GlimpSe

This book chapter by Howard Gardner intersects well with the episode of Cosmos I watched last night. It focused heavily on the way humans have contributed to the imbalance of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere leading to Global Warming. What’s interesting is this is a topic everyone knows about, yet actions to prolong the inevitable consequences lag, particularly in Australia. I wouldn’t classify myself as an environmentalist but when the facts are presented in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s unique manner, it’s difficult not to be concerned. 

How easy is it to just combat this issue though? I’m not the one with the scientific education, but I do like to think I have elements of all five of Gardner’s minds packed into mine. Identifying strengths and weaknesses in others is key to successful action, and in order to progress into a sustainable future, thinking globally, but acting locally, nationally and regionally, like Gardner suggests is paramount. 

I like the idea of Education as a lifelong prospect. It can often be forgotten that after school finishes, life begins, and living is essentially learning from the world around you. I will say that as a graduating student preparing to enter the unknown world of creative production/freelancing/bumming around… that I along with many others from my generation are learning to acquire skill sets in various fields. Gardner writes of the importance of this and I can not disagree with how vital this is. Being able to adapt from workplace to workplace or project to project with a scientifically analysing mind will ensure a prosperous future. 

– Gabe

I felt a bit torn by this week’s reading. The idea of being time-savvy was easily distinguished, but there was a lot of waffling around the subject. It wasn’t easy to engage with, but it’s not a difficult concept to apply to everyday life. As we strive to spend less time working, we want to be able to spend more time in a leisurely manner. And what constitutes leisure anyway? Making music is a great past-time of mine, and there is a monetary value that can be attached to that. It purely depends on strategy and innovation.

I have asked myself this question though: “Am I being too selfish spending time developing my skills rather than putting my knowledge now into practice?”. The answer harks back to last weeks reading teasing out the passion/craftsman debate. Over time, the more skills learned will amount to more options and the rewards will come. That’s my approach for now anyway. I want to build a career fundamentally based on skills, driven by a passion to deliver splurges of entertainment to others. But I have committed to starting small, and this is where I think it pays to be selfish – by spending time on my musical and multimedia crafts.

Something that caught me a little off-guard in the reading was the thought that autonomous cars will eventually provide a place for people to work while they go to work. Maybe I’m just picking up the wrong tone, but this sounds to me like it’s missing the point of having extra time. I can honestly see a future of people being driven around in autonomous vehicles, spending the time catching up on sleep… Or maybe you could drive from job to job 8 hours at a time and sleep the whole way there. Just an idea. Keeping an open mind…

– Gabe

The reading this week presented a way to positively focus on ‘work’ in order to maintain a sense of focus and drive. Cal Newport describes this methodology as the craftsman mindset as opposed to the passion mindset. With the help of some anecdotal evidence (bluegrass musician Jordan Tice), Newport argues that focusing on one’s craft/strengths first and honing in on the skills you have to offer the world is more important than seeing what the world has to offer you. To paraphrase, it is an approach reliant upon being/becoming so good that employers can not ignore.

It is proactive in principle, but only to the extent of personalised practice. I do agree that in the creative industries, people will always find the best and cheapest routes to complete a task. But my issue here, and I stress I am playing devil’s advocate, is with Jordan’s likely representation covering all other bases besides the actual writing/performance aspect. The article mentions that Jordan was born into a musical family. From this I can only assume that contacts had been established previously allowing him more time to spend honing in on his craft, and in actual fact concurrently conforming to the passion mindset of seeing what the world has to offer him.

With more people taking the approach of cutting out the middle man in the creative industries, I believe a well rounded balance between spending time with the craftsman mindset and spending time with the passion mindset is appropriate. To refer back to a previous post of mine about my future endeavours, I would love the ability to spend time moulding my craft (music, multimedia) with the funding coming from an unrelated source of work.

– Gabe

• Pentina, I, Tarafdar, M 2014, ‘From “information” to “knowing”: Exploring the role of social media in contemporary news consumption’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 35, pp. 211-223

This study/report provides an insight into the role Social Media currently plays in the consumption of news. It is known that the amount of content channels and sources continues to grow through the facilitation of platforms such as Facebook, but a few startling figures in this study showed just how much our exposure to news content has increased. As Pentina and Tarafdar explain “A single Sunday edition of The New York Times today contains more information than typical 19th-century citizens faced in their lifetime and more new information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the last 5000” (2014). 

This continuous influx of content can potentially lead to something called ‘information overload’. This is when “information-processing demands on the individual exceed their capacity to process the information” (2014). It relates to a similar study conducted by Ran et. al on perceived and factual political knowledge. 

The report acknowledges that social media has effects on our perception of news, that may seem ‘paradoxical’ (Pentina and Tarafdar, 2014). With social media comes the ability to immediately communicate and discuss topics at ease with many people. But as some research has shown, the algorithms embedded in Facebook for example, has the tendency to display content confirming preexisting beliefs, thus limiting exposure to challenging ideas (Pentina and Tarafder, 2014). This is called an ‘information bubble’. 

The report continues by outlining a study conducted by Pentina and Tarafdar which provides an interesting insight into the ways people consume news. Although we are not necessarily concerned with the coping mechanisms of ‘information overload’, it helps in providing some background for our research. It at least provides statistical and anecdotal evidence to establish historical grounding: 

“Social media enable these strategies by providing timely and relevant information that is socially curated by like-minded network participants. However, social media also complicate the news stimuli screening process by contributing to information overload due to their exposure to unverified, anonymous and overwhelmingly subjective sources of news.” (Pentina and Tarafdar, 2014).

Other useful info:

Categorically, coming across news through social media can be classified as passive, a somewhat stumbling approach to consuming. The opposite of this is the active approach of searching for stories with a general theme in mind. 

Citizen Journalism: The idea that access to social media allows regular people to express and broadcast ideas and opinions with ease. 

– Gabe

Freelancing in the hope of making money is the likely direction that myself and many of my colleagues will take at some point after completing this Media program. Like the reading suggests, it is an area of unknown, sitting somewhere within the boundaries of freedom, passion, stability and remuneration. For someone who has gone through University with consistent financial aid from the government, I expect my first year out to be challenging but ultimately rewarding. Finding the balance between part-time work (whatever it may be) and content creation will be difficult at times but I am excited to juggle the two, rather than the current three (University included). I want to emphasise the distinction between how I intend to make money and how I intend to form a body of work directly after the completion of this degree. Whilst the occasional monetary transaction for future creative work will be highly appreciated, I want to ensure my passion is firmly entrenched in the field by not treating it as “work” per se. The fulfilment and gratification that comes from completing things I am proud of is my immediate goal and something I consider to be vey rewarding.

Financial stability is probably the biggest issue to come from these plans of mine, and it is a concern, but I won’t let that deter me from doing what I want to be doing. I have found that living in the eastern suburbs has helped me save money by not having to fork out a ridiculous amount each month for rent. It sounds silly but saving by not spending money on unnecessary living arrangements has put me in good stead for the future.

– Gabe

• Pang, J 2016, The Future of News and Publishing, Tech Crunch, Web article <https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/17/the-future-of-news-and-publishing/> 

Pang first establishes that traditional print publishers such as Forbes and the Washington Post are recording significant audience growth rates whereas ‘digital native publishers’ including Buzzfeed and Gawker have been relatively stagnant of late (statistical evidence provided/linked). He puts this down to the keener interest established print readers have in credible, distinguished journalism. It is suggested that a shift in this direction/investment in this area is likely for all new and future media content. 

Pang discusses a few future potential developments in media publishing and consumption designed to keep engagement and interest levels high. He heralds instant messaging to be the next frontier for news, which is in line with our interest in tailored content – presumably following the format of a one to many distribution model. But this seems to be an unnecessary stepping stone to a truly effective way to receive personalised content. 

What intrigued me most about this article was the idea that audio is the new video. Pang doesn’t necessarily argue that audio content will make video content obsolete, rather, that it is worthwhile to consider it a competition and a relevant outlet. The death of radio predicted through the amount of new cars being connected to the internet provides a marketable avenue for audio content. It should be kept in mind though the progression of autonomous vehicles, allowing a whole new way to consume news/media/content whatever the format.

While the article has some relevance to targeted/personalised content, it has more of a focus on production. They are two sides of the same coin, however, and the many links throughout the article provided helpful insights/further leads. 

– Gabe

• Ran, W, Yamamoto, M, Xu, S 2016, ‘Media multitasking during political news consumption: A relationship with factual and subjective political knowledge’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 56, pp. 352 – 359 

This article presents the outcomes of a study identifying the effects of media multitasking during political news consumption and how it translates into one’s perceived knowledge of political agenda’s versus their factual political knowledge. 

The study conducted by Ran, Yamamoto and Xu applies the existent findings that “performing more than one tasks at a time, particularly complex tasks that involve careful attention, reduces the productivity of a primary task” to a political context (2016: p352). This helps in thoroughly grounding the research. It ultimately investigates how well people engage with news when dividing their attention across multiple sources. 

For the purpose of the study, ‘multitasking’ is identified as a general grouping of undertaking two or more tasks requiring a certain amount of cognitive attention. Examples include listening to music whilst reading, watching or listening to political news (pairwise multitasking), and engaging in political news as a primary task whilst giving attention to two or more other media activities such as texting, watching TV, social networking, etc (bundled multitasking). 

The results identify a negative relationship between media multitasking and political learning. In other words “those who engage in more than one media activity during news consumption learn less from news media and therefore have lower levels of factual political knowledge” (2016: p357). These results are backed up with statistical evidence conducted over two distinct tests. 

This study provides empirical evidence for our interest in slow media. Our ability to access multiple platforms of media at once detracts from our ability to consume, interpret and effectively understand information at a high level. Current technology allows us to rapidly consume huge amounts of information at a level that may not be so productive or effective. 

– Gabe

As a gen-y-er, I find myself in a transitional phase of consumption. I have a collection of music and movies, the majority of which is digitised. But I still find value in physicality, particularly when it comes to music. It’s not just the warmth that comes from placing a record on the turntable and hearing the authentic crackle, but it’s also the larger hangable artwork that often comes as an extra add-on that is appealing. Norway’s booming DJ scene as outlined by the reading, is responsible for a staggering 30.5% increase in physical music sales. Although the statistics aren’t quite the same in Australia, there are pockets of Melbourne with a similar mindset of collecting vinyl for use.

But, as a few classmates and I were discussing yesterday, there is a high chance that those 5-10 years younger than us are totally engaged in digital consumption. There’s nothing wrong with that, it is just the way the world is progressing and developing. It seems to me that (besides Norway’s vinyl habits) the general trend is to become more and more possessionless as our access to more and more content (both news and entertainment) rapidly grows.

What I have noticed from this is that the huge influx of news content, for example, has improved spread but reduced depth. By this I mean there is a large amount of coverage on the same topics, but the quality of the coverage is lacking as our attention span gets shorter and shorter. We want condensed information or we run the risk of losing interest. That has become a major flaw with the way we consume our media. We are so privileged with our options that we perhaps take quality content for granted, hence the rise in popularity of sites like buzzfeed feeding the advertising sector.

I’m perhaps a bit standoffish when it comes to embracing new technologies. I think this comes down to being relatively satisfied with how I am set up at the moment. I am both a producer and consumer of content and don’t yet see the advantages of reading the news off a fridge… In saying that though, it’d be stupid to not keep an eye on the happenings of the entertainment industry because if I want to be involved in it down the track I, along with my colleagues will need to find clever ways to be innovative.

Such is the nature of our technological world today, whilst reading through this article, I could concurrently connect Schwab’s ideas and theories to other pieces of information in my web vicinity. He discusses a few different ways in which the world’s technology is advancing. One of these is the continual development of autonomous vehicles. Elon Musk is a key figure in this field, and his forward thinking plans with Tesla are something to keep an eye out for. One other advancement that Schwab discusses is the genetic modification of DNA in humans and plants alike. I am aware of Artificial Intelligence and the potential risks and rewards that studies in this field can bring. But I had not given much thought to what happens when we interfere with the biology of nature until I watched a Documentary on Netflix called The True Cost. In the most efficient way possible, it is a doco about how the fashion industry has become like fast food restaurants, creating a lopsided system whereby communities in third world countries are being outsourced to make clothes dirt cheap and suffering severe conditions in slave-like environments. Now, this is a serious issue and has huge repercussions. From the environmental perspective it means that more cotton is being consumed. The answer has become to genetically modify the plant to withstand poison and other pesticides in order to increase production efficiency so that more clothing can be made. The obvious problem with this is the amount of toxins being released in the air and directly into the soil. It is damaging, not only to our environment but the way in which our world functions as a whole.

Okay, so I’m not an expert in any of these fields, but you can’t disregard even the loose connections established between the few ideas above. The overarching theme that stood out to me from the reading is the ability we (those more so in the western world) have to access information through the Internet. But there is a huge disparity between those who have and those who do not have and it appears to be getting worse. At our fingertips is an extremely powerful tool evolving so rapidly that in order to effectively progress and develop properly we need to adapt to it in an inclusive way. With this adaptation though comes drawbacks. Our innate tendency to check our phones for example in an awkward/unnatural situation can simultaneously ease the tension and disconnect us from real human interaction – leading to individualisation, creating social issues as Schwab touches on.

It seems that the most important thing we can do globally is to collectively understand and embrace the changes in new technology in a way that benefits the human race as a whole.

– Gabe