Week 1 - Module 1.2.1

Blog Post: RecoSense Infosolutions 2020, How disruption in news media is creating better opportunities?, Medium.

I found this article to be poorly written to the point of illiteracy. It read like an article generated by an AI, with poorly modelled grammatical rules. It was painful to read the entire thing - viscerally painful - sentences started in one tense, shifted indiscriminately to another, and singular and plural didn’t match from one end of a sentence to another. In short, it was a crap piece of prose in my opinion, and did nothing to dispel the sense I have gained that Medium is a dumping ground of pedestrian quality writing. Noting, of course, I am a paid up member of the site, and as such believe I have paid for the right to hold my harsh opinions.

I hope the articles put forward in a communication course are better than this example, and indeed the others I have read today have been considerably better in terms of quality, content and legibility.

However. I digress.

Media organisation: News.com.au

1. Consider a news media organisation that you engage with. Have they employed any of the ‘solutions’ to digital disruption identified in the blog post? Do you perceive these solutions to be successful?

   News.com.au is considered, by myself and a close friend, to be a bottom-of-the-barrel, dog-whistling right-wing, populist megaphone. However - it is used by said friend to judge the tenor of the ‘average’ Australian’s opinion on news topics, not via the content of the articles but by reference to the comments section. I am yet to try this, but the general tenor of opinions were remarkably consistent with the recent Federal election outcome. In this sense, the institution of participatory media via the comments seems to be serving a useful purpose, and reflecting a certain conservative and reasonably reactionary shared opinion base in a way that is possible to discern and decode.

2. What standout opportunity does participatory media allow? How might you leverage participation and collective intelligence in your role as a communications strategist?

   These are difficult questions. I suppose, following on from the item one above, the possibility of building a composite picture of trends in opinion is an opportunity - gained from skimming across multiple comments. It is really subjective and imprecise, but perhaps it is possible to pick up a ‘vibe’, albeit one that does not stand up to rigorous scrutiny.

   Collective intelligence: Not sure about this at all. The Wikipedia example is a good one, but I struggle to think of examples in my own industry. Or perhaps it is more correct to say, I don’t actively participate in any examples regularly, so struggle to see how it could be applied. Dezeen.com, designboom.com and Yellowtrace.com.au are architecture, design and interior design sites with the capacity to comment on posts, reviews and articles, but the comments are not prominent or particularly consequential.

   I think I have to think about this some more as we move through the course. Maybe there is a design/architecture/interiors equivalent to Wikipedia waiting to be born.

Week 1 - Module 1.1.3

Human factors have largely remained the same despite the digital changes. Why is it important to consider the human factors of communication?

The communication goes two-ways.

It’s pretty straight forward: a conversation is a two way street. None of this “talking at someone” mindset, a dated approach reminiscent of mass media days where businesses had the power to choose when, where and how they communicated AT their consumers. The most potent transformation recent technology brings is the power shift it brings to the consumer.

Source: Mung, B 2017, The evolution of business communication, Youandco.com.au, You & Co.

If conversation is two-way, engagement is important. Human engagement. The human dimension of storytelling are fundamental to driving engagement. Emotion and subjectivity have always been an important part of the propagation of meaning and ideas. This was as true of Gutenberg’s innovation as it is of the transmedia landscape of the web now.

How will you keep this in mind during this course?

I think that the corporatisation and narrowing of communication channels and the polarisation of alternative viewpoints is destructive. I am interested in the human dimension of my day job (architecture) and equally of my other day job (communication).

I am less interested in profit (attention, eyeballs, clicks) at the expense of value (slow engagement, quality, inefficiency). The nexus between these things are storytelling, meaning and communication. How, what, where, when and with whom.