Thursdays' Guest Lecturers

Dr. Sue Salinger and Jason Zietz both provided the class with interesting information regarding the means of how people receive messages during a crisis.  Although both speakers were informative, each had a unique presentation style

Dr. Salinger barely used power point slides to convey her presentations theme of 'the media as the message.'  I was able to easily relate to this topic as we had to read this article in the TAM intro class.  What 'the medium is the message' means is that a person's perspective on how an image is consciously received is based on the medium.  The reason for this is that each medium incorporates a certain level of a social agenda.  For example, television users receive commercial advertisements in between programs; this is because the social agenda of advertising is to sell.  Salinger tied this into social media for social good by describing how people receive and interpret messages in the time of crisis.  During a disaster the most important content is news.  Due to technology the trends in how we receive news has changed from printed paper, to broadcast radio, to broadcast television, to the internet.  As technology progresses so does our ability to filter out any social agendas from mediums.  Consider the difference in bias between receiving news from a non-political website and receiving news from FOX news television.  Since FOX news must hire expensive anchors and run expensive networks then behind the scenes there must be somebody with an agenda paying bills.  It is for this same reason that internet sources prove to be the most unbiased.  It is free for individuals to construct a webpage, since there is no parent company overseeing the operations of the website there is less social agenda.  The medium being the message ties into social media for social good because it is important to study which platform proves to be the most effective for providing useful information to the greatest number of people for the lowest cost.  

Jason Zeitz used more of a visual/ hands-on approach to lecturing.  He presented most of his information through drawing on the board.  This was necessary because his presentation was about visually displaying data during a crisis.  He explained how different charts and tables can be used for different situations.  I had never seen a tree-graph until Thursday; I plan to use these in the future for visually displaying trends with multiple factors.  I also learned that Zeitz is not a fan of pie charts because they are hard to precisely estimate the proportions.  This came as a shock to me as a fourth-year business student I have probably made of one hundred pie charts.  In a nutshell Jason Zeitz lecture ties into Dr. Salinger's lecture.  In visually displaying messages the medium is once again the message.  In other words, the chart or table you decide to use can have a vast impact on how the receiver interprets the message.  For example, if I am trying to display the infant mortality rate by country as a percentage of Africa as a whole, then according to Zeitz I would use a tree graph as opposed to a pie chart.  This is because the pie chart may skew the message because the receiver has trouble interpreting it.  These small differences may seem trivial on the surface but consider the impact of a medium's message on a global scale.  For a closing example consider the presidential election that takes place every four years.  If the majority of undecided voters choose to watch FOX news instead of visiting an unbiased website, then those voters have subconsciously been swayed to vote republican.

*As a side note I learned in TAM intro about 3rd person viewing.  3rd person viewing is a mentality that proactive people use when interacting with any medium.  It means that before a receiver interprets a message they take a step back and consider the medium.  Ask yourself, is the medium trying to push something upon me?  An example of 3rd person viewing would be, before you turn on the television say to yourself, 'these commercials are trying to sell to me.' If you are able to take yourself out of the picture and realize that mediums carry a social agenda then you can make yourself unswayable to bias.