Enter World: exploring mediated cultures

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

No Time To Read

Mail arrived today from my old address in Portland, carrying with it three journals, two psychology magazines, and one art magazine. On top of this, five books I had requested at the library came in yesterday. An intimidating amount of reading that I just can’t get to right now. Tonight is the community potluck, 40 minutes and counting. Our house is closing this week, we should be signing and paying tomorrow! So much excitement, there’s no time to curl up and read ...

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Journal of e-Media Studies

Found the Journal of e-Media Studies today and have been perusing the contents. Looks like an interesting new journal out of Dartmouth.

Also have been reading a research paper on how much people trust libraries and museums. Turns out they are more trusted than news sources. This begs for a post of its own that is still brewing. 

Monday, May 05, 2008

Information overload & cultural collapse: old fears

Reading The Cult of the Amateur has made me mad. I guess that’s one thing to be said in favor of the author: his writing can incite emotion. There are so many flaws in his logic that I am going to break down this post with subtitles to keep myself from rambling on and on and writing my own 205-page diatribe.

The overwhelming feeling I get from this book is fear. Fear of too much information to sift through. Fear that the professional is losing control. Fear that the masses are uneducated and unable or unwilling to embrace quality media.

Information Overload
All of these fears have arisen with other societal changes and are not new to the web. Technology and change seem to have this effect. The press and mass production of books incited similar grandiloquences about information overload: How will the people (and the experts, as a separate entity of course) ever wade through the innumerable tomes?

Information overload is not a new concept. And perhaps not surprisingly, it seems to affect those who were raised in the old system of information more than those born into the newer, differently structured, information network. It has been shown that kids have the ability to mutli-task better than adults. While adults may feel they are multi-tasking, they are actually less adept at each of their tasks as they attempt to juggle them. Kids’ brains are able to nimbly handle all those things they’re doing: chat on IM, search the web, listen to music, text on the phone, and type up a homework assignment—without the struggle their elders face.

Blaming New Technology for Failures
One of Keen’s main criticisms falls on Wikipedia. However, this is a case where his flawed factual backup is such a stretch that I can only use his own words against him: “The 232-year-old Britannica went through a series of painful layoffs in 2001 and 2002, cutting its 300-person staff in the United States almost by half; with the advent of Wikipedia, no doubt more layoffs are to come.” Wikipedia started in 2004. The old system was failing before the new arose. Although other arguments he poses against Wikipedia hold some value, this leaping accusation deteriorates the value of all other statements near it.

Assumptions About Mainstream Media
Keen also supports the mainstream media and states that it has “reinforced American values and made our culture the envy of the world” for 200 years.

Sure, the AP wire started in the 1840s, and in 1800 the Sedition Act forbidding criticism of the government by the media expired. However, it wasn’t until 1920 that our modern interpretation of journalism arose. Four journalism schools were formed in 1920 (Columbia, Northwestern, Missouri, and Indiana) because of the lack of faith the general population had in a media system run for profit, before this professionalization of journalism the media was based on sensationalism and yellow journalism. Prior to this, it was not even acceptable for a journalist to take notes. This change in journalism did separate the United States media from other countries, but it certainly wasn’t 200 years ago. It also was not the glorious and value-ridden idealistic media that Keen seems to imply.

Media has always been questioned in the United States. Training journalists and following ethical codes was an attempt to create unbiased media in the face of a profit-driven industry, but the credibility of media continued to be questioned. By 1996 the media was “seen as part of a strongly disliked governing elite� according to a U.S. News and World Report survey. Where is the motivation to save an institution that has been taken over by corporations despite the efforts to professionalize it, one that is seen not as the reinforcer of values but instead as one big advertisement?

Cultural Collapse
If generations of information jugglers are able to find all of the information they want, then why would they depend on a talking head to tell them what to think? This is where the next fear arises. If no one listens to the professional, is there still such a thing?

Keen prefers to be told by someone else what to think, or at least what to think about. His assumption is that mainstream media provide this service. Keen fears that without mainstream media as the middle man, we will not be able to recognize, or find in the marsh of information, true genius.

This concept reminds me of a presentation at the New Communications Forum by Tim Westergren’s, of Pandora.com, and Milton Olin, Jr., Altschul & Olin, LLP, on the fall of the hierarchy in the music industry. Musicians no longer need to know who is the head of a major record label and bow to the lackeys below to struggle to the top. When that was the case, 1% of musicians actually made it to a label. Even fewer made it to the public. They may have been signed but if their music sales weren’t projected to cover the expenses of recording and marketing, they were shelved and no one was able to hear them. Even the ones who made it big handed over most of their profits to that label to cover expenses.

You tell me, which is better:

Old men in suits deciding what good music is and allowing the masses to hear a small percentage of what is out there, while hoarding the profits even at the expense of the musician?
Or
Everyone being able to find music they like no matter what other people think of it, at the expense of taking the time and energy to find it?

There may still be a need for people to find quality information and entertainment, but rather than controlling it they will be sharing it.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

reading: Cult of the Amateur

I’m not sure how much more I can read, and I’m just starting. If it doesn’t flesh out into something more than the desperate ranting of a man frightened of losing his imagined cultural control, I may not make it to the last half of the book.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Nielsen fails to support web strengths

I was shocked and angered to see Jakob Nielsen’s response (below) to a student highlighted in his April 21, 2008, Alertbox email:

I WON’T DO YOUR HOMEWORK

Last week I got this email:

“My name is Donald Duck, and I am currently a junior psychology major at Duckburg College. For my senior thesis, I would like to conduct some usability studies in the process of redesigning my old high school’s website. In making this my senior thesis, part of what I have to do is find out what research is currently being done in the field, in order to build upon it. I do not know much about usability or interface design from a research perspective. I am wondering if you might be able to point me in the right direction for where I can get started learning about this field.”

Sorry - I am not going to do your homework for you. Even today, there is such a thing as the library. Or search engines that rapidly will turn up articles such as “Usability 101” to serve as a starting point for online research if you can’t be bothered to crack open a book or research journal:  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

What good is a usable site if you refuse to connect with the readers? The ability to contact people otherwise remote is at the center of the internet’s democratization of networking. Unless more than the name, “Donald Duck” is surely not the sender, was edited by Nielsen, it appears that the student was asking for resource suggestions to start researching not a 250-word essay to plagiarize.

On top of that, although I am an avid fan of libraries—why discount the student for contacting the most notable primary resource on the topic rather than relying on secondhand information watered down by publishing houses and buried in the stacks? Yet another thing that a usable internet gives us is access to the source.

Nielsen was flat out rude and inconsistent with usability—on top of which, he downplays his own site by referring to it only as a source to use as a last, lazy, resort. Poor form.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Birthday Wanderings

Yesterday I turned off my cell phone for almost half the day as a birthday gift to myself. I headed out to the big, downtown library to get some reading done. The research I’m presenting this week was done a year ago, so even though I have it all prepared, I wanted to read up on anything related from the past year.

Somehow I passed the library and figured I’d just go over that next hill to see what was there, it turned out to be a part of Schenley Park I hadn’t been to yet. When I pulled up to a pond with a fountain surrounded by trees dripping with magnolia blossoms, I knew I needed to be sitting at a picnic table in the 70-degree sunshine being scoped out by a squirrel instead of inside an air conditioned library.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Google News

I’ve had “media psychology” in my google news since 2004. Typically 4 or 5 headlines show up that are slightly related. Today was the first day when there were more headlines in this category than any other. 

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

A new journal

Some people I know through Fielding have started a new organization and are working on an online media psychology journal. It’s exciting to have two now, and it’s nice to see the older one publishing again. I hadn’t checked the site for years because the information didn’t change, now there’s all sorts of new tidbits, like the online gaming piece.

Media Psychology Review
Journal of Media Psychology

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Summer Reading

Ever since there was a call for researchers for a documentary about Philip Pullman‘s The Golden Compass, I’ve been reading YA/mid-level books. Right now I’m hooked on a German author, Cornelia Funke. I’m reading the English translation of Inkheart and would love to find an original German version.

Although I will not stop reading, substituting fun books this month seems like an excellent use of my leave from Fielding.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Thoughts on Everything Bad is Good for You

Everything Bad is Good for You, by Steven Johnson

Overall the concept is a breath of fresh air, someone finally looked at media impact from a new angle.

As one example, he discusses TV shows with complex narratives and social webs that encourage audience interaction with the stories. Johnson points to cognitive challenges in modern dramas, and states that the good ones don’t “talk down” to audiences (referring both to the removal of blatant hints and the inclusion of technical jargon). However, he also refers to some of this language as above the audience when he discusses the “willingness to immerse the audience in information that most viewers won’t understand” (p.80). It is precisely this information that interests me. While Johnson covers social and technical skills honed by complex media environments, he overlooks the potential for learning specific information. That was an intentional separation for the purpose of this book, but something I’d like to see explored further in relation to the concepts Johnson presents.

These same shows that subject the audience to new information could be aiding the audience in understanding professional and academic fields as well as in developing their cognitive skills. All of the major networks seem to have more shows with problem solving by professionals or academics than sitcoms. Forensics, forensic anthropology, psychology, medicine, mathematics ... these are all fields that have played the background role of nerd or geek in past shows and are now the key roles. (Excepting computer science, which seems to still be represented by an off-beat character kept within the confines of the office to solve those truly complex technical issues.) By following these characters as they solve complex puzzles, the audience is introduced to the scientific process as well as specific terminology.

I read a wire story a while back that said Americans are more science literate now than ever before. It accredited improved understanding to the requirement of basic science classes in universities. But I would argue that the interest in science, and the willingness to read science news, also lies in the popularization of these fields through characters in television shows and the transformation of research from rigorous academic reading into hip, colorful, and fun formats such as Wired, Seed, and boingboing. Science information has become more accessible to the public through these popular media formats. And while hearing fictional doctors spout out medical terminology on TV is no substitute for studying anatomy or pharmacology, it does open interest in the field and make more people comfortable with the jargon.

Maybe Johnson’s assumption that it’s all in the way we think still holds true: it’s not so much which words the audience remembers or that they will be able to mimic the actions presented, but that they can wrap their minds around it and find it interesting. Just don’t throw out the message completely.