Word: pop
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...love on the line," says the author, who is reviving a little-known character from the '70s. Omega is "kind of a meta-superhero," he says, a "bewildered visitor to the Planet Earth" with--yes--a cape. Next we'd like to finally see that Philip Roth pop-up book...
...media aimed at kids--Johnson is not using the term in its moral or social sense. He's not arguing whether reality TV humiliates people, video games promote violence or movies glorify sex. Instead he wants to know whether it gives the brain a good "cognitive workout." For Johnson, pop culture is like algebra class. Whether you remember the quadratic equation as an adult is less important than whether you learned the analytic thought processes that solving equations teaches. Likewise, for Johnson, what matters about pop culture is not its message but whether it forces you to engage in complex...
That argument, Johnson emphasizes, "does not mean that Survivor will someday be viewed as our Heart of Darkness or Finding Nemo our Moby-Dick." Rather, apples to apples, today's pop media are far more challenging than yesterday's. The Sopranos' interlaced plots make Hill Street Blues look like a Barney video. Nemo tracks many more characters and story lines than did Bambi. And supposedly mindless shows like The Apprentice are graduate seminars compared with '70s trash like The Love Boat, requiring us to parse webs of relationships, motives and strategies. In today's media, says Johnson, "even the crap...
...Today's pop culture, he writes, builds on rules established by earlier pop culture (as, say, The Simpsons complicated the sitcom genre). And new formats such as dvds make audiences more receptive to complex creations that reward repeat viewing or playing. A traditionalist could say that new media are simply good at teaching kids to use new media, but Johnson argues persuasively that they also force kids "to think like grownups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns...
...just a few minutes an hour. Why not turn it into a radio the rest of the time? That's the thinking behind MSpot, which offers 13 channels of on-demand radio through Sprint for $5.95 a month. There are eight channels of music (from pop to hip-hop and R&B), NPR, sports and weather. Founded by Daren Tsui and Edwin Ho, serial entrepreneurs with several successful start-ups, MSpot will soon be interactive, allowing you to buy an album (through Amazon.com or download a ringtone of a song you're hearing. "We're trying to build an interactive...