Key Terms

Adhocracy-people with diverse skills and knowledge brought together to confront a specific challenge

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand your mental capacities.

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Brief Summary

Rise of digital media is perceived to have contributed to the decline in young people’s attention span. This is due to the fact that digital media encourages readers/watchers to scan the info environment rather than fix their attention on a single element. The response of young people to this digital media environment is multitasking. The difference between the adult and youth view of multitasking is shown in the farmer vs. hunter example. Farmers must localize their attention, while the hunter scans, looking for any sign of its prey.

Challenging the traditional view of intelligence is distributed cognition. According to Clark, “intelligence is distributed across brain, body, and world.” Meaning that intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed. Through the use of “information appliances that augment human’s cognitive capacities” distributed cognition focuses on reasoning. “Students need to know how to think with and through their tools as much as they need to record information in their heads.”(Clark)Playing in   games such as Call of Duty helps one form mental maps of what player and non-players (CPU) are doing. To plan, players don’t need to know what others know but what they are likely to do.

Today users have begun exploiting the potential of networked communication through a process called collective intelligence. The world of collective intelligence is where, “everyone knows something, nobody knows everything, and what any one person knows can be tapped by the group as a whole.” (Levy). Collective Intelligence is an alternative source of power that allows communities to respond to govt. institutions. Focus on teamwork is how today’s workforce is structured. People with diverse skills and knowledge are brought together to confront a specific challenge. Students aren’t prepared for this adhocracy, as schools are encouraged to create, “autonomous problem solvers”; while with collective intelligence ownership of work is attributed to the group.

Knowledge is always a process with collective intelligence as you must show proper judgment when trying to distinguish fact from fiction, argument from documentation, real from fake, and marketing from enlightenment. Using proper judgment requires not simply logic, but also an understanding of how different media institutions and cultural communities operate when attempting to authenticate new information.

New& Old Media

Old media to me is the type of media my parents had when they were my age. During that time period the ways of communicating information were through print media and through radio. I remember seeing my dad in the morning, walking around on eggshells, waiting on his aunt to tell him if he won the bet on the Laker game the previous night. He went through all of this because the newspaper wouldn’t have the game results until two days after the game. So in describing old media I would say that in terms of getting information it was very slow but with getting information more slowly chances are the information is probably more accurate.  I think new media is essentialy digital media. You have audio, video, images all a click away with new media. It really is the opposite from old media, in that you get it extremely fast but the information is less accurate since the appropriate amount of time to check your information is not properly utilized. This along with the fact that with old media the amount of people who could supply you with information was very limited, whereas with new media the number is infinite leading you to have to sort out what information is true and what is fabricated.

Work Cited

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. Print.