- There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick • The Register – The middle-aged Register speaks to the medicare-aged retiring. There’s more time to stay further in front of the curve when you’re old.> The kids of my day bantered in rhyming slang and Nadsat; these days they speak StartUp and DipShit.
> Age has nothing to do with the definition of culture.
> In fact, the whole age thing is overrated if you ask me. All my neighbours are long retired but they are completely up to date on modern culture, from AI in healthcare to Facebook’s naughtiness. OK, admittedly one of them thought Stormy Daniels was a rapping conjurer but that’s what you get when you strike up conversation in the automated till queue at Waitrose.
> It’s simply because most people are thick. I realise now that I’m not an old geezer worried that modern culture has left him behind. I’m just a snob. Phew! I can live with that. – (culture )
- [toread] An Apology for the Internet — From the People Who Built It – – (history )
- [toread] Fandom, Feminism, and Maker Pedagogy – – (maker_pedagogy making )
- Civil war erupts at top of FCC over Sinclair’s creepy grasp on US telly – > “We need to stand up, speak out, and call out when government is being used as a tool to attack the conditions that make it possible for news to serve as a check on power,” said Rosenworcel. “We cannot allow the cry of fake news to extinguish our inquiry into hard subjects, diminish our willingness to seek truth, or temper our support for the First Amendment.” – (fcc freespeech )
- 25 Years of EdTech – 2003: Blogs – – (#en3177 )
- RSS is undead – Reasons to love RSS: no branding, no user analytics, no ads, user rather than provider curation. Content. – (socialpractices reading marketing rss )
- The Final Surrender of Anti-Trump Conservatism – “An authoritarian can be a Republican in good standing.” Not really a novel conclusion. But conservative support for Trump has revealed the anti-democratic ideology at its core. – (authoritarianism politics trump )
- The Fall of the TV Family in Trump’s America | WIRED – The TV family sitcom never was a forum for debate. The Beaver never sat dow with Wally and had it out. Rosanne has was a Snidely Whiplash melodrama.> rushed through on the way to the next joke – (none)
- 25 Years of EdTech – 2000: Learning objects – LO couldn’t die fast enough. Locally, they were pushed top down by admins looking for standardization. Pedagogically, the problem was decontextualization that drained them of worth outside of training. – (open_learning learningobjects )
- Better than the Printed Page: Reading on an iPad – Modding the iPad for reading. – (ipad reading visual_perception )
- Language Log » Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis – Co-diffusion as a mechanism – (Linguistic_change classification linguistics )
Tag Archives: Marketing
digital media: why think?
From The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan, 1967 (1951″>caption id=”” align=”alignleft” width=”299″] From The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan, 1967The Mechanical Bride haunts the interwebs.Both texts myopically focus on readers as bored passive consumers and writers as lackeys to the market. While they both cover (rather than question”>/caption]I just looked over two texts from Rutledge for possible use in digital writing and rhetoric courses, and came away disappointed. Saddened. Without anything good to say. Both books give an unintentionally clear look into the cold heart of darkness that is written mass media. Neither delivers what they suggest they will. Both have a distinctive ordour of journalism-as-marketing-the-brand shaping both the texts themselves and the advice they present as understanding.Writing and Editing for Digital Media is misnamed. Its emphasis is on writing and editing for digital marketing.Digital Innovations for Mass Communications has a similar problem in the title: There aren’t any real innovations in the book so much as continuations of the what McLuan critiqued in the 1940s. The Mechanical Bride haunts the interwebs.Both texts myopically focus on readers as bored passive consumers and writers as lackeys to the market. While they both cover changes in media distribution, they do so superficially, and without concern for semiotic changes in affordances, rhetorical function or situation. They build their work on the purported commonalities: this web thing – it’s not that different when you get right down to it, and Good Writing is Universally Good Writing, as it was codified, variously, by StrunkNWhite, Orwell, and Confucius. Their own directive is poorly worded, oddly aligning “a person writing” with “the principles are”: “Whether a person is writing a news story, novel, letter to the editor, or advertising copy, the principles of good writing are the same.” (Writing for Digital Media, 1.) Gertrude Stein is just below the surface:
Whether a person is writing. A news story novel, letter, to the editor or advertising. Copy the principles of good writing. The same.
Not far off from How To Write.
In keeping with the easy emphasis on The Universal, the text gives the typical (copy and pasted) lists of Advice (active! verbs!). What seems new are tricks of how to generate heads using Wordle, and how to lace up stories with words planted for SEO. But the goal of the advice betrays the mindset of a marketeer, c 1955: Drugstore shelf space and the cover photo used to be the magic for selling pulp; today, keywords are the new currency.
As for readers: Here’s Digital Innovations’s simplistic sense of audience as content consumer motivated by desire: bored, superficial, but thrifty.
noindent”>And here is the obligatory nod to convergence culture – the very idea that makes both these texts untenable. Digital Innovations gives a nod to Henry Jenkins’s, keeping the focus on his head-shot rather than his ideas:
noindent”>But with the next paragraph, they change the direction, away from Jenkins’s emphasis on the activity of the consumer driven by unnamable desire and towards the institutionalized presentation within museums.
noindent”>This is less a remix of Jenkins than a selective appropriation. Jenkins’s focuses on pro-sumer agency with “A whole range of new technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content and in the process, these technologies have altered the ways that consumers interact with core institutions of government, education, and commerce.” But there’s nothing like the institute of a museum to say Hands Off the Content! Stay behind the velvet rope, children. These artifacts are fragile. They need to be handled by the professionals.
noindent”>Digital rhetoric is at cross-purposes with these examples of digital marketing-journalism. So where are these two texts useful? In courses that look at how the print market is driven. In courses engaged in media archaeology. In courses looking at digital rhetoric in order to question what is being presented as mainstream values. In courses that aim at authorizing the digital reader, that aim at giving the digital reader some agency other than consumption.
on pinboard for May 16th, 2014
- New Impressions of Africa. hypertext version Hugill trans – – (dh pataphysics hypertext )
- Social Media Influence: 10 Theories to Know For Greater Persuasion – An unpersuasive blip attempting to connect Science! to rhetoric. Ha ha. – (rhetoric marketing )
bookmarks for August 6th, 2012 through August 8th, 2012
- The Digital World Demands a New Mode of Reading – Academic Workplace 2012 – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Sweet bit of short-fluf to start a discussion in FYC or among the lit majors who enjoy their paper Harry Potter and side-step 19th century syntax. – (reading fyc )
- The Myth of the Tech-Savvy Student – The Digital Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Two uses: a) to counter the tech eddies claim that we need to move faster, and b) to signal the need for more literacy focus in FYC et al. The myth was cooked up by admins and eddies mistaking marketing surveys for educational surveys. – (wcw fyc marketeering marketing )
bookmarks for December 21st, 2010 through December 23rd, 2010
- Designed by Apple in California – (37signals) – only a starting point for analysis – (marketing rhetoric semiotic visual_rhetoric )
- What’s wrong with (M)OOCs? – Seimens sketches his concerns about MOOCs. They arw becoming more popular. – (ple mooc twwt )
bookmarks for November 18th, 2010
- 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web – Shiny Google People promote their vision life, the universe, html5, and everything in the guise of a children's book. More myopic than Microsoft, heavier-handed than a railway baron, more condescending than Bill Buckley. It's all about revision and Manifest Destiny, wrapped up in a shameless rip of Dr Seuss figures. Sure, it shows what they can do with html5, but so would an html version of The Wasteland. Meh. – (book revisionist_history google marketing ebook death_by_google )
- Social networking: teachers blame Facebook and Twitter for pupils’ poor grades – Telegraph – The opening claim – "Children who spend much of their time online find it harder to concentrate in class, are permanently distracted and have shorter attention spans, researchers found." – turns out to be perceptions and beliefs by teachers. The article tells us more about misconceptions than what student are doing. Shame on Telegraph. – (Fyc myths facebook twitter )
bookmarks for November 15th, 2010 through November 18th, 2010
- Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design – by Rachel Lovinger. Early piece on content strategy and thinking about difference between copy and content – (wcw content_strategy copywriting design IA marketing ux freelancing writing )
- A List Apart: Articles: You Can Get There From Here: Websites for Learners – Amber Simmons. A few elements for writing for learning – (wcw content_strategy ia writing copywriting ux freelancing )
- A List Apart: Articles: Reviving Anorexic Web Writing – Distinction between copy and content. – (wcw content_strategy ia writing copywriting ux freelancing )
- 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error – (none)
reminder: you can’t force the brand – in class or out
Digital natives, aka Millenials, are defined along marketing lines, an approach which may serve university PR and recruitment (to an extent – as long as you don’t push student expectations beyond classroom realities) but is inappropriate for teaching and learning. Never mind the limited sample that is the basis of characterizing Millennials; and never mind the clear stereotyping of the group. The Chronicle covered all that back in October, 2009. And never mind the mid-20th century Mad Ave mindset behind characterizing a homogenous audience in a time of fragmentation: Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus takes that down a notch. (And see also a marketing perspective on the implications of Shirky’s thesis from Jason Falls.)
Instead, consider this: The Millennial group rates their computer expertise higher than they perform.
Second, consider the argument I’ve heard more than once: “Students don’t need courses that deal with computers or the internet. They’ve grown up with that. They know all that.” The fallacy in that argument should be obvious to those of us who grew up with television.
Third, consider that a university’s marketing perspective often drives administrative decisions on programs and courses, in part directly, and in part through local PR, and by defining The One True Story the university is supposed to tell the world.
Well, it does at my university, anyway.
So, here’s The Read Write Web on So-Called “Digital Natives” Not Media Savvy
Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.
A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it’s legit.
The article mentioned is from The International Journal of Communication: “Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content,” by Hargittai, Fullerton, Menchen-Trevino, and Yates Tomas. Here’s the abstract, and the link:
We find that the process by which users arrive at a site is an important component of how they judge the final destination. In particular, search context, branding and routines, and a reliance on those in one’s networks play important roles in online information-seeking and evaluation. We also discuss that users differ considerably in their skills when it comes to judging online content credibility.
This is the kind of information faculty and administrators need when designing programs and courses – and even the direction of the university – not the marketing orientation. This is the kind of information that drives course design, class and online interaction, knowledge making, and all the other high-minded features we ascribe to our decisions.
And, finally, a reminder from Falls – not just for Communications and Marketing but for faculty thinking that Social is this Season’s Black (yeah, including me).
The bad news for marketers is that Shirky’s examples quietly illustrate that we can’t force meaningful social activities. They happen organically, if not accidentally. So instead of trying to build branded communities and produce “viral” videos, our best bet is to just be hanging around when something cool happens and be there, not conducting the train.
Faculty can’t force the social, either. Have some more sushi. I’ll be in the corner, reading.
bookmarks for September 26th, 2009 through October 8th, 2009
- Writing Spaces | Readings on Writing – Writing wants to be free. A significant project, but the anti-wiki spin isn't really necessary: "An Alternative to Wiki Textbooks. Some teachers might have thought about participating in other open access textbook projects like Wikibooks, but have not for fear that such work would go unrewarded in tenure and promotion. Writing Spaces' individually authored texts and more traditional proposal and peer review process gives you a line on your CV with direct publication credit for your work.An Alternative to Wiki Textbooks
Some teachers might have thought about participating in other open access textbook projects like Wikibooks, but have not for fear that such work would go unrewarded in tenure and promotion. Writing Spaces' individually authored texts and more traditional proposal and peer review process gives you a line on your CV with direct publication credit for your work." Seems the project is heavily embedded in traditional writing spaces. – (publishing writing wikibooks pedagogy literature book )
- if:book: a clean well-lighted place for books – "The purpose of this new set of notes is to expand the thinking beyond how a specific text is presented or interacted with. Reading (and writing) do not happen only at the level of the individual work. There is a broad ecology of behaviors, activities and micro-environments that surround each work and our relationship to it — how things come to be written, how we choose what to read, how we make the purchase, how we share our experience with others. Currently (i.e. toward the end of age of print), that ecology is defined by agent/editor mechanisms of acquisition, sharp delineation between authors and readers, top-down marketing, heavy reliance on big mainstream media to get the word out, the bookshelves that make our books part of our daily life, bookstores and — yes — Amazon." – (books ebook publishing reading marketing ebooks library2.0 )