My hours on and off media and why it matters

Numbers too large for me to calculate. 

Like so many American children of the 1960’s and 70’s, I practically lived sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the television set.  There must be serious chunks of my brain so steeped in the fiction of the stories and ideas I consumed that they are as much a part of me as my DNA.  

TV was a window to the world. Like so many kids, at my home there weren’t many other affordable past-times such as sports leagues, music or art lessons. There were few parks or public pools, and no museums to hang out in my small town. My older brothers and sister, however, did not grow up with a TV in the house. My family was a bridge between the eras before and after TV's explosive growth.

I grew up and began my life-long study of communication. After college, I worked in commercial and public radio and television.  Ultimately, I obtained advanced degrees so I could teach communication at the college level.  I spent thousands of hours with hundreds of college students over the past 35 plus years, fifteen before the Internet, and the remainder after its arrival. We explored the evolution and business of mass media industries, their impact on society. We studied the emerging Internet-based communication platforms that now form the fabric of so much of our current social, educational and work lives. 

Before and After Smart Phones

Like my generation of test pilot TV viewers, my college students were also test pilots, who lived in the world pre and post the arrival of the Internet and social media platforms. When I compared students engagement in my classes before and after the introduction of the smart phone and social media I noticed a marked decline. 

The distraction of their cell phones on the desk was like an itch they couldn’t help but scratch. The immediate attraction of a new text message from home or from a friend, or a notification from Facebook or Twitter was too compelling to set aside during note-taking for lectures or lesson activities. 

Their focus was lost for a few minutes each time their phone distracted them with alerts or to be glanced at for updates of any kind. After the smart phone interruption was attended to, the student then mentally returned to the course material. There were now gaps in their learning. Time was lost in the ramping up required to catch up. Multiply this by several times each class period by the majority of students.  The loss in learning was the same as if  a student arrived a few minutes late or left early each class period.  A few minutes may not have mattered, but in the aggregate would come to matter quite a lot. I saw the distractions of a smart phone were a disadvantage that out-weighed its advantages.

 

What Tech Hath Wrought

As exciting as technology has been for me professionally (I am retired from teaching and now I write, shoot and edit videos), there are downsides to what tech has brought us. Like that of my students, I notice my ability to focus is a constant struggle. 

Where was I? Yes. That bad. On the surface, I look steady, reliable and attentive. That’s the front yard. Come see the burning dumpster in the back yard, where half dressed projects prance around teasingly, wagging hands and fingers from their ears, wearing socks that don’t match.

I tried hard to focus and stay on task. I wrote daily to-do lists, practiced mindfulness and meditation, and I read and re-read hundreds of self-help books. Yet, the seductive siren call of the screen beckoned. I stopped to read texts, checked to see if there was a new text or email. I stopped and started my work several times every few minutes. I scanned social media, podcasts, and news sites. Just as for my students, time slipped stealthily away for in-real-life pursuits like face-to-face dinners, face-to-face walks with friends, getting to know more people and learn new things. 

As my hours on social media increased so did my dissatisfaction.  At the end of the day, I felt tired of constantly stopping and starting, setting and resetting my focus. I saw the hours slip away from the day and many of my goals recede further in the distance.

Screens accompany us everywhere we go. They help us get where we drive to, and act as our adjunct brains for learning, work and entertainment. Smartphones have become so familiar we often consider them a natural part of our life and home. But our phones and the platforms they contain are not natural. They are an industry. They offer us entertainment and access to information. They then sell our personal information and preferences to others for their advertising and profit.  It is convenient to the industry that we keep thinking of smartphones as tools we employ, rather than see ourselves as employed (and exploited) by these tools. 

Turning An Ocean Liner

The essays and activities in this book are a result of my efforts to do something constructive about my backyard dumpster fire. I want to transform my dissatisfaction with social media and its impact on the quality of our communication. This e-book is a contribution from a teacher in the frontlines of college teaching, whose boots are worn and muddy. 

My goal is to have us rethink our contract with social media. From my classroom experience, I offer ideas and options to parents of children and teens to help them harness the tools in our purses and pockets.  We can set up guardrails of our own design into place and practice, long before regulatory bodies can climb across lobbyists whose job it is to keep us blissfully unaware of smart phones' adverse effects. 

The time has come for my college classroom to spread its message of empowerment and potential into homes and school campuses everywhere.

It is important for us to study how our tech tools, like all tools, can hurt us and our kids, when they are used without preparation or carelessly. Years from now, we may think of our culture's rapid embrace of smartphones as unfortunate, just as we now think about to the dangerous era of dynamite's early days, or when physicians and surgeons were uninformed about germs and refused to clean their hands before operating on a person. So many avoidable deaths. 

Rethinking our relationship to something as familiar as our technology is easier said than done. For me it's been like turning an ocean liner. It takes focus, time and energy.

 The good news is we are not alone on our journey. More importantly, the prize for our efforts is regaining for ourselves and our loved ones the priceless time and experiences that might otherwise have gone unnoticed in moments of distraction.

Why Study Media Messages?

We all use them. We all love them. Media messages are important parts of our lives. 

Fish don't ask about water. Birds don't ask about air. We humans have a more evolved and complex brain than any other living creature. Yet, we often react in the same way to our media saturated environment as our brothers with fish and bird brains. 

Media messages, from those in books, to the latest software, are such a welcome presence in our lives (think all the fun we have). While we spend our time being entertained, they may rob us, without our awareness, of our privacy, personal data and, most importantly, precious time.

This is About Money

Media, for all its attractions, is first and foremost an industry. Media takes our attention and time and uses them to make money. 

We are the product, not the images that captured us. Those are bait. Media companies sell our eyes and interests to advertisers, businesses and mailing lists in order to sell us stuff. 

We are entertained in the bargain. The transaction is ingrained and automatic. Each time we browse, stream or listen to music, a podcast or a book we signal our agreement that the transaction is acceptable to us. 

Until we stop, take a moment, and put a pin in it. 

Try This At Home: Five Questions

Asking questions about the media we are immersed in protects our time and how it's used. Over time we become more conscious consumers of media.  

Welcome to media literacy and its gifts. It is an important road to start on whatever our age. The benefits are enormous. With media literacy, we add to our enjoyment of media, we feel more sure about how we use our time and resources, and when we Don the writer/producer hat to create our own media messages, they are more effective because we are media literate.

Why should we improve our awareness of media? Don’t we have enough to do already?

Fostering a questioning attitude towards media products does not come naturally. An entire army of programmers  exists to keep our attention moving along, not stopping to ask pesky questions. We’re not supposed to stop and inspect media or ask questions about it.

If a media message is a piece of chocolate cake, think of the five questions of media literacy as knowing not only how the cake tastes, but also how the baker made the cake, what is inside it, how long it took to bake it and how and when to serve it. 

Some may be content to have their cake and eat it, without aspiring to know its journey from ingredients to our teeth. Some may be content to know we consumers are the product, not the messages we consume.  

The benefit of asking questions of our media breaks a belief that media messages are akin to magic. We learn that mistakes can happen and the people who create media messages have their own biases and agendas as well as put their pants legs on one at a time. 

Our curiosity about media helps, protects and serves us.  Since our time is limited, it is important to select with awareness and care how we spend whatever time we allot to media.

Questioning Media Messages Is Active

When we passively watch whatever is on the set or find ourselves down another rabbit hole on our phone, we often ask where did all that time go? The five media literacy questions break the spell that media so deftly casts. 

Media Literacy Questions Awaken Us From Slumber  

Dorothy landed in Oz to discover an old man behind a drawn curtain, pulling ropes and sounding otherworldly while putting on a show for his benefit alone. Dorothy and her journey to return home began when she awakened to what she had not known before she drew back the curtain. 

Asking questions around media messages is not something we need to always do, but,  because media messages shape our views and lives, it's something we always need to know how to do.  

Our engagement deepens when we explore the message to uncover assumptions and biases. The practice gets easier, even automatic. 

When we are passive, our minds are unguarded, receptive, and un-questioning. When we ask questions, we shake off our comfort. We lace up our sneakers. This is no longer a sit-down spectator sport. 

Studying a scene in a movie or an image looming over us on a bulletin board can be a way for parents to engage with their kids on values or assumptions. It models to kids that asking questions of media messages is not only allowed but helpful to someone growing up.

Drawing back the curtain to show the hidden sides and angles of any message or story, even one made with multiple millions of dollars, pays us back with even greater riches. Media literacy allows us to thrive, instead of aimlessly wonder as we wander, serving other's interests before our own, in the media rich world that surrounds us.

Songs, The System and So Many Questions

 

I love songs so much that all my life I have wondered how songwriters construct them. 

Do lyrics come to a songwriter first, and then afterwards comes the idea for the music? Or is it the other way around? 

Seeing the mobs’ flag on the walls of the nation’s capitol scaled by lawless weightlifters, I felt the same sort of question form in my mind. 

What came first, the hateful fear-mongering rhetoric of cable’s bargain basement screaming heads programming, or was it the policies that led to the mob’s anger: the loss of good-paying jobs in the U.S. to countries whose workers are forced to work for lower wages? 

Or, as a card-carrying Chicana lesbian, I wonder, too, if the reason includes the changing features and shades on the faces of America’s family portrait?

I wonder also which came first, corporations’ higher profits and our collective reduced support for K- 12 education and colleges  or was it unregulated social media? 

Did new media’s rush for ratings and views blind us to the power shown yesterday of media’s impact and influence over people and their behaviors? 

Disenfranchised people who drank Trump’s Jonestown Kool-Aid and took to the streets at the behest of their leader yesterday sure gave us a show. What a show. 

And I ask were the rioters admitted onto the grounds by an  intentionally under-prepared capital police force? And when they were herded out without being arrested, where did the muscle men thugs go during a curfew to celebrate their failed coup d’état? 

I know this: They got their time on camera, their moment in the spotlight,  their 15 seconds of fame, taking selfies in an elected official‘s office and on the dias  of the senate chambers. Also, I know the system worked. The legislators did their job. The system worked.

 I remind myself that is what’s important. 

As we sat watching the legislators speak for five minutes each when they finally returned to work, we were thrilled with being able to listen to them and watch them. The system at work. They were going to do the job of certifying Biden’s election.

It was magical even if they were limited to five minutes to see their passion and hear their thoughts,  their speeches without interruption from commercials or interpretation. 

I realized it had been decades since I had been able to listen to a live speech! And as I followed on Twitter there were people there complaining about the length of time taken up leading to the final vote. Our collective attention span has reduced, mine included

Yet I thrilled at watching people who I read about for years but had hardly seen on TV.  Even if I didn’t agree with them, I saw their personalities and their passion and appreciated being able to see the system work, live and unfiltered. It had been bruised and battered, true, and we have years of work ahead of us. But the system worked.

A Visit From Colette and Ruminations on the Internet

Students at the college are hard at work. They are completing their media presentations, designed partly on Michael Wesch's "A Vision of Students Today" video. http://youtu.be/dGCJ46vyR

Their addition to the model from Wesch's class is to explore their research question in the library's data bases and to see what facts and statistics exist about the topic they are exploring.

As we head towards student media presentations this week, I think of the weeks of hard work they've put into their projects.

Groups of 4-5 students, often in smaller groups of 2-3, each selected a topic they wanted to explore. They next wrote a research question avoiding bias, such as Wesch's "What is it like being a college student today?" They then researched the topic, and created a listing of 10-12 facts they learned, such as the number of U.S. students who die from suicide each year due to cyber bullying. Students then posted their research question to their social media, gathering responses to questions from friends and even people who they don't know, which they collect and analyze to include in their 4-6 minute media presentations.

So much of the project is based on technology. From the research to the collection of data and the presentation, including up-loading to Youtube, the work is all done online. No paper.

Yet, I notice most of the students are still struggling with video, Powerpoint and Prezi, and for all the mileage under their belts with the Internet, most are still novices at doing any research using our library's online proprietary databases.

Educator Marc Prensky famously posited some years ago that our students are digital natives, and we teachers are immigrants. Yet, because of the ever increasing rate of change and additions to technology each day, with new apps, programs and 'what-not' connected with computers and cell phones, I'm inclined to say, even for the young folks among us, that we are all of us immigrants to this new world of communication.

It's more than just new ground for us all. It's new ground with tremendous potential and promise. I've been reading Seth Godin and have just finished Hugh Macleod's fine treatise on creating a job for yourself in this digital era, "Ignore Everybody and 39 other keys to creativity." "Ignore Everybody"

Both encourage writers to blog and be witnesses to their own truths and discoveries. I celebrate our human urge to share of ourselves.

I don't know where she came from, but in all this rumination over the Internet, I was visited by an old friend, Colette, the French writer who died the year I was born.

I loved her stormy life and her contribution to letters, and remember the difficulties she faced as a woman writer. I ask myself just what would have Colette done with the very writing tools that I have before me today, computers and Internet and a way to publish her work aujourd'hui? 


Some things change, and others stay the same. Here is old Lucky, enjoying the warmth of the hearth and grooming his Maine Coon fur, carrying on the tradition of accompanying his well-trained owner-writer as she picks and pecks upon the alphabet.