McTucky Fried High: Cartoons Create Unique Opportunities to Discuss LBGTQ Issues in MLE

Much like puppets, cartoons can offer opportunities to examine complicated and controversial issues through comedy and allegory that offer critical distance from the embodied engagement with human actors in video. McTucky Fried High is a compelling, often funny, new animated web series that uses fast food characters to portray LBGTQ issues among teens at school. Viewing this series may not fly in socially conservative educational communities, but in moderate or progressive communities, the series offers media literacy educators of teens and young adults an opportunity to laugh about and discuss the trials and tribulations around sexual identity in high school. The following Vialogue post invites discussion while modeling prompts for media literacy inquiry useful for exploring gay identity representation and for discussing how the McTucky Fried High culture relates to your learners' reality, with the following key questions:

• How do students assume gay people are oppressed at McTucky High? How are they actually oppressed? 
• How does it seem they are supported? 
• How is gay identity exploited by students? 
• How do these representations of oppression, support and exploitation compare to the reality at your school?

I was especially excited to see these cartoons after reading parts of Lauren Berliner's dissertation, Making It Better: LGBT Youth and New Pedagogies of Media Production (2013), where she critiques identity-based youth media production projects like the It Gets Better Campaign for "interpellating queer youth into fixed, homogenous, subject positions" and "conflating video visibility with action, expression, and power" (p. 230). Part of her critique called my attention to the power of remaining unseen or unnamed (as gay, or what have you), which well-meaning youth media production activities may disrupt by making learners perform or embody their beliefs on video. The McTucky Fried High web series offers not only a rich media text for analysis of LGBTQ issues from a variety of points of view, which students may or may not take up at their own discretion, but it also suggests animation as a medium for youth production activities addressing identity issues.

[More after the jump on how cartoons allow learners to confront identity issues with distance from embodiment in media literacy analysis and production; and a bit on the tension in MLE around educators taking up particular political positions]

Puppets Tell Tales of Tinder Horror

Puppets, especially puppets portraying adult situations, can create a heightened sense of awareness about the construction of narrative and character as well as about our own meaning making and communication processes. I guess that's in part why therapists use them, and why they make storytelling funnier, as they certainly do in this series of web videos, Tales From Tinder, on stories from people's personal experiences of using the Tinder dating app--often with calamitous results.


For an adult learning group or college class, a discussion of how using puppets to tell these personal stories of dating misadventure offers an opportunity to examine the communication technique as well as the pitfalls of dating apps like Tinder. The audio is from interviews with Tinder users from around the world of different genders and sexualities. The themes are mature, for sure, and some of the language is profane, so be warned. However, it is fascinating to ask:

• How does the use of puppets affect the story and the storyteller?
• How does this web series comment on Tinder and other digital apps for dating?
• How do you feel about mixing dating and digital media?

Sharing stories of misadventure in social media, and dramatizing the story and storytelling with puppets could make for a fun media literacy lesson as well, empowering learners to reflect on and share experiences through production while creating a collective examination of protectionist themes around the potential dangers of digital media use. My previous post on the muppets offers more reflection on how puppets and parody may support media literacy, and an earlier post about Tinder offers some ideas for creating critiques of new media. Thanks to the Junkee blog for pointing us towards this fascinating Tales from Tinder project from Melbourne-based TV producer Emma Watts.

Love or Loathe Loose Ties? Laugh and Learn about Social Media Norms with Garfunkel and Oates

If you connect ML4ML with all your facebook friends, we promise to always wish you a happy birthday with lots of exclamation points, clever punctuation, and emojis, when prompted by an alert message, unless we forget or have something else to do--which you will be totally okay with because we don't really know each other anyway, we just like some of the same things, maybe. Yeah, emerging online behavior norms and interpersonal ethics are pretty tricky. If we are going to have any hope of sorting out the emotional confusion between our close friends and myriad acquaintances that our social media apps refer to as our "friends," we need to activate our digital media literacies. With help from musical parody act, Garfunkel and Oates, let's see how laughing with their song "Happy Birthday to My Loose Acquaintance" can help us consider some key questions about emerging interpersonal ethics.

"We coexist in a mutually unstated /unattached cohesion that facebook created...
to keep our minor affinity with minimal maintenance"

This song has a couple of brilliant moments, like the lyrics in the caption above, that offer tight definitions of what Internet scholars call "loose ties," connections to people that only exist through shared interests or other mutual acquaintances, often supported or created by digital algorithms in social networking apps and maintained with minimal attention and effort. This post offers resources for using the Garfunkel & Oates song to explore the value of loose tie relationships in social media, and how they affect our behavior, beliefs and attitudes towards friendship. First, enjoy a hot minute of crack-up from G&O:

Above is my Vialogues post with the embedded video featuring my annotated discussion questions and comments, and here is a link to a pdf of those notes. I have also uploaded the lyrics text, and my annotated questions/comments to Genius (embedded below), the awesome annotation app that I highly recommend (there is a way to get a free educator account to restrict the annotation/ discussion to your group's work, but my post is public). So, you can 1) focus on the lyrics conversation through Genius if that works best for your group, 2) start a group Vialogue of your own (or add to mine); or 3) do the group analysis analog, without tech, using the annotated printout pdf to support discussion for a group viewing or listening session. I also did a Vialogue post of just the lyrics, and here is a link to a pdf of the lyrics.

Read “Happy Birthday to My Loose Acquaintence” by Garfunkel & Oates on Genius

Once you've had a good discussion of this song, it can make for a nice model of how parody can be constructive (and instructive). Making funny songs is actually really hard (I'll reflect on my own experience in a musical comedy writing workshop in an upcoming post), but young media makers often strive to make their peers laugh through mocking familiar behaviors in the style of pop culture media they enjoy. It's hard to fine good models of doing parody to spark constructive discussion--so, this sort of video/song and discussion provide an opportunity to link analysis to learner's own production interests. Look for a post soon about some strategies for making musical comedy.

Often the best question to ask is the simplest; so, I recommend asking: Why is it funny? Ask for any given joke, like the line "Happy birthday dear person who I sort of know." The typical response is that it’s funny cuz it’s true. But that’s pretty weak. Push for better articulation. For this song, I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s funny because it seems like a contradiction ["dear person” instead of friend, who I “sort of know”] that many of us use without thinking about it. This makes us conscious of our error, and the inconsistency is funny (partly because it’s safe too, since so many people do it, we’re not feeling like the outcast or feeling like we’re cruelly singling others out). It’s nice to know we are wired to get pleasure from finding out our own mistakes and foibles.

Colbert on Telecomm Contracts, Privacy: Feds Bound More by Phone Service Agreement than U.S. Constitution

Here's a biting bit of irony blown up by the Colbert Report about the U.S. Department of Justice publicly suing Sprint for overcharging $21M on their top secret wiretapping service, which federal judges have declared illegal and unconstitutional.

"That takes balls. It's like a guy telling his wife, 'I'm suing the prostitute who gave us both herpes. And by the way, I go to prostitutes, and you have herpes."

How's that for a way to start off a discussion about government surveillance and taxpayer money? So, that joke in the caption probably makes this useful for discussion with the college/adult crowd only (who should also notice the casual insensitivity of using sex workers as a vehicle for the joke), but it's certainly worth discussing both the ethics/legality of government spying (especially in connection to some research about how they're spying a la the Snowden leaks), and Colbert's clever method for bringing up the fact that taxpayers pay for all of this. Of course, Colbert's satirical impersonation of a right wing pundit demands that he couch the economic issue as due to Obama's mistakes, which he brilliantly frames from the point of view of a disappointed parent chastising a kid for jacking up the family bill through irresponsible cell phone use.

"Someone is going to have to pay for this, sir. Because even the President of the United States is bound by his cell phone agreement, though apparently not by the Constitution."--Stephen Colbert

So, what's left out of that critique? For starters, taxpayers had been paying for the service either way, and now pay for the law suit. I'd love to hear from you--what are the most important questions to ask to frame debate about the ethics of government wiretapping/data-mining, transparency of government action, and use of taxpayer money? And what research questions does this piece inspire?
[clip autostarts after the jump]