Class Notes 3/17/21

NFT

Kings of Leon article

-release of album as an NFT

-NFT stands for "non-fungible token"

-Built on block chain technology

- A fungible asset is one that can be replaced with another identical one of the same value, such as a dollar bill

- So, a non-fungible token cannot be replaced and cannot be merited to the same value, therefore making anything sold by it increase value

-NFTs rides on important elements key to selling art: scarcity and authenticity

- On Nifty gateway, artists set the number of editions for any single artwork by deciding how many accompanying tokens be made available

-It connects artists directly to collector's NFTs effectively

Crash Course Video: Social Thinking Crash Course Psychology

Social Psychology: focuses on the power of the situation. Examines how we think about, influence and relate to one another in certain conditions

Social thinking

- Attribution theory: the theory that we explain someone’s behavior by crediting either their stable, enduring traits—also known as their dispositions—or the situation at hand

Hard to tell if someone’s behavior is based off disposition or situation

Fundamental attribution error: the tendency for observers, when analyzing another’s behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition

Can warp opinions of others, lead to snap judgement

Statistic: 7 in 10 women report that men have misread their polite friendliness—which would be appropriate for the situation—as a sexual come-on

What we choose to believe have big consequences

Ex: political views

Richard Petty and John Cacioppo

Developed a dual process theory of how persuasion works

1. Central route persuasion: involves calling on basic thinking and reasoning to convince people

When interested people focus on the evidence and arguments at hand, and are persuaded by by the actual content of the message

2. Peripheral rout persuasion-influences people by way of incidental cues like a speaker’s physical attractiveness or personal reliability

Happens more readily when not paying much attention

Our attitudes can be effected by our behaviors

- foot in the door phenomenon: the tendency for people to more readily comply with a certain big request after they’ve first agreed to smaller, more innocuous requests

Moral action strengthens moral convictions, just as amoral action strengthens amoral attitudes

Ex: stanford prison experiment- zimbardo 1971

14 day experiment

70 applicants screened

24 male college students deemed selected

Coin flip determined half guards and half prisoners in prison simulation

Guards told prisoner’s behavior were being studied

Prisoners not told anything

Experiment made out to be as realistic as possible

“Prisoners” lost sense of identity after being treated like prisoners

“Guards” actions quickly became dehumanizing

Prisoners started breaking down, others rebelled, and still others becoming passively resigned, as if they deserved to be treated so bad

Experiment eded only after 6 days

The power of a given situation can easily override individual differences in personality

Leon Festinger’s Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

-the notion that we experience discomfort, or dissonance, when our thoughts, beliefs, of behaviors are inconsistent with each other

The point is that this mismatch between what we do and who we think we are induces tension—cognitive dissonance and that we tend to want to be resolve that tension

How the modern world makes us mentally ill?

-media is responsible for causing a high background level of anxiety/ widespread low level depression

- 6 low level features of modernity with this effect

meritocracy

the media

secularism

perfectibility individualism

individualism

romanticism

Meritocracy

-everyone free to make it if they have the talent and energy

-downside: any act opposite of success, it is not deemed ACCIDENT/ MISFORTUNE but sure sign of lack of talent/ laziness

-"you get what you deserve"

-poverty becomes not a problem but evidence of damnation

- cure: strong/ culturally endorsed belief in 2 big ideas

-luck

-tragedy

Individualism: preaches the individual and their achievements are everything

- everyone capable of a special destiny

- the community doesn't matter

-ordinary = curse

- result: most things we will end up being is freakish failure

- cure: cult of good/ ordinary life and appreciation of the every day

Secularism: secular societies seize to believe that anything that is bigger than or beyond themselves

-religious persons/ the church used to keep our petty ways/ status battles in perspective

-nothing to relativize humans whose triumphs/ mishaps feel like the be all and end all

-cure- regular using sources sources of transcendence that establish a benign relativizing perspective on our personal sorrows

Romanticism: philosophy that tells us there is one special person out there who can make us completely

-settling for moderately bearable relationships

-cure: realize we didn't go wrong, encouraged to believe in a very improbable dream

-build up our ambitions on friendship and non sexual relationships

The Media:

-immense prestige, huge place in our lives

-routinely direct our attention to things that scare/ worry/ panic/ enrage us

-denies us agency/ chance of personal action

-attends to least admirable sides of human nature without exposure to good intentions decency

-news: focused on presenting solutions rather than generating outrage focus on systematic solutions

- news we most need from our own lives/ direct experiences

Perfectibility

modern society presses on being content/ sane/ accomplished

- we end up loathing ourselves feeling weak/ feeling we wasted our lives

-cure: a culture where perfection is not within our grasp

-being mentally unwell is inescapable part of the human condition

-real friends who we can share our fears and vulnerabilities with and not be judged for.

"Why are Americans So Pathetically Ignorant About Politics?"

-Rick Shenkman

- James Fishkin, a political scientist who now teaches at Stanford, came up with the idea of a deliberately poll

- ⁃ experts are brought in to help participants make sense of the material they are given. At the end of the conference, by which he has become an educated voter on the issues under review, he is surveyed again

⁃ The first televised deliberative poll conference held in the United States took place in the presidential election year of 1996 in Austin, Texas, over the weekend of January 19-2. The conference attracted 460 people

⁃ Drawn from diverse geographical populations in both Red and Blue states. A quarter of the participants came from families with an income of less than $20,000 a year

⁃ As a precaution against bias, the materials given to voters were reviewed ahead of time by two members from opposite parties, Democrat Barbara Jordan and Republican Bill Frenzel

⁃ While opinion shifted in favor o bigger budgets for child care and education, the voters decided that the safety net programs would be better left to the states to manage

⁃ Fishkin notes that in 1996 Pat Buchanan, when he was running for president, was asked if he would cut Medicate to balance the budge

⁃ He would protect Medicare, which was the politically safe answer

⁃ Foreign aid consumes less than 1 percent of the total federal budget. It’s a rounding error

⁃ The people who attend Fishkin’s conferences are plenty motivated, but that’s because Fishkin uses incentives. He pays people to attend his conferences =. People who went to the Austin conference got a $300 honorarium

⁃ For most attendees this the first time they will have the chance to meet somebody like Jim Lehrer who can be seen on national television. Fishkin goes to great lengths to encourage people to participate. In his book about the Austin conference he explains that he was able to get a Chicago voter who’d never flown in an airplane to agree to come by flying a friend along to keep her company

⁃ This suggests that if we want smart voters we need to start paying them

⁃ After the effort to extend the Watergate reforms at the federal level faltered, reformers moved to the states. Clean election reforms, which are designed to take private money out of politics by publicly financing campaigns, were tried in ten states at various levels of government

⁃ Culture, it turns out, can work as effectively as the incentives James Fishkin employs. The lesson of Scandinavian experience is that if you teach people civic in school and then continue to emphasize civics in adult education courses—75 percent of Swedes participate as adults in civics-study circles at some point in their lives— they will retain the information they learned in school and will continue to express an interest in politics.

social trust is the critical factor, as is often claimed by civics reformers, the we should expect to see the highest voter turnout in local elections. Which elections in the United States draw the least number of voters year in and year out? Local elections.

--Americans not committed to vibrant civics in Scandinavian mold

-In 2000 Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, convinced that Americans Ignorance of history was putting the Republic at risk, got Congress to pass a program to improve the teaching of history

-Supreme Court justices have been especially prominent in the campaign to raise civics standards

-in the 1980s, Chief Justice Warren Burger became so committed tot he cause of teaching Americans about the Constitution that he resigned from the Court ----to incite interest on the bicentennial of the Constittuion

-civic duties aren't just responsibilities, they help get things done

Media Literacy and the Emerging Citizen Chapter 2:

Media Literacy and the Emerging Citizen

- Len Masterman (1985)- Media education is an essential step in the long march towards a truly participatory democracy, and the democratization of our institutions. Widespread media literacy is essential if all citizens are to wield power, make rational decisions, become effective change-agents, and have an effective involvement with the media. It is in this much wide sense of “education for democracy that media education can play the most significant role of all (p.13)”

-there is growing consensus among scholars and educators that media literacy is a promising means of “developing informed, reflective and engaged participants essential for a democratic society (NAMLE Core Principles)”

-media literacy build competencies in citizens to be both engaging and skeptical, both critical and creative

-media builds identity, facilitate world views, and reproduce both positive and negative impressions of humans

teaches skills but also the larger ideological and cultural, relationships embedded in information and society

-codependency between media and citizenship

-media provides people membership into groups, stabilize daily life, and function as a large educational tool

-media has a place in socialization and cultural expression: arguably has taken the place of the family, the church and the school as the major socializing influence in the contemporary society

-peer media platforms are facilitating the dissemination, sharing, and appropriating of messages

-has a civic role: that of preserving and maintaining an engaged, active, participatory public

-to be an active participants, individuals must have access to information that explains how, why, and to what end certain decisions are made

-how this information is personal but is an important answer to how media literacy develops

-one of the main aims of media literacy education is to enable in individuals the ability to effectively use media to exercise democratic rights

-the increasing centrality of media in the facilitation of daily information and communication needs “calls for the implementation of curricular and co-curricular pedagogical practices that develop media literacy—the ability to critically analyze and decode message embedded in various media productions

- if media guides and supports citizens in their daily endeavors, media literacy must facilitate more critical, engaged, and active dispositions towards the role of media in every life

—Following arguments position media literacy as a core competency for engaged citizenship through preparing citizens to become critical thinkers, creators, and communication, and agents of social change

1. Media Literate Citizens as Critical Thinkers

- critical thinkers—able to access and analyze information on which to base democratic participation

-Renee Hobbs “Seven Great Debates in the Media Literacy Movement” (1998), she emphasizes that media literacy “invites students to identify the cultural codes that structure an author’s work, understand how these codes function as part of a social system. And disrupt the text through alternative interpretations”

Paula Freire’s “critical consciousness” - individuals develop the ability to perceive their social reality “ not as a close world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform”

Media literacy education-prepares citizens for democratic participation by helping them analyze mediated representations of their communities, as well as address issues within their communities

-people learn to deconstruct media texts and “deconstructing injustices, expressing their own voices, and struggling to create a better society”

2. Media Literate Citizens as Effective Creators and Communicators

“Good citizenship” relies on a person’s ability to act as effective creators and communicators

-actualizing and engaged imply a type of civiv participation that goes beyond party affiliations

-engaged citizen and active audience have similarities in definition

-consumers of media always reinterpret and often remix media texts and share these creations with communities

ex. Fan communities

- these spaces for online communication/collaboration/creation and circulation of pop culture products can prepare people for more active participation in democracy

3. Media Literate Citizens as Agents of Social Change

Today’s citizen must be able to gather and analyze information, develop informed opinions, and share these perspectives with others

Efforts most effective when lead to the organization of political movements, creation of new political practices and process, and the institution of new legislative policies

March Horkheimer- project is not the theory of emancipation, it is the practice of it as well”

“Political of social change objectives” in media education have been sight to struggle

-promise of “repositioning media literacy as the core of new civic education commitment to democratic education and critical pedagogy encourages the creation of classroom cultures and teacher-student relations that prepare students for self-directed learning

-communication alone can create the Great Community

Towards a Media Literacy Framework for Engaged Citizenship

- media literate citizen is born from a convergence of the tools and platforms that now occupy the divide that once existed between the media industry and the individual

-older models of media are less relevant to them as separate silos information

-younger people start their media information from their peers than it becomes a network of sources, formats, and messages that are always moving/shifting

-framework begins with boundaries between the message producers/media and the individual.

GRAPH:

First circle, connects media and citizen through mobile platforms

Mobile platforms are replacing desktops, tv, etc. as the main space for information gathering, sharing, and producing

-social shift towards mobility in all facets of information habits

-the tendency of modern creations to attract much greater degreee of audience participation than ever before

-the phenomenon of a single franchise being distributed through and impacting a range of media delivery methods

Chapter 3

Digital Media Culture and the Civic Potential of Media Literacy

-Citizens have the capacity to organize, express, and participate to degrees rarely seen in the mass media age

-tools only half the equation

- a participatory culture has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship...what is known by experienced is passed to novices

-for a participatory culture to engage around an issue, cause, or hobby, the technologies that allow people to collectively share their voices must be readily available

-tools, spaces, and campaigns depend on citizens that know how to critically engage with information in collaborative and digital spaces

the media literate crowd is always right

-most of us have the lack of ability and the desire to make sophisticated cost-benefit calculations

-settle for what is good enough, though despite limitations, our collective intelligence is impressive

-the concept of collective intelligence traces back more than a century but has found renewed rigor in its application to the online crowd

three core forms of collective intelligence:

- prediction-the ability for the crowd to engage in large-scale information sharing to determine outcomes, trends, and solutions to problems

-problem solving- groups of interested people come together to find ways to address an issue, challenge, or problem

- predicated on a crowd gathered to address a specific issue or challenge they are invested in solving

idea jams- massively large brainstorming section

- spaces for people to help bring more efficiency, fluency, and innovation to any social, civic, or personal cause

these type of collective intelligence all depend on media literate crowds to facilitate real, actionable outcomes.

crowds depend on networks:

-"a commonly owned forest, we all stand to benefit from it, but we also work together to ensure it remains healthy and productive....while social networking is distinctively human and ubiquitous it should not be taken for granted"

-Competencies for Media Literate Criwds:

-Curate- to organize, to pull together, to preserve

-Critique - analysis, tools for finding non transparency, codes and conventions, audience decoding, content and message, and motivation

-Contribute- sharing information, kind of how social media provides new functions to do in meaningful ways

-Collaborate- behavioral shift from simply contributing content to an active form of collaboration

-Create-participation in digital culture is "more than being able to access serious information online and culture// the capacity that youth have to produce, share, and appropriate "media" content in public spaces

Why media literacy matter for the emerging citizen

-if not for those who enter collaborative spaces and create value out of the tools new platforms and spaces that now exist foster more collaborative production, social advocacy, and interactive dialog necessitates a new look

-young citizens today enter this new knowledge culture with a certain level of familiarity with digital tool and platforms

-make sure that digital citizens are well informed citizens in both understanding information and in their ability to evaluate and analyze what they are seeing

the success of collaborative platforms largely depends on the ability for networks to be interactive knowledgeable, critical, trusting, and transparent

two fundamental questions:

-How much are young people relying on social platforms and mobile tools for daily information and communication needs?

How do young people understand and perceive these tools as vital conduits for engagement in civic life?

-lack of transfer from use to perception may be result of social media displacing time spent in engaging in social and civil life

-developing these new competencies in young citizens must start in the classroom, in the home, and from a young age......

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