Neuroscience and subliminal advertising
I’ve seen stories on neuromarketing, and it makes sense that the advertisers would cotton on to the impact of neuroscience on their ability to change people’s behaviour. Here’s a video of Richard Restak talking on the subject.
The Google generation?
Being born quite a way before 1993, I don’t qualify as part of the Google generation: made up of Western-born individuals who have grown up with the internet, ‘a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web’. I can remember life before the web. It wasn’t bad. Travelling in 1994, no-one knew where I was for months, and there was no way I could regularly communicate back home. As I said, not bad.
A recent story at Pandia.com looks at a new report released by the British Library and JISC conducted by the CIBER center at the University College of London. It contradicts or at least challenges the belief, first put forward by Mark Plansky (coiner of the term ‘digital natives’) that:
today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.
Pandia.com notes that… Read more
Controlling your digital identity
Reading one of my regular neuroscience blogs and I picked up this story about QDOS, a site still in pre-register beta status, but which aims to give you “a starting point for managing and taking control of your online status. Be seen how you want to be seen.”
The premise is that consumers (i.e. users) should be more in control of their data, but in the world of Facebook and its ‘you can never leave’ mantra, we need to go further than this, and that users should have more say in their digital identity: how others see us; how others make us seen (do I really have 157 ‘friends’? The language is critical here). That’s based on some research they did: Read more
Reporting climate change - badly
The New Statesman magazine published an article by David Whitehouse on 19th Dec ‘Has Global Warming Stopped?’ which claimed that the science on CO2 emissions was wrong, and that the world was not heating up in the manner that we now, generally, understand. Whitehouse stated that, based on his analysis of the data:
Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.
Over 600 people wrote in to complain about the veracity of the analysis, and established environmental journalists and campaigner Mark Lynas also responded, pointing out that: Read more
Baudrillard Pt2 for tonight
Got into a quick chat with a colleague after work tonight about the early days of the internet, and how people we now see as pioneers were at one point viewed as ‘computer criminals’. Somehow we got onto new media and capitalism and I talked about ‘capitalism as a code we can’t break’, thinking myself very original. Of course, Baudrillard was there first:
A revolution has occured in the capitalist world without our Marxists having wanted to comprehend it… This mutation concerns the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign, from the abstraction of the exchange of material products under the law of general equivalance to the operationalization of all exchanges under the law of the code.
Quoted in ‘Baudrillard: A Critical Reader’, by Douglas Kellner, p.168. Tonight was obviously meant for a reflection on the hyperreal.
Baudrillard’s Postmodern Media Theory
Back in 2005 I wrote an article on hyperreality and arrogance for a website set up by some Masters-level peers at Oxford, where I used an old colleague’s arrogance as the example to explain Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, something I taught during Magazine Theory classes at Middlesex Uni. I was reminded of it tonight while reading Anais Nin’s diaries from 1935, when she meets her brother Thorvald off the boat at New York harbour. She interprets his hard outer shell as a cover for his sensitivity at meeting for the first time in ten years, but then says ‘but i always interpret people’s shells in this way, and many times I have been proved wrong’. She has got it wrong, she later admits. And I guess I’ve been wrong about this, too (whenever I say ‘I guess’ I know that I’m making it easier for myself to admit something), so I need to apologise to that old friend. Luckily he’s on Facebook. It is often the easiest way to interpret those who come across as offhand or not in tune with your own outward facing identity. I got it wrong over the last couple of days with a close friend, who I felt wasn’t giving me enough support over an issue. Sometimes picking up media theory and using it to analyse interpersonal relationships can be a tricky business. Read more
Training journalists on climate change
I found this story on Cameroon journalists being trained in covering climate change stories uplifting. I used to follow Allafrica.com during my time at Oneworld, as we worked with them as a media partner. I have a–soft spot?–a wry eye for African journalism, which often speaks of a bare truth without, perhaps, meaning to; take this for example, of journalist’s ‘dishing out’ the news. The programme is in response to:
the need for the journalists to be trained so that they can dish out right and accurate information to raise awareness on the issue of climate change.
Tough words on journalists aside, climate change reporting is a big issue…
Get blogging
All journalism students should have a blog. That’s the clear message from the leading journalism bloggers and educators. For MAC 250 students the opening quote on this discussion should make you think about what to do after the module’s over. Take a look at Dave Lee’s blog as an example: the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade recently called him ‘probably Britain’s leading student journalist blogger’.
Make sure you read Neil McIntosh’s comment too: ‘blogs are the minimum’. Get your site up and running now. See where it takes you, well before you think about that journalism or PR job.
Is the internet an institution?
Went to the annual Bagehot Lecture at Queen Mary last night, with Andrew Marr talking on the subject of ‘History and Journalism’. Was an entertaining hour, if not illuminating, except it was great to hear first hand that ‘If anyone tells you the government did not bully the BBC over the Hutton Enquiry, they are wrong, because I was on the end of the phone’. Marr spoke… Read more
Twitter goes Dossy
Was shown a new site earlier this week, Dossy, that’s developep a Twitter Karma application so you can see who you’re following and who’s following you–and then also who’s following your followers, etc, an on, ad infinitum.
A colleague (T) and I had a discussion: is this anything useful, or just a way for the media pack to massage egos? Probably a bit of both. Twitter’s a phenomenon and it’s going to be around in some guise for a while, not least because it’s a perfect fit with shortening requirements to communicate. I have a Karma score of 1, in that I have one follower (same colleague, in fact, T). I’m happy with that for the moment, until I gather some things to say in less than 256 characters (never been my strength).
It made T and I muse on the subject of speed (or I think this might have been from the Bagehot Lecture at Queen Mary, given by Andrew Marr, who talked about the change in media over the last 20 years, driven by ‘ever-decreasing attention spans’ according to Marr. Which came first…?). Media are becoming faster, both in terms of reaching the consumer, and in terms of production and bandwidth, spectrum; and with that speed, the message is shrinking in size.
MediaPost’s Mobile Insider summarized a key point last year when it read from new metrics that ‘the writing is already on the wallpaper: media sharing will be more important than media consumption‘. If that’s the case, which it looks like, with youtube.com et al, where does that leave the journalist?
