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Alive, and thinking.

But still without internet access, so my nights at home are spent watching cable tv instead of communicating with the outside world.

I've just finished reading an article by Hugh Rank, a professor who's developed a cool little tool for teaching people how to analyze media. Just the schema "Intensify/Downplay." Ask yourself, what is the ad/speech/article hyping up? What is it omitting? His website's got a lot of other tools on it, especially to help kids understand advertising. Oddly enough, reading this I thought of two things: Pedagogy of the Opressed and D.A.R.E. Say what you will about D.A.R.E.- I went through it (and won a teddy bear in a D.A.R.E. t-shirt for an essay I wrote), and the one thing I took out of it was what they taught us about ways of persuasion. I remember posters with cartoons depicting "get on the bandwagon" and "sex appeal" and the others. Now that I think about it, it was probably a pretty formative moment. As for Pedagogy, I think anyone in grassroots organizing and policy should read this (I'm thinking of you in particular, M.R.)

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