Pies, preparation, bread, and beliefs

My mother taught me to bake pumpkin pies on Christmas eve. They have more time to "chill" in the fridge. And the oven is free for other things on Christmas day. She tried to teach me to make pie crusts. I did not learn. Instead, we developed a tradition. She made the crust. I made the filling. She fell asleep for the final time shortly before Christmas four years ago. Christmas is not the same without her and her pie crusts.

Mother also taught me to bake bread. But challah, which is now my go-to bread for holiday meals, is a recipe I learned in home economics class at Takoma Academy. We learned not only how to activate the yeast and kneed the dough, but also how the braided bread was made on Friday in preparation for the Sabbath. I made my challah today in preparation for Christmas.

I am prepared for Christmas. As I write, church bells begin to ring for an afternoon service. I plan to sing Christmas songs this evening. Perhaps at one of the several churches in walking distance from my home. But more likely at a secular gathering at a nearby non-religious venue.

I believe in seasonal traditions. I believe in family and food. I believe in music and ritual. We do not all share the same families or food. We do not all share the same music or ritual. But I am sending out a wish that we can all share in the preparation for a season of peace on earth and goodwill toward all.

Media, Politics, and Fagmentation

I have taken a vow. I will NOT express my personal political views on social media. I have views. I am willing to discuss them FtF. But the social media echo chamber turns nasty too quickly. I will not engage.

But I am interested in discussing communication phenomena that are occurring in the current political climate. Two stories struck me today. The first, in the Washington Post, profiled Obama and introduced several interesting communication topics.

The article chronicles an extended e-mail "conversation" between a Chicago doctor and Obama. The doctor asked Obama to use "fair-minded words" when discussing abortion -- one of the more divisive topics in the political landscape. It seems Obama tried to heed that advice, but struggled for balance in a world where "right to choose" and "right to life" are both heavily laden with moral outrage and the "right to be right."

@GregJaffe, who wrote the WP story, suggests that the country has become more divided in the past eight years and that: "The reasons for the country's divisions are long and complicated and include a fragmented media, economic uncertainty, and rapid social change."

I find the media part of that equation interesting. While they are hard to stomach, I waded into the user comments on this article. By reading the comments, one can almost guess the commenter's media habits. Some insist that Obama is a Muslim, some take a lecturing public television approach to describing the article as a "puff" piece. Most troubling are the attempts at "dialogue" in which commenters are clearly operating from a completely different set of "facts."

When we use value-laden terms to describe decisions that are both intimate and immense and we draw our "facts" from different sources, how can we be "one nation?"

Which takes me to the second article. It is in the New York Times and provides insight on my academic discipline both broadly (media) and specifically (advertising). I learned things I didn't know about ad rates and Super Pacs. But I also learned that, as I suspected, a lot of campaign money is no longer going to television advertising. There are many reasons. But fundamentally campaigns are getting more targeted.

Like him or not, Obama started us down this pathway. Social media IS an echo chamber. But it is also targeted and it is cheap. Why spend millions on television advertising to reach an audience that has already largely decided how to vote? Social media offer enticing new ways for politicians to find and grow their base of support.

But does all of this micro targeting create more macro fragmenting? Can a house so fragmented stand?

Time, Media, Retail, and Clutter

Two pieces I read online in the New York Times this morning turned my thoughts to #time.

The first is an analysis of streaming video. I grew up without television. I never developed a video habit. I haven't streamed any video. Still, the thoughtful analysis of #media grabbed my attention.

Early movies and television used techniques from stage. But when they broke free of the place-based constraints of the stage and realized the time-based benefits of their format they really began to shine.

A few quotes from @poniewozik I found particularly compelling:

"In TV, narrative has always been an outgrowth of the delivery mechanism."

"Watching a streaming series is ... like reading a book — you receive it as a seamless whole, you set your own schedule — but it’s also like video gaming. Binge-watching is immersive."

"... “linear TV” — assumes that your time is scarce and it has you for a few precious hours before bed. The streaming services assume they own your free time, whenever it comes — travel, holidays, weekends — to fill with five- and 10-hour entertainments."

"...the medium (broadcast) didn’t come into its own until it learned to use what made it distinctive — the ability to tell open-ended ongoing stories. Likewise, streaming needs to learn to use its supersized format better, not fight against it."

"More so than any recent innovation in TV, streaming has the potential, even the likelihood, to create an entirely new genre of narrative: one with elements of television, film and the novel, yet different from all of those. But it’s going to take time for all of us to master it."

#Time. That's what ties the two NYT pieces together.

The second is about #retail shopping and #clutter. People say they want to spend less #time shopping. They want less #clutter. People say they want straightforward pricing. But when stores remove clutter, take away the deal hidden in the haystack, and make it easier to get through the store quickly, revenues drop.

@PacoUnderhill1 found that "consumers generally reported that time spent in-store was roughly twice that on our stopwatch." And despite wanting to spend less time dealing with clutter, "stuff" got into consumer's carts because it was a “great deal.”

His final advice: "Get rid of everything you don’t use, love or need. Donate it, shred it, trash it. Life is too short to keep clutter around. Leave that to the stores."

Lack of #clutter is one of the reasons I love digital #media. I did all my NYT reading without a single piece of paper entering my home. But #time is the thing I value most this holiday season.

My husband sits across from me reading the local paper on paper. It has created a cluttered mess around his chair. But the quiet #time we spend together on a Sunday morning transcends our #media choices, is far better than a #retail frenzy, and is worth a bit of #clutter.

Digital Cats and Control

I love cats. Most of my adult life I've been owned by at least one feline. Rocky, who currently lets me live in his house, was named for Rocky Top (a tune we hear many times on Saturdays in the fall), not Rocky Balboa. Nevertheless, he is far more likely to punch at bags than be contained in them.

Rocky

Still, I was struck by a recent article that asserted: "letting go of a false sense of control is important. The digital cat is out of the bag and everyone has social media."

The same day I smiled over the concept of #digitalcats, I also read an insightful piece about brands and reputation. A recent meeting of chief marketing officers in higher education seems to have come to a broad agreement that communicators manage brands while reputation "happens to you."

My academic research career began with an attempt to understand interactivity. I still don't really know what it is, but an article I published with a graduate student in the pre-social-media era of 2002 identified user #control as a key element of interactivity.

Have professional communicators lost #control of our messages? Did we ever have it? Can we manage brands? Or will unruly #digitalcats frisk round cyber space clawing at our reputations?

Resources, Preparation, Ability, Grit and Student Success

According to an article in the Atlantic, first generation students come to campus with little academic “know how” and little hope for degree completion. That article chronicles multiple students at different types of institutions in Tennessee and paints a bleak picture.

Tennessee offers an interesting context. The Tennessee Promise now provides free community college to high school graduates. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT) recently won the Trailblazer Award from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities for improvements in retention and graduation rates. The picture is brighter than the Atlantic makes it seem.

At UT we’ve found that no single factor predicts struggle or success. There seem to be four big pieces to the puzzle: #resources, #preparation, #ability, and #grit.

Parental educational attainment is one of a “bundle” of #resource issues that impact student success. A regression analysis done by UT economics professors, found that students whose father have a four-year or graduate degree have a 5% boost in their chance of retaining from first to second year. The effect of a mother's education is about three percentage points.

Other #resources matter, too. The percentage of students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch in the high school a student attended matters almost as much as parental education. If two students are identical in all other respects, but one attended a school with 5% economically disadvantaged students and the other a school with 55% disadvantaged students, the latter would typically be predicted to have more than a 7% lower probability of first-year retention.

#Preparation during high school matters as well. A student who receives at least one credit on an Advanced Placement exam increases his or her estimated retention probability by about 6%. Parents of first-generation students might be more inclined to encourage an after-school job rather than an extra-work class that would lead to AP credits. But the AP course is more likely to prepare the student for the rigors of college study.

In the UT study, the strongest single predictor of students’ success is high school grade point average with a single point in core GPA increasing retention probability by almost 14%. GPA is not a perfect measure of #ability, but even in an era of grade inflation, students who earn the good grades in high school are also most likely to stay in college after their first year.

#Grit is also important, but hard to measure. My father and my husband were both first-generation students. They lived through grinding poverty during the depression. But they had rich high school experiences that tantalized their native intellects. The GI Bill sent them to college. They had the grit to graduate and they went on to successful careers in science and journalism respectively.

Those of us who are in the second-generation and beyond are privileged. From that position of privilege, we need to work to increase the #resource base and enhance the #preparation of students who have both the #ability and the #grit to succeed in college.

Writing and Karma

As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered: "a writer."  I didn't stay totally true to that dream.  Typing class in high school threw me a bit off my game.  If I wasn't coordinated enough to type, how would I ever be a writer?  But my high school English teachers encouraged me.  And after a few false starts, I graduated from college with an English major.

Reasonable persons looking at my CV, would probably say I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.  And they would be right.  I've been a high school English teacher, assistant/associate book editor, freelance journalist, non-profit manager, technology executive, university faculty member, and academic administrator.  My CV doesn't show it, but there were even a few times that I kept myself from starving by honing those typing skills and working as a Kelly Girl.

Oddly enough, what ties all of that together is #writing.  A great piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today by @nathcoliver asks academicians and writers "What are we worth?"  For freelance writers, the answer seems to be about $2 a word.  As the article points out, media companies have "abdicated their responsibility to financially care for journalists."

I count myself among the lucky ones.  Since I started on my seven-career adventure,  I've never been hungry.  I've always been able to pay the rent.  And #writing has always enriched my work. I don't know exactly how I got so lucky, but this is where #karma enters today's post.  I've always tried to give to others who were growing their careers.  I respond to surveys for doctoral students.  I write letters of reference for former students.

And that's where today's #karma will end.  While shopping in a grocery store that both of us rarely visit, I ran into @utadpr graduate @margohuges.  Through social media, I knew that she was trusting the universe and reinventing herself without a net.  I had already offered up assistance.  But, as it turned out when we talked IRL, there were some very easy connections I could help her make.  AND she had a great idea for ways she could help me with a class for which I'm #writing the syllabus right now. Grocery store #karma and #writing.  It's what I'm thinking about today.

When Social Media Isn't Sociable

Recent piece in the New York Times  asserts that social media have created a media environment that "is exhausting and rarely illuminating." @fmanjoo asserts that "The Internet wasn’t supposed to be this ugly. In its earliest days its pioneers harbored grand ideas about the web’s expanding our democratic discourse."

I've been online a long time.  My physicist-father had us playing online games in the 1970s.  And I wrote a dissertation in 1997 that examined health-related content on the internet.  I've heard all about how "information wants to be free."  And I've read many of the pioneers of the digital frontier who hoped that free and open communication tools would improve and expand democracy.

But I'm fairly new to #socialmedia.  I was a FaceBook latecomer and I lurk more than post.  I've been LinkedIn for several years, but haven't actively cultivated professional contacts.  I've recently forced myself into blogging and tweeting because I'm going to teach a social media class.

One more extended quote, and then a question:  "But there’s also a way in which social networks seem to be feeding a cycle of action and reaction. In just about every news event, the Internet’s reaction to the situation becomes a follow-on part of the story, so that much of the media establishment becomes trapped in escalating, infinite loops of 140-character, knee-jerk insta-reaction."

So is social media really to blame?  Is it the short format?  Is it the fact that anyone can publish?  Is it the fact that anyone can respond?  Is it the fact that everyone is trying to collect followers and build an online social presence?  Is it that we all choose who we want to follow and therefore only expose ourselves to part of the story?  Does social media really make us unsociable?  Or is there something else going on?

Communication, Media and Consumerism

Yes.  I am on faculty at the University of Tennessee.  And, yes, I've been "caught up" in all the happenings about diversity, inclusion, intrusion of legislators, and the so-called "war on Christmas."

I really didn't want to blog about it.  There is plenty of coverage in the local press, national media, and higher education publications.  But this morning I've come to realize that there are strong ties to things I DO what to blog about.

First, #communication.  Particularly in the context of how it is managed by university administrators.  My classical PR training says that the role of a public relations office is to manage communication between an organization and its publics.  In that context, it makes perfect sense that the office of communication should manage content for all of the most visible portions of the university's web presence.  So should it mange content for all vice chancellors?  At UT, the Provost's site already is managed by the communication office.  And now the Vice Chancellor for Diversity will also have his site managed by that office.  But what about the rest of the vice chancellors?  Should they be treated the same?

Second, #media and #consumerism.  Really liked a pieced in Inside Higher Ed this morning.  It's mostly about how the Puritans fought against celebration of Christmas.  But toward the end, the author notes that newspapers in the 1820s and 30s "began their campaign of Christmas advertising."  He also suggests that the "practically irresistible culture-shaping course of mass media and consumerism" that had come into play by the turn of the 20th century was, at least in part, responsible for eroding religious resistance to the holiday.  In another 100 or 200 years, what will thinkers say about our current media environment and its influence on consumerism?  Will social media, like mass media, have "culture-shaping" effects.

And now, to loop back to the start. Will social media improve diversity or further fragment our society?

Place and Media

New York Times article (http://nyti.ms/1XYqTzu) today compares “going viral” in social media with the retail politics of Iowa primaries.  Lots of interesting points, but the one that struck me was that less than 3% of campaign spending thus far has been in Iowa.

Instead of buying media in one geographic place, candidates are "directing the funnel of their campaign money to their national offices staffed by D.C. political operatives.” The article suggest that these centrally run campaigns are more likely to focus on engaging voters directly through social media than investing in paid political advertising in an early voting state.

So, the campaign is already national.  State boundaries and political processes are becoming irrelevant. And if campaigns are investing less in paid media advertising is this just one more blow to the struggling mass media business?  Just how dependent are media outlets on revenue from political advertising? Can they grab a piece of the social media spending?  

Advertising and Content

Today’s New York Times article calls online advertising “maddening”: http://nyti.ms/1OKIwCm.  The article outlines the many ways that advertisers and media properties are trying to force people to watch ads before accessing media content.

Trying to come up with more ways to force people to pay attention to ads is not the answer.  Truly creative marketers are identifying better ways to engage consumers with their brands.

As a cat lover, I will voluntarily spend three minutes with “Dear Kitten” videos (http://bit.ly/1Q3jADK) and at the end of that three minutes feel good about Friskies.  But those warm feelings don’t carry over if Friskies tries to block my access to content at sites that I visit looking for news.

Why would either Atlantic or Airbus think that an annoying full page video add blocking access to the magazine’s content and targeted at the “elite few who are in the market for planes” was a good idea?

Will this kind of advertising survive?  Or is it just a last-gasp attempt to keep the link between media content and marketers alive? 

Time, Place, Money, Media

Print is a place-based medium.  You have to physically have it in your possession to read it.  But timing is flexible — you can read it whenever you want. 

Broadcast is time-based.  You have to tune in at a specific time to see/hear the message.  But place is flexible — everyone gets the same message no matter where they are.

Digital media have no time or place boundaries.  You can read, listen, watch, and contribute anytime, anyplace, using any digital device.

In print media, advertisers buy space.  In broadcast they buy time.  But in both advertisers are really buying the opportunity to put their messages in places and times where targeted audiences attend to professionally developed content.  

In digital media, advertisers can buy space or time in professionally developed content.  But banner ads and lead-in videos are not particularly popular with advertisers or digital media users. 

Marketers don’t want to buy a target audience that might be interested in their brand.  They want to communicate directly with individuals whose digital behaviors have identified them as potential customers.  Digital media users want to freely access content without having their time and space interrupted by unwanted commercial messages.  

So here’s the question.  Who will pay for professionally developed content in digital media?  Advertisers no longer need it.  Most attempts at subscription models have failed.  Can journalism survive?   

Opening Post

In preparation for co-teaching a social media class, I am amping up my social media presence.  This blog will be a somewhat random set of posts about things this professor thinks about.  Thus the title.  OK.  Not everything I think about.  Mostly things related to my two primary research interests -- interactive communication and higher education.