The Plaug

A Tethered World: Study Released

The newest Academy Study, A Tethered World, was released today via a story on the Huffington Post. You can find their story HERE.

I also wrote a piece on the study, which you’ll find below. Thanks to Everyone who helped with the study! p

This past Spring, 793 students from 8 Universities from around the world participated in a 24-hour mobile information tracking exploration and reflection to answer the question: How have mobile technologies changed the information habits of a digital generation?

The Result is A Tethered World: A Study that explores the mobile information habits of emerging citizens around the world. Students spanning 52 nationalities on 4 continents participated in a global study that tracked their mobile habits over a 24-hour period, collecting survey data and 500 word reflections.

A Tethered World was designed to explore the information habits and dispositions of university students’ mobile phone use (consuming, sharing, reading, publishing, expressing, etc.) Three general research questions guided the study:

• Q1. How have mobile technologies influenced the information habits of university students around the world?
• Q2. What similarities and differences exist in university students’ use of mobile technologies for information purposes?
• Q3. How do university students conceive of mobile technologies role in their daily lives?

A Tethered World revealed a generation that has fully integrated mobile technologies into their lives. The results of this study, broken into general insights and top data takeaways, collectively show a homogenized, technologically dependent population, who use their phone to tether themselves to communities, and to social networks…but not much else. The following student quotes exemplify some of the main emergent themes of the study.

• [Mobile Phones] Make us shallower and self-centered, as well as hungry for attention.
• We are constantly texting, talking, searching, sharing, and updating, mainly by ourselves. In doing this it negatively effects our social interactions as we tune out all the people around us, (like train takers) and end up keeping to ourselves.
• Social networking and the Internet have done wonders for my organizations and relationships to old and new friends. There are few people that I text or call on a daily basis; social networking gives me the opportunity to keep relationships strong even when I can’t always dedicate a whole lot of time to them.
• My phone provides me with (shallow) feelings of connectivity and being loved or attended to.
• Even I cannot deny the excitement I get when a hundred of my 972 closest Facebook “friends” wish me happy birthday and having that be the judge of to whom I’ll leave a message of wishes when their special day comes.
• My mobile device allows me to make myself heard and present, like on Facebook for example.

Visiting the Tethered World study, you’ll find the following pages:

• conclusions and insights
• top data takeaways
• comparisons of data by country
• 24 hour tracking data
• Qualitative Reflection Summary
• About the Study

The following brief data takeaways reveal some key insights into the information habits and dispositions of mobile phone use by university sutdents. (See the full data takeaways here)

1. Facebook & Twitter dominate in all aspects of mobile information use and communication.
2. On mobile phones, Apps are like Cable TV.
3. On mobile phones, sharing information and commenting on other people’s social spaces are done more frequently than consuming information.
4. Email is dying.
5. In the 30,000+ word reflections, students used the word addiction over 80 times.
6. Mobile phones have benefited organizational relationships and advocacy. 
7. For those who do consider themselves news followers, phones have allowed them to expand and broaden their information diets. 
8. A large gap exists between heavy and light users of social media on mobile phones, with little middle ground.
9. Students reported, consistently, a feeling of anxiety when they had their phones in their pockets but were not allowed to use them.
   
10. All students, across all 56 represented countries, are doing generally the same few things.

These insights, among others, help to show how a new generation of media savvy emerging citizens are using mobile technologies to integrate all information needs and habits into the pockets and purses of their daily lives.

Please direct all questions about the study to:

Paul Mihailidis
paul_mihailidis@emerson.edu
@pmihailidis

Thanks to all of the partners of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change who took their time to participate in this study.

And a very large thanks to Eivind Michaelsen and Kristing Berg (Team Norway), capable and driven Graduate students at Emerson College, who spent many hours gathering and crunching the data to make this study possible. Their hard work made the study

Universities who participated in A Tethered World

Why We Do It: My Academy List

It’s now been a week since I’ve been home. I’ve had to wash dishes, make my bed, and brew coffee.  I’ve been moping around in my usual post-Academy haze, trying to figure out what we accomplished, what we didn’t, where we are, and where we need to go. 68 amazing students representing over 20 nationalities spanning the globe all just spent three weeks together, exploring media literacy, global citizenship, and empowerment. There’s a lot to digest.

We had an ambitious program this year, with a host of accomplished guest lectures from around the world—Renee Hobbs from the University of Rhode Island and the Media Education Lab gave an inspiring keynote talk on the intersection of art, journalism, and advocacy; Christy Pipkin of the Nobelity Project screened her film One Peace At a Time, and talked about the power of change; Gerry Power from Intermedia led a rigorous discussion on media research; Sanjeev Chatterjee of the University of Miami introduced his Global Cities project and showed a gripping piece on Climate refugees in Bangladesh; Edward Mortimer from Oxford led a seminar on the outcomes of a BBC study he conducted on the MENA uprisings; JoAnna Wasserman from the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum led a session on propaganda; and Anthony Ioannidids, a usability expert based in London, provided a crowd-pleasing, and, well, usable lecture on why usability matters for the future of media. We had an amazing cast of faculty members and staff that helped this academy be our most dynamic program to date.

As students engaged with a media literacy curriculum that asked them to explore their identities and communities, define pressing global challenges, and create action plans that use media literacy to address these challenges, I saw more engagement, on a higher level, than ever before. Through this maze of energy, I kept looking around at the faculty, who work tirelessly day and night for this program, and wondered: Why do they do it?  The answers to that question get to the core of why media literacy can be a transformative experience. Here are a few insights from me.

1. Community and Collaboration make Media Literacy Stronger  – During our wrap up session, our keynote speaker, Renee Hobbs, reminded the students that we are limited by what we can do alone, but if we multiple our reach by one, we double our possible impact, by two, by three, our reach grows and grows. What we are doing at the Academy is mobilizing a global network of scholars, activists, and professionals to help change the world.

2. We need to believe in Media Literacy as a change agent – I think all the participants need to believe in the Academy as a change agent. Christy Pipkin of the Nobelity Project reminded us of how change starts, by just getting up and going. And this is what our faculty and students believe in. It’s why we are still doing this.

3. Creating a core of lifelong friends – This is not an understatement. When passionate people get together and become friends, they are far more motivated to be part of collective goals and ideals. This is what happens at the Academy, and why we’ve been able to grow into a vibrant, diverse, and dedicated community.

4. It’s about one word: Empowerment – During the final day of the Academy, a group of students from Argentina were filming interviews to make a video to bring home to their university, to help spread the word about media literacy. They asked me a simple question: if there is one word you associate with the Academy, what is it? Empowerment. From the most senior faculty to the youngest student, at the core of “why do we we do it?” is to empower future leaders in media across the world.

In Salzburg we are forming a global collective of young leaders, emerging faculty, professionals, and activists who are building a dynamic global initiative for media literacy as the path to active, engaged, and empowered citizens. Faculty come to form a global research network (see our News Literacy book, our World Unplugged study, and our Tethered World study), to embrace in faculty development around how we teach media literacy in our respective institutions, and to try and help build a solid framework for media literacy education as it crosses cultures, borders, and divides.

Through the work of dedicated young and emerging leaders in media fields across the world, who have the passion to do good, we achieved a long list outcomes and projects. There were creative videos on UGC, Information Overload, Groupthink, and Bias, among others. There were simple stories about Acceptance too. These were all part of an attempt to use media literacy to solve some of the information challenges we face in a digital age. You can see more work on identity, community, and action through media literacy here.

See the Me stories
See the We stories
See the Media Literacy Action Plans

And finally, I noticed that as students began to wax poetic about how much they missed their Academy and Schloss, a few began to create top 10 takeaway lists for their experience. As always, they are far more creative, provocative and funny than I could imagine. What a great way, however, to really say something about the Academy, that is sweet, to the point, and powerful.

So, without further ado, here is my Academy list for 2012.

1. It’s not what you do in life, it’s who you do it with.
2. Media Literacy is personal to each of us, but collective around the values that we want our communities to uphold
3. Change starts with you, and multiplies with those around you.
4. You can only break cultural barriers when you break down your own barriers first. That is a lifelong process.
5. Faculty learn as much from students as they do from Faculty. It’s a dirty secret we keep
6. When you hike the Untersberg, you transcend groups, and become an elite team of Academy overachievers
7. The faculty are the most amazing hard working lifelong friends we have the fortune of knowing
8. The students are the most amazing hard working lifelong friends we have the fortune of knowing
9. The Academy is about empowerment. Media is the tool we use to get there.
10. Dance. And when you can’t think of anything else to do. Just dance.
Bonus: Thanks to everyone, 2007-present, who have made this the most rewarding experience in the world for us. It’s amazing what we’ve done and where we can go. It takes a group of really motivated people to make that happen. We’re lucky to have you all.

The Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change
@salzburgAcademy
http://www.facebook.com/SalzburgMediaAcademy

Community Media through the Eastern European Lens

Kosice, Slovakia, 16 June 2012

This past week I’ve been traveling through Slovakia, starting in Bratislava talking with the editors of the English Language Slovak Spectator, then moving onto the University in Trnava, to explore the school of communication, and finally for the last four days in Kosice, where I’ve been participating in the International Festival of Local Televisions (iFolt). The festival has been quite pleasant. I’ve had the opportunity to serve on the international jury selection committee, watching some great (and some not so great…) short form film, documentary, and local news pieces from all over Europe, but primarily in the Balkan region. I’ve also had the opportunity to listen to some very interesting research about the Velvet Revolution, and learn much of the vibrant and recent history of that period as told through a Slovak-perspective. As my host from the US Embassy put it, “From 1989 to today, we’ve swung from one extreme (communism) to the other (hyper-capitalism).” While Slovakia tries to make sense of its new found economic and political freedoms (it still struggles with corruption, materialism, and excess…but then again, don’t we all?), one of the major areas of revolution and still unsettled change is local media.

I was invited here to talk about media literacy and empowering civic voices. I’ve met with a range of folks from a range of professional and educational industries. After talking with them (over countless hospitable beverages), I realized media literacy here is already something the Slovaks are passionate about in the education industries, but still needs to make its way into discussions on community media, local programming, and citizen dialog in general.

The majority of practitioners at iFolt are entrenched in creating great content and also in the main questions and challenges it seems the world is facing in community media: how will we operate in 5-10 years (or sooner)?, how OR will we exist with less and less support?, and how do we reach younger generations who can’t listen and don’t want t?

All generations of media producers here seem to understand the need to really engage their constituents with participatory approaches to media production, but often get mired in the aforementioned challenges. There are three points where I think community media and media literacy stands to help the situation throughout this region:

1. ReFrame the conversation from what’s lost to what’s ahead – This has been preached for some time now, but it can never be said enough. The conversation must start from what opportunities lie ahead (arguably more than ever) instead of how difficult it has become to have the support and infrastructure that once was and is no longer. This is a vital point and it needs to evolve into how community media can take advantage of the now seemingly endless ways to offer great content, service, dialog, and voice to their community.

2. It shouldn’t just be “local televisions” – Implicit in the title of the festival itself is the medium, which is breaking down. In the participatory media project that happened parallel to the festival, the street reporters found overwhelming public shift to the internet as the main source of all content. If this is the case, local media needs to respond. And participatory media isn’t just about having people learn how things work, and then creating linear content themselves (which is too often the case). It’s about people finding ways to empower communities, like collaborative efforts, goals, incentives, programming, etc. There is a need to make things participatory from the ground up.

3. Local media needs to form strong partnership with community stakeholders…ahem, universities – I talked for a while with Erik Mollberg, the Assistant Manager of the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, IN. He is doing some great work providing resources and space for the public to produce, create, share, and express through the community media operation run there. It seems that the community media outlets need to form stronger partnerships with public spaces, including libraries (public and school) and the university. What a way to use the pulse of new technology (students) for public media. It makes total sense but is often not taken advantage of. Take a look at the GR Tag Tour started by the community media center in Grand Rapids, MI. What a great way to enable youth, community, and media to thrive.

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The festival aptly gives out the Golden Beggar Award, based on the old myth of a kind beggar in Kosice who saved enough of his earnings to build a magnificant home in the middle of the city. It’s an apt title for the current state of local and community programming. But if we want to reframe how we think about the future of community and participatory media in an age of less traditional support but a more vibrant public, it may be high time to see the Golden Beggar not before he built his house, but after.