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Media Psychology

~ Informing, Educating and Influencing

Media Psychology

Monthly Archives: June 2016

This Is How Much Data The Internet Gets Through In One Minute

30 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

 

Source: This Is How Much Data The Internet Gets Through In One Minute

Computer software company Domo has just released its fourth annual installment of its “Data Never Sleeps” series, which breaks down our online habits and Internet activity across the biggest online media platforms. As you can imagine, our appetite for information and emojis has only gotten stronger over the course of this year.

Over 200 million people hooked up to the Internet this year, meaning that 3.6 billion of us are just a few clicks and a scroll away from each other. Pretty impressive, considering when Domo started this project in 2013 there were just 2.1 billion people online.

As the world chomps through 18,264,840 megabytes of wireless data every minute, pretty much every household name of the online world has seen a similarly salient boost, such as millennial matchmaker Tinder, which receives 972,222 “swipes” every single minute; that’s over 380,000 more than last year.

There’s also some new players to the game such as Giphy, the GIF search engine, which has risen through the ranks of the Internet giants within just three years. After integrating with Twitter and Facebook, this platform now serves up around 598,217 GIFS every single minute.

For comparison, you can check out the 2015 edition right here.

 

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Life Is Streaming Past You – Binge Media Culture Finds a Receptive Audience in Americans

12 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

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The freedom to binge on all media anytime. See a problem ahead?

Source: Binge Media Culture Finds a Receptive Audience in Americans

Future Tense

By TEDDY WAYNE           MAY 2, 2014

When Beyoncé released, without warning, 17 videos around midnight on Dec. 13, millions of fans rejoiced. As a more casual listener of Ms. Knowles, I balked at the onslaught of new material and watched a few videos before throwing in the towel.

Likewise, when Netflix, in one fell swoop, made complete seasons of “House of Cards” and “Orange Is the New Black” available for streaming, I quailed at the challenge, though countless others happily immersed themselves in their worlds of Washington intrigue and incarcerated women.

Then there is the news, to which floodgates are now fully open thanks to the Internet and cable TV: Flight 370, Putin, Chris Christie, Edward Snowden, Rob Ford, Obamacare, “Duck Dynasty,” “bossy,” #CancelColbert, conscious uncoupling. When presented with 24/7 coverage of these ongoing narratives from an assortment of channels — traditional journalism sites, my Facebook feed, the log­out screen of my email — I followed some closely and very consciously uncoupled from others.

Had these content providers released their offerings in the old­ media landscape, à la carte rather than in an all-­you-­can-­eat buffet, the prospect of a seven­ course meal might not have seemed so daunting. I could handle a steady drip of one article a day about Mr. Ford in a newspaper. But after two dozen, updated every 10 minutes, plus scores of tweets, videos and GIFs that keep on giving, I wanted to forget altogether about Toronto’s embattled mayor.

While media technology is now catching up to Americans’ penchant for overdoing it and finding plenty of willing indulgers, there are also those like me who recoil from the abundance of binge culture.

In the last decade, media entertainment has given far more freedom to consumers: watch, listen to and read anything at anytime. But Barry Schwartz’s 2004 book, “The Paradox of Choice,” argues that our surfeit of consumer choices engenders anxiety, not satisfaction, and sometimes even a kind of paralysis.

His thesis (which has its dissenters) applies mostly to the profusion of options within a single set: for instance, the challenge of picking out salad dressing from 175 varieties in a supermarket. Nevertheless, it is also germane to the concept of bingeing, when 62 episodes of “Breaking Bad” wait overwhelmingly in a row like bottles of Newman’s Own on a shelf.

Alex Quinlan, 31, a first­year Ph.D. student in poetry at Florida State University, said he used to spend at least an hour every morning reading the news and “putting off my responsibilities,” as well as binge ­watching shows. He is busier now, and last fall had trouble installing an Internet connection in his home, which effectively “rewired my media­consumption habits,” he said. “I’m a lot more disciplined. Last night I watched one episode of ‘House of Cards’ and went to bed. A year ago, I probably would’ve watched one, gotten another beer, then watched two more.”

Even shorter-­term bingeing can seem like a major commitment, because there is a distorting effect of receiving a large chunk of content at once rather than getting it piecemeal. To watch one Beyoncé video a week would eat as much time as watching all in one day, but their unified dissemination makes them seem intimidatingly movie ­length (which they are, approximately) rather than like a series of four ­minute clips.

I also experienced some first-­world anxiety last year with the release of the fourth season of “Arrested Development.” I had devoured the show’s first three seasons, parceled out in 22 ­minute weekly installments on Fox as well as on DVD, where I would watch episodes I had already seen (in pre­-streaming days, binge­ watching required renting or owning a copy, which was more like a contained feast). But when Netflix uploaded 15 new episodes totaling 8.5 hours on May 26, I was not among those queuing up for it. It took me some time to get around to the show, and once I had started, the knowledge of how many episodes stretched in front of me, at my disposal whenever I wanted, proved off-­putting.

This despite the keeping­-up-­with­-the-­Joneses quality to binge­ viewing. If everyone is quickly exhausting every new episode of a show, and writing and talking about it the next day, it’s easy to feel left out of the conversation if you haven’t kept pace. And sometimes when you’re late to the party, you decide to stay home instead.

Because we frequently gorge when left to our own Wi­Fi­ enabled devices, the antiquated methods of “scheduling our information consumption” may have been healthier, if less convenient, said Clay Johnson, 36, the author of “The Information Diet.” He recalled rushing home after choir practice when he was younger to catch “Northern Exposure” on TV.

“That idea is now preposterous,” he said. “We don’t have appointment television anymore. Just because we can watch something all the time doesn’t mean we should. Maybe we should schedule it in a way that makes sense around our daily lives.”

“It’s a lot like food,” he added. “You see some people become info­anorexic, who say the answer is to unplug and not consume anything. Much like an eating disorder, it’s just as unhealthy a decision as binge­watching the news and media. There’s a middle ground of people who are saying, ‘I need to start treating this form of input in my life like a conscious decision and to be informed in the right way.’ ”

For example, some news fanatics, Mr. Johnson said, are breaking free from reading only perspectives they agree with, a practice that can be both compulsive and unedifying — not to mention emotionally damaging, said Mr. Quinlan, the doctoral student.

“With the things that get us to really crave the news, the tenor of the story tends to have a negative impact on the way we see the world more generally,” he said, referring to the controversial and scandalous subjects that draw in chronic readers and viewers. “We become more cynical.”

Does he regard his own bingeing on these topics as escapist?

“Absolutely,” he said. “You forget about your life for 30 minutes while you read about Chris Christie’s implosion.”

Joshua Ferris’s forthcoming novel, “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour,” is about “the obsessive­-compulsive nature of your own personality emerging through these platforms, and disliking the person who is taking advantage of them,” he said. Mr. Ferris, 39, confessed to bingeing on news, TV and YouTube videos, though he recently took a six­month purgative sabbatical.

“The person who binges is the laziest and most craven version of me,” he said. “I fall down the rabbit hole and berate myself for having done so. If I have spare time, I’d like to think I would choose to spend it parenting my son. But instead it’s, ‘You watch the iPad and I’ll watch Netflix,’ and suddenly I’m not being an ideal parent.”

Bingeing is also becoming a tactic of the book industry, though only in genre fiction. It would be hard to imagine publishing new literary titles from an author at a fast enough rate to be deemed binge­-worthy, with the notable exception of Joyce Carol Oates. I’m grateful that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” six Proustian volumes of autobiographical novels sprawling out over 3,500 pages, is being translated sequentially from Norwegian into English.

As for Mr. Quinlan, the former TV binger, he’s channeled his habit to a more highbrow outlet.

“I’m now binge­reading scholarly articles on the poetry of John Ashbery,” he said.

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels “The Love Song of Jonny Valentine” and “Kapitoil.” Future Tense appears monthly.

A version of this article appears in print on May 4, 2014, on page ST2 of the New York edition with the headline: Life Is Streaming Past You.

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See how our brains group words by meaning in surprisingly complex semantic maps

07 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

https://aeon.co/videos/see-how-our-brains-group-words-by-meaning-in-surprisingly-complex-semantic-maps

A groundbreaking new study from the Gallant Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley is transforming how scientists understand language organisation in the brain. Published in Natureon 28 April 2016, the paper ‘Natural Speech Reveals the Semantic Maps That Tile Human Cerebral Cortex’ reveals that we use our entire brain – and not just the temporal lobe, as once believed – to group words by meaning. And while every ‘brain dictionary’ appears to be unique, they share some surprising similarities. To learn more about the research, explore the interactive map based on the study at the Gallant Laboratory’s website.

Video by Nature

Animator: Alexander Huth

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How TV Affects Brainwaves

05 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Ken S. Heller in Media Effects, Media Psychology, Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cognitive, Psychological Effects

Nice clip from TVSmarter’s Terry Severson and worth understanding.

tvSmarter

Here’s an excerpt from my new brainwave page.

Please let me know if you have any questions, suggestions for improvements, etc…

Also, this is just an excerpt, for more complete information please go to:

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/brainwaves.html

How Does TV Affect Brainwaves?



View original post 766 more words

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How Biased Is Your Media?: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast – Freakonomics

05 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

When it comes to politics and media, the left argues that the right is more biased than the left while the right argues that the left is more biased than the right. Who’s right?That’s what we try to answer in our latest podcast, “How Biased Is Your Media?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript below.) In a way, this episode is a follow-up to a podcast we put out a few months ago called “The Truth Is Out There, Isn’t It?,” which examined how we choose to believe what we believe about a variety of important issues. In this episode, we apply that same idea in a small-bore fashion, going after media bias.

Source: How Biased Is Your Media?: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast – Freakonomics

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