Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World

Our Space is a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments. Through role-playing activities and reflective exercises, students are asked to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people, and whether and how they behave ethically themselves online. These issues are raised in relation to five core themes that are highly relevant online: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation.Our Space was co-developed by The Good Play Project and Project New Media Literacies (established at MIT and now housed at University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism). The Our Space collaboration grew out of a shared interest in fostering ethical thinking and conduct among young people when exercising new media skills

Cultural supply chain of counterfeit fashion

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, September 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "August 2009."Includes bibliographical references (pages 95-99).This thesis attempts to uncover the emotional and cultural economics of material culture. What does it mean for material good to be "fake"? What are the salient aspects that are being copied and are those aspects purely material? How does counterfeit branded fashion function as craft, as commodity, and as idea? The first chapter, Productions, looks not just at how fakes are made but what makes a fake, at how fake branded luxury goods are produced, both materially and immaterially. The second, Exchanges, examines the three most common sites of exchange, street markets, online message boards, and purse parties, and how the culture of exchange at each site produces a value specific to that site. The final chapter, Ownerships, explores how owners and observers make meaning from branded luxury goods, real and fake, and how, more specifically, how emerging legal discourses misunderstand the nature of creativity in fashion. To conclude, it considers what it might mean, more holistically, to use branded objects made, bought, and used outside of authorized channels, to constitute everyday life.by Deja Elana Swartz.S.M