PopPolitics contributor Richard Crepeau is featured in a Dallas Morning News story about Barack Obama’s omnipresence in the media.

Karen Brooks reports:

He’s on his own channel on your satellite television. He’s in MTV videos by rap and reggae artists. His ads pop up on the Web sites you read. He’s delaying a World Series game to buy a block of national TV time. And when you’re cruising down the street in your favorite racing video game, his face whizzes by on a cyber-billboard

The only place he hasn’t appeared yet is on a box of Wheaties.

Love him or hate him, and whether it helps him or hurts him, the presidential hopeful is everywhere.

“It’s stunning, isn’t it?” said Dick Crepeau, a contributor to PopPolitics.com and a professor of American cultural history at the University of Central Florida. “It’s very, very calculatingly done, and they’ve done it very well.”

Brooks enlists Crepeau and other cultural critics to look at the benefits and possible pitfalls of being “everywhere.”  While Obama has been able to reach non-traditional voters by appearing in places like a billboard within popular video games (the image above is from Burnout Paradise on Xbox 360), the McCain campaign uses the opportunity to claim, once again, that he is more “style than substance.”

We’ve posted a new article in our online magazine: “Virtual Victories: Hezbollah’s “Special Force 2” by Allen McDuffee.

The article discusses the controversial new video game, which recreates — from Hezbollah’s perspective — last year’s July War between Israel and the Lebanese Shia militia group. It also compares Hezbollah’s efforts to the U.S. Army’s efforts to market itself through the “America’s Army” online game and commercial efforts such as “Full Spectrum Warrior.”

Read the full article here.

We are very excited to welcome Jesse Miksic as a new contributing writer to PopPolitics. When he is not writing fiction or criticism, taking photographs or making his living as a graphic designer, Jesse is pursuing his MA in media studies at the New School.

Check out his occasional political rants at BlogCritics.org or peruse his essay, fiction and design work at miksimum.com.

At PopPolitics you can look forward to his takes on everything from films and literature to video games and graphic novels.

Enjoy the conversation.

A Virtual Moral and Spiritual Crisis: Mitt Romney’s latest campaign ad identifies video games as part of “a cesspool of violence and sex and drugs and indolence and perversions” in which “our children now swim.” Matt Peckham of PC World (yes, PC World) correctly tags Romney as just the latest in a long line of politicians that have fomented a “climate of fear” to create a more malleable populus.

By the way, is gambling “indolence” or a “perversion”? In either case, Romney will probably be happy to know that the producers of Second Life have outlawed gambling in their virtual world — which is beginning to feel like a “ghost town,” according to ValleyWag.

On the other hand, evangelizing is making a much smoother move into that same world — at least for the Jesuits. Father Antonio Spadaro tells the Financial Times: “This virtual Second Life is becoming populated with churches, mosques, temples, cathedrals. synagogues, places of prayer of all kinds. And behind an avatar there is a man or a woman, perhaps searching for God and faith, perhaps with very strong spiritual needs.” (Thanks, Lede, for the lead)

And whether it’s Second Life, MySpace or Facebook, Henry Jenkins, building off of Danah Boyd’s research, wants us to consider the “participation gap” among online users.

Drawing Well: Tim Cavanaugh of the Los Angeles Times is surprised to learn that sales of comic books have been increasingly steadily for the last five years. He’s been used to hearing only of the impending death of the genre:

If it’s striking how many movies are based on comic book properties these days, it’s even more striking how few of those properties were minted within the last decade or so … A favorite sport of industry watchers is figuring out just how the form went from being something youthful and dynamic to becoming something fearful, risk-averse and cramped.

He sees some hope in — you guessed it — the web, where sites like PvP and Modern Tales are pushing the envelope and turning a profit.

Comic books, of course, have always been a strange mixture of regressive and forward-looking ideologies. Lyle Masaki at AfterElton is sure to spark a conversation with his list of “ten of the coolest gay superheroes you (probably) haven’t heard of.”

Adhir Kalyan as Raja in “Aliens in America”

Aliens in Hollywood: Lisa de Moreas, whose laugh-out-loud columns make me feel like she’s a stand-up comedian in a television critic’s body, is having her usual fun at the summer press tour in Beverly Hills. But the story she tells in the second part of this column is both funny and revealing.

De Moreas loves the upcoming CW sitcom “Aliens in America” — in which a Pakistani exchange student finds both friendship and prejudice in America. She sees it as the next coming of “Freaks and Geeks” (and from the hilarious trailer, I’m probably going to agree).

Other critics, though, took great offense at its portrayal of a bigoted Middle America. De Moreas’ transcription of the critics’ confrontation with “Aliens in America” producers could be the basis for a sitcom itself.

Black is Intellectual: African American public intellectuals are not a rare breed — the incestuous mainstream media just make it feel that way, according to David A. Love’s insightful analysis in The Black Commentator.

Mark Anthony Neal’s defense of Michael Eric Dyson in PopMatters makes a similar point from another direction. Dyson, according to Neal, has been the source of scorn both for his popularity and for presenting too reductive and celebratory a picture black life: “This widely circulated and decidedly worn ‘poverty pimp’ thesis has been applied to figures as diverse as Reverend Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, and the current cadre of hip-hop generation intellectuals, who supposedly, as the critique goes, wallow in victimization and refuse to hold the black rank-and-file, particularly black youth, accountable for bad behavior.”

But Neal says we should show praise Dyson and others who have “leveraged the appeal of popular culture” — whether that’s television, hip hop, etc — to fight the good fight. Neal brings up BlackProf.com and Professor Kim’s News Notes — which we have been long fans of here at PopPolitics — as examples of how black intellectuals have harnessed the blogosphere.

Finally, Cornel West himself reinforces both Love’s and Neal’s perspective in a recent interview with the Washington Post, where he defends Dyson and his own forays into music and other modes of cultural expression.

I Want My Culture Back: David Browne and Alan Riding, from two very different perspectives, are lamenting the demise of serious culture — art that challenges us, both intellectually and politically.

Browne, in his “Anti-Cheese Manifesto” for the Huffington Post, admits his own obsessions with low-brow pop culture but refuses to celebrate them: “The danger in perpetually embracing the awful is the way it trivializes sincerity and makes earnestness seem mawkish and old-fashioned. It says: Don’t take it all so seriously, since nothing matters … Perhaps it is simpler to chuckle than invest genuine feeling in anything, since that can be too chancy, too uncool, and too emotionally risky.”

And Riding, in a column for the International Herald Tribune, writes from a more nostalgic perspective, recalling the way the arts in the past have directly challenged corrupt and repressive governments. He sees recent spectacles like Live Earth as symptomatic of a culture that values performance over action.

Viva Ruth Frankenburg: Speaking of intellectuals, culture and political engagement, it’s worth reading some of the homages to the recently deceased Ruth Frankenberg, a ground-breaking British-born sociologist. Donna Haraway, an exemplary intellectual in her own right, wrote the obituary for the Guardian, in which she praised her feminism and anti-racism — and her nuanced exploration of the complicated intersection between the two. Dana Goldstein has a more personal response to Frankenburg’s work on her blog, Une flâneuse.

The National Media Education Conference, sponsored by the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), took place this week in St. Louis. While this might sound like yet another conference of like-minded academics theorizing and socializing — and therefore something that has little relevance to the real world or your life — people in-the-know know better.

The president of the MacArthur Foundation, Jonathan Fanton, spoke with urgency recently about the importance of media literacy in a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed. Inspired by Henry Jenkins and his work on “participatory culture” — in which Jenkins sees a younger generation learning a great deal from their interactions in the digital world — Fanton offers a wake-up call:

We, in the sunset of the old information culture, are not understanding this new media literacy soon enough. Those who have no opportunity or desire to be part of these revolutionary digital communities may be deprived of vital virtual skills that will prepare them for full participation in the real world of tomorrow.

In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda, and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing. Those truly left behind in the evolving digital culture will be those children who fail to bridge this participation gap.

Our challenge is to harness these educational forces, opening our classrooms to the learning in which children now engage largely outside of school. We may find that the best way to institutionalize and encourage this new media literacy is to understand and harness what our young digital culture seems to be doing pretty well on its own.

Fanton’s point is reinforced by recent studies about the power of online gaming.

Whether the focus is gaming, television, or any other form of visual or digital media, though, the concept of media literacy allows us to recognize the great potential of these new forms of communication and connection while taking a critical look at how they can both empower and disempower us.

(more…)

Online gaming makes you a better businessperson, according to a new study. Collaboration, rapid-fire decision-making and opportunities for leadership are just a few of the skills that World of Warcraft and EverQuest — or IBM’s new Innov8, which IBM is marketing directly to corporations — are apparently teaching better than your nearest MBA program.

IBM, Stanford, and MIT collaborated with Seriosity, a new company focused on developing corporate software solution inspired by multi-player games, to look at how these online environments effectively mimick the challenges of a global economy:

One of the key findings from the research, says Thomas Malone, an MIT professor of management and Seriosity board member, is that companies need to create more opportunities for flexible, project-oriented leadership. In fast-paced games, people can jump in to manage a team for as little as 10 minutes, if they have the needed skills for the task at hand. “Games make leaders from lemmings,” says Tony O’Driscoll, an IBM learning strategist and one of the authors of the study. “Since leadership happens quickly and easily in online games, otherwise reserved players are more likely to try on leadership roles.”

The study points out that games can become “management flight simulators” of sorts, letting employees manage a global workforce in cyberspace before they do so in the real world. More than half of the managers surveyed say playing massive multiplayer games had helped them lead at work. Three-quarters of those surveyed believed that specific game tools, such as expressive avatars that can communicate via body language, as well as by voice and typing, would help manage remote employees in the real world.

Of course, many of the players of these games take on leadership roles because they are games and not the real world. Regardless of the virtual global economic utopia envisioned by many of these consultants, improving human-to-human interaction — and increasing genuine social skills — will matter for a very long time.

In any case, this is definitely a much cooler way to spend time at business conferences than listening to yet another PowerPoint.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Make Me Dance Around the Question: Watch the Democratic candidates squirm when asked, in light of Gen. Peter Pace’s comments, if they too believe that “homosexuality is immoral.”

When are the Democrats going to realize that backbone is a turn-on for voters? Even if they might disagree with you on a specific position, nothing shows character like having real values.

My Cousin Pookie: Speaking of Obama’s awareness of audience, he said the following during his recent Selma sermon: “If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.”

Wondering who Pookie is? Jonathan TiLove of the HNIC report has the complex, nuanced answer:

In their interviews and e-mails, Pookie emerges as a stock character of the black popular imagination, a name that has come to personify the kind of layabout kin who, if endearing, is also a source of some embarrassment and consternation to his more successful relations. And, it turns out, in his use of Pookie, Obama reveals something about himself …. In dropping Pookie’s name, Obama is signaling to those who question his blackness — because his mother was white and his father an African without slave ancestry — that he is not an outsider to black life.

Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, claims, “It’s a way of Obama getting purchase on that brand of black self-critique and establishing … his bonafides as a black figure willing to be critical of his own.”

Mark McPhail, an expert on rhetoric at Miami University of Ohio, see it somewhat differently: “This is the type of appeal that reveals Obama’s willingness to play on the worst type of stereotypes.”

The Real Black Youth: Cathy Cohen, a University of Chicago professor, is the author of the Black Youth Project, which interviewed 15 to 25 year-old African American women and men about their attitudes and actions. Their “Topic Area Primers,” which provide very accessible and well-organized results of their research, should be required reading for anyone who strives for accurate image of possibly the most stereotyped demographic in America.

NPR’s News and Notes has held repeated conversations with her and other academics about the state of black youth. The latest installment on the role of sex in their lives is what triggered my interest.

Free Love: A University of Alberta study found that one third of Canadian boys are heavy users of pornography:

Ninety percent of males and 70 percent of females reported accessing sexually explicit media content at least once. More than one-third of the boys reported viewing pornographic DVDs or videos “too many times to count,” compared to eight percent of the girls surveyed.

The great majority of the students surveyed use the Internet as their main conduit to the pornography.

Conservatives have latched onto the study as proof of our collective moral decline. Sonya Thompson, the author the study, however, has a more relevant question: “What kinds of expectations will these young people have going into their first sexual relationships? It may be setting up a big disconnect between boys and girls and may be normalizing risky sex practices.”

Between the Thought and the Act: From Scientific American: “People who play car racing video games may be more prone to drive recklessly and get into accidents, according to a study that adds to evidence that video games can influence the behavior of some players.”

Which brings us to the age-old question of the power of media in altering behavior, particularly of youth. Jonathan Turley, writing in the Washington Post, considers himself a “weapons-tolerant parent” who is not concerned about his sons playing with toy guns. Citing a few disparate psychologists — but mainly ruminating — Turley believes their games model “notions of courage and sacrifice,” work out “more basic emotions in more basic ways,” and, in the words of child psychologist Penny Holland, make sense of the world through “timeless themes of the struggle between good and evil.”

Oh, for a world so simple.

Rockstar, the gaming company behind the Grand Theft Auto series, knows what buttons to push. Its latest offering is Bully, set to be released in October:

The story follows Jimmy Hopkins, a teenager who’s been expelled from every school he’s ever attended. Left to fend for himself after his mother abandons him at Bullworth to go on her fifth honeymoon, Jimmy has a whole year at Bullworth ahead of him, working his way up the social ladder of this demented institution of supposed learning, standing up for what he thinks is right and taking on the liars, cheats and snobs who are the most popular members of the student body and faculty. If Jimmy can survive the school year and outsmart his rivals, he could rule the school.

Needless to say, the game had put many wary organizations in a tizzy. Brian D. Crecente of the Rocky Mountain News does some excellent reporting, giving voice to a variety of opinions and providing some social and historical depth to the controversy.

To cite one example, his juxtaposition of two particular voices is revealing:

“This is plainly a new way to communicate messages, to tell stories and a new way to get people conversing with one another,” said Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship.

“(Video games) plainly have certain levels of subtlety that are not easily available to other genres. The story can move in a lot of different directions depending on how you play it.”

But Frank Bolaños, the Miami-Dade school board member who pushed for the game to be banned in his district, has a different view. “It’s just a violent game,” he said. “It just seems to be profit driven.”

Bolaños, who hasn’t seen the game, formed his impressions from the three screen shots released for it last year. He asked the board to add the game to the school’s banned list as part of an ongoing effort to “increase student safety and reduce bullying.”

Bolaños thinks the game will lead to an increase in violence at schools. School districts have a responsibility to look out for what games and books children are exposed to, said Bolaños.

“Parents need to be aware of the impact books or video games have on children.”

What bothers me so much here is not the act of censorship itself but the process by which Bolaños “formed his opinion” of the game. Stephen Colbert (see previous post) would argue that while Bolaños doesn’t know the facts of the game, he has the “truthiness” of it — he just feels it’s a bad thing.

The unwillingness to critically engage our culture allows us to be prey to many forces — not just the forces asking us to consume without question but also the forces who assert a prejudiced moral absolutism about entire cultural genres — and entire generation, for that matter.

Why can’t we have conversations about cultural texts like Bully when it is available to everyone — referencing specific scenes, discussing point-of-view, etc.? Why are we so afraid of that dialogue? Younger generations, from my experience, know very well when they are being insulted.

Clive Thompson, video game critics for Wired News, is very articulate on this point:

Video games are as divisive as rock ‘n’ roll was and they have created an experiential generation gap ….

There are a number of reasons why games are more disturbing to people than movies or music. It is demographics; the people who are worried about them, don’t play them, and don’t understand them. It’s a perfect storm of misunderstanding.

[...]

Play tends to disturb America. All forms of play are seen as wastes of time, but they are philosophically, existentially important.

Video games are forms of valid expression, without question. You can use them to convey ideas, thoughts, a world-view, they are so obviously art.

We’ll have to wait and see how artistic and complex Bully actually is, but the only way we will form an educated opinion is to play it, watch it and talk about it.

Certain genres in our culture seem to be perpetually behind the curve. Take the science fiction film, for example. Unlike science fiction literature, whose best practioners have always used the genre to shine a critical light on the foibles or tunnel vision of contemporary culture, the most celebrated science fiction films — think of the endlessly mundane “mythology” of Star Wars — almost always take the easy way out. Despite their often cutting-edge special effects, the stories they construct or resurrect lay out a comfortable black and white good vs. evil conflict — as they seem to revel in the worst of our culture’s sexist and xenophobic prejudices.

An exception might a film like the original Matrix — but it’s the exception that proves the rule. First, although philosophically challenging, it is a rehash of issues that science fiction literature had mined for over 20 years (from William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the beginnings of cyberpunk). And second, the two sequels to the film eschewed all of the original’s complexity for popcorn-movie cliches.

All of this is to say that video games suck. Like science fiction films, they often offer ground-breaking visual perspectives on the modern world. And video games’ interactivity provides the potential for profound and active audience participation.

But so, so few video games seize that potential. Instead, they allow their players –whether it be shooting up bad guys in outer space or shooting up good guys on the urban streets — to move around in ironically familiar, comfortable landscapes.

So it’s no surprise for me that a new effort by Def Jam records and others to bring diversity to the video game genre (dominated by white males) is an empty effort, at best, and a cynically manipulative use of their hip hop “authenticity,” at worst.

Vanessa E. Jones of The Boston Globe writes a lengthly piece about these new games, focusing in particular on “50 Cent: Bulletproof, ” a first-person shooter in which the rapper battles underworld figures to uncover a conspiracy, and “Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure,” in which you strive to become a graffiti legend. She asks the right questions:

Authenticity doesn’t resolve more pressing issues about the content of these games. Will the creative input of people in the rap world help relieve the gaming genre of racial, ethnic, and sexual stereotypes? Or will the creators of these new games follow Def Jam’s lead and continue incorporating these elements because they sell?

From the description of the games, it seems clear that marketing has won the day. Unfortunately, either Jones didn’t pursue the question and never got anyone to give her a straight answer for the record. She spends most of the time dwelling on how cool 50 Cent was for taking such a hands-on role on making his thug life virtual.

She returns to the question of diversity near the end of the piece:

A new program hopes to solve the diversity problem from the bottom up. Joe Saulter, the CEO of the African-American video game company Entertainment Arts Research, recently announced the launch of the Urban Video Game Academy, which will teach game programming to African-American high school students in Baltimore, Atlanta, and Washington D.C.

The question remains whether these games will ultimately battle stereotypes. The lead characters in Bulletproof aren’t athletes, but black men who steal cars and blow up things. You could also point accusatory fingers at Getting Up. The protagonist breaks into private property to tag objects.

The “Urban Video Game Academy,” like video games themselves, sounds like a great idea. Engaging students in constructing their own idealized visions of the world is a very healthy thing — especially when they must do so for an audience that will be literally moving through that world.

Why, then, does it scare me so?

Two items of interest in today?s edition of The Scout Report. First up is a brief look at the excellent website companion to the National Museum of American History exhibit ?Sports: Breaking Records, Breaking Barriers,? which focuses on the achievements of athletes along with the broader social and historical context.

Next is a compilation of stories and historical materials related to the new online video game JFK Reloaded that enables players to recreate the President Kennedy?s assassination.

According to the Boston Herald, Kirk Ewing, managing director of the British game developer Traffic, said JFK Reloaded would ?stimulate a younger generation of players to take an interest in this fascinating episode of American history.”

Not everyone agrees. Presidential historian G. Calvin MacKenzie of Colby College said, ?Aside from being in incredibly bad taste, the idea of marketing it as an educational tool seems to stretch the notion of education beyond belief.”

Slate?s Clive Thompson played it for a couple of hours and came away depressed: ?As a physics simulation, it’s remarkable. But as an experience? It’s nauseating.?