pay wall around your online information, but only if you can afford to do so.  A recent Pew Foundation study on the State of the News Media discovered that just 7% of Americans are willing to pay for news content

Bob Merry pioneered sustainable online strategies for specialty newsletters, such as his Congressional Quarterly.  He was recently named publisher of Stratfor, a source of independently-reported global intelligence news, which charges $349 a year for its online subscription.  When I asked him what he thought about Pew’s 7% figure, he said, “That’s good for us!”

That’s because Austin-based Stratfor is a lean-and-mean operation: no printing presses, no satellite control room, with a good number of corporate and governmental subscribers who see value in the organization’s research.  Seven percent may not be enough to sustain a general interest news outlet like the New York Times (which is about to erect a pay wall), but it seems to be more than enough for a niche product like Stratfor.

Meanwhile, back at News Channel 8, Bill Lord admits that everything he’s doing these days is an experiment, as they try to settle on a sustainable business model.  But they’re feeling a whole lot more hopeful now than a year ago when advertising revenues were plummeting across the board.  And Bill says he actually likes the quiet hum of the blogging side of the newsroom, compared to the traditional buzz of TV news.

Originally posted to Storyteller Uprising

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The digital revolution in media production is dramatically changing the techniques, forms, content, and function of modern animation and is actively remixing it with other media forms so much that digitally-created animation is now nothing short of a new mode of cultural production and a totally unique form of motion-graphic storytelling of its own right.

The diversity of software tools available for creating moving images on a screen has contributed to the rise of a tremendous and diverse number of styles, techniques, and looks. The multitude of distribution channels further enforced the trend of convergence towards forms more suitable for display on multiple screen sizes and configurations.

As Manovich puts it in his review of Adobe’s AfterEffects, a popular suite for creating digital animations: “[A]s software remixes the techniques and working methods of various media they simulate, the result are new interfaces, tools and workflow with their own distinct logic. In the case of AfterEffects, the working method which it puts forward is neither animation, nor graphic design, nor cinematography, even though it draws from all these fields. It is a new way to make moving image media. Similarly, the visual language of media produced with this and similar software is also different from the languages of moving images which existed previously (Manovich, 2006).”

Modern tools for animation have lowered the barriers to entry into the field by lowering the cost of production, but also, and perhaps most dramatically, by waiving the requirement for traditional artistic ability (which is not to say that it waives the requirement for creativity). No longer does an animator need to draw each single frame or object within the frame. In most modern software packages, the animator has the option to import objects with different formats, including pre-existing media clips, photos, and drawings as is the case in Adobe AfterEffects. The digital animator also has the option to create shapes from primitives and default components provided in the application itself, such as circles, squares, and other basic shapes that can be combined creatively to produce the desired visual effect–a technique which has become a hallmark of Flash animation. Digital animation simultaneously embraces both the technically and the artistically inclined animator, hence opening up the field to a wider range of skill levels (Brazdell, 2007).

Digital animation has adopted free and automated Internet distribution channels such as YouTube, Newgrounds.com, Atom.com, and Machinima.com. Consequently we are witnessing the rise of a new visual vocabulary that emphasizes sparseness, limited color, and limited motion to accommodate for varying bandwidth availability. Additionally, to accommodate for the rising popularity of mobile device distribution, one can also observe a trend towards using more medium and close-up shots which are better suited for display on tiny screens and in varied viewing conditions.

A combination of the tools and the distribution channels have given rise to new and unique genres emphasizing the social media principles of sharing, remixing, and mashing up. Whole amateur communities are now devoted to amateur genres like Brickfilms (stop-motion LEGO videos); Machinima (animations recorded from and in game and virtual worlds); and Animutation (Flash-based mash-up humorous music videos).

Digital animations, especially those distributed over the Internet, cannot be evaluated in isolation from the new media context in which they are presented. A good story is still a good story regardless of how it is told, but the digitization of the story adds a layer of metadata in the form of links, tags, comments, responses, trackbacks, and the rest of the digital experience that both feeds from and into the social media ecosystem in which it is distributed. Content and meaning in new digital animation is created through a process of juxtaposition within the piece and against other productions and media. Nonfiction documentaries, confessionals, commentary, humor, and satire are dominating content and style in amateur multimedia production.

With data and associated metadata becoming the smallest common denominator between all forms of digital arts online, modern media production and manipulation software packages have many characteristics in common, such as: use of layers, channels, and libraries; the ability to import and export multiple formats; and the support for third party plug-in integration that enables compatibility with other software suites or distribution channels. The reduction of basic unit from cell to data also has equalized the storage and archiving processes for digital animation. Animation files can share the same ecosystem as other digital arts. This convergence of moving graphics components both is encouraged and encourages the remix/mashup visual culture of today’s digital animation landscape.

Participation in amateur multimedia creation has been tremendous. 325,000
multimedia files have been submitted to Newgrounds; YouTube has become the amateur’s playground and features approximately 65,000 new videos per day; Machinima.com contains over 2,300 films shot and produced within video games (Brazdell, 2007). With this volume of amateur production we are witnessing the forming of the back channel from the Internet to other media outlets. One example is Machinima.com’s long-running series Red Vs. Blue, which saw a DVD release based on popular demand.

Digital animation is no longer only the site of artistic production, but also of important cultural productions at the hands of amateurs. Animations like All Your Base Are Belong to Us have now become permanent cultural markers that will forever date the technophiles who witnessed their glorious viral spread.

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Hanson Hosein I’m tired of being in a perpetual state of communication (says the digital media journalist guy via Twitter and Facebook). [7 comments, 6 people liked this]

Hanson Hosein How to restore “contemplative balance” in an info-saturated world. Love that notion, wish I were in town to attend: http://is.gd/4NbSK [my wife liked this]

Graphic by Kim Rosen

I also joked on Twitter: I’m thinking of starting a Master of Communication in Analog Media.

Far too many people expressed interest, leading me to believe that all us tech-lovers secretly despair of our passion for all things digital.  I had mentioned as much during a Fireside Chat on Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW, which led to this article in the upcoming issue of Seattle Magazine, “Sound Off: Examining the Value of Tuning Out” (in fine analog style, the columnist Karen Johnson, interviewed me in September, a fact-checker contacted me about my quotes in October, and the dead-tree December issue has yet to hit news stands).

And now I’m up late on a Sunday night — having finished grading assignments, and attempted the Sisyphean e-mail push uphill — writing this blog post.  Overwhelmed, overloaded perhaps, but forever propelled by anxiety.

Yup, I’m afraid of missing out — on the latest Tweet, the latest Google Wave plug-in, the latest bit.ly — on any development that will rock my world as a digital media professional and professor.  It’s brutal out here in this unsettled, shaky world of technology.  From the Seattle Magazine piece:

We’re in the midst of a perfect communication storm. Twitter and Facebook have given us the power to forge vast social networks, and mobile devices allow us to do almost everything online all the time…Many of us have learned first-hand that hypercommunication and multitasking come at a cost: stress, shortened attention spans and a constant sense of urgency.

I know this to be painfully true.  Even in my current course (Strategic Research and Business Practice), we’re clearly no longer in my father’s classroom.  With each session, we have to manage a Twitter feed (#mcdmresearch), an ongoing conversation via a collaborative online workspace, a live video stream of our lectures, and the upload of our various slide presentations prior to class.  They’re all effective tools for the 21st century classroom, but there’s a lot going on even as we teach.  My dad actually is a professor, and I think he just uses the overhead projector and a marker…

I’ve started to take countermeasures to defend my personal time.  I’ve turned off the e-mail on my Nokia smartphone (too smart for my own good) after 9 p.m., and on weekends (for the most part).  When I really want to think, I either (a) step away from the computer and pick up a fountain pen, and paper, plug into a tube headphone amplifier and listen to something like The Band’s The Last Waltz (b) get on a flight for at least 3 hours, where I can read, contemplate and be in a state of blissful disconnect from the phone and the web; (c) take my daughter to the bookstore to help her choose another adventure about Thomas the Tank Engine.

I’ve forgotten what it was like not to be perpetually connected, but I suspect it was a little more peaceful, and a lot less stressful.  I may have even made it to bed by 10.

My students were surprised, and a little concerned, when I actually admitted to getting 9 hours sleep a few days ago.  But that only happened after a heavy storm knocked out the power around 8 p.m.  My laptop did have enough battery life, and I could have tethered my cellphone’s data connection to keep working in the dark.  But even I knew then, that enough was enough.

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