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Friday, August 15, 2008

Speaker: Sut Jhally
Title: How TV Exploits its Audience

In a 1958 speech, legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow said about TV, "This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is nothing but wires and lights in a box." Imagine if Murrow were around today with all talk shows full of hot air, vitriol and salaciousness. That box is a delivery system for media corporations to sell eyeballs, audiences, to other corporations called advertisers. That's the political economy of TV. Viewers are bombarded with ads wrapped around inane programming. The box has great potential as Murrow says, but it is barely approaching it. TV is more of a device to get people to buy things they don't really need.

Sut Jhally is Professor of Communications at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is the founder and executive director of the Media Education Foundation and the author of The Codes of Advertising. He co-directed the critically acclaimed documentary, Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Speaker: Julian Darley
Title: Post-Carbon World

As our lives have become ever more complex so too has our food chain. Where once people ate food grown fairly close to them now it is being shipped literally from around the world. From grapes in Chile to water from Fiji much energy is expended in filling our fridges. These products arrive in containers at ports where they are then loaded onto tractor-trailer trucks for long haul delivery. This is an unsustainable model. The stress on the planet and its fragile ecology is severe. Changes in climate and energy point to the necessity for rethinking our local economies. There is a huge growth in and popularity of farmers markets and CSAs, community supported agriculture. More and more people are thinking and acting locally when it comes to food and life in a post carbon world.

Julian Darley is the founder of Post Carbon Institute headquartered in Sebastopol, California. He is the author of High Noon for Natural Gas and the co-author of Relocalize Now!