COMMUNICATION
StoryNarrative imagining – story – is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking are organized as stories.
Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language,Oxford University Press, 1998
Until recently, much of the world’s data and information was housed in physical libraries. But today facts are ubiquitous and available at the speed of light via computer. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact. And that is the essence of the aptitude of story – context enriched by emotion. E. M. Forster wrote, “A fact is: The queen died and the king died. A story is: The queen died and the king died of a broken heart.”We are our stories. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves. That has always been true. But personal narrative has become more prevalent. There is a hunger for what stories can provide – context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters. We are each the authors of our own lives and must listen to each other’s stories.
Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Riverhead Books, 2006
TechnologyCommunications technologies are often designed with the goal of bringing people together when they are physically separate. This entails many assumptions, one of which is that physical separation is a key problem that technology might solve. Consequently, technical innovation has emphasized the bodily aspects of the communicating human, such as sight, sound, and touch, while focusing less on the mindful aspects of humanness, such as intentions or ideas, and the symbolic value that an act of communication can deliver. If we take into account this latter perspective, we might treat communication as involving many different purposes and goals, and as offering various different ways of creating bonds through symbolic value. For example, providing communication modalities that allow individuals to create new forms of expressive content, or tokens of their communication acts, might be one way in which such bonds are made apparent.
Communication technologies ought not to offer simple proxies for being physically close to those who are important to us, but should instead allow new ways of creating materials that express and symbolize our being in touch with them. In the same way that a written letter is not only a device to make up for physical absence, but also a tool that creates a new landscape between sender and receiver, so new forms of communication can be built upon the goal of allowing us to create materials that manifest and embody our intentions, hopes, and aspirations.
Microsoft Research, Making Meaning in 21st Century Communication
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/sds/themesmeaningmaking.aspx
Media LiteracyToday, information about the world around us comes to us not only by words on a piece of paper but more and more through the powerful images and sounds of our multi-media culture. We are exposed to hundreds of images and ideas from television, websites, movies, talk radio, magazine covers, email, video games, music, cell phone messages, billboards, and more. Media no longer just shape our culture ... they are our culture.
Although mediated messages appear to be self-evident, in truth, they use a complex audio/visual "language" which has its own rules (grammar) and which can be used to express many-layered concepts and ideas about the world. Not everything may be obvious at first; and images go by so fast! If our children are to be able to navigate their lives through this multi-media culture, they need to be fluent in "reading" and "writing" the language of images and sounds just as we have always taught them to "read" and "write" the language of printed communications.
Author Douglas Rushkoff calls the current youth generation "screen-agers" because their media use is not distinguished specifically as television or video games or movies or computers or even cell phones, but simply as a series of screens which they both access and manipulate in a constantly evolving stream of shared communication. This capability, in turn, is transforming the use and impact of media in everyday life:
• Screen-agers see media not as discrete products that can "impact" them or their culture but as elements of a multi-media mosaic that is their culture.
• Screen-agers "read" and "write" seamlessly using images, sounds, and words.
• Screen-agers experience the world not in physical boundaries but as an instant global network of wireless connections and interconnections.In this kind of world, the content of a specific media message is no longer all that relevant. It's only one of thousands received everyday. What is important is facility with analyzing new information as it's received, evaluating it against one's prior knowledge, formulating a response, and ultimately communicating to others your decision or point of view. In other words, what is important is not so much the message itself as how we make sense of the message and by extension, of the mediated world around us. It demands a new kind of literacy, rooted in the real world of instant information, global interactivity, and messages created on multiple media platforms.
Today learning happens anywhere and everywhere, 24/7. Increasingly it occurs most powerfully through the convergence of media and technology. Videogames, for example, are not just mindless entertainment, but according to literacy scholar, James Paul Gee, are actually quite intricate learning experiences that have a great deal to teach us about how learning and literacy are changing in the modern world. Gee identifies 36 learning principles built into good games and predicts that video games are the forerunners of powerful instructional tools in the future. It is this convergence between media and education, between entertainment and learning, that is driving major change in the sources and the content of what we learn and how we learn in today's world.
What are the core components of quality media literacy practice? First, the focus of media literacy is on process rather than content. The goal of media literacy is not to memorize facts about media or even be able to make a video or design a PowerPoint. Rather the goal is to explore questions that arise when one engages critically with a mediated message – print or electronic. It involves posing problems that exercise higher order thinking skills – learning how to identify key concepts, how to make connections between multiple ideas, how to ask pertinent questions, identify fallacies, formulate a response. It is these skills, more than factual knowledge, that form the foundation of intellectual inquiry and workplace productivity, and that are necessary for exercising full citizenship in a democratic society and a global economy. As writer Alvin Toffler points out: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn." By its very nature, media literacy education teaches and reinforces 21st century learning skills.
Second, media literacy education expands the concept of "text" to include not just written texts but any message form – verbal, aural, or visual (or all three together!) – that is used to create and then pass ideas back and forth between human beings. Full understanding of such a "text" involves not just deconstruction activities – that is, taking apart a message that already exists — but also construction activities – learning to "write" opinions and ideas with the wide range of multi-media tools now available to young people growing up in a digital world.
Third, media literacy is characterized by the principle of "inquiry" – that is, learning to ask important questions about whatever you see, watch, or read. With a goal of promoting healthy skepticism rather than cynicism, the challenge for the teacher (or parent) is not to provide answers, but to stimulate more questions – to guide, coach, prod, challenge the learner to discover how to go about finding an answer. "I don't know. How could we find out?" is the media literacy mantra.
The Center for Media Literacy provides a framework for learning and teaching in a media age. At its core are five key questions that provide an entry point to explore the fundamental aspects of any message in any medium:
• Author – Who created this message?
The media messages we experience are written by someone (or probably many people). However as the audience, we don't get to see or hear the words, pictures, or arrangements that were rejected. We only see, hear, or read what was accepted! What is important for critical thinking is the recognition that whatever is "constructed" by just a few people can tend to become "the way it is" for the rest of us.• Format – What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
Understanding the grammar, syntax, and metaphor system of media, especially visual language, not only helps us to be less susceptible to manipulation but it also increases our appreciation and enjoyment of media as a constructed cultural artifact.• Audience – How might various people understand this message differently from me?
Each audience member brings to each media text a unique set of life experiences (age, gender, education, cultural upbringing, etc.) which, when applied to the text – or combined with the text – create unique interpretations. The more questions we can ask about what we and others are experiencing around us, the more alert we can be when it comes to accepting or rejecting messages. And hearing other's interpretations can build respect for different cultures and appreciation for minority opinions, a critical skill in an increasingly multicultural world.• Content – What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in (or omitted from) this message?
What's significant about this question is not the fact that ideas and values are embedded but that values-laden information reinforces or challenges how we interpret the world around us and the people in it. If we have the skills to rationally identify both overt and latent values in a mediated presentation, we are likely to be much more tolerant of differences and more astute in our decision-making to accept or reject the overall message.• Purpose – Why is this message being sent?
We use this line of questions to determine whether and how a message may have been influenced by money, ego, ideology, etc. The Internet provides multiple reasons for users of all ages to be able to interpret rhetorical devices, spot faulty reasoning, verify sources, and recognize the qualities of legitimate research.The vision of media literacy is to put all individuals, ultimately, in charge of their own learning, empowering them to take an active, rather than a passive, role in acquiring new knowledge and skills.
Elizabeth Thoman and Tessa Jolls, Media Literacy: A National Priority for a Changing World.
Center for Media Literacy. http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article663.html
