Exam preparation materials

Chapter 8 • Audience: Individual Perspective

A very broad city street with lit buildings on both sides and traffic on the streets. Lit billboards and large store fronts are seen on either side.

Even the incredible information processing power of the human brain can be overwhelmed when stimuli aggressively compete for attention in the modern world.

Fresh photos from all over the worlds/Getty Images

Key Ideas: People’s traits and exposure states influence how they make decisions—both consciously and unconsciously—about filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction.

· Information Processing

o Filtering

o Meaning Matching

o Meaning Construction

· Analyzing the Idea of Exposure to Media Messages

o Exposure and Attention

§ Physical Exposure

§ Perceptual Exposure

§ Psychological Exposure

§ Attention

o Exposure States

§ Automatic State

§ Attentional State

§ Transported State

§ Self-Reflexive State

· Information-Processing Traits

o Cognitive Traits

§ Field Independency

§ Crystalline Intelligence

§ Fluid Intelligence

§ Conceptual Differentiation

o Emotional Traits

§ Emotional Intelligence

§ Tolerance for Ambiguity

§ Non-impulsiveness

· The Media Literacy Approach

o Processing Information

o Tools

· Summary

· Further Reading

· Exercises

Harry and Ann are discussing their relationship over lunch on campus.

“Harry, you never pay attention to what I say!”

“How can you say that? We spend almost all day together every day and you are constantly talking,” Harry replies. “I hear what you say.”

“Maybe, but you don’t understand what I say.”

“Yes, I do. I know a lot about you. I know the names of all your brothers and sisters, and where you went to high school, and your favorite color and—”

Ann interrupts, “Those are facts about me. They are not me! You don’t seem to know me.”

“I know the meaning of every word you say. I don’t need a dictionary!”

“There is more to meaning than the definitions of the words I use!”

As we encounter messages from the media, we are continuously processing the meaning of those messages. That processing is shaped by a person’s set of information-processing traits as well as the states they experience while encountering media messages.

In this chapter, I will first show you the three-step process humans use when encountering media messages. Then I present an analysis of the idea of attention so that you can understand that while we are consciously aware of some of our media exposures, a great deal of our media exposure occurs while we are in non-attentional states. Next, the chapter outlines the cognitive and emotional traits that exert the strongest influence on how we process media messages. Finally, these ideas are used to show you how you can increase your media literacy.

INFORMATION PROCESSING

As we navigate through our media message–rich environment every day, we are constantly engaged in a series of three information-processing tasks. These tasks are filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction (see Table 8.1). First, we must decide whether to filter the message out (ignore it) or filter it in (continue processing it). If we decide to filter it in, then we must make sense of it, recognizing the symbols in that message and matching our learned definitions to the symbols. And often, we need to continue beyond matching meaning to engage in the task of meaning construction.

Table 8.1

Filtering

As you saw in Chapter 1, there has been a huge increase in the amount of information generated, which has led to media companies competing much more aggressively for our limited attention. We cannot possibly pay attention to all the media messages constantly clamoring for our attention, so we must filter most of them out. Cognitive psychologists have estimated that human brains are constantly processing about 11 million pieces of information from the body’s five senses every instant, but humans are limited to processing only about 40 of these pieces of information consciously at any given moment (Wilson, 2002). This means that each human is constantly encountering an overwhelming amount of information but that they must filter out almost all of it; that is, we can only pay attention to a very small sliver of that information at any given time.

How are we able to continually handle such a massive filtering task? The answer to this question is that we rely on automatic routines that run in our brains. Think of these automatic routines as similar to the many programs that are constantly running on our computers. When we turn on a computer (laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc.), programs are automatically loaded and start performing all kinds of tasks without us having to direct the computer to do each one. To illustrate this point, think about your email account. Your email provider uses spam filters to screen out all those emails that they determine are coming from spammers who are trying to sell you things such as pseudo-wonder drugs, pet rocks, and other products that 99% of us would never buy. Spam filters are automatic routines that do a considerable amount of filtering for you without asking you whether you want to receive emails from various addresses. However, because you don’t see the tens of thousands of spammer addresses that the automatic filter is using, you don’t know whether the spam filter is blocking out some messages you might want to read. For the sake of efficiency, we don’t make the considerable effort that would be required to read through the long list of spammer addresses; instead, we let our spam filters run automatically.

Our minds also have filters that automatically guide the processing of messages. This raises the question of who programmed those filters—who decided which messages to filter out. If it was you who fully programmed this code, then the filter is automatically following only your commands. But what if some of the filtering code was programmed by someone else? If this is the case, then you have let that other person exercise some control over what you see and what you do not get to see.

A close up of a screen with the search results for the keywords online deals. Folders are seen in a column on the left side of the screen.

Our personal preferences, web history, and even the conversations we have around our devices affect the results we get from search engines such as Google. Have you noticed these effects?

SpiffyJ/Getty Images

Some media services do a significant amount of filtering for us. For example, when we shop for a book on Amazon.com, the keywords we use might generate a list of several hundred possible books, but Amazon shows us a screen of perhaps a dozen books. When we do a search for information on Google, the search might result in several million hits, but Google displays a screen with its top choices to save us from spending all day going through thousands of screens. For example, when I Googled “information overload,” my screen said there were 92.6 million results. While this is helpful in going from the 30 trillion websites that Google says it searches down to 92.6 million pages, it still leaves me with far too many choices to process in a reasonable amount of time. These filtering services proclaim that they are providing you with efficiency, which is true. But they are also exercising considerable control over the filtering process. And they are continually seeking ways to increase their control over those filtering processes by claiming to personalize our searching and shopping experiences. For example, until 2009, Google relied exclusively on your keywords as filters when constructing a hit list for your searches. But in December of that year, Google changed its algorithm to include the personal data it had been collecting from users over the years. Since then, your searches on Google are determined not only by the keywords you enter but also by the personal information that Google has about you and people like you. Thus, two people who type in the exact same keywords into a Google search will be given a different hit list as a result of their search if they have a history of expressing different interests. (To test this for yourself, do Exercise 8.1.) Then, in the fall of 2010, it rolled out Google Instant, which guesses what you are searching for as you type in the keyword. Google Vice President Marissa Mayer said that the company hoped to make the search box obsolete—Google wants to guess at what you want to search for so that you won’t even need to type a keyword (Pariser, 2011).

Where do these companies get their information about you in order to direct your choices? They collect some of the information themselves by recording your interactions with them; they also can buy a tremendous amount of information about you—your financial transactions and your media usage, including how often you use social media, email, and text as well as what you talk about. One of these companies that collects personal data and sells it to marketing companies, organizations, and governments is Acxiom. You probably never heard of Acxiom because it keeps a low profile among the general public. But Acxiom is a very successful data company that has an extensive database on 96% of all Americans and half a billion people worldwide. This means that there is a 96% chance that Acxiom has collected thousands of details about you, including your current and past addresses, what you buy with credit cards and checks, how often you pay your credit card bills, whether you own a dog or a cat and its breed, whether you are right-handed or left-handed, what kinds of medication you use based on pharmacy records, and on and on (Pariser, 2011). These large data firms collect even more information on individuals than the government does. Remember the terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers on 9/11? The major U. S. intelligence agencies (Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, Drug Enforcement Administration, etc.) worked round the clock to identify the terrorists; three days later, they announced that they had identified 11 of the 19 terrorists involved. Most of the information those intelligence agencies used to identify the perpetrators was bought from Acxiom (Pariser, 2011).

Internet companies employ sophisticated algorithms to churn through all the information they have about you in order to make reasoned guesses about what you like, then they use those guesses to direct you to particular products. These companies tell you that they are trying to make your searching and buying experiences more efficient. And they do offer efficiency in the sense that they are filtering your choices down to a manageable number. However, their filtering process also prevents you from seeing many choices that you may like. Thus, they are significantly narrowing your range of choices and experiences without your awareness.

Implications of Filtering Algorithms

Imagine the following scenario: A marketing company assembles a huge database about college students by pulling together information from Facebook pages, credit history, health history, parents income level, and so on. Then someone in that marketing company develops an algorithm that churns through all that data and rank orders all the college students on potential for success and economic wealth.

Now, imagine that the marketing company’s algorithm ranks you at the bottom but ranks your roommates at the top as potential winners. The marketing company sells its rankings to advertisers who then send your roommates all kinds of great offers for low-interest credit cards, coupons for exciting trips, opportunities to network with successful professionals, and so on. Meanwhile, you are ignored by these advertisers because you are regarded as an undesirable target audience.

Your roommates go on to live very successful and happy lives because of all the opportunities offered by advertisers who bought data that told them that your roommates were highly desirable targets. Your roommates get higher-paying jobs at graduation than you because employers looked at the rankings. Your roommates go on to get bigger raises and promotions, have better health care plans, travel more and meet more interesting people, and so on. Marketers can set people off in different life paths by the opportunities they offer certain people and not others.

QUESTIONS

· Do you think this is fair?

· Should advertisers offer the same opportunities to everyone?

· In a society where people’s needs are so varied and fragmented, does it make sense to expect all advertisers to incur the high cost of advertising to everyone when they know that many of those people will never buy their products?

Meaning Matching

Meaning matching is the process of recognizing elements in the message and accessing our memory to find the meanings we have memorized for those elements. This is a relatively automatic task. It may require a good deal of effort to learn to recognize symbols in media messages and to memorize their standard meanings. But once learned, this process becomes routine. To illustrate, think back to when you first learned to read. You had to learn how to recognize words printed on a page. Then you had to memorize the meaning of each word. The first time you saw the sentence “Dick threw the ball to Jane,” it required a good deal of mental effort to recognize how the letters composed words and to recall the meaning of each word. With practice, you were able to perform this process more quickly and more easily. Learning to read in elementary school is essentially the process of being able to recognize printed words and to memorize their denoted meanings. When we are young, we also learn how to recognize other elements in messages (numerals, symbols, pictures, sounds, etc.) and memorize the denoted meaning of those elements.

This type of learning develops competencies. By competency, I mean that either you are able to do something correctly or you are not. For example, when you see the phrase 2 + 3, you either recognize that the 2 and the 3 are symbols that refer to particular quantities or you do not. You either recognize the + symbol as referring to addition or you do not. You can either perform this mathematical operation and arrive at the answer of 5 or you cannot. Working with these symbols does not require—or allow for—individual interpretation and creative meaning construction. Competencies are our abilities to recognize standard symbols and recall the memorized denoted meanings for those symbols. If we did not have a common set of symbols and shared meanings for each of these symbols, communication would not be possible. Education at the elementary level is the training of the next generation to develop the basic competencies of recognizing these symbols and memorizing the designated meaning for each one.

When your cell phone makes a particular sound, you know that means you have received a text. You look at the screen and see a name and know which friend has sent you that text. You tap a specific icon on your screen and your text message is revealed. That message has words and emoticons that convey meaning to you. In this example, the sound, name, icon, words, and emoticons are each symbols that have a specific meaning that you have learned in the past and are now able to match with a learned meaning with almost no effort. This task is accomplished automatically because you have acquired those competencies.

Oftentimes, the process of meaning matching is all we need to satisfy ourselves that we have processed the full meaning of a message. But in many instances, meaning matching is not enough; we feel there is more meaning that we can derive from a message, so we are motivated to engage in meaning construction.

Meaning Construction

In contrast to meaning matching, meaning construction is a much more challenging task. It is not an automatic process; instead, it requires us to think about moving beyond the standard denoted meaning and to create meaning for ourselves by using the skills of induction, deduction, grouping, and synthesis. We engage in a meaning construction process either when we have no denoted meaning for a particular message in our memory banks or when the denoted meaning does not satisfy us and we want to arrive at a different meaning.

Let’s say you get a text from your friend Christopher who has just broken up with his girlfriend Christine and the text message says, “Chris is not happy with your help. Thanks a ton.” This message is too ambiguous for meaning matching. For example, does the Chris in the message refer to the sender or his ex-girlfriend? Is the sender being sarcastic when he says, “Thanks a ton” because he resents your interference? Or is he sincere because you helped him break up when he couldn’t do it himself? To answer these questions, you need context about your friendship with Christopher, about his relationship with Christine, his intention to break up with her or not, and so on. You need skills rather than competencies to analyze the situation, evaluate his intention, see how this message fits into the pattern of your relationship, and synthesize an appropriate response.

Many meanings can be constructed from any media message; furthermore, there are many ways to go about constructing that meaning. Thus, we cannot learn a complete set of rules to accomplish this task; instead, we need to be guided by our own goals, and we need to use skills (rather than competencies) to creatively construct a path to reach our goals. For these reasons, meaning construction rarely takes place in an automatic fashion. Instead, we need to make conscious decisions when we are constructing meaning for ourselves. Also, every meaning construction task is different, so we cannot program our minds to follow the same procedure automatically when we are confronted with a variety of meaning construction tasks.

Much of our processing of media messages utilizes meaning construction. There is a large body of research that clearly shows that each of us brings a considerable number of factors with us to any media message exposure and that these factors constitute a frame that we use to interpret the message. For example, Kepplinger, Geiss, and Siebert (2012) conducted a study to see how people constructed meaning in news stories. They wanted to see if the way the media presented the story influenced how viewers interpreted the events and people in those stories. The researchers found that the way the media told the story did indeed influence the respondents’ interpretation of meaning but that the meaning was also strongly influenced by the personal frames of the individual respondents.

Two female anchors are seen on a set against a backdrop with two camera pointed at them.

Just as creepy horror music can make a rom-com trailer seem ominous, the framing and presentation of a news story can deeply affect how the audience interprets the message.

VM/Getty Images

While meaning matching relies on competencies, meaning construction relies on skills. This is one of the fundamental differences between the two tasks of meaning matching and meaning construction. Competencies are categorical; that is, either you have a competency or you do not. However, skill ability is not categorical; on any given skill, there is a wide range of ability. That is, some people have little ability whereas other people have enormous ability. Also, skills are similar to muscles. Without practice, skills become weaker. With practice and exercise, they grow stronger. When the personal locus has a strong drive for using skills, those skills have a much greater chance of developing to higher levels.

The two processes of meaning matching and meaning construction do not take place independently from one another; they are intertwined. To construct meaning, we first have to recognize symbols and understand the sense in which those symbols are being used in the message. Thus, the meaning matching process is fundamental because the product of the meaning-matching process then is imported into the meaning-construction process.

It’s important to avoid getting the two mixed up. Consider the example of a physics exam in which the professor asks students how they could use a barometer to measure the height of a building. If the professor is treating this as a meaning-matching task, then there is one sanctioned answer—take a reading of barometric pressure at the foot of the building and again at the roof and then, using a particular formula, translate the differences in readings into feet, thus computing the height of the building. But what if a student is creative and can think of other ways to use the barometer to measure the height of the building? This is what Neils Bohr did on a physics exam at the University of Copenhagen in 1905. Bohr answered the question by saying that he would go up onto the roof of the building, tie a string to the barometer, lower the barometer to the ground, and then measure how long the string was. The professor gave him an F. When Bohr went to talk to his professor and explain his reasoning, the professor did not change the grade. Bohr then explained that there were many ways to answer the exam question, such as throwing the barometer off the roof and counting the number of seconds it took to hit the ground and calculating the distance from that data, or measuring the length of the shadow of the barometer and the building and then calculating the ratio. While all of these alternative methods could yield an accurate measure of the height of the building, the professor did not care because he was looking for one particular answer that required matching the problem to the one solution he taught in his physics class. Bohr took the F that day but continued to use his creative mind to become a very successful physicist, winning the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922 for his contributions to atomic structure and quantum mechanics.

Metaphors for How Human Minds Work

Philosophers have been speculating for millennia how the human mind works and scientists have been conducting research tests of the human mind for perhaps a century. However, we are still in the early stages of understanding this wonderfully complex phenomenon. Thus, it helps to think about the human mind metaphorically. Two popular metaphors have been clocks and clouds (Brooks, 2011).

Clocks are self-contained, orderly systems that can be examined in a reductive manner; you can break down a clock into its component pieces and see how they all fit together in one and only one way. This metaphor captures what neurologists do; they focus on the parts of the human brain and how each part functions.

Clouds, in contrast to clocks, are irregular, dynamic, and idiosyncratic. They change from minute to minute and can be formed in many different ways. The essence of clouds cannot be captured in numbers or fixed structures. The cloud metaphor reflects how humanists regard the human mind.

There are scholars who continue to debate which conception of the human mind is more accurate. But as you can see, both are useful ways to think about what the human mind does.

When we take a broad perspective on media literacy, we can see that there are times when the human mind seems to act similar to a clock and there are other times when it appears more as a cloud. With meaning-matching tasks, the human mind acts more similarly to a clock as it automatically clicks through the routine of recognizing symbols and accessing the meanings that are connected to the symbols in memory. With meaning-construction tasks, the human mind acts more similar to a cloud as it makes associations in a more amorphous and constantly changing manner.

QUESTIONS

· Can you think of examples in your life where your mind acted more like a clock?

· Can you think of examples in your life where your mind acted more like a cloud?

· Which metaphor describes the way your mind works better?

ANALYZING THE IDEA OF EXPOSURE TO MEDIA MESSAGES

In everyday language, the terms exposure and attention are often used synonymously. However, now that you have seen that we are exposed to a great number of media messages without paying attention to them, it is important to highlight the difference in meaning across these two terms.

Exposure and Attention

As we clarify the difference between exposure and attention, it is helpful to analyze the idea of exposure and see that there are several kinds of exposure. Let’s look at a sequence of three types of exposure: physical exposure, perceptual exposure, and psychological exposure to media messages.

Physical Exposure

The most foundational criterion for exposure is physical presence. A person must experience some proximity to a message in order for exposure to take place. Physical exposure means that the message and the person occupy the same physical space for some period of time. Thus, space and time are regarded as barriers to exposure. If a magazine is lying face-up on a table in a room and Harry walks through that room, Harry is physically exposed to the message on the cover of the magazine but not to any of the messages inside the magazine unless Harry picks it up and flips through the pages. Also, if Harry does not walk through that room when the magazine is on the table, there is no physical exposure to the message on the cover of the magazine. Likewise, if a television is turned on in the lunchroom during the noon hour and is turned off at 1 PM, anyone who walks through that room after 1 PM is not physically exposed to the television messages.

Physical proximity is a necessary condition for media exposure, but it is not a sufficient condition. A second necessary condition is perceptual exposure.

A woman holds one side of a fabric book with the a young girl holding the other side. Two more children are seen between them as they all look at the book. Two large windows are seen behind them.

How are each of the three types of exposure—physical, perceptual, and psychological—present as this woman reads to the children?

iStock.com/Weekend Images Inc.

Perceptual Exposure

Perceptual consideration refers to a human’s ability to receive appropriate sensory input through the visual and auditory senses. We are constantly immersed in a wide range of stimulus elements, but we perceive only a small fraction of these elements because of the limits on our sensory organs and processing ability. We live in a world where information is encoded on each of billions of different frequencies along the electromagnetic spectrum. One of these frequencies is called light and our eyes are sensitive to perceive some of the information on that frequency. At other frequencies (e.g., television signals, radio signals, cell phone signals, etc.), we cannot hear that encoded information but we have invented devices to translate that information into a form that occurs within our ability to perceive it (e.g., radio receivers translate that information into sound waves within our range of hearing).

Compare & Contrast Meaning Matching and Meaning Construction

Compare: Meaning matching and meaning construction are the same in the following ways:

· Both are essential tasks of information processing.

Contrast: Meaning matching and meaning construction are different in the following ways:

· Meaning matching is a largely automatic process whereas meaning construction requires attention and concentration.

· With meaning matching, symbols are efficiently matched with previously learned meanings whereas with meaning construction, people move beyond simply accepting the previously learned meaning of symbols and infer (or create) fresh meanings that fit better with the context of the present situation and/or the person’s own needs for meaning.

· Meaning matching relies on competencies whereas meaning construction requires skills.

The perceptual criterion, however, has a feature beyond simple sensory reception; we must also consider the sensory input–brain connection. Frequently, when the sensory input gets to the brain, it must be transformed into something that we can understand. For example, when we watch a movie in a theater, we are exposed to individual static images projected at about 24 images per second. But humans cannot process 24 individual images per second in a conscious manner; instead, those individual images run together and appear as continuous motion. Also with film projection, there is a brief time between each of those 24 individual images every second when the screen is blank, but the eye–brain connection is not quick enough to process the blanks, so we do not see those blanks as blanks; instead, we only see smooth motion. If the projection rate of images were to slow down to under 10 images per second, we would begin to see a flutter; that is, our brains would begin to see the blanks because the replacement of still images is slow enough for the eye–brain connection to begin processing them.

Stimuli that are outside the boundaries of human perception are called subliminal. Subliminal messages leave no psychological trace because they cannot be physically perceived; that is, humans lack the sensory organs to take in stimuli and/or the hardwiring in the brain to be sensitive to them.

There is a widespread misconception that the media put people at risk for subliminal communication. This belief indicates a confusion between subliminal and subconscious. There is an important distinction that needs to be made between subliminal and subconscious because they are two very different things and they have two very different implications for exposure. Subliminal refers to being outside a human’s ability to sense or perceive; thus, it is always regarded as non-exposure. However, once media stimuli cross over the subliminal line and are able to be perceived by humans, it is regarded as exposure. However, this does not mean that all exposure is conscious, and this brings us to the third criterion in our definition—psychological exposure.

Limits of Human Perceptual Ability

· Seeing: With the human eye, we have three kinds of cones in the retinas at the back of our eyes. One code recognizes red, one blue, and one green. Thus, the human eye perceives three primary colors, and every color we see is a combination of these three.

Some animals, such as skate fish, have no cones; they experience the world only in white and black (presence of light and absence of light).

Some birds and insects have up to six types of color receptors (Storr, 2014) so they can perceive much more of a range of color than we can.

· Hearing: Human sensitivity to sound frequency extends from around 16 Hz and 20,000 Hz, but sounds are heard best when they are between 1,000 Hz and 4,000 Hz (Metallinos, 1996; Plack, 2005).

A dog whistle is pitched at a frequency higher than 20,000 Hz, so humans cannot perceive that sound—it is outside their range of human sensitivity to sounds.

Bats have very poor sight compared to humans, but their hearing is much more developed, so they live in a world of sounds.

· Smells: Many animals have a much more sensitive perceptual ability to experience a wider range of smells. For example, dogs have a much better sense of smell than humans do, so they live in a world of smells much more than humans do.

QUESTIONS

· Can you think of ways in which your human senses are better than other animals?

· Can you think of ways in which your human senses are more limited than other animals?

Psychological Exposure

In order for psychological exposure to occur, there must be some trace element created in a person’s mind. This element can be an image, a sound, an emotion, a pattern, and more. It can last for a brief time (several seconds in short-term memory) or a lifetime (when cataloged into long-term memory). It can enter the mind consciously (often called the central route), as when people are fully aware of the elements in the exposure, or it can enter the mind unconsciously (often called the peripheral route), as when people are unaware that elements are being entered into their minds (see Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Thus, there is a great variety of elements that can potentially meet this criterion for psychological exposure. The challenge then becomes organizing all these elements into meaningful sets and explaining how different kinds of elements are experienced by the individual and how they are processed as information.

Attention

In order for attention to occur, a person must first clear all three of the exposure hurdles described above—physical, perceptual, and psychological exposure. However, these three things alone do not guarantee attention; something else must also occur. That something else is conscious awareness of the media message. As you can now see, there are a lot of things that have to happen in order for us to pay attention to a media message. For this reason, it is rare for a media message to achieve attention. Harold Pashler, who wrote The Psychology of Attention (1998), explains that at any given moment, awareness encompasses only a tiny proportion of the stimuli impinging on a person’s sensory systems. Furthermore, while we are paying attention to one thing, our attention can be distracted away to another thing. He says there are times when “attention is directed or grabbed without any voluntary choice having taken place, even against strong wishes to the contrary” (p. 3). Thus, when we are paying attention to a conversation with our roommate, our attention can be grabbed by a sound or an image that pops up on our computer screen and we shift our attention away from our roommate to the screen.

Exposure States

Thus far, I have made a distinction between automatic processing and paying attention to particular media messages. This suggests two exposure states, but to better understand the experience of media exposure, we need to consider two additional exposure states. Thus, the four media literacy exposure states are: Automatic, attentional, transported, and self-reflexive. Each of these states is a qualitatively different experience for the audience member. By this, I mean that these four are not arrayed along a single continuum where they are distinguished simply by the degree of attention. Instead, crossing the line from one state to another results in a qualitatively different experience with the message.

Automatic State

In the automatic state of exposure, people are in environments where they are exposed to media messages but they are not aware of those messages; that is, their mind is on automatic pilot as it filters out all the messages in the environment. This screening out continues automatically with no effort until some element in a message breaks through people’s default screen and captures their attention.

In the automatic processing state, message elements are physically perceived but processed automatically in an unconscious manner. This exposure state resides above the threshold of human sense perception but below the threshold of conscious awareness. The person is in a perceptual flow that continues until an interruption stops the exposure or bumps the person’s perceptual processing into a different state of exposure or until the media message moves outside of a person’s physical or perceptual ability to be exposed to it.

In the automatic state, people can look active to outside observers, but those people are not thinking about what they are doing. People in the automatic state can be clicking through a series of websites without paying attention to the messages on those sites. While it may look to an observer that the person is actively searching the web, the person may be just randomly clicking through websites while thinking about something else. Even when there is evidence of exposure behavior, this does not necessarily mean that people’s minds are engaged and that they are making” decisions; rather, the decisions are happening to them automatically.

Exposure to much of the media is in the automatic state. People have no conscious awareness of the exposure when it is taking place nor do they have a recollection of many of the details in the experience if they are asked about it later. This is especially the case when people are multitasking. Someone might be listening to music, surfing the web and talking to a friend on the phone; while the person may be paying attention to the phone conversation, they are in an automatic exposure state with regard to the music and the websites. If their attention suddenly shifts to an image on a website, then they slip into the automatic state with the phone conversation and no longer pays attention to what their friend is saying. Multitasking severely reduces a person’s cognitive advantages (i.e., ability to concentrate on a particular message) but enhances their emotional gratifications (i.e., receiving pleasure from more than one thing at a time; Wang & Tchernev, 2012).

Attentional State

Attentional exposure refers to people being aware of the messages and actively interacting with the elements in the messages. This does not mean they must have a high level of concentration, although that is possible. The key is conscious awareness of the messages during exposures.

Within the attentional state, there is a range of attention, depending on how much of a person’s mental resources one devotes to the exposure. At minimum, the person must be aware of the message and consciously track it, but there is a fair degree of elasticity in the degree of concentration, which can range from partial to quite extensive processing, depending on the number of elements handled and the depth of analysis employed.

Transported State

When people are in the attentional state but are pulled into the message so strongly that they lose awareness of being apart from the message, they cross over into the transported state. In the transported state, audience members lose their sense of separateness from the message; that is, they are swept away with the message, enter the world of the message, and lose track of their own surroundings. For example, when watching a movie in a theater, we often get so caught up in the action that we feel we are involved with that action. We experience the same intense emotions as the characters do. We lose the sense that we are in a theater. Our concentration level is so high that we lose touch with our real-world environment. We lose track of real time; instead, we experience narrative time: We feel time pass as the characters feel time pass. This transported state typically occurs when people are playing digital games.

Four men are seen holding consoles and leaning forward from the couch they are sitting on. Beer bottles are seen on the low table in front of them.

Have you ever been reading a book or playing a video game and been so absorbed by the message that you forget that you are not actually part of it? That is the transported state.

iStock.com/aywan88

The transported state is not simply the high end of the attentional state. Instead, the transported state is qualitatively different than the attentional state. While attention is very high in the transported state, the attention is also very narrow: People have tunnel vision and focus on the media message in a way that eliminates the barrier between them and the message. People are swept away and enter the message. In this sense, it is the opposite of the automatic state, in which people stay grounded in their social world and are unaware of the media messages in their perceptual environment; in the transported exposure state, people enter the media message and lose track of their social world.

Self-Reflexive State

In the self-reflexive state, people are hyperaware of the message and of their processing of the message. It is as if they are sitting on their own shoulder and monitoring their reactions as they experience the message. This represents the fullest degree of awareness; people are aware of the media message, their own social world, and their position in the social world while they process the media message. In the self-reflexive exposure state, the viewer exercises the greatest control over perceptions by reflecting on questions such as Why am I exposing myself to this message? What am I getting out of this exposure and why? and Why am I making these interpretations of meaning? Not only is there analysis but there is also meta-analysis. This means that the person is not only analyzing the media message, they are also analyzing their analysis of the media message.

While the self-reflexive and transported states might appear similar because both are characterized by high involvement by audience members, the two exposure states are very different. In the transported state, people are highly involved emotionally and they lose themselves in the action. In contrast, the self-reflexive state is characterized by people being highly involved cognitively and very much aware of themselves as they analytically process the exposure messages.

INFORMATION-PROCESSING TRAITS

People differ in how well they process information. Traits can be used to explain why certain people process information better than other people. Traits are relatively enduring internal characteristics about individuals. They are considered innate in the sense that we are born with certain predispositions about how we think and feel about things. In this section, I focus your attention on seven traits that influence how we process information. The first four of these traits are cognitive; that is, the way we think shapes how we process information. The remaining three of these traits are emotional; that is, the way we feel influences how we interact with information.

Cognitive Traits

There are four cognitive traits that are most influential on how we process information from media messages: field independency, crystalline intelligence, fluid intelligence, and conceptual differentiation.

Field Independency

Perhaps the most important trait related to information processing is field independency. Think of field independency as your natural ability to distinguish between the noise and the signal in any message. The noise is the chaos of symbols and images. The signal is the information that emerges from the chaos. People who are highly field independent are able to sort quickly through the field of chaos to identify the elements of importance and ignore the distracting elements. In contrast, people who are more field dependent get stuck in the field of chaos; they get distracted and overwhelmed by all the details and miss recognizing the big picture, which is the signal. They are dependent on other people to tell them what is important (Witkin & Goodenough, 1977). For example, when reading a news story on a website, field-independent people will be able to identify the key information of the who, what, when, where, and why of the story. They will quickly sort through all the individual words, the graphics, and the visuals to focus on the most essential information about the event being covered. In contrast, people who are field dependent will have difficulty in distinguishing the signal from the noise; that is, they will regard all the elements in the news story as being equally important—even the peripheral elements of pop-up pictures, ads, borders, and so on. Because they regard all of these elements as being fairly equal in importance, they are as likely to remember the trivial as they are to remember the main points of the story. This is not to say that field-dependent people retain more information because they pay attention to more; on the contrary, field-dependent people retain less information because the information is not organized well and is likely to contain as much noise (peripheral and tangential elements) as signal (elements about the main idea).

Let’s try one more example of this concept. In your college courses, have you ever felt overwhelmed by all the details in the course’s textbook and asked your professor for a study guide to prepare for exams? If so, you are likely to be more field dependent than field independent. You have difficulty processing the text’s information adequately in order to distinguish between what is most important (the signal) and what is background or peripheral (the noise). In contrast, students who are more field independent are better able to filter out the noise and recognize the signal, and they are better able to match meaning and construct meanings of their own.

The value of being field independent increases as our culture—and your everyday life—grows more and more cluttered with media messages. Think about all the text messages, emails, and phone calls you receive and send each day. Think of all the words, pictures, images, and videos you see on all your screens every day. How well are you able to navigate through all the noisy clutter to direct your attention quickly to the most important information? If you can do this efficiently and accurately, you are likely field independent. But if you get distracted easily and go off on long tangents of trivial information, then you are likely more field dependent; that is, you allow the field to take you in all kinds of directions rather than controlling your journey of processing meaning for yourself.

People who are highly field dependent struggle with information-processing tasks. They either exhaust themselves trying to process every tiny bit of information with the same diligence or they give up on the processing challenge when they feel overwhelmed by all the information coming at them; they default to a passive state of filtering out everything that is not already very familiar to them and this locks them into a condition where they sink deeper and deeper into a rut rather than embrace new experiences and challenges.

Crystalline Intelligence

Some people think of the trait of intelligence as a single thing, but it is more helpful to distinguish among various kinds of intelligences. With information processing, it is useful to focus on two types of intelligence: crystalline and fluid. Both types of intelligence are important for media literacy.

Crystalline intelligence is the ability to memorize facts. It is best measured by tests of basic factual knowledge. Highly developed crystalline intelligence gives us the facility to absorb the images, definitions, opinions, and agendas of others. With most adults, crystalline intelligence seems to increase throughout the life span, although at a decreasing rate in later years (Sternberg & Berg, 1987). This means that as adults get older, they do better on tests requiring factual knowledge of their world, such as vocabulary and general information. In general, older people can more easily add new information to existing knowledge structures and can more easily retrieve those bits of information from the knowledge structures they use most often. To test this, pick a topic that is of equal interest to you and your parents (your neighborhood, your family, politics, sports, etc.) and then see how much detail your parents remember compared to you.

When you have a well-developed knowledge structure on a topic, it is easier to sort through new information as you are exposed to it, compare the new information to what you already have in your knowledge structure, and make a determination about whether the new information is useful to remember. If the new information is worthwhile to remember, it is easy to catalog in a way that makes it more efficient to recall later. However, if you are exposed to a message on a brand-new topic (one for which you do not have a knowledge structure), it is difficult to process that new information.

People strong in crystalline intelligence are good at what is called vertical thinking. Vertical thinking is systematic, logical thinking that proceeds step by step in an orderly progression. This is the type of thinking we need in order to learn the introductory information on any topic. We need to be systematic when we are trying to learn basic arithmetic, spelling, and dates in history. People high in crystalline intelligence are likely to have a more extensive list of competencies because they have memorized a much larger set of symbols and their denoted meanings.

Fluid Intelligence

In contrast to crystalline intelligence is fluid intelligence, which is the ability to be creative and make leaps of insight as well as perceive things in a fresh and novel manner. People strong in fluid intelligence are good at what is called lateral thinking. Lateral thinking, in contrast to vertical thinking, does not proceed step by step in a straight line. Instead, when confronted with a problem, lateral thinkers are able to take different perspectives on a problem, which allows them to see the problem from many different angles; this increases the likelihood that they are able to perceive a novel way to solve the problem that other people cannot perceive. Lateral thinkers are more intuitive and creative. They reject the standard beginning points to solving problems and instead begin with an intuitive guess, a brainstorming of ideas, or a proposed solution that might at first appear to be out of the blue.

Inventors and entrepreneurs are likely to be lateral thinkers because they approach old problems in fresh ways. For example, Thomas Edison invented so many things that by the end of his life, he had more than 1,300 patents in the areas of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movie camera, and projectors. This suggests that there is a capacity for generating new ideas that is better developed in some people than in others. This trait does not seem to be related to general intelligence but more to a particular way of thinking. There are smart and not-so-smart lateral thinkers, just as there are smart and not-so-smart vertical thinkers.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both of these traits of intelligence. Vertical thinkers tend to do best at solving traditional problems for which the solutions can be learned. However, when their traditional methods of solving problems break down, they are stuck and have nowhere to go because their systematic step-by-step method of proceeding has led them down a path to a dead end. When people are stuck at a dead end of thinking, it is the lateral thinkers who are not stopped by these barriers along a vertical thinking path, because they are able to work around those barriers. However, lateral thinkers can often be flighty and may come up with many new ideas that might not be feasible solutions. People who are good at both and who know when to use each approach are, of course, the most successful problem solvers.

Being strong on both these traits helps with increasing one’s level of media literacy. Highly developed crystalline intelligence gives us the facility to absorb the images, definitions, opinions, and agendas of others. This helps us a great deal in the meaning-matching task because we are likely to have acquired a large set of accurate matches of symbols and meanings. Highly developed fluid intelligence gives us the facility to challenge what we see on the surface, to look deeper and broader, and to recognize new patterns. This helps us a great deal in the meaning construction task because we are able to move beyond the surface meaning and construct meanings that are more useful for our own purposes.

Compare & Contrast Crystalline Intelligence and Fluid Intelligence

Compare: Crystalline intelligence and fluid intelligence are the same in the following ways:

· Both are natural cognitive abilities in which individuals vary along a continuum from low natural ability to high natural ability.

· Both can be developed to higher levels with training and practice.

· Both are related to a person’s level of media literacy: Higher abilities reflect a higher level of media literacy.

Contrast: Crystalline intelligence and fluid intelligence are different in the following ways:

· Crystalline intelligence refers to a person’s natural ability to memorize facts and absorb information as presented. It is reflected in vertical thinking, which follows a systematic, logical progression and is most valuable in learning the spelling of words, dates in history, and steps in solving arithmetic problems.

· Fluid intelligence refers to a person’s natural ability to be creative, make leaps of insight, and perceive things in a fresh and novel manner. It is reflected in lateral thinking, which is solving problems not by taking logical steps but by thinking outside the box.

Conceptual Differentiation

This cognitive trait refers to how people group and classify things. People who classify objects into a large number of mutually exclusive categories exhibit a high degree of conceptual differentiation (Gardner, 1968). In contrast, people who use a small number of categories have a low degree of conceptual differentiation.

Related to the number of categories is category width (Bruner et al., 1956). People who have few categories to classify something usually have broad categories so as to contain all types of messages. For example, if a person only has three categories for all media messages (news, ads, and entertainment), then each of these categories must contain a wide variety of things. In contrast, someone who has a great many categories would be dividing media messages into thinner slices (breaking news, feature news, documentaries, commercial ads, public service announcements, action/adventure shows, sitcoms, game shows, talk shows, cartoons, and reality shows).

When we encounter a new message, we must categorize it by using either a leveling or a sharpening strategy. With the leveling strategy, we look for similarities between the new message and previous messages we have stored away as examples in our categories. We look for the best fit between the new message and one of the remembered messages. Typically, it is rare to find a perfect fit; that is, the new message always has slightly different characteristics than our category calls for, but we tend to ignore those differences. In contrast, the sharpening strategy focuses on differences and tries to maintain a high degree of separation between the new message and older messages (Pritchard, 1975). To illustrate this, let’s say two people are comparing this year’s Super Bowl with last year’s Super Bowl. A leveler would argue that the two games were similar and point out all the things the two had in common. The sharpener would disagree and point out all the differences between the two Super Bowls. Levelers tend to have fewer categories so that many things can fit into the same category, whereas sharpeners have many, many categories. In our example, the first person would likely have only one category for Super Bowls, feeling that all the Super Bowls are pretty much the same. A sharpener might have a different category for every Super Bowl, treating each one as unique. Increasing one’s level of media literacy requires one to do more sharpening of categories for media messages, media companies, and media effects.

Emotional Traits

In addition to the four cognitive traits outlined above, there are three emotional traits that influence how you process information. These three emotional traits are emotional intelligence, tolerance for ambiguity, and non-impulsiveness.

Emotional Intelligence

The trait that explains our ability to understand and control our emotions is called emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is thought to be composed of several related abilities, such as the ability to read the emotions of other people (empathy), the ability to be aware of one’s own emotions, the ability to harness and manage one’s own emotions productively, and the ability to handle the emotional demands of relationships.

Those of us with stronger emotional intelligence have a well-developed sense of empathy; we are able to see the world from another person’s perspective. The more perspectives we can access, the stronger our emotional intelligence trait is. When we are highly developed emotionally, we are more aware of our own emotions. We also better understand the factors that cause those emotions, so we are able to seek the kinds of messages that get us the emotional reactions we want. In addition, we are less impulsive and are able to exercise more self-control. We can concentrate on the task at hand rather than become distracted by peripheral emotions.

Tolerance for Ambiguity

Every day, we encounter people and situations that are unfamiliar to us. To prepare ourselves for such situations, we have developed sets of expectations. What do we do when our expectations are not met and we are surprised? That depends on our trait of tolerance level for ambiguity. If we have a low tolerance for ambiguity, we are likely to feel totally overwhelmed by the constant flood of information. When we feel overwhelmed, we likely choose to ignore those messages that do not meet our expectations because we feel too confused or frustrated to work out the discrepancies.

In contrast, if we have a high tolerance for ambiguity, instead of feeling overwhelmed, we feel motivated by the challenge of making sense of the flow; we feel excited by the opportunity to use all that information as a resource to be creative and construct our own meanings; and we feel confident that the meanings we construct will help us satisfy our needs better than if we ignore all the messages.

During media exposures, people with a low tolerance for ambiguity encounter messages on the surface. If the surface meaning fits their preconceptions, then it is filed away and becomes a confirmation (or reinforcement) of those preconceptions. If the surface meaning does not meet a person’s preconceptions, the message is ignored. In short, there is no analysis.

People with a high tolerance for ambiguity do not have a barrier to analysis. They are willing to break any message down into components and make comparisons and evaluations in a quest to understand the nature of the message and why their own expectations were wrong. People who consistently attempt to verify their observations and judgments are called scanners because they are perpetually looking for more information (Gardner, 1968).

Non-impulsiveness

This trait refers to how quickly people make decisions about messages (Kagan et al., 1964). People who rush to a decision are impulsive. In contrast, people who take a long time and consider things from many perspectives are reflective or non-impulsive.

When making decisions, there is typically a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Impulsive people are most concerned with speed; they feel overwhelmed by decisions so they want to have things resolved as quickly as possible. For them, it is worth the risk to make a bad decision as long as they can quickly end the worry that comes with being faced with a decision-making task. In contrast, less-impulsive people are more concerned with accuracy; they fear being wrong, so they think about all the options of a decision, even if it takes a long time.

How much time we take to make decisions is governed by our emotions. If we feel comfortable encountering new information and like to work through problems carefully, we are likely to act reflectively and take our time. However, if we feel a negative emotion (such as frustration), we tend to make decisions as quickly as possible to eliminate the negative emotional state.

THE MEDIA LITERACY APPROACH

The ideas presented in this chapter will help you understand how you can increase your media literacy. That is, you can get better at making decisions about your media exposures and what you get from those exposures. The more you know about how humans process information and the tools they use in these information-processing tasks, the more effectively you can increase your media literacy.

Processing Information

The processing of information involves three tasks—filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction—each of which presents its own challenge. This chapter has shown you what these tasks are. Now you need to ask yourself a series of questions to understand how you are handling these tasks and their challenges.

As for the filtering task, ask yourself, “What are my media exposure habits? Why do I spend so much time with particular media and particular messages while ignoring others?” If you have good reasons for your habits, then it is likely that those filtering habits are helping you achieve your own goals. But if you are puzzled by some of your habits, it is time to think about changing those habits to see if your needs can be better met through exposure to different media and different kinds of messages.

As for meaning matching, ask yourself, “To what extent are the meanings I have memorized accurate?” If you have accepted faulty ideas as factually accurate, then you are likely to be automatically matching inaccurate meanings and therefore end up making decisions that are not likely to be in your best interest. Perhaps you have acquired some of those meanings by simply memorizing the opinions of so-called experts, such as newscasters, pundits, cultural critics, and so on. Perhaps the experts were later found to be wrong, yet you still hold onto a memorized opinion that is now faulty. Or perhaps you should not have memorized an expert’s opinion but instead constructed your own opinion that fits better with your personal beliefs and experiences. It is likely that your large set of memorized meanings contains elements that are out of date, are causing friction with what you now believe, or are faulty in some way. If you don’t identify them and clear them out of your mental dictionary, you will automatically continue to use those meanings and this can take you further away from your goals. Also ask yourself, “Are there important areas where I have not yet learned enough meanings (or words, faces, symbols, sounds, etc.) to allow me to function? Or is ignorance preventing me from understanding what is going on in these areas?”

As for meaning construction, ask yourself, “Am I relying too much on meaning matching and not enough on meaning construction?” The more you work on transforming the raw material of information into knowledge that helps you achieve your own goals, the more your meaning construction process will operate under your control.

The meaning of media messages is not always the way it might seem on the surface. There are often many layers of meaning. The more you are aware of the layers of meaning in messages, the more you can appreciate all the options for meaning construction that are available. And when you recognize multiple options for meaning construction, you can exercise more control over selecting the meanings that are most useful to you.

Some people perform these information-processing tasks better than others and are therefore more media literate than other people. Increasing one’s level of media literacy requires a strong personal locus. We need to be aware of our personal goals and needs and then exert the drive energy to take control of our meanings.

Tools

We also need tools to execute our plans. Some of these tools are traits that are inherent in our personalities. There are four cognitive traits that explain why certain people are naturally more media literate than others. These are field independency, crystalline intelligence, fluid intelligence, and conceptual differentiation. Ask yourself, “Do I have a lot of difficulty figuring out what is most important in a media message? Do I have difficulty in retaining the important facts in a message? Do I have difficulty in figuring out new ways to solve a problem when I get stuck? Do I have too few categories in my knowledge structures to catalog an adequate amount of information and make this information useful enough for me?” If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are experiencing a limitation in your information processing that is traceable to a cognitive trait.

We also differ in terms of emotional traits. These three emotional traits are emotional intelligence, tolerance for ambiguity, and non-impulsiveness. Ask yourself, “Do I have difficulty recognizing what other people are feeling? Do I have difficulty understanding what I am feeling? Do I expect other people to simplify things for me so that there is less chaos and fuzziness in my life? Do I frequently feel impatient in tasks so that it is hard to concentrate and I want to bail out and do something else?” If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are experiencing a limitation in your information processing that is traceable to an emotional trait.

Traits are difficult to change. But with work, they can be changed in ways that will make your information processing run more efficiently and more effectively. There is no way to avoid all information-processing tasks, so you are left with two options. One option is to continue avoiding your weaknesses—we all have them—and continue to struggle in these tasks more than you have to. The other option is to invest some work now to achieve improvements that will continue to pay dividends the rest of your life.

In addition to the tools we are born with, there are also tools that we have acquired. These tools are competencies and skills. Competencies are the tools people have acquired to help them interact with the media and to access information in the media’s messages. Competencies are learned early in life and then applied automatically. Competencies are categorical; that is, either people are able to do something or they are not. For example, either people know how to recognize a word and match its meaning to a memorized meaning or they do not. Having competencies does not make one media literate, but lacking these competencies prevents one from being media literate because this deficiency prevents a person from accessing particular kinds of information. For example, people who do not have a basic reading competency cannot access printed material. This will greatly limit what they can build into their knowledge structures. This will also suppress the drive states in the personal locus; people who cannot read will have very low motivation to expose themselves to printed information.

In addition to competencies, people need a set of media literacy skills, especially with the task of meaning construction. Skill development is what can make a large difference in a person moving from lower to higher levels of media literacy. People who have weak skills will not be able to do much with the information they encounter. For example, if their skill of analysis is weak, then they will not be able to dig out the good information from media messages. If their skill of evaluation is weak, then they will not be able to judge the quality or usefulness of information well, so they cannot tell which information is good and which is faulty. If their skills of grouping induction are weak, then they will not be able to see patterns across different messages. If their skills of abstraction are weak, then they will struggle to see the big picture in a message. And if their skills of deduction and synthesis are weak, then they will have great difficulty in incorporating new information into their knowledge structures. They will organize information poorly, thus creating weak and faulty knowledge structures. In the worst case, people with weak skills will try to avoid thinking about information altogether and become passive; as a consequence, the active information providers—such as advertisers, entertainers, and news workers—will increase their power as the constructors of people’s knowledge structures and will take control over how people see the world by altering their beliefs and by giving people faulty standards that they then use to create their attitudes.

Skills and competencies work together in a continual cyclical process. With certain information-processing tasks, some skills or competencies may be more important than others. For example, with the task of filtering, the skills of analysis and evaluation are most important. With the task of meaning matching, the competencies are most important. And with the task of meaning construction, the skills of grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis, and abstraction are most important. However, the value of the individual skills and competencies varies by particular challenges presented by different types of messages.

SUMMARY

As we encounter the flood of media messages each day, our brains engage in three interlocking information processing tasks: filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction. The task of filtering is performed automatically; almost all messages are processed unconsciously and only a very few break through into consciousness. The meaning matching task is also performed unconsciously, similar to a machine in which message stimuli (such as words, sounds, and images) are matched with recalled meanings. In contrast, the meaning construction task requires a conscious process using skills to create novel meanings for the messages we encounter.

Because so much of information processing takes place automatically, we need to periodically examine the mental codes that govern that process to determine if our mental codes are operating in our best interests. It is important to analyze our media habits periodically so that we can identify which habits are working to achieve our goals and which are diverting our time and attention away into wasteful or harmful practices. Once we can make this distinction clearly, we can reprogram our automatic codes so that when we return to the state of automaticity and our minds make thousands of decisions while on automatic pilot, those decisions will make us more productive, smarter, and happier.

Further Reading

Brooks, D. (2011). The social animal: The hidden sources of love, character, and achievement. New York: Random House. (424 pages, including index and endnotes)

This is an easy-to-read book about the human brain. It presents a lot of interesting information about what is known—and what scientists think they know—about this complex organ.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam. (352 pages, including index)

In this very readable best seller, Goleman argues that there is an emotional IQ, not just an intellectual one. He challenges the long-held belief that a person’s intelligence, as measured by a narrow IQ test, is an inadequate predictor of success or ability. First, he broadens the conception of intelligence and then he shows how a person’s emotional development interacts with a broad range of cognitive abilities. He cites physiological data to show that emotions are part of the brain and are triggered by the capacity of the body.

Konnikova, M. (2013). Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes. New York: Penguin Books. (273 pages, including index)

This book is a blend of psychological text, literary analysis, and self-help. The author, who is a fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories and has a PhD in psychology, examines how Holmes thinks and how he solves his mysteries. She shows readers how the well-known fictional detective uses psychological principles and thinking skills to solve crimes. The book is easy to read and shows readers how they can apply the same skills to solve problems in their everyday lives. She focuses on the skills of induction and deduction, which are two of the key skills of media literacy. Its eight chapters are organized into four sections: (1) understanding yourself, (2) from observation to imagination, (3) the art of deduction, and (4) the science and art of self-knowledge.

Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: How the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. New York: Penguin Books. (294 pages, including index and endnotes)

In this fascinating book, Pariser provides many examples about how the mass media are making filtering decisions for you.

Potter, W. J. (2019). 7 skills of media literacy. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. (176 pages, including references and glossary)

This book shows you a step-by-step approach to improving each of the seven skills of media literacy. It presents lots of examples and exercises for each skill.

Storr, W. (2014). The unpersuadables: Adventures with the enemies of science. New York: The Overlook Press. (355 pages, including index and endnotes)

The author is a journalist who has interviewed people who hold beliefs at odds with scientific evidence (creationists, holocaust deniers, etc.) to find out why they hold their beliefs. He concludes that all of human reasoning and knowledge is based on stories that we tell ourselves and that it is too psychologically troubling to change our stories, so we deny all those versions of the truth that do not conform to what we believe.

EXERCISE 8.1

CONDUCT A SEARCH ON GOOGLE TO OBSERVE THE RESULT OF PERSONALIZED SEARCHES

1. Get together with some friends in a group.

While this exercise can be performed with as few as two people, it works better with a larger number. Also, this exercise works better when the group is composed of people with a wider divergence of interests.

2. Brainstorm a list of searches.

The list of searches should be specific: They should refer to the specific interests and hobbies of the different people in the group.

3. Develop a list of keywords for the searches.

Try to use words that have more than one meaning. For example, the word fish could refer to the action of trying to catch food from a boat, searching for information, the victim in a con game, and so on. The word green could refer to a color, a person who is new at something, a person’s last name, and so on.

4. Conduct the searches simultaneously on Google.

Each person should be connected to the internet on their own device (laptop, notebook, smartphone, etc.), be on the Google home search page, and enter the exact same keyword at the same time.

5. Analyze the results of each search.

Notice differences in the time of search, number of hits, and sites ranked highest. Can you explain the differences in search results by the personal characteristics of the different people who conducted the searches?

6. Repeat the process above with relatively general terms, such as news, clothing, advertising, reality, effect, and so on.

Analyze the results of each search on a general term. Are there as many differences across people when you use a general term compared to when you use a specific term?

EXERCISE 8.2

THINKING ABOUT THE BREADTH OF YOUR LIFE EXPERIENCES

1. Friends

· Do you have lots of friends or just a few?

· Are your friends all pretty much the same as far as background, values, political attitudes, personality, and so on? Or is each friend very different from the rest?

2. Daily routines

· Do you march through life structured by the same routines, or do you try to make each day different?

· Do you wake up each day at the same time and go to bed at the same time?

· Do you eat your meals at the same time each day?

· Do you commute to school or work the same way every day or are you curious about new routes?

3. Shopping

· Do you shop at the same stores or are you always looking for new shopping experiences?

· When you enter a store, do you walk around the merchandise the same way each time?

· When shopping for groceries, do you buy the same foods and brands each week?

· When shopping for clothes, do you always look for the same styles and same brands?

4. Education

· Think about the range of courses you have taken in college or high school.

· To what extent is the range of courses due to the mandatory requirements for your degree and to what extent is the range due to your curiosity for exploring new areas of knowledge?

· How much of your education has been motivated by a desire to get a degree and how much has been motivated by your curiosity?

5. Media use

· Do you routinely access certain media (such as the internet) and routinely avoid others (such as print newspapers)?

· When you listen to recorded music, is it typically the same artists and same genre?

· When you watch movies or television programs, is it typically the same types of shows?

· To what extent do you have media habits; that is, how structured are your days by media exposure routines?

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