Strategically Communicating

In reading throughout the week, I had a hard time deciding what to write about.  There were so many good topics.  So I decided instead to offer a summary of the things that jumped out at me that I continue to think about.

First, I enjoyed reading about the “Survivor Spoilers.”  I thought it was interesting and impressive that so many people can come together with a common interest solely through online communication.  I really enjoy meeting people face-to-face and usually that’s how I entrust people as well.  These spoilers created a way to screen and qualify each other’s credibility.  They then had to trust each other’s ability to research and dig deep into finding information and clues; no matter how small and come together as a whole to figure out the results before the general public knew.  What is particularly impressive is the degree of accuracy they performed at.   This left me wondering what these individuals do for a living and how they can devote so much time to “spoiling” someone else’s fun.  It is funny though that Chillone was able to spoil their fun.

Second, I tried to be as careful as possible about tracking my media usage and consumption.  I found that I don’t consume as much media as “they” would like me to.  In one short week I see a very clear pattern of my media usage.  It left me asking myself “Why don’t I use more?”  Is it because I don’t have or make time or is it because I’m not interested or is it because I only use what I need when I need.  For example, I found that while I have a Facebook page, I don’t use it nearly as much as other family and friends.  It’s not that I don’t want them to know what’s going on.  I think it might be because I want to have something to talk about when we see each other in person.

Last, one big thing that stood out in reading Convergence Culture and U&G theory is that research is always behind real time.  This is being compounded by the speed at which technology is evolving.  It was fun to read about the predictions for the future and how they have either materialized or not.  The questions that remained for me were:

Will research ever grasp a true understanding of media usage and answer the who, what, when, where and why, when it’s always behind and moving slower than technology and the consumer?  And, how reliable can the research be if it is so far behind the curve?