Strategically Communicating

Media has found its way into my hands from the first moment I wake up, and is often there right before I go to sleep. It’s in the music I listen to, the television I watch, it’s on my commute to work, it’s even at work.

I understand media to be a vessel through which information travels; information with a strategic purpose. This purpose can reflect entertainment, education, marketing, the spread of ideas, etc. Media manifests digitally or in print. That menu you’re looking at? That font? Those items? That is an ad, a promotion. Its purpose is to compel a selection. It was designed, written, and edited with a brand in mind and a product to sell.
I think it is valuable to look at this constant flow of information we are subjected to with a critical eye. It’s interesting to consider who is attempting to reach us, what they are saying, how are they saying it, and why. Being passive with media is limiting and actually, many could argue, prohibits you from being fully in control and cognizant of your choices.
We are fortunate in the US that we have largely untampered access to information. I think we owe it to ourselves to pay attention to what it is, exactly, that we are absorbing rather than taking it for granted. I’d also like to reference the current fight going on in Hong Kong for just this very right.

Time Article: The Voice of a Generation

Reading about the reality that media produces brought up an instance in which I knew I was hearing something that was not real through a medium that was supposedly a live broadcast.

In 2007 during an NFL game featuring the New England Patriots and Indianapolis Colts, an audio “miscue” was heard on American television. While Tom Brady was calling his next play, you can hear fans at the stadium cheering. It was loud. And then suddenly, the cheers and crowd noise lowered to a level I would describe as soft. The announcers were speaking at a regular level and the players on the field could still be heard, bur the ear piercing growls of the crowd had gone away and then, just as abruptly as before, the roars were back.

Blogs and comments were posted over night. All with the similar title of “Did you hear that during the game last night?” The Patriots claimed the Colts were cheating by playing crowd noise through their stadium speakera. The NFL claimed it was an error from the CBS production truck that allowed the sound to be played during their broadcast.

I became as skeptical as a conspiracy theorist over sports broadcasts from there on out. The NFL games must have not been that exciting after all and CBS was using cheap parlor tricks to gain more viewers. Since then, it is impossible to find a video or audio online of the incident.

It wasn’t more than a few moments after reading the explanation of ‘mediated reality’ (the third chapter of ‘Mediating the Message in the 21st Century’) that I began to wonder about the effect of today’s social media environment on this concept, as I understand it.

For example, how do social media outlets, like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook today mediate reality differently than traditional media? The book itself asks whether a personal observation provides you with a more ‘truthful’ view of what is being presented, versus what the media portrays. What about thousands, or even millions of nearly-real time reports from individual ‘reporters’?

Thinking back on the Boston Bombings, which I followed closely on Twitter and traditional media, I found myself following individuals and police in that area, along with the more traditional media outlets. Understanding the reality of that horrible event involved sorting through what might be rumor and speculation, with kernels of actual truth sprinkled throughout. Absolute reality to me was the validated reports that the traditional media reported on after the fact.

Perhaps even in a world with millions of voices, we still rely on organized, traditional media to mediate our reality and present the truth.

Recently, katieaoreilly explored the question content vs. credibility in the “media.” What allows one idea to rise above the rest for a ‘click?’

Our reading explains that in The Hierarchy Model, content is ultimately just a function of ideological positions that maintain the status quo, as guided by media organizations and routines (8).

When pitching editors in attempt to secure PR coverage, I always have to remind myself what my email will be going up against. My little baby of a pitch will soon find herself in an inbox containing sensationalized headers such as Eva Mendes, Ryan Gosling Gave Baby Girl A ‘Family Name’. Step one in a pitch: engage your reader enough to at least open the email – who is on the receiving end?

In his communication experiment, Newsweek reporter Zach Schonfeld decides to read and reply to every single PR email he receives for a week. His weeklong media log (let’s call it) sparked heated discourse from PR professionals and editors alike. Why? He usually gets to choose which emails he reads and which ones will never be opened, thus determining what “news” he will report. As for the email headers (read as ‘content’) that don’t spark his attention – they just get deleted.

How can we so quickly pull out our pitchforks when the same can be said for our own media engagement tendencies – we decide what news stays and what goes. We read, follow, and ‘click’ on the content we find amusing (even if just for one second).

The text cites several studies that conclude the Internet, though rich in diverse user-generated content, still eventually reinforces the status quo, or the idealized social structure (p. 41). Keeping in mind that the media is a distorted mirror of reality (p. 3) as gatekeeper’s decide what goes into the media based upon their own preexisting prepositions, (p. 35), to what extent do people have control over their own reality?

Some may argue that with the implementation of hashtags and other media filters such as search engines, that we can tailor our feeds to best reflect reality, taking out the “inaccurate” content. However, if our brains are indeed drawn to things that activate the amygdala (p. 61)- the part of the brain that tells us there is a threat, thus exciting us to feed into dramatized news- does it further solidify the aims of the status quo in society? The status quo was defined in the text as the promotion of those in power in society (p. 8).

The text also raises questions about gender and the differences between the responses men and women have towards “bad news.” In the study from Maria Grabe and Rasha Kamhai (2006), they find that where men veer more toward the bad, women tend to respond more the good news (perhaps a maternal instinct?) (p. 56). How does this reiterate or hinder the idealized social structure of dominant male/passive female roles in society? Overall, does the Hierarchy of Influences Model we use to understand the relationship between individuals and social systems prohibit or inhibit independent thought function on “micro” level?

The mention of Marshall McLuhan on Page 24 of the reading inspired me to look up exactly what McLuhan, the media theorist, meant by his famous phrase, “the medium is the message”. It summed up his view that the method by which content was delivered was more important than the content itself. It was introduced in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, but a subsequent book, The Medium is the Massage, was printed with an error in the title (“Massage” instead of “Message”). McLuhan decided to keep and replicate the error because it illustrated his thesis better than the original title did. He saw the forces that controlled the media as “massaging” messages to suit their aims. (For a fascinating collection of audio recordings featuring McLuhan, click here.) The fact that one’s eyes may easily pass over the minor typo without registering it illustrates the point that we are “consumers” of media information, ingesting it so quickly that we fail to notice hidden or erroneous messages, whether they are intentionally so or not.

The first three chapters of the reading include discussion of the individual journalist’s relationship to the larger media machine. Here’s my question to the group: Given the choice between Strat Comm and MMJ, choosing MMJ was a no-brainer because “pure” journalism seemed a more “honest” field, less subject to message manipulation by a client, etc. Now entering my third year in the program, I’m no longer so sure. What do you think?

In keeping a journal of my daily media interactions, I started to wonder. What constitutes media?

In class last week we each defined journalism and media, and came to the general conclusion that “journalism” constitutes the content, and “media” is the platform through which it is shared. Theoretically this suffices, but in application, it becomes less clear. What counts as media today, and who decides?

On October 7, I interacted with multiple media sources, primarily online. I visited Yahoo news, Al Jazeera English, Huffington Post, Facebook, and D-Listed. I wrote blog posts and newsletters at work about medical advances and awards, and then I wrote a Facebook post about my thoughts on a proper name for a pork chop food cart. It cannot be debated that each of these sources counts as media, but I can’t help but notice a substantial, personal perceived difference among each source’s level of importance and credibility. In grouping all of these things together, it feels like I’m comparing Walter Cronkite to Perez Hilton.

My own social reality leads me to place more legitimacy on news media than entertainment media, and I have difficulty viewing the two as equal outlets. However, looking at my media journal, I seem to utilize both forms equally and for specific purposes. I chose the platforms for each of my messages carefully. Does the content truly matter in making media today, or does credibility now depend on the way each consumer interprets it?