Cellphone Use in Classroom topic on a roll

I rushed to the CTV studios right after school yesterday and did the taping for Province Wide. I was 15 minutes late after getting out of the building and then finding on my drive that Wellington Street was closed. I was a little frazzled but managed to shake it.

Daiene asked me what I thought about banning cell phone use in schools and I explained I felt it was sad that some boards that ban the devices are missing out on opportunities to teach students about appropriate use. We chatted about parents who don't know how to set boundaries as role models for students and how students need to work through their compulsion so they don't end up like the generation before them. What a great opportunity for education to guide them through this. By the way, Daiene's cell phone went off during the taping and we had to re-start a question. Her daughter needed a ride home and I had probably kept her later since I came in a little late. It really wasn't her fault, but it was still pretty funny.

After supper, my husband showed me a news post on the Internet that Premiere Dalton McGuinty had been asked by Toronto reporters what he thought about cell phones in the classroom. The Toronto Board had just announced it had decided to review its cell phone policy. I immediately thought, "Yeah Neil!" Neil Andersen, who appears in my documentary is a retired media consultant for the Toronto Board of Ed. I was so glad that people were starting to talk about the issue. It's been a long time coming.

This morning I was surprised to see a negative backlash to what McGuinty had said. All he had said was that schools need to help students find appropriate use for ell phones in the classroom and that we need to consider a place for them. That's exactly what I had been saying Tuesday morning. I guess the fear-mongers ran with that one and attacked him for not considering the distraction of cell phones in the class. It's strange how people can twist things out of proportion because bringing them in to class is what we needed to do in order to deal with the compulsion to be on call. I wish people could see my documentary so they could understand the issued a lot better.

Before lunch, I got another call from the office that the CBC had been trying to get a hold of me again. CBC's radio syndicate requested 11 interviews for between 3 and 6 PM. I'm so glad I got up early this morning to write down some of the counter talk I could expect from people. It came in handy on the circuit. Some interviews went easily with talk show hosts that were open to the issues, but a couple went much tougher with the announced out in Halifax calling himself a curmudgeon and David Gray calling me crazy. I think David was just upset because I caught him on one of his own points. He said that teens shouldn't have cell phones in the classroom to use as tools because it's unfair to the ones who don't have them. I said it was an easy fix and that I had never had a problem with it. Students work in groups and the ones that have them are quite happy to share. He asked me if I really thought it was okay to ask the kids who have cell phones be asked to share with the ones who don't. I explained again that the haves are quite willing to share with the have-nots if you ask them, it's not a requirement. The haves don't mind sharing their phones while working in groups and don't see it as a big deal. It's all in how you use them in class and that's something the teacher can set up with the students; is how and when to use them. David asked "isn't that drawing a line between the haves and the have-nots? Shouldn't we level the playing field?" I said, "Are you saying that students should miss out on deeper opportunities for learning just to level the playing field when teachers can create equal learning opportunities through putting students into groups? He quickly changed the question.

There's several more points I made through 3 hours of talks. The battle with David Gray really stuck out because he challenged me. I have taped some of the interviews and will go over them to accumulate some of the issues that were raised and post them later. I also want to write about the questions my students had for me today. We had a great discussion on the fears that people have around texting. I could tell they had been sitting around the supper table talking with their parents about it. Great questions included: "is texting making us become more anti-social?" and "is texting ruining our ability to spell correctly and use proper grammar?" I will save these discussions for the next post as this one is getting quite long.

Texting and Teens Generates Interest

As I drove away from the CBC battling Toronto traffic to get back to the Waterloo Region, I felt a huge sense of relief. My documentary got handed in on time to Ryerson with my bound paper and I had a great time visiting friends and celebrating the end of my work. Appearing on Metro Morning and the provincial morning show felt like the wrap-up.

About a half hour after I'd arrived back at Waterloo Oxford I got a call from the office that CTV had been trying to get a hold of me. I was asked to appear on Province Wide for the coming weekend and reporter Frank Lynn asked if he could come out to the school to do a story. I made plans to tape Province Wide today right after school and asked for an extra day to get media releases all organized from the students so that we could be ready to have CTV come in Thursday.

I don't have the questions for Province Wide, but I have a feeling they're going to be around cell phone policies. Diane mentioned that my talk on CBC around trying out with students that they keep their cell phones on and out in the open intrigued her.

Documentary, "Conditioned To Be On Call" Finalized

Finally, the re-edits of my documentary on teens and texting are done. I have just burned the project to Blu-ray and will hand it in to Ryerson tomorrow.

This project has really got me thinking about how we can address the issues of cell phone use in schools. We need to start talking about it and come up with some solutions. I'm going to be interviewed on CBC's Metro Morning Tuesday about my doc and plan to talk about the compulsion that students feel to text using their phones and all the social pressures that surround that. I haven't received the questions for the interview yet, but during my pre-interview I talked a lot about self-regulation to fight compulsion so I'm hoping that will be the focus.

Typical reactionary response to bringing Facebook to education

I wasn’t surprised at the negative comments that appeared in the story write-up about the Waterloo Region Public school board planning to open its firewall to Facebook this September. Any time anything “new” is explored in education, wide-spread skepticism and reservation become rampant. I do find it hard to believe that not one student The Record spoke with felt that Facebook should be openly welcome in the schools. Or, maybe students weren’t asked about the potential benefits at all. Certainly, the experts in social media were not consulted.

I just returned this week from Scotland where I interviewed Dr. Tracey Alloway of Stirling University about using Facebook as a learning tool. Alloway has completed extensive research in the area and is currently meeting with her research team to write up and publish the results of her findings. What she told me was that social media, particularly Facebook, builds and exercises working memory –an important part of processing and managing incoming information. She likens working memory to a series of post-it notes that are sorted and pieced together to develop comprehension of a greater concept. Her studies also showed that using Facebook can actually increase the IQs of teens, improve multi-tasking skills, and raise Oxytocin levels –a chemical in the brain that helps us feel pleasure and fight depression.

While it is likely that students will continue to use Facebook to socialize, the novelty will wear off and with some guidance, they will find academically productive uses for the social media tool as well. Cyberbullying will become much less of a concern as teachers and parents become a guiding presence. Study groups, peer tutoring, and career networks will continue to develop as learning continues during and after school hours. With some lessons in digital literacy and digital citizenship, students will have a safe and empowering forum in which to communicate in the anytime, anyplace world they have created for themselves.

The Lone Shooter

I miss having my friend Mike with me on shoots. We were a great team. Mike took the stills and looked after the audio while I operated the camera. This year I have been filming on my own a lot. I feel like one of those one-man bands with a drum attached to my front and a drumstick rigged to my arm, harmonica at my lips, tambourines in between my knees and a horn on my belt. I often wonder if that's kind of how I look to people when I go out on shoots.

I find it tough to have to think about and monitor all the equipment myself. I've been interviewing people while having an ear bud placed in my ear to monitor for interfering background sounds. I am constantly scanning the camera viewer for proper headroom, noseroom, leadroom, light balance, tonal mergers and the audio v/u levels. My mic stand holds the boom now and I'm constantly checking it so that it's not in my shot, so that it's pointed in the right direction, so that it's not placed where someone will trip over it.

Over the next two months I will be flying solo to Boston, Vancouver and the U.K. to shoot my documentary. I'm having nightmares already of forgetting to white balance, charge my batteries, put a battery in the boom, plug my XLR in all the way, forgetting to check for stereo sound and failing to format my SDHC card properly. There's a lot that can go wrong on a shoot, especially when there's no one else looking out for you. Just as the airplane pilots will be doing before taking me away to shoot my doc, I'm going to follow a standard checklist. I'll post it once it's finished, though it's specific to my equipment set-up. Maybe I'll even have a story later on about how the checklist saved a shoot.

2-time Emmy award winner and Documentary film-maker Paul Saltzmann

Recently, Paul Saltzmann spoke at TEDx Waterloo. I had a chance to jot down some notes.

Paul Saltzmann worked at the NFB in the Montreal office at the age of 23. What he learned while working at the NFB is to “pause” and not to try to fill the void. The universe will give us opportunities.
As a young man, there were parts of himself that he didn’t like. Eventually, a voice inside of him told him to get away from the environment he grew up in to get a clearer view of himself.

Paul told the story of how he heard an NFB Director was going to Bombay, India and he wanted to get out of Montreal and find himself so he asked the director if he could go as his cinematographer. The director had already hired someone from the UK, but instead of walking away, he paused, and Paul stood in front of him, pausing as well. It was a long enough pause that the director asked, “Have you ever done sound?” Although Paul had never done sound, he said “yes” anyway and was soon off to Bombay India.

In India, Paul worked on a film for six weeks before receiving a letter from his girlfriend that she had moved in with “Henry”. Heartbroken, Paul tried meditation to heal his broken heart. The Beatles were at a meditation facility overlooking the Ganges in India recording an album. The place was closed to the public. “Not at the PRESENT time” a man at the gate told Paul when he asked if he could come in and learn how to meditate to heal his broken heart. Paul heard the word “present” and asked “can I wait?” He slept eight days outside waiting. Eventually, the man who taught meditation came back and let Paul in. After a week of meditation, Paul says his broken heart was healed and he felt better. One day he was walking past an open area of the complex with a beautiful view off a cliff and saw members of the Beatles including John Lennon and Paul McCartney sitting at a table with their girlfriends and spouses. McCartney offered him a chair after Saltzmann asked if he could take a chair. Paul’s internal voice told him they were just regular people and he began to talk with them. McCartney told him they had everything they ever wanted but it didn’t mean happiness. That was still something else you had to find for yourself. I suspect the broken heart story was a great excuse for getting into the complex, but Saltzmann is a fantastic storyteller and can be forgiven for being so ambitious.

Recently, Paul produced a documentary for the NFB called “Prom Night in Mississippi”. It took five months to film in Charleston. Actor Morgan Freeman had offered to pay for a black and white mixed race prom 10 years earlier. Paul called him and asked if the offer still stood. There was silence on the other end and so Paul paused and let the silence continue. Morgan Freeman answered that the offer did still stand. Paul went down and documented the whole process leading up to and including the event.

Saltzmann’s sage advice…slow down and notice the spaces the universe offers you…listen...and you will see opportunities open up for you.

Advertiser Terry O'Reilly "Friction is the Secret Ingredient"

O’Reilly’s job as an advertiser is to create the easiest, speed bump-free path to the sale. This takes skill, though Terry told us he wasn’t going to talk to us about it at TEDx Waterloo. Instead, Terry talked about the quirk in the collective psyche, saying sometimes people need friction before they will buy a product or buy into an idea. Friction, he says, can be the key ingredient in persuasion.

Terry told the story back in time of when housewives ignored a company making instant mix cakes. The company researched and talked to housewives and determined the emotions that surround the process. What they found was that the women felt they weren’t involved enough in the work of making a cake. They needed to be persuaded that they actually had something more to do in the process. The manufacturer went backward in the process and removed the egg from the mix. They then asked the women to put the egg back in so that they felt like they were more of the process in making the cake. By increasing the friction and adding the extra step women were attracted back to the product. Sales spiked.

O’Reilly talked about Johnson and Johnson having a marketing problem with their antiseptic cream. People would not buy the cream a second time. Johnson and Johnson brought human nature into their research. If we don’t feel pain, we don’t feel we are being healed so they put alcohol in the cream to give it a sting. The added friction of pain gave the product credibility and as a result, sales spiked back up.

Clairol introduced a hair product back in the 70s. The instructions for how to use the conditioner were 1. work conditioner into hair 2. let sit for 30 minutes 3. rinse…but it only took 2 minutes to work and not the 30 minutes that women were used to in the salon. So, Clairol suggested 30 minutes to give their product credibility by keeping the instructions for use in line with what the salons were doing. Friction aligned the new product with an existing belief system and made it legitimate.

O’Reilly’s message…Take a look at marketing over the last 100 years…friction can be a powerful tool to persuasion. You can take the concept of friction and apply it to fundraising. Terry cites a donation form for a charity with 3 donation boxes to choose from: a 500 dollar box, 50 dollar box, and 5 dollar box. There is friction with 500, 5 dollars is barely worth the stamp. They framed the desire of the 50 dollar box with the shock of the 500 dollar box and the shame of the 5 dollar box. 50 dollars was always the target.

O’Reilly also mentions an instance of setting up on-line shopping on an e-commerce site. The man designing the site looked at the 5 steps to the checkout process and replaced it with one step. He even added advanced error checking and retrieval of the page if the Internet went down. The idea failed miserably. The 5 steps created a friction that made the customers feel they had added security. Terry compares it to shopping. The narrower a store aisle, the more crowded it is…the more buying is done. More friction means more shopping as choice is a way to exert control over your environment. You control the experience by exercising choice. When the aisles are wide open, people won’t buy. They lash out by buying more in narrower areas.

O'Reilly says Steve Jobs understands his customers. 50 percent of products that are returned to stores actually still work. It’s just that people have a fiddle tolerance. People will only fiddle for 20 minutes. Jobs took this understanding and it applied it to unpacking the computer mouse. He purposely wrapped up the individual mouse so that you would have to become more familiar with it as you were unpacking it. No mice were returned after purchase. If you can embrace this concept, you will have less returns.

Lastly, in looking at human nature… Atul Gawande wrote a book called The Checklist Manifesto. He looked to others to see how they prevented mistakes…ie/ aircraft pilots. Gawade created checklists for hospitals. The hospitals that used this had the number of mistakes go down 8 percent. Unfortunately, only 1 fifth of hospitals in the U.S. use this. Although some surgeons felt offended (20 percent) when asked if they would want a surgeon operating on them to use a checklist , a whopping 95 percent said “yes”.

Friction works. It gives credibility. It can guide and steer people to positive outcomes. There is a real human nature element. O”Reilly looks back at books published in the 40s and 50s…Madison Avenue. He says the more things change, the faster it happens, but the study of the aspects of desires in man never change. These are fundamental traits of our species. Terry closes with the quote, “Friction is the secret ingredient to life” and Mary Poppins was wrong when she said a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, a spoonful of sand might make it go down quicker.

Another Look at Pointless Populism

William R. Seaman's “Active Audience theory: pointless populism”, 1992

Active audience theory grew in practice during the application of ethnographic research methods in the study of TV audience viewing practices in the 1980's. In John Fiske's 1987 book, “Television Culture” he explains how ethnography came to be a valid method of studying television and its viewers. David Morley (who Seaman actually criticizes in his 1992 paper), felt that Stuart Hall overemphasized the role of class in producing different readings (Hall's work was in encoding/decoding, examining preferred reading, negotiated reading, and oppositional readings). There were some cross similarities between people of different social backgrounds such as bank managers and apprentices, and Morley surmised that the two were similarly constructed as subjects of capitalist ideology, inserting themselves into the dominant ideology in a shared interest of the economy's survival and success. As a result, the emphasis of ethnography shifted away from the textual and ideological construction of the subject to socially and historically situated people. The emphasis in the late 80s turned to studying “the way people live in their culture” and acknowledged the differences between people despite their social construction and pluralized the meanings and pleasures they found in television. (Fiske) Greg Philo later writes that people do read the intended encoded message of a media text the same; it's not polysemic in having different meanings to different groups. He believes instead that audiences are likely to criticize the content of a message in relation to another perspective, which they hold to be correct. “They are therefore aware of the encoded meaning and the manner in which it was constructed -they just do not agree with it.” (Philo, Active Audiences and the Construction of Public Knowledge, 2008)



Summary of reading

Seaman has an aversion to ethnographic research in the field of cultural studies, rejecting the overall view that, “television audiences hold far greater power over the medium than is generally acknowledged.”(301) He also says that an “active audience approach has tended more to mystify than to clarify, to rationalize a set of practices rather than to explain them.” (309) Further, he charges active audience theorists with taking a rhetorical role in theory construction, rather than an analytic or descriptive approach. (306) Seaman also argues against the active audience theorist view that the viewer's individual interpretation constitutes interaction, implying a measure of control over the televisual text, as the text is just an A/V signal and is not altered itself by the viewer. (306) This goes against Fiske's view that TV doesn't have an effect on the individual, but rather on the ideology of a society in that it promotes and prefers certain meanings (that already exist).

Seaman has trouble with the term “free agency.” Unless viewers are aware of the “highly constrained character and content of programming...of the information, analyses, perspectives, beliefs filtered out by mainstream media, it is wrong to suggest they are truly free of their decisions to act.” (307)



Ethnographic Research

-Seaman believes it allows cultural studies theorists to makes self-serving judgements

Seaman's first critique of ethnographic research in active audiences is that it focuses on the apparent characterizations of these theorists in certain cultural practices as “resistant” or “oppositional”. He criticizes Morley's playing with the oppositional reading. Morley countered an earlier view that Thomas Lindlof and Paul Trandt had earlier observed in that television is used to create personal space and may actually be used to avoid conflicts and be used to lessen conflicts within larger families with his own reading that television is used for things such as acceptable zones for private pursuits and provides organizing centres and an opportunity for new types of communicative contexts. In doing so, Morley started to replace words such as “can be seen” with the more definitive “television is”. Another example Seaman gives is when theorists say that the text is being “used” in a particular context, it implies that the subject is controlling the text for his or her own purposes. Other questions must be asked first, such as whether or not the subject is even aware of alternative choices so that essentially I think what he is saying is that comparisons need to be made in order to judge the assessment's validity or plausibility. Seaman warns that theorists must be careful that possibilities are not turned into judgments as this can be misleading.


Audience Interpretation

-Ineffective override and negative reinforcement

A) Seaman warns that mediated effects cannot confirm whether or not a target subgroup interprets degrading representations of that subgroup in ways that overthrow the dominant reading.

He used the example of Fiske's work in stating that “women have told me how much they enjoyed Charlie's Angels when it appeared on their screens in the 70's and that their pleasure is seeing women taking active, controlling roles was so great that it overrode the incorporating devices that worked to recuperate feminist elements in its content back into patriarchy.” The way that the women may have perceived the experience of viewing cannot stand alone as the success of overriding the incorporating devices of a television program. “The word “pleasure” has to be explored in context. Seaman surmises that interpretations that rest on such elements as “viewer pleasure” can be self-serving.

B) He also warns that an oppositional reading of a text by a subgroup may work as an affirmation of their prejudices, giving them even more strength. He cites the anti-Arab racism in the American mainstream media and says the harm is not the demoralization of the subgroup, but the reinforcement of the prejudice and an encouragement to continue racist feelings in the dominant group.


Empowerment and the Active Audience

-Seaman wonders how can Active Audience findings empower, if there's no readable action being taken?

Seaman says viewers do use the information they pick up on TV as reference points in making sense of the world but worries when theorists see this as an empowerment. He argues that viewer empowerment through the use of interaction with television is alarming to the “degree that elite interests dominate our news media and so constrain the field of options for 'reference points', examples and analyses” (305). I think he means that knowing that not all of the information and viewpoints make it to the audience by way of TV, it would be scary that we only see what does make it to the tube as worthy enough of conversation, consideration, or even value. More evidence to this view is on page 308 when he writes, “The problem does not lie with audiences, but rather with a system of mass communication that systematically excludes certain forms of programming and imagery in favour of a profoundly restricted and highly interest driven selection. The problem is not with audience interpreting practices, but with what is available for interpretation.”

Seaman seems to have a problem with theorists who use the term “empowerment” when it doesn't really have a measurable effect in terms of action. On the subject of empowerment, he writes about Madonna as empowering for young women, “does nothing to decrease the staggering risk of date rape and other all too common forms of sexual assault and harassment.” (308) The result deals more with thoughts and feelings, which Seaman says is difficult to characterize, and makes the point that it's not that he feels audience thoughts and feelings should be ignored.



Seaman harshly slams the active audience approach, saying it provides no insight into research in communication and media theory. He refers to the “pleasures made possible by inflected television readings simply will not address, let alone confront, the parochial bigotries, racist and sexist hiring practices, or the conservative voting trends that threaten even the most basic social programs, affirmative action and abortion rights here in the U-S...the violence against women and people of colour. “ (309)



Morley's Rebuttal

In 2006, Morley wrote a response to the backlash against ethnographic research in his paper title, “Unanswered Questions in Audience Research.” Morley feels Seaman's “Pointless Populism” is really “a return to a very old story about media effects and largely readable as the return of a narrowly fundamentalist political economy.”

“It is one thing to argue (as I have myself done) that some recent audience work has exaggerated, and wrongly romanticized the supposed power and freedoms of media consumers, imagining that all audiences everywhere are engaged in a continuous form of “semiological guerrilla warfare” (Eco, 1972) with the media, in which they constantly produce oppositional readings of its products.” (Morley, 2006)

Morley further acknowledges Seaman's criticism of qualitative ethnographic research for not leading to follow-up action. “The further question raised by the critics of cultural studies audience work is whether it matters if people make oppositional or subversive decodings of media material, unless they go out and 'do something' (go on a demonstration; start a petition) about it.” Morley defends himself by saying that the many micro-instances of 'pre-political' attitude change in the cultural sphere acts as the impetus for political change. (Morley, 2006)

Morley ends up calling for a balanced approach to the two methodological practices of qualitative and quantitative. He surmises that there are times when more traditional types of research such as quantitative (number crunching and statistics) may be useful in audience research but warns that too much content can “deaden” under the weight of the “quantity of unanalysed contextual data. He gives validity to qualitative and ethnographic research in that it provides insight into, “the complexities of how audiences “indigenise” the media materials which they consume”, but warns that it runs the “danger of, descending into anecdotalism” and “we should not mistake the vividness of the examples it offers us for their general applicability.” (Morley, 2006)

I pulled my first all-nighter Sunday night. I wanted to get my research paper done for Research Methods at least two weeks before it's due. The reason why? I know how weird this sounds but if I write the paper now and leave it for at least a week, I can go back and edit my own work. Besides, I had just read 12 papers on my subject area, "TV is still a part of the texture of everyday life". If I had gone to bed without writing my paper, I would surely have forgotten everything I read by the next day. That's what having kids does to your brain. Well, that and age and probably some stress added to that as well.

Culture IS Ordinary!

While pulling my information together on Raymond Williams, I soon discovered how important it would be to explain his whole background, for this is central to Williams’ socialist outlook on culture. In order to best describe his background and ideas, I played with words and images in PowerPoint to help me organize the information and stick to the most important points of Williams’ contributions to the study of media. I went on the Rolands Collection website and downloaded a video of Michael Ignatieff interviewing Raymond Williams back in the 80s on an interview show in Britain. The file had DMR rights to it so I couldn’t play the video itself, but I was able to record a short audio clip of Williams speaking about mobilized privatization.

Raymond Williams was born to a working class family in Wales; the son of a railway signalman. He went to grammar school and later attended Cambridge on a scholarship. After being called away as a wireless operator and a tank operator during World War II, Williams returned to finish his schooling in modern languages, history and the classics. He became a tutor in Adult Education where he discovered that people who wouldn’t normally be from the same social circles (think of a factory worker and a doctor), could come together for social discourse. As well, because of his own ordinary upbringing and background, he discovered through experience that culture is not for the elite, it is for everyone. In this, he differed from Marxist viewpoints in approaching culture through class conflict. He felt the teachings misunderstand what culture really was, and disagreed that “since culture and production are related, the advocacy of a different system of production is in some way a cultural directive--to serve the ideology". He felt that socialism wasn’t the only model.

Williams felt culture could not be separated from other factors when studying effects models on an audience. He felt that the interpretation of culture must be done so in relation to its underlying system of production such as its political and economic conditions. Culture is a whole way of life and the arts are part of the social organization.

In looking at Williams’ writing in the article, I focused on three areas and asked three questions in relation to these areas:

1. Q: Williams criticized Lasswell’s sociology of mass communications’ effects model that looked at, “who says what, how, to whom, and with what effect because it excluded the question, “to what purpose or for what intention,” Although Williams believes it’s worth looking at “intention” at least from the point of view that there are interests and agencies of communication involved, the problem with the social model itself he says is that it, “abstracts social and cultural processes to concepts like socialization, social function, or interaction,” which basically amounts to filtering the results until you get what you want from them. The problem with this Williams says, is that you can’t isolate certain influential factors in socialization (such as school, work, home, television, and the press) because they are interwoven in social and cultural process. Can you think of another example involving a communications medium in which these socialization factors are intertwined?

A: For a modern day example, Pricewaterhouse Coopers did research which Don Tapscott was permitted to use in his book, “Growing Up Digital”, a study of the effects of and on the net generation, he admits in his Introduction when writing about interviewing 10-thousand people, holding dozens of private executive briefings on program results and recommendations”, that, “ The reports are proprietary to the research sponsors, but some of the high-level findings and main conclusions can now be shared publicly.” (xi Grown Up Digital, Mc-Graw-Hill, New |York, 2009) He thanks the sponsors on the next page, there are 25 of them including Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Sony, and Ogilvy One. (1. market research 2. technology company, 3. advertising agency. The companies holding the big bucks are directing the research here. What interests might Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Sony, or Ogilvy One have in a book that uses its research to show that Tapscott has discovered not a bunch of spoiled “screenagers” with short attention spans and zero social skills, but a "remarkably bright community which has developed revolutionary new ways of thinking, interacting, working, and socializing"?
(front flap, Grown Up Digital, Mc-Graw-Hill, New |York, 2009)

Furthermore, Williams said conflicting ideology also makes it difficult to focus on a particular aspect of socialization. In the article, Williams points out a preferred or dominant reading that violence is a contributing factor in aggressive behaviour, and an oppositional reading could be that violence is cathartic. (Stuart Hall ) Halloran called this ability to have differing perspectives in a society, 'the plural values of society' enabling them to 'conform, accommodate, challenge or reject'.

Williams facetiously made an argument that if there is much more violence on TV than what is taking place in society, one might think agencies and producers are the ones living outside of the norm. (R. Williams: “Effects of the Technology and its uses”, 1975)

2. Q: Williams mentions that the technological landscape has led to a much broader access to television news, yet he notes the co-relation between voter turnout rates lowering and the numbers of people involved in social protests and demonstrations rising. What is he saying about the effects of television viewing here?

A: "It could be argued that increased exposure to competitive assessment in these terms has weakened adherence to occasional election as a political mode, or even that (given other kinds of political stimulation by television - the reporting of demonstrations, the dramatisation of certain issues) it has had some strengthening influence on alternative modes. (p 4)
Williams questions the preferred reading that the increased exposure to politicians provided by TV has strengthened the public's engagement with politics. He's suggesting an oppositional way of looking at this in that maybe watching TV news turns off voters and leads them to act publicly instead in the form of demonstrations and protests.

3. Q: The last question is in relation to Lazersfeld’s two-step flow model in that information is disseminated to the opinion leaders in society with the most access to media and the greatest understanding of content…who then pass on the information through their own politically-altered filters. Keeping this in mind, how would Williams view the use of the Internet for the dissemination of information?

A: I think he would look at the Internet as a broadly based tool in western society for getting both preferred readings and oppositional readings out into the public. (He might also note the somewhat limited use in some more remote areas due to either geographic availability of the service or economic affordability of the technology). The benefit of the medium in its heavy use of interactive, user-generated material, is that people who are willing to get their information from a variety of sources, may be better equipped to enter an educated arena of discourse with people from all different classes. The downside, he would say is the amount of disinformation dispersed on the Internet as a result of members of the public having difficulty determining some of the sources as reliable. This could make it difficult for the public to become genuinely educated on issues. As for the pop-up ads and side-bars, he alluded to a future of controlling agencies with commercial interests in his writing, Television – Technology and Cultural Form. Although he was talking about television as a great tool for helping generate, “an educated and participatory democracy”, Williams cautioned that, “a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could further reach into our lives, at every level from news to psycho-drama, until individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited to choice between their programmed possibilities”.

An informal list of sources (not in MLA style)
http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/02/work-life-williams-english
http://www.raymondwilliams.co.uk/
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/raymond_williams.htm
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rseiler/williams.htm
http://www.mediaknowall.com/alevkeyconcepts/audience.html)
http://www.rolandcollection.com/

(R. Williams, Television – Technology and Cultural Form. Quotes republished by Jim McGuigan /Loughborough University, UK on October 22nd, 2004 in Flow TV, http://flowtv.or/?p=685

Stuart Hall http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism11.html

Cole, Josh (2008) 'Raymond Williams and education - a slow reach again for control', the encyclopaedia of informal education.