After spending a couple of years at RMIT, I feel comfortable with the practice of interactive lectures. It is a great way of engaging students and involving them rather than sitting and passively absorbing information for 2 or 3 hours. Being apart of the media means being able to interact and communicate with not only peers but potentially people outside of our comfort zones. These lectorials push the boundaries and will push development. But this seems to depend on how focused and willing we are as students.
The Deep attention/hyper attention reading task piqued my interest. It was a funny experiment, asking students to attend to an essay on attention span. I didn’t feel like a guinea pig or anything, it was just a clever way of getting the class to talk about study habits among other things. Our ability to disperse our attention while studying among media platforms is suggested to be a rapid form of hyper attention, or multitasking. Although, the reading suggested a decline in efficiency when it comes to multitasking, it seems to be a subjective matter. For me, listening to music while studying can create a comfortable atmosphere in which to study and focus. The comfort factor is very important to me when it comes to gettin’ stuff done. If I wasn’t comfortable then I would do absolutely nothing. Where’s the efficiency there? Perhaps it is the sweet rhythm of music that keeps me on track.
The reading encouraged me to think about the science behind retention of memory and this is something I am keen to explore. There is a definite relationship between Psychology and Media, and I want to understand it. Being able to give an explanation of the relationship would be better. Media is about getting inside people’s heads and tapping into their thought processes in order to create appealing content. To get through to an audience, you have to think like them. You have to be the audience. In this program, I expect we will have plenty of opportunities to be an audience member and plenty of opportunities to be a cast member. I look forward to collaborating and discussing with my peers.
If you’re game, have a watch of this video…
Reference Material
- N. Katherine Hayles (2007), ‘Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes’, Profession, pp.187-199
– Gabriel