Context Will Be King

Leading to Self-Organized Learning

Technological progress is rapidly changing our world, this we know.  As Professor Sugata Mitra asserts, university students in the near future will be able to make educational progress at a distance and as suits them.    Degree granting institutions will become places of assessment and research.  Put in other terms, all curricula will be local and unique to the interests of the individual learner.  It is media technology in particular that is making such learning possible. 

Our information age can be characterized by the democratizing of information and the ever lower cost of accessibility to knowledge.  With relatively cheap access to knowledge of high levels, education’s self-organizing principle is becoming more easily revealed through the work of Dr. Mitra and others.  Perhaps self-organized learning has always been the way of true education only technology is making organizing information easier.  How long it will take for traditions in education or any other societal institution to adapt to this new actuality depends on market realities and institutional specific forces of inertia.   

What is clear is Fielding Graduate University has pioneered in this new edge of technology-facilitated education.  Its professors have studied the issues and implications of distributed learning with the goal of maintaining the highest rigor, experimented with curriculum delivery, and thought deeply about the myriad impacts of this change on learning. The media psychology faculty clearly conclude the key skills of refined critical thinking and determining media bias inform cornerstone abilities for a discerning media psychologist.   They also desire students understand that this current wave of technological integration in our lives is a live-linked social matrix of hyper-connectivity which leaves data exhaust of personal and preferential nature.

Time Marches Digitally On

As this Time Magazine cover mash up spanning almost forty years illustrates, there is no turning back from this forward march of the merging of the digital data driven world with the material, energy driven, atom-based world.  So what is the next iteration of the Web shaping up to look like as this fusion continues?

The Semantics of Web 3.0

 

Tools for filtering and linking of data within documents and delivering those few key links to a mobile device will be custom managed by curator technologies.  These technologies and methods, according to Wikipedia, “allow machines to understand the meaning - or “semantics” - of information on the World Wide Web.”   Instead of the current Google search shotgun philosophy of ‘more is better’ a more specific, useful and unique customized information bullet (Hare, 2010) will present itself in the most opportune manner.

Data Visualization: A Better Way of Assimilation

David McCandless argues that the best way to see new connections and unseen patterns in complex data sets is through clean, relatively simple designs as exemplified in the diagram about the Twitter community below.  Here color and proportional scale surprisingly reveal the data fact at-a-glance that only five percent of Twitter members have more than 100 followers.  We would do well to note, however, that there are over 120, 000, 000 registered members of Twitter according to a recent TechCrunch article and this number is growing at 300,000 per day.

Tor Nørretranders a Danish author of popular science converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms.    In the following diagram McCandless illustrates this bandwidth. 

The sense of sight (blue) is the fastest and has the same relative bandwidth as a computer network.    Then comes touch (pink), which shares data flow capacity with a USB port.   Hearing and smell (yellow) have the throughput of a hard disc.  Following is taste (majenta) with a relatively small process capacity of a pocket calculator.    The small white square in the lower corner that the (red) arrow is pointing to is 0.7% of total bandwidth of our sensory input.  It also happens to be are active awareness at any particular moment according to Nørretranders.

Thus, the majority of information that comes into our system is unconscious and enters via the eye.    This led McCandless to suggest that the eye and optical processing in the brain has it’s own language.   The eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns, shapes and colors so tremendous amounts of information can be conveyed almost instantaneously via visual media.  When combined with the language of the mind, which is about words, numbers and concepts, “you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other.”  (McCandless, 2010).  This new enhanced dual-language thinking of vision and concepts, he continues, more readily alters our perspective and changes our views to a broader and more subtle angle of perception.

What this means is absolute figures in a connected world are not as revealing as contextualized data.   When this interrelated data is connected to other significant and associated data and depicted visually with scale, meaningful color, concepts and words, new understanding emerges.  Technology is allowing us to more readily come to ‘see’ what others think.  To see visually conflicting ideas beautifully rendered is a non-threatening, non-overwhelming experience that allows one to quickly move to a clarity and insight that persuades and changes viewpoints.

Dr. Hans Rosling's brief video The Joy of Stats superbly demonstrates how this kind of data visualization does just this.

The One Machine

“Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.”
- Alan Kay

Kevin Kelly (2007) suggests, all these computers, laptops, mobile devices, and all servers are leading through this vast quantity of connections to one machine.   The world's most reliable machine ever built.  So far in the World Wide Web’s brief history this networked machine has never failed running 6000 days without interruption to date (Kelly, 2007).    

Using the scale of web activity today, Kelly associates 100 billion clicks per day to our average daily sensory input in a single human brain.  55 trillion links almost matches the average number of synapses in a human brain, 1 quintillion transistors relates well to neurons per brain and a massive memory capacity of 255 exabytes on a scale relative with human memory capacity.    The human brain metaphor is an apt approximation for the scale of this Web machine and the size and complex network of how the Web works (Kelly, 2007).   So if this networked forming single machine is currently two Human Brains (2HB), in thirty years time it will be as large as 6 billion human brains.   By the year 2040 it is estimated that the total processing power of this machine in raw bits will exceed the total processing capacity of humanity (2007).

2010 2HB Machine

Convergence of the Atomic and Digital
As media psychologists we need to understand this fundamental shift is fast arriving.  As pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay (2010) notes:

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come.
The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled
by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards
for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas.  

Atom meet Byte

Recognizing that every screen in the world is becoming a portal into this machine or cloud is a fundamental insight with complex implications and a vast subject for inquiry.   The Machine will be doing the computing as more quotidian objects will connect to the Web and be freed from requiring a CPU in situ.  Phones, cars, cameras, documents, almost everything, each artifact will be in some sense connected to or mirror rendered in the cloud - the Machine.  As Kelly (2007) puts it, “A shoe will be a chip with heels while a car will be a chip with wheels.”

Laws of Media Will Apply

According to Kelly the laws of media as he defines them will apply in this new reality:  Copies will have no value; value will reside in the non-replicable - things like authenticity, originality, and immediacy as well as things made of matter of course; media wants to be liquid, that is things are free so they can be manipulated and recombined in new ways.  This kind of mixing is already occurring in the world of popular music (mashup) but will expand throughout human knowledge domains.  Network effects rule, meaning the more media we have the more we will get.  Finally, attention is a currency (Kelly, 2007) for which advertisers will pay a premium and other issues of attention will impinge upon society as ADD and ADHD have to date. 

So the price of total personalization will be almost total transparency with massive and often unintended amounts of personal information on the net.  Just as we are dependent on the alphabet and writing we will become co-dependent on this Machine.   While content will always be an important part of life, in the near future, with so much information available to each human in such ubiquity, context itself will be the source from which we derive meaning in this evermore interconnected world.

To predict specifically about the future is notoriously difficult.   As media psychologists we are well placed to engage in shaping the dialogue and analyzing media implications around many traditional issues long studied in the domain of the social sciences.

Capstone Word Cloud

The Word Cloud image above is another new way of displaying the written information in this blog post.   It visually connects words based on a scale of meaning, repetition and emphasis.   What this word cloud blog post displays - issues of media, language, attention, social relationships, human-machine interaction, data-information processing, learning and memory - are the province of psychology today.  Media psychologists are uniquely qualified to analyze and draw meaning from these realms for the purpose of living well and mindfully in this emerging world of augmented digital overlay on our more familiar earth of atoms.

Most creativity is a transition from one context 

into another where things are more surprising…

Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in

- the one that we think is reality.

Alan Kay (2004)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Enter the Doctorate

 

“There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth...not going all the way, and not starting.”

~ Buddha ~

To embark on a Ph.D. in media psychology is ultimately an act of identity making.  For me this intensive five-day program was a time of reawakening.  During these few hours I experienced a confirmation of my aspirations to work in the new territory of psychology and media field.  I was deeply inspired by the professors and my fellow students.  Each professor, for me, was a living example of following one’s dream and living life to the full while serving students, their chosen academic discipline, their art and society.  

Critical Dialogue with Fellow Media Critics 

Conversations with my colleagues in media psychology often mentioned how fortunate we felt to finally be having a group of individuals who were interested in and passionate about having these in depth dialogues about all things media.    

Media to Go

This was also the first time I had ever witnessed a doctoral defense.  To experience Jonathan White at the end of his graduate school journey was an extraordinary learning opportunity.  Not only did the importance of narrative come through his thesis but the level of the academic conversation and points raised in the discussion were highly enlightening.  The idea that through qualitative, idiosyncratic research Jonathan could be evolving a new theory of creativity was simply inspirational and eye opening for me.

Academics, Advisers and Role Models

The brilliance, professional accomplishments, humor and incisive questioning of Garry Hare acted as an invigorating tonic to my thought process.  Whether he was discussing the program, Lewin’s Force Field Analysis or countless other topics, his hard-won pragmatism and ‘one good thing’ philosophy of social activism will continue to be an inspiration. 

Karen Gill’s focus on content analysis was an effective method to demonstrate how a scholar would convert qualitative data into quantifiable information.   Using her current research focus on diet headlines on Women’s World Magazine covers created a meaningful lecture in which her keen mind, expert knowledge, and open teaching style shone through.

Jason Ohler’s digital thought pioneering and vocabulary creation such as terms like ‘squezzal’ left me feeling like I need to read everything he’s written about the digital age. 

Jean-Pierre Isbouts’ lectures on visual paradigms, mini-lecture on electronic file format history, academic writing and music lead me to a place of intellectual wonder and gratefulness that I will be able to experience his guidance as my faculty adviser.

Our group shared an appreciation for the depth of Don Polkinhorne’s research and study design expertise.  It was clear he possesses a broad and deep knowledge in the fields of philosophy, history of science and psychology.
Reawakened Creativity

Wake Up and Smell Your Hidden Talent

This opportunity to study at Fielding for me is a dream reawakened.   Making the PSA film was a watershed moment for me over the coarse of the NSO.   After we made the one-minute PSA film someone in the class said something to the effect, “Whoa, hidden talent.”  

That evening, as I spoke with my wife about the experience she said, “Well of coarse you have a hidden talent.   Don’t you remember before going into your MA in counseling you were seriously thinking about applying to Vancouver Film School?”  Wives are like that.  And no, I had totally forgotten about that dream from a decade ago.  I recall dismissing the very notion because I felt I couldn’t reliably count on a livelihood with such training.  It was a very moving realization for the artist within me, coming from a home of medicine, law, history and reason, art was something to be appreciated but never pursued. 

After my NSO experience, I more fully appreciate that media psychology is the space from which all of my future aspirations can manifest in business, academia and the world-at-large.  Becoming an active and positive contributor to the Fielding community in the study of media psychology field will be an endowment made possible through this program.  

At Fielding Diversity is not just a Word

I write this feeling joy, inspiration and newly invigorated.  It is with a profound sense of gratitude to the founders of Fielding Graduate University and all those devoted individuals that continue to nurture and manifest the scholarly vision of rigor-infused, distributed, self-directed education to whom I bow.   At Fielding NSO we learned there is room for all at the table of higher learning.

Fielding provides one with the privilege and opportunity to join in the scholarly conversation at the cutting edge of technology, education and design.  What more could I have ever hoped for?

Media Bias: A Product of Human Nature

Well-known social psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance (1957).    He used this theory to describe the uncomfortable feeling one has by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously.    Hence, so the theory goes, it is the tendency to avoid discomfort that leads one into either resisting conflicting information that comes our way or more commonly accepting and selecting only that information which matches our preexisting bias.

Bias Within

The basic forms of bias are those within the individual and those that come to us from information resources.  The complexity of evaluating either is significant.   As a researcher we need to understand we are human.   Over time we can have a tendency to attach to and to defend beliefs or research into which we have invested a great deal of time and energy.   We also have political religious or spiritual perspectives, and unique family backgrounds giving us idiosyncratic viewpoints.   Finally, we are subtly and continuously influenced by our culture and surroundings.   
Within ourselves social science has demonstrated we can have known biases in thinking, judgment and memory (Kida, 2006).  This is known as confirmation bias.  Plous (p.233, 1993) defines confirmation bias as “a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true.”

Bias Without - Technology Bias

A new field of research, the CASA paradigm - short for computers as social actors - suggests many of us actually treat computers as if they are human and hence interact accordingly.  This paradigm suggests we take care not to hurt the computer's ‘feelings’ suggesting we come to see our technology platforms as confidants and personal assistants who keep track of our lives and win our affection and scorn (Nass & Yen, 2010).  This can lead us to behave in biased ways towards the instruments of media themselves.   With this growing trust and affection we may come to view the content that these technologies deliver into our lives with less scrutiny.   To test whether this kind of human-computer bonding is occurring in your social circle simply ask five friends which do they prefer, a Mac or a PC?   One will witness first-hand the impassioned emotional response such a question generates.

Robot Bias Equals Search Engine Bias

Studies have also shown the algorithms that make up a search tool, can be biased to seek one type of information over another while preferring one type of website structure over another.  This leads to search engines that produce very different results when searching the same query (Van der Graaf, 2010).    An entire industry dedicated to generating this type of search selection bias has arisen to help one’s site stand out above the multitudes.

This bias also works counter-directionally regarding search engines.    According to a study by Penn State researchers (Giles et al, 2007), web site policy makers who use robots.txt files as gatekeepers to specify what is open and what is off limits to Web crawlers favor Google over other search engines.  The net result is that Google is able to index pages that other search engines cannot and is thus favored by webmasters.



Bias Antidotes - Becoming Aware and Staying Informed

The John’s Hopkins University, Sheridan Libraries web page on Evaluating Information (Johns Hopkins, n.d.) clearly states that all information is presented with motive or a point of view.   It persuasively and logically argues we need to follow a basic protocol of critical web source analysis similar to those we have already been trained in for evaluating any source, including reviewing:
· information about the author and his/her qualifications for speaking on the subject,
· the publisher and its credibility,
· the quality of the writing,
· the research method(s) used,
· how the data found is presented and fit together to develop the conclusion,
· sources cited and their credibility, and
· currency.

Aside from website specific analysis of bias, author bias must also be considered.  Does the author discuss the topic from an apparently objective point of view or is his or her writing reflecting one or more biases?

Whois in Charge
Understanding the website registration process and it’s potential for manipulation is a central skill for online media bias detection.  The three most common URL manipulations are:
Cybersquatting involves registering, selling or using a copyrighted domain name of another organization or individual in bad faith or for profit of sale to the trademark owner of the name.
Typosquatting is the registration of the most common misspellings of trademark names in particular for the same type of bad faith uses as mentioned above.                
URL cause co-opting occurs when an individual, group or corporate interests present a site or organization as if it is in support of a cause or to add unearned legitimacy to their contradictory views in order to help shape the public relations messaging.    Examples include what is known as greenwashing by event hosting Houston Earth Day 2010, sponsored by Marathon Oil or a white supremacy group registering and posting www.martinlutherking.org.

Media psychologists, position themselves as scholarly professionals and intermediaries between media’s messaging and understanding the structure of this message in the mind of the receiver (Hare, G., 2010).  We also then must accept responsibility and commit ourselves to developing sophisticated bias detection skills.   Along with this skill comes obligation to disseminate information on countering media bias.

Humility - The Touchstone of Bias Defense

Cultivation of humility is perhaps the strongest character trait to foster as an antidote to bias and truth seeking.  Examining media bias leads to the gray areas of life becoming more comfortable places for scholars and social thinkers like media psychologists.   We are entering into a dialogue with the voices of history and posing questions for the minds of the future that will come upon our ideas.   Picking up pebbles on the seashore of knowledge, as Newton’s famous quote below hints.   The process of human truth seeking is by its very nature gradual and cumulative.

Sir Issac Newton

 I do not know what I may appear to the world, 

but to myself I seem to have been only 

like a boy playing on the seashore, 

and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or

a prettier shell than ordinary, 

whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Truth’s invitation welcome’s all to stand together on the seashore of this Ocean of Truth, shoulder to shoulder, from an ever-widening vantage point and inhale, sigh and breathe.

Social Media: Means without End

“It turns out that we don’t use computers to enhance our math skills – we use them to expand our people skills.”

Will Wright

To deny the impact of social media on society is to deny a hypothesis familiar in sociology that also makes intuitive sense.  That is behavior norms and ways of thinking are more uniform within than between groups.  “So people connected to otherwise segregated groups are more likely to be familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving, which gives them the option of selecting and synthesizing alternatives” (p.1, Burt, 2003).    Since the mixing of cultures and ideas is the nexus point of creativity, social media is rapidly facilitating this confluence with ever lowering barrier thresholds of cost, distance and time (Shirky, 2008).  In so doing we are facing a transformation in society that will lead to more knowledge, innovation, creativity and one hopes, wisdom as well.  

The Social Networking Tidal Wave

Can Facebook be Stopped?

              Facebook reports approximately 600,000 new users register with the world’s largest social networking site every day.  As Facebook recently crossed the half-billion users mark, it’s clear that many competitors such as MySpace and Bebo are in rapid decline (BBC, July 2010).   According to the BBC, (July,21, 2010) influential blogger Robert Scoble believes privacy issues are of little concern to the average user of the service.   He sees Facebook as the place for keeping up to date with friends while Twitter is used to get information out and talk to a community that cares about similar issues.   

Dynamic shifts in communication have always impacted society in profound ways.  Shirky (2008) points out as we moved from printing bibles to mass printing presses literature and knowledge erupted across Europe ushering in the Renaissance.  Marconi’s radio led to the creation of a massive music recording and distribution industry.  Television, the beginning of the entertainment culture sixty years ago and mass consumption through ever more sophisticated advertising.

What communication history teaches us is communication technologies lay the groundwork for innovation.  The process itself, like all human learning, is one of experimentation and revision.    The consequences of this technology are neither universally positive nor negative (Shirky, 2008).

Real World versus Virtual World: Influencing Each Other

  As this image of internet use today shows, we know about peer-to-peer influence of social networks and internet use, but what is clear is that video is becoming the dominant (51%) online medium according to internet traffic measures.   What makes video a unique media is it’s singular power to access human psyches through visual and auditory inputs, activating inner emotional stimuli usually without much conscious awareness.   While video used to be the purview of media elite because of cost it is becoming much more affordable and widely available.  Using music, moving image, digital sound and video effects and all of the other tools of filmmaking and digital manipulation, video content producers have immense power to trigger, influence and manipulate emotion.  This is significant because video media, including gaming, is perhaps the most effective media tool today for emotional engagement and hence manipulation.  This  emotional charge often then leads to action as outlined below: 

The flaw in reacting to Twitter and other web 2.0 innovations as sea changes in the world of marketing/communications/transactions/fill-in-the-blank is thinking that somehow the medium changes the customer.  Yet, customers were socially networked human beings before MySpace.  They sought to compare and research products before the Internet.   They passed notes in high school before texting existed.

The real change, as Arussy (2010) argues, is how internet users connect with each other and can form new strong foundation building emotional bonds via directly and interactively connecting with a brand or issue.   This is achieved by tapping into core emotions that lead to action in the real world.  Some common types of action are those that would be constructive, as in the case of a positive social cause like organizing over concern for the environment.  Destructive like radicalizing American Muslim youth by exploiting their feelings of isolation and it’s concomitant resentment.  Or consumption oriented action as manufactured branding excitement at becoming a ‘rebel’ and reclaiming youth leads one to joining a motorcycle blog and buying a Harley Davidson motorcycle.  All actions have the common connection to core emotions fostered and enabled by social media, which then provide the fuel leading to an action.  While this is not new, the potential scale is clearly staggering simply by looking to Facebook’s phenomenal exponential growth.


Mobile Social Networking: Future Web

On Becoming a Social X-Ray

TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington argues proximity detection will play a key role in mobile social networking (Arrington, 2009).  Our mobile devises will help us remember details of acquaintances.  They will aid in meeting new people for dating, business and friendship.   Imagine not just location based mapping information overlaying on your daily travels with a service like FourSquare and Facebook Places but having both personal Facebook style information and Linked In professional resume backgrounds available as you meet others for the first time via mobile-to-mobile interaction.   What will that feel like, having all those near to you at a meeting, laying revealed for your browsing pleasure as our mobile devises link locations and trade pings about us?    

The interface with our mobile device itself will become evermore easier.  Perhaps it will be more like how Star Trek characters relate with the USS Enterprise’s computer…

The future of mobile computing user interface ease and integration with everyday life raises many questions.  Will we become so distracted by our mobile window to the virtual world that we disengage with the real time one we are in?  Will we become walking social x-rays with massive amounts of personal information available to the majority?  What impacts this will have on our interactions with others, our sense of self, the size of our social and business networks and other transactional impacts we can only make educated guesses at this point.   What will be the social consequences for those who choose to opt out of such interaction, social seppuku?  What about those who cannot afford such technical mobility devices and service plans - will society have a new domain of digital poverty?

As media psychologists, our future will entail studying and understanding these impacts and suggesting means of adaptation, remediation and best practice articulating the macro and micro influences of media on individuals and our societies.   Thomas Szasz famously said, “Some people say they haven't yet found themselves. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.”  With the coming social networking tsunami, the means to meaningful self-creation has never been more accessible or as empowering. 

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