Communication

1
Communication MediaTransformations in the
Conceptual Age

• Thom McCain
• 2006

2
Perspectives on Media and the Future

• Three lenses
• Technological evolution
• Political economy
• Learning Literacy
• How people use media How people are used by
  media
• Implications for teaching and learning.

3
Contemporary Environment

• The Information Age moves to the Conceptual Age
• The speed of technology invention
• From speaker to writer 41,500 years (1,300
  lifetimes)
• From writing to printing 5,000 years (167
  lifetimes)
• Last 100 years more invention than in the
  previous 450 centuries.

4

• If the same rate of change happened in the Auto
  industry as has happened in communication
  technology in the past 10 years, you could buy a
  Lexis for ten cents and it could travel for 1000
  miles on a thimble of gas. (Randall Tobias)
• More technologies will be invented in the next 20
  years than have been imagined in all of prior
  human history

5
Moores Law its Implications

• Transistors decrease in size by ½ every 12 months
  (originally every 24 months)
• Computing capacity (the number of transistors on
  a chip) double every 12 months.
• Speed of each transistor doubles every 12 months.
• Computational capacity of a 4,000 computing
  device is approximately equal to the
  computational capability of the human brain
• 20 million, billion calculations per second
• Memory in 2020 is an electronic phenomenon, not a
  mechanical one
• Neural Implant chips are introduced

6
Law of Accelerating Returns (Ray Kurzweil, The
Singularity, Age of the Spiritual Machine)

• As order exponentially increases, time
  exponentially speeds up
• The time interval between salient events grows
  shorter as time progresses
• In evolutionary processes ORDER increases
• In evolutionary processes CHAOS decreases
• Time speeds up
• Order is information that fits a purpose
• Technology is on an evolutionary curve that is
  the same as geology and biology.

7
Communicating in the future

• Can do anything, with anyone, everywhere, at any
  time
• Most meetings can be accomplished virtually
• High resolution 3-D images projected through
  direct-eye displays and audio lenses. Resolution
  exceeds human eye
• Technology totally emersive and wearable

8
Your future?

• How do you envision the world in 2020?
• Politics
• Sex
• Violence
• News
• Stereotyping
• Advertising
• What will learning be like in this future?

9
Communication Infrastructure the Political
Economy of Media

• Below the surface and usually taken for granted.
• Necessary for all human societies
• Other Society Infrastructures
• utilities (heat, water, etc..)
• transportation
• banking/money

10
Stakeholders and Convergence

• A stakeholder is an organization, public or
  private, with a substantial stake in the
  outcomes of alterations in the infrastructure.
• The Old Four Communication Industries
• newspaper/book/magazines (print, content)
• telephony (wires, no content)
• broadcasting/cable (air wires, content)
• computers (hardware, software, no content)
• There is significant variation from country to
  country
• Examples?

11
Markets, Technology, and Policy are inseparable
aspects of the same phenomenon
12
Transforming infrastructures --Global
Flatteners (Thomas Friedman)

• Berlin Wall cold war
• Netscape goes public from a PC platform to an
  internet based platform (TCP/IP, HTTP, VOIP,
  etc.)
• Work Flow Software interdependent production
  and re-assembly Paypal ebay)
• Open-Sourcing self-organizing collaborative
  communities (apache, moodle, sakai)
• Intellectual Commons
• Wikipedia the peoples encyclopedia
• 250,000 articles in English
• 600,000 articles in 50 other languages
• Freeware

13
Flatteners continued

• Outsourcing sending work to other places
• want fries with that?
• Offshoring moving the whole factory to another
  country
• Supply-Chaining Eating Sushi in Arkansas the
  Wal-mart effect
• Collaborating horizontally among suppliers,
  retailers and customers to create value
• Insourcing What the guys in funny brown shorts
  are really doing.

14
Flatteners

• In-forming Google, Yahoo!, MSN Websearch
• Play on the googol, the number represented by
  numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros
• The opposite of being taught
• Reputations damaged earlier and more often
• Always tell the truth, that way you wont have
  to remember what you said (Mark Twain)
• The Steroids digital, mobile, personal
  Virtual
• Todays students have never known life without
  them
• The Ipod phenomenon

15
From Information Age to Conceptual Age Daniel
Pink (A Whole New Mind)

• Neuro Psychology
• Left hemisphere controls right side of body,
  right hemisphere controls the left.
• Left hemisphere sequential, right hemisphere
  simultaneous.
• Left hemisphere specializes in text, right
  hemisphere in context
• Left hemisphere analyzes the details right
  hemisphere synthesizes the big picture

16
Abundance, Asia, Automation

• Abundance
• 70 percent of Americans own homes (13 are 2nd
  homes)
• Self storage -- 17 billion industry
• U.S. spends more on trash bags than 90 other
  countries spend on everything
• Asia
• One in four IT jobs will be offshored by 2010
• Automation
• Big Blue beats Kasparov
• By the year 2020, computers will exceed human
  intelligence.

17
Recap of the Pink perspective

• The scales are tilting in favor of R-directed
  thinking.
• Abundance, Asia, Automation
• Boosting the significance of beauty and emotion
  and accelerating individuals search for meaning.
• Increasing need for relying on skills that cant
  be shipped overseas
• Requiring L-directed professionals to develop
  aptitudes that computers cant do better, faster
  or cheaper

18
The Six Senses of the Conceptual Age High
Concept High Touch

• Design
• Story
• Symphony
• Empathy
• Play
• Meaning

19
Online Learning

• Most college students today (90) will take at
  least one course online.
• 70 of college classes today are computer
  enhanced
• The political economy of course management
  systems and other software is driving many
  teaching/learning decisions
• K-12 Educations fastest growing trend is in
  online schooling
• Cyber course catalogs
• Cyber schools
• New stakeholders in K-12 learning are changing
  the landscape
• University of Penn, provides blogs for all
  students.

20
What is media literacy?

• Not so much a finite body of knowledge but rather
  a skill, a process, a way of thinking that, like
  reading comprehension, is always evolving
• Help students become competent, critical and
  literate in all media forms so that they control
  the interpretation of what they see or hear
  rather than letting the interpretation control
  them

21
Learning what to look for

• All messages are constructed
• Gate-keeping and editing leave more things out
  than are included
• Media messages are created using a creative
  language of their own
• Understanding the grammar, syntax and metaphor
  system of media language increases appreciation

22
Learning what to look for cont.

• Different people experience the same media
  message differently
• Heavy viewers vs. light viewers
• Arousal
• Novice vs. expert
• Media are primarily businesses driven by a profit
  motive
• Newspaper news hole
• Advertisers pay CPM impressions

23
Learning what to look for cont.

• Media have embedded values and points of view
• Characters age, gender, race, lifestyles,
  attitudes.
• Actions and reactions of plot.
• Setting or location

24
http//www.reallybadjobs.com/http//www.funnyplac
e.org
25
Five Basic Questions to Ask of Media

• Who created this message and why are they sending
  it?
• What techniques are being used to attract my
  attention?
• What lifestyles, values and points of view are
  represented in the message?
• How might different people understand this
  message differently from me?
• What is omitted from this message?

26
Questioning process

• Usually applied to a specific text.
• Sometimes a media text can involve multiple
  formats
• Uncovering many levels of meaning and multiple
  answers to every question is an engaging and
  enlightening activity

27
How to question the media?

• Core Questioning
• The five basic questions
• What are the differences between a newspaper and
  a tabloid newspaper?
• Close Analysis
• In depth scrutiny of one or two examples
• Action Learning and Empowerment (Freire)
• Awareness, Analysis, Reflection, Action

28
Debates about media literacy

• Does media literacy protect kids?
• Does media literacy require student media
  production activities?
• Should media literacy have a popular culture
  bias?
• Should media literacy have a strong ideological
  bias?
• Does media literacy detract from learning the
  basics of a language?

29
Texts and the Construction of Meaning Debates

• Objectivist Meaning is entirely in the text --
  it is transmitted to audiences.
• Constructivist Meaning is an interplay between
  text and reader it is a negotiation between
  author and audience.
• Subjectivist Meaning is entirely in its
  interpretation by readers it is re-created.

30
Whats the end in mind?

• Transform the context for student learning
• Provide authentic experiences for learning with
  technology
• Encourage and model collaborative work
• Combine skill training with problem solving
• Relax and fuel the chaos
• Require public student performance of learning
• Develop credible assessment and evaluation

31
McCains Vision
32
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the
lighting of a fireW.B. Yeats
33
The motion picture is destined to revolutionize
our educational system and. . . .in a few years
it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the
use of textbooks.Thomas Alva Edison, 1922