Today is National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, which also commemorates the anniversary of the Montréal Massacre in 1989. I am honoured to have been asked to read one of my poems at the Toronto Candlelight Vigil to mark the anniversary of this tragic event.
The fact is that violence against women is an everyday reality for millions of girls and women around the world. There are many kinds of violence. The word “violence” is related to the word “violation” – and each time a woman’s right to be a full, self-determining human being is violated because she is a woman, violence against women is committed. From media and advertising depictions of women as vapid damsels in distress worthy of little more than objectification for men’s pleasure, to domestic abuse, workplace sexual harassment, date rape, marital rape, the misogyny of religious fundamentalisms, and sexual assault and gender-based violence, women, girls and trans people are still much more likely to be at the receiving end of violence and violation. These problems are usually worse for women who are not white, not from the upper-middle classes, and those of us who straddle multiple social-cultural identities as immigrants and children of immigrants. Continue reading ‘National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women’»
My dad forwarded me this pic that just says it all…
Journalist Mark Glaser has an article up on the pbs.org MediaShift blog about the changing face of media in the 21st century. He talks about how both traditional media and new media must learn from each other, and merge the best practices. I like the point he makes about the techno-genie… once it’s out of the bottle, no one can put it back in. We’ve seen the same phenomena with all technological breakthroughs: TV, radio, Film, Nuclear weapons, cell phones, you name it.
No longer do people rely on TV Guide to program their lives around their favorite TV shows. Now they can use a digital video recorder or watch shows on-demand online and fit their TV watching into their lives. The people are taking control and watching, and listening to what they want when they want — and on the devices they want. And that goes for TV as well as radio and audio, with podcasts allowing people to listen on their own time and fast-forward or rewind shows at will.
What do we gain? We get more control of our lives and our media experience and we are no longer slaves to programmers. But what do we lose? We are losing shared experiences, where we all watch the same shows at the same time, or watch the same sporting events together. And our “water cooler” talk has a new etiquette, where we must tell people not to ruin our favorite shows because we’re taping it to watch later!
A couple of excellent articles from Business Week: 1 about how ads push your buttons, and another about how ads are changing in the face of the new media evolving in front of us:
This Is Your Brain On Ads
Advertising: Now a Conversation
Oh the troubles of the rich and narcissistic….
$49,267 mortgages
$16,000 clothes
$102,000 entertainment, gifts and vacations
$4,758 dining out
$35,000 for child and spousal support
$ 0savings and investments (all figures monthly spending)
Quick somebody tell Chris Crocker!
Most people saw this coming years ago.
At 10:59 a.m., a cheer went up on trading room floor
Is that in Canadian or American dollars?
“It didn’t really matter,” Mr. Feig says with a laugh. “It’s the same price either way.”
The Corporate Bullshit Generator is a must-have for anyone who has ever worked or will ever work in or around cubicles.
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Themocracy