The Media: Thinking so You Don’t Have to

[IMG] Chris Pirillo Free AdSense Help The Media: Thinking so You Don?t Have to Aspartame is Poison Deciding on a Conference Keynote Live Conference Audio and Video Streaming Conference Marketing What kind of Blog Geek Reader are you? When Politics and Technology Collide

due to the simple fact that they use technology in their day to day business and that technology typically has something to do with the Internet and as a result, they find conferences like this. So it should come as no surprise when you read one of Pirillo’s most recent blogs on how technology is there to make our lives easier… to the point where people don’t want to use their brain anymore! This my friends, is by far, the one issue that frustrates me the most about some people… the lack of (or to use) their common

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We teach our kids not to do drugs, yet all they can see in between the news reports is how pharmaceuticals have made our lives easier with drugs (including protecting us from “restless leg syndrome”).Chris Pirillo According to the ads on tv, I suffer from “restless leg syndrome”. What do I do? I get up and walk away from the g-d tv! Because it’s my body’s way of telling me that it’s tired of sitting there so long. Move! Do something! Same thing happens when

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Very well said.

One thing to note further, there will be people who might try to debunk this expecting that you mean to say you plan to correct things and tell the truth by telling them what to think. It’s a vicious cycle that too many are stuck in where that very idea might come up in many.

Quite the contrary, what you are indeed doing is just calling attention to trying to learn something new from somewhere else and many streams of information at once. Let yourself learn. The first mistake made is thinking you know enough to know everything. Always be open to disprove your initial impression on things. Even if you have made a decision, allow it to fail.

Pride really does hurt us by the fact that it closes so many off. It incites emotional attachments, irrational traditions of thought and no chance for innovation or further progress. Pride is exploited by the pole-itical parties and the Main Stream Media, just as much as the subserviant majority who have been told to believe nearly everything they hear. So it’s two extremes that we must find an inner balance of. Don’t be too closed off by being obsessed with what you think you know, but also at the same time and on the other side of the coin, learn and compare information with what you have previously learned (the grain of salt expression kind of comes to mind), make a decision and continue to learn more.

That really is the way of things. It is how we are where we are today as a human species. But we are also the way we are today because of the select few exploiting the more animalistic side of us. Be warry of that. Be mindful. Remember the wisest person knows they know nothing.

I agree with you (and, in fact, took an undergrad sociology class last semester on Media & Society), but I have one quibble. You mention Restless Leg Syndrome in a derogatory fashion. I’ve been diagnosed with it for a year, but have had it, off and on, for four. An occasional episode is one thing, but it’s quite another to suffer from sleep deprivation for days or weeks at a time because your legs repeatedly jerk at night, keeping you awake. Requip helped - it didn’t go away completely, but kept my RLS under control enough for me to sleep better.

I actually got “into computers” because I enjoyed writing, photography and art and not because I wanted to be a geek. When I was in college my major was mass communication but after working on the college paper and a local “real paper” I began to realize I didn’t want to be a part of that “culture.” If I could do college over I would probably major in art and minor in computer science but I do enjoy writing and sharing news and ideas with others. The media in see in our local paper, TV stations, etc. is not the idealized world of “journalism” I was taught in college. I am thankful I can take those things I learned in journalism, media law, news and feature writing as a “citizen journalist in the real mass communications of the Internet.

Your take on this is very astute. The need for critical thinking and media literacy is huge. I often have different media on during the day and find myself wanting to scream at the TV because either the content is inane, inaccurate or ignorant.

Even C-Span is scary, although reporters are finally starting to question inconsistency of information in the new White House press room.

I’ve recently noticed some good content for teaching media literacy and critical thinking (del.icio.us/sheywood/media.literacy)

Thanks for posting this.

Keep it up, Chris, and don’t let anyone tell you different. We need as many awakened people in our world as possible.

You have recently jumped to the top of my to-read list.

The aim of the news is not to inform but to sell advertising.

Media outlets are becoming more consolidated, sure, but they are also competing with the average Joe for our attention. And with the always-on nature of citizen journalism, the outlets have to constantly come up with sensationalist content.

But the applications like Miro are starting to democratize the distribution of media, and I really think that the pattern is slowly changing.

I completely agree with this article and I’m using it in a paper I’m writing for school. I have one problem though, and it lies in the comments. People are looking past the article as a whole and singling out something so trivial out of it. The part about Restless Leg Syndrome is not about RLS, it is about the fact that while young people are told not to use drugs, we grow up in a society bombarded with advertisements for drugs that will help with nearly every problem or even inconvinience imaginable. The mentioning of RLS was not singling it out and bashing it, it is merely an example from current media. Commercials for RLS meds are all over the T.V. so it is only logical that it would be high up on the list of examples for meds. By singling out this one thing from the article, you not only took away nothing from the article, but you proved the point in an almost hard to beleive twist of irony.