The Media Show

Welcome to The Media Show. If you’re a teacher, professor, librarian, journalist, or other person currently wearing their serious-grown-up hat, this article will explain a little bit about what The Media Show is, and why we do what we do.

The Story So Far

Weena Jimenez, a sixteen-year-old punk puppet with an attitude problem, has decided that she learns way more while skipping school than being bored to death in a classroom. Her more responsible older sister, Erna, runs after her to try to keep her from catastrophically messing up her life.

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We made it! Thanks to all of you who pledged to or spread the word about our Kickstarter fundraising campaign.

We’ve had a few requests to share what we’ve learned by running the campaign, including one from Mitch Altman, a friend of The Media Show and all-around cool guy who will soon be running a very interesting campaign of his own (so follow that Twitter feed!) I wrote up a good chunk for Mitch, then figured that it would be another good addition to the extensive documentation we’ve done of the show. So I’m posting my rough postmortem of the campaign here.

First of all, I read this before I got started, and it was useful. Good statistics about who pledged and how much on one particular project.

That article says you should have good $50 and $100 rewards, as people seem to like pledging at those levels. I somehow didn’t quite remember that as I started the campaign, and made up a finite number of $50 rewards, garnering some early criticism, and had to add more fast. (More on those prop-related rewards in a moment.) But yes, be sure you’ve got good premiums at those numbers, and make sure you have enough for a lot of people.

What else I learned from our campaign:

Having a super-complicated rewards structure (in our case a lot of unique one-off props from the show) was confusing and cluttered our Kickstarter page. I imagine that’s easier for others to avoid, so if you can, do. Although I do think our fans and friends enjoyed the props. It’d be nice if Kickstarter could hide one-off rewards which were pledged for. I may mention that to them. Aside from that the site was pretty much a joy to use.

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Don’t be embarrassed — a lot of people don’t. Heck, search engines showed up after most people alive today graduated from school. How were we supposed to learn about these things?

The Media Show aims to teach people how technology works, so they can protect their privacy better, avoid scams, and make the most of their time online. We’ve made videos about where spam comes from and the truth about online predators.

We’re fundraising right now so that we can make an episode which shows how search engines work.

Want to make it happen? Pledge to support The Media Show before our fundraiser is over this Tuesday!

We look forward to sharing the mysteries of the Internet with you!

It seems like a day doesn’t pass these days without “hackers” showing up in the news. They’ve taken down Sony’s site. They’ve exposed passwords. They’ve snuck into government or nuclear reactor systems. They’re having some giant convention out in Vegas.

Why do they do this? What does “hacking” actually involve? Is there a personal threat to me? you may be wondering.

We at The Media Show have been spending time with hackers for a number of years, and we know that the real story is more complicated than you sometimes hear in the news. So we want to share with people what we know. In one of our upcoming episodes, we want to interview hackers and explain in simple terms what “hacking” really means.

But we can’t do it without your help. We have just hours left to meet our fundraising goal, or we won’t be able to produce more episodes.

Could you help us out? Click here to visit our fundraiser page. Thank you for your support!