Strategically Communicating

“If we do it, it’s ugly or ghetto. When other people do it, it’s cool.” –BP

I asked 4 Black women at very different stages of life a question, and not shockingly, everyone came to the same conclusion. “Lady Gaga wore faux locs, so did Rihanna. A website compared the two and stated they were ‘not sure how to feel’ (capitalfm.com) about Rihanna’s locs. Thoughts?”

During #NewsEngagementDay, I stumbled upon a picture and a discussion of Lady Gaga and Rihanna wearing faux dreadlocks at different times.Underneath the two pictures were captions asking if we loved Lady Gaga’s dreads, and in the next caption, they gave an under-handed review of Rihanna’s hair.

Historically, Dreadlocks can be dated all the way back to biblical days, Africa, and even ancient Greece. Dreadlocks are not specific to one culture, neither are braids, big lips, or large derrières. However, they are more prominent in the Black community.

The problem lies with society’s habit of shaming Black women for having all of the above, while celebrating those very same qualities on other women of a different race. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, we the media, are consistently telling Black women and girls something is innately wrong about them.

Is it possible to lift up a woman without tearing another woman down? We can start by acknowledging there are biased views on Black beauty and culture, in addition to, checking our intentions when attempting to set beauty standards that promote cultural shaming.

During the first week of class, it was mentioned that Facebook is now the top source of news in the United States. Given that fact, this Washington Post story caught my eye. The writers conducted an experiment where they checked Facebook every hour and recorded the trending news, which is determined by an algorithm. This has been a controversial issue recently as many question the ability of a left-leaning company to present the news objectively.

I selected four individuals to describe this story to, and who I know to have different media platform preferences: My sister (26, prefers social media sites), my husband (28, radio), my mom (58, nightly news and social media), and my grandma (87, nightly news and physical newspapers). My mom and sister are the two most in-tune with social media, so it was fairly easy to explain the story to them. My husband is not a big Facebook user, but he checks it often enough to understand the situation.

As I anticipated, my grandma was the most challenging, as her understanding of social media is limited. While telling it to her, I avoided social media jargon such as “trending,” or anything regarding Facebook’s layout, like “side bar,” as those are specific to the user experience. I also realized that she is of a generation that was not taught to be suspicious of the news. She sees the media as an authoritative body, while my peers are much more cynical.

Prominent in the media spotlight last week was the unraveling Wells Fargo scandal, in which the California-based bank allegedly created 2 million fraudulent customer accounts to generate millions in illegal fee revenues. As a recent former Wells Fargo employee, this story hit close to home for me. While I, like most of their 250,000+ employees had no knowledge of, or part in these shocking sales practices, it’s a huge blow nonetheless.

The 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer findings illustrate business trust is on the rise, with both the informed and general public demonstrating greater trust in business than in media or government, respectively.

I had to ask myself, with greed and ethics like these exposed, how is it possible that the informed public trust in business is growing? Do media and government play a role in this trend? Is there an opportunity for media and government to respond to such scandals in a way that might lift their own trust ratings?

The media plays a role in drawing attention to events and issues. Often times, public outrage over featured stories fades as quickly as the news cycle, and we shift our attention to something new; perhaps an Olympic swimmer inventing a robbery, a pharmaceutical company overcharging for EpiPens, or corrupt politicians.

Is it also the responsibility of media to track these stories over time, to keep our attention focused and create accountability around resolving important societal issues?

The PTA. Farmers Association. Neighborhood Watch.

If you grew up in a small town or rural area, these are groups you probably heard a lot about.

In a world where it is becoming more difficult to maintain a small town economy, I don’t think it’s a coincidence we’ve witnessed a shift towards the adoption of “broadband connection” in rural communities. Small towns have always thrived on big social trust, but predictably, the transfer to similar online social trust has taken longer than suburbs and cities. As of ten years ago, the Pew Research Center found that rural policymakers were still finding it difficult to justify investment in high-speed infrastructure, even for private sector businesses.

Online social networks facilitate motivating powers of trust and engagement in small communities in America. According to John Anderson, professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska, social capital as cultivated online may be a reason that small towns have continued to thrive.

As I reflect on the shift from physical to online vehicles for social trust, I think of my hometown farmers association:

Or my current residence’s Facebook group, Newberg-Dundee Citizen Info Group.

Through online groups and social media outlets, I feel connected to more of my neighbors and better equipped to step into civic action.

Some things do change, but it doesn’t feel very different from reading my small town newspaper, calling my cousin who lives 300 miles away (who happens to be a 4th generation farmer), or showing up to a PTA meeting.

Working for a local community paper for over five years, I have often wondered if the NewsRegister.com would eventually replace the local paper published in McMinnville since 1928. When the paper first offered subscribers the opportunity to read the paper online for free the local community seemed to embrace the idea. However, locals did not feel the same when a fee was required to read the online version of the newspaper, letters to editor multiplied.

“Community journalism is thus about connectedness and embeddedness. It articulates and emphasizes the “local” in both geographic and virtual forms of belonging, using its rootedness within a particular community to sustain and encourage forms of “human connectivity” within that environment.”  (Robinson 2014)

Community journalism is personal and the social interaction concept—reciprocity directs the readers to trust that the journalists can help us and in turn we can also help them. The focus on stories is local and what is happening in town rather than nationally. Advertisers also get into the local community paper via shop local campaigns, ads and community involvement.  Citizens often play a role in providing articles as guest writers for different perspectives building the community and the economic flow.

Will online papers and advertising replace the printed versions? The number of online versions of newspapers in America is abundant. Did you know you can buy the Wall Street Journal online for $1.00 for two months? You could check out www.newsregister.com for what’s happening in the beautiful Yamhill Valley.

While growing up, children often find themselves in a one way conversation with their parents as they are lectured about life’s lessons. When children grow up, there is still the respect factor for their parents, but they can speak more on the same level while contributing to the conversation. This is loosely an analogy that describes the relationship between journalists and their audience today.”When the digitization of media and culture have ushered in a general expectation for a dialogical conversation rather than a one-way lecture.”

Since news media has gone online with the option to allow the viewers to leave comments/input, it has opened the once closed door to allow thru traffic. No longer do people read the paper and feel the frustration of not being able to have an opinion. Now, not only can they have their opinion known, but they can add to the conversation/story.

“How do social media users participate in news? Half of social network site users have shared news stories, images or videos , and nearly as many  (46%) have discussed a news issue or event. In addition to sharing news on social media, a small number are also covering the news themselves, by posting photos or videos of news events. Pew Research found that in 2014, 14% of social media users posted their own photos of news events to a social networking site, while 12% had posted videos. This practice has played a role in a number of recent breaking news events, including the riots in Ferguson, Mo.”

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news/

In Reciprocal Journalism, by Lewis, Holton, and Coddington, the authors lay out a goal early on by stating that the essay is searching for “a way of imagining how journalists might develop more mutually beneficial relationships with audiences.” It is a challenging exercise for sure, to try to come up with your own ideas on how to accomplish this, but some things that I thought of that might help included: Reddit, and how that community functions, with its up- and down votes, the concept of Wiki sites and crowdsourced information, and live-Tweeted tv shows and conversations that take place in real time, adding depth and information.

In the next reading, Is There Social Capital in a Social Network Site?, I took exception with the statement, “Other research shows that young people are motivated to join these sites to keep strong ties with friends and to strengthen ties with new acquaintances, but not so much to meet new people online.” I somewhat disagree. I think that this depends highly on the medium. I fondly remember MySpace, and I made many new friends through there and I believe that that particular site was geared to facilitate those new interactions, more so than Facebook is now. Some additional reading that I did helped me to fully realize that social capital is not a new concept. It existed before the Internet. One of the main articles that helped me to grasp this idea is found on Harvard University’s website. In it, to define social capital it states, “The central premise of social capital is that social networks have value. Social capital refers to the collective value of all ‘social networks’ [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other [‘norms of reciprocity’].” From: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/programs/saguaro/about-social-capital

“Thank you for taking my picture. I won’t remember you, but remember that.” Dot Mahoney poses for a photograph. While their caretakers learn new ways of coping in a class at South Salem Senior Center, people with Alzheimer’s Disease make new friends on Saturday, Oct. 23, 2010.

Having worked in community newspapers for more than a decade, one project in particular sticks out for creating a truly mutual exchange between a subject and me. I spent a year with Ivan and Dot Mahoney, trying to immerse myself in their daily experience as a couple married 63 years confronted the continual slippage, and the daily disappointments, due to Dot’s Alzheimer’s Disease.

Ivan Mahoney visits his wife, Dot, at the memory-care facility in Salem, Ore., where she now lives. The couple has been married for 63 years.

Only after Dot passed away and my story was published, did I see the work as a whole. On the publication date I brought Ivan a stack of newspapers, and he told me that a stranger had come up to him on the street and hugged him after reading about him and his devotion to his dying wife. Ivan’s neighbors, who previously had no idea about his struggle, came over to mow the lawn and drop off dinner. The day of Dot’s funeral, Ivan took time out of his emotional day to talk with me about the nature of relationships, how they were truly the point of living. And that night I asked my now-wife to marry me.

I came to realize that in telling the story of one relationship, and how it changed and did not change as it grew old, I was also telling the story of a larger community. The Alzheimer’s Network asked to share the story, and together we created a fundraiser called A Night To Remember. Many members of the community saw themselves, or their parents, in Ivan and Dot. They related to the story. And as a result, they helped create a small measure of change.

After Dot Mahoney is honored in a memorial service at Salem Evangelical Church, Ivan, her husband of 63 years adjusts to his new life without her on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011.

It was interesting to read the findings in this 2009 article about Facebook’s effects on its users’ psyches. The authors of that study found “positive relationships between intensity of Facebook use and students’ life satisfaction, social trust, civic engagement, and political participation.”

As reassuring as the results of that study are, I was reminded of another study I saw drift across my own Facebook newsfeed recently, the Huffington Post headline above. That article references a 2014 academic paper which found that Facebook activity negatively affected people’s emotional state, creating feelings “such as envy, lowered life satisfaction, reduced satisfaction of basic psychological needs, and dampened mood.”

The stark contrast in the findings of these two studies raises some interesting questions about the current state of research into the relationship between new forms of mass communication and the society that uses them.

For one, it’s difficult to measure some of the elements of these studies. How do you quantify a person’s “life satisfaction?” How do you catalog someone’s Facebook use when it is increasingly a part of everything we do online?

Perhaps more importantly, the nature of our relationship with these new forms of media is still taking shape. I think it’s altogether possible that there has been a shift in the psychological effects of Facebook in the five years between the first study and the second.

What do you think, does the contrast between these two studies indicate differing research methods, or a societal change in our relationship with Facebook?

As I research Benjamin Moore Paints for an assignment, I find myself surfing the net for DIY projects. Granted, these projects include paint but they are not really applicable to my research. Still, the various links distract me.  They take me away from my primary goal— the mission and vision of Benjamin Moore Paints.

“When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” (Carr, Pg. 116)

After pondering this statement, I believe my task to find and absorb the information becomes secondary to learning.  I wander around sites and scan over key words: mission, vision, values, profits, competition. While information is accessible via the internet, I detour from my main subject to check Facebook or emails. Possibly, procrastination is happening, or is it merely another distraction? I believe it is time to head to Linfield’s library to accomplish my assignment. Otherwise, all I learned is there are two easy DIY house projects I want to tackle in 2016.

Here is the question I pose to you grad students: Is the internet a distraction or can you overcome the distractions to possibly find what you need for your paper?  The following links are great articles that might help determine if you are easily distracted and what we might do to overcome our addiction…

http://99u.com/articles/6969/10-online-tools-for-better-attention-focus

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/students-cant-resist-distraction-two-minutes-neither-can-you-f1C9984270

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0