We are being changed by the new media, neurologically, sociologically, culturally. We know our brains are malleable. Reality is now changed and our world is without boundaries and time itself and our sense of it has changed. Truth and how we find it, understand it, work with it and who we trust... all of these things are altering. It is a shift as important as the shift in the Renaissance, as important as the changes from the agricultural foundations to the industrial age.
New technology and what can gain our attention, our time, and how we interact with the new media will guide us, impact us and change us. It is, as a recent article in the Online Journalism Review puts it, "biologically tactile" and the ability to understand and measure it is allowing a view into how we are morphing with these changes.
The overwhelming load of information and the ability to manage it and discern trustable networks and sources is important. Hence Forbes magazine's big push on the issue of trust. When truth, lies and spin seem to be part of postmodernism's fungible narrative, especially politically (nothing is bigger now than the battle for the 9/11 narrative) and commercially, trust looms ever more important -- personally, politically and corporately. Trust in institutions has been declining. Who and what you choose to trust in the process of learning, managing, choosing and working with and understanding the information onslaught is of utmost significance and importance.
Teens say they get their news and information from sources such as South Park, The Colbert Report and Jon Stewart's Daily Show , and 66 percent get their news from online aggregating news portals such as Google and Yahoo! and they are active seekers of the news, according to an article in Media Life, New Media, on teenage online news use. They are gaining a sense of trustability and would rather rely on satire than be victims of media and political spin. In some ways, they have learned to be more active pursuers rather than passive consumers of tech and media avenues.
New media theory is what I'm immersed in at the moment as part of my graduate studies. I'm reading Frederic Jameson, building on Marshall McLuhan, and trying to understand this in terms of the emerging attention economy and neurology, new media and technology. It is very exciting. Incidental learning, trust, physics of time, breakdown of boundaries, the subliminal and subconcious influences and how attention is gained and how deeper thinking is demanded and yet subjugated... Cross-fertilization of ideas, scientific discoveries, alteration of foundations: fodder for our future, now, in our present.
My oldest daughter's honors thesis in psychology, recently completed, had to do with attention and mental focus and what criteria impacts both. Terrifically fascinating in today's 24/7/365 media, society and culture. Warp speed changes, grip tightly for the ride. Beyond postmodern. As yet unnamed, the rhetoric of it all.
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