Critical Thinking makes Media Critics

When it comes to understanding our media, as Amy Poehler humorously notes, bias can be implicitly laden in the mere framing of a seemingly simple question.   This clip demonstrates that how a question is asked defines the parameters of what the answer can be and allows for implied meanings of association when none may exist.  Critical thinking skills can work as an antidote to media manipulation and add clarity to fuzzy logic and erroneously drawn conclusions. 

Critical thinking is a sophisticated, disciplined cognitive process essential to scholarly argument, intellectual advancement and widely applicable across disciplines and in life.  It is especially useful where a multiplicity of outcomes present themselves and an actionable decision is required.   Critical thinking involves a precise process of challenging explicit and implicit biases, information selection, evaluation and conclusions based upon data sources from which new understandings can be arrived at or the best course of action taken with available information.

This vodka ad image plays on the well known brand ads for Absolut Vodka but with striking counter-point messaging which impacts a new reality into the originally intended conclusion of cool, one which challenges the internal logic and preconceptions of the viewer's previous brand exposures.  To arrive at such imagery as this ad, the creative mind behind it probably walked through a critical thinking process that addressed what most definitions of critical thinking share: elements of reasoning, searching for bias or underlying motivations, uncovering the source of the information and adhering to intellectual standards such as clarity, truth-seeking and precision, and intellectual traits like openness, courage and humility.

Critical Thinking Takes Work

A word is not the same with one writer as with another.  One tears it from his guts.  The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. 

~Charles Peguy

Think Critic Think!

To do the hard work of critical thinking means we are willing to face frustration and have the patience to work through a process that will deepen our empathy and change how we engage with media and scholarly work.   This rounded and widened viewpoint implies a deeply held awareness that imagery, video, and all written forms of information can be altered to support any point of view or thesis.  A driving diligence is required to discover motivations, methods, and data from where a source draws it’s information.  In fact, I suggest uncovering the source is often more revealing than the news item itself.

As Mayer (2010) notes in her recent New Yorker article on the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, they have quietly given more than $100 million dollars to right wing causes over the past several decades.  Most recently, they have been the main underwriters of the Tea Party movement and in the past, of similar hard-line libertarian political funding causes and think tanks like the Cato Institute.   Clearly it would seem that the Koch brother's political funding efforts closely align with their corporate anti-regulation, anti-taxation and anti-government business interests. 

Critical thinking certainly allowed journalist Jane Mayer to sense a coordination behind seemingly separate political movements and issues coming from the right.  Her training helped her ask the right kinds of questions to make connections others in the media did not.   One could say her critical thinking abilities led her to this powerful funding source group manipulating news media and turning the legitimate anger of many Americans into a tool for their own purposes (Mayer, 2010).  As Mayer comments in her interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air  these billionaire brothers have been actively working to make their personal and corporately motivated views into a political movement for decades.

Open Your Mind

As a media psychology researcher, cornerstone critical thinking skills will inform my academic and professional endeavors through Fielding and beyond.   I hope to contribute to the field of understanding and exposing bias in all its forms by sharing and utilizing this knowledge for greater social good via the media itself so that individuals, groups and society-at-large will become more fully empowered, electronically engaged citizens in the coming century.  

Media Convergence: Technological Complexity and Unpredictability

The convergence of media technology, content, complexity and societal impacts is occurring in ways which are profound but whose ramifications are often unpredictable.  For example, the ‘Sixth Sense’ device developed by MIT graduate researcher Pranav Mistry², as shown above in this video segment at a recent TED Conference appearance demonstrates the radical re-conceptualization of media interfaces with the natural world we could conceivably be engaging in as ‘normal’ media interactions in the near future.

As often as technology is revisionist, improving slightly on a previous innovation, it can frequently be disruptive, witness the phenomenon of the iPod and iTunes store reinventing the century old recording and music industry and digital photography decimating Kodak’s camera film business as recent examples (Bernius, 8/17/2010)³.  Media technology in particular is equally susceptible to Taleb’s (2007) ‘Black Swan’ occurrences.   Events characterized by similar rarity which lie outside the realm of regular expectations, carry extreme impact, and are only explainable retrospectively, never predictably in advance⁴.  

Hence, as media psychology researchers, there is a need to master current scholarly theories and methodologies and continue to evolve and innovate psychological and psychobiological theories along with communication technology.    Anticipatory methodologies of analysis and media measurement with sound extrapolative impact predictions are needed to understand and positively influence the inevitable biopsychosocial changes and normative shifts that will result in both individual and ever widening social ecosystems.

I am particularly focused on the fast evolving world of smart phones, tablet computing, cloud computing, Web2.0/3.0 as related to mobile media consumption and researching viable commercial models in this media realm.

The Metaphor is the Message

Today media design plays a major role in shaping and informing content and delivery methods.  The iPhone has revolutionized the personal digital assistant marketplace and evolved an entirely new field of smart or more accurately app phones and tablets.⁵ 

Take for example, this website.   The design template was chosen from the blog template metaphor of a picture window and the image is that of a green bamboo leaf.   For this website author, a picture window represents a view or insight into our media domain or a novel way of framing the vast world of ideas, images and choices before us.  It also implies there are an infinitude of frameworks through which to view this wondrous world and the more consciously we do so the better.   The bamboo leaf hints at the author's affinity for Eastern art, philosophy, culture and ecological values.   Bamboo is known to be very fast growing, spreading from below the ground and shooting up rapidly, these qualities as well as strength combined with flexibility have led it to being incorporated more commonly in many green products.  Even if not thought about consciously, a visitor to this site would develop some emotional responses to their visual experience of the site and may begin to form some guesses as to the character, motivation, values and interests of the person who designed it.

Creativity and Insight, Humor and Haiku  

Neuroscience is revealing many insights into how we think creatively and what circumstances help us produce insight balanced with concentration⁶.   As the heir to Gary Larsons cartoonist throne Dave Blazek notes, it often feels as if one's brain operates according to the following diagram⁷.  

As a forming media psychologist I am fascinated by these mechanisms in our brain and exploring how they can interface with our media technologies to reveal unique uses of new media to aid us in promoting innovative thinking.

If you would like to try an experiential experiment, see for yourself how the similar experience of the ‘Aha’ moment occurring from reading and getting the joke of a cartoon such as the two samples listed below⁸ feels versus the insight or sought after satori experience inherent in a Zen haiku.

Haiku

                                                The old pond

    A frog jumps in

 Plop!  

    ~ Basho~ 9