World on Fire

• 11 November 2004
• watching

I’m a little more than a month behind the zeitgeist, apparently, but I just got a link to Sarah McLachlan’s World on Fire video, and want to point any of you who haven’t seen it yet toward it. McLachlan redirected the $150,000 that would ordinarily have gone toward producing the video to various international charities; the actual video cost $15 to produce (the cost of one blank DV tape).

This story says, I think, both good and bad things about contemporary media culture: bad, in that spending the $150,000 on a video would have been nothing out of the ordinary for our consumption-oriented culture; but good, in that digital technologies are making it possible for alternate cultural priorities to be brought to our attention.

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