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Blog 12- We Report. You’re Confused.

Dr. Jeff Share of UCLA spoke to our class this week about the perpetual claim of neutrality on the part of news and other ‘fact-gathering’ organizations, often in the face of mounting criticism that sees these organizations as both ideologically and economically driven. Thus, Fox News’ mantra, “We Report. You Decide”, cloaks itself in the garment of unbiased fact-giving; news in this model is to be a simple window on reality through which we view what’s ‘really happening.’ Rarely do we think of news as a construction, an image, which is not reality but rather a re-presentation of it. To return to last week’s blog, “this is not a pipe.”

I say this after stumbling across a relatively recent American website, whimsically titled “Conservapedia.” It describes itself as an alternative to Wikipedia- it’s slogan is “The Trustworthy Encyclodepdia”, leading the reader to infer that those ‘other’ encyclopedias are a bunch of hogwash, but this is the one place you can get the real facts. On it’s ‘About’ page, the site claims to be a ‘clean and concise resource for those seeking the truth.” What it provides, however, is saturated in conservative ideology (which is fine, but it’s far from the claim that it’s somehow unbiased).

Consider the following excerpt from an article on the website titled “Economic Conservatism Triumphant”:
“Once again, economic conservatism is tried and triumphant! A recent map of U.S. unemployment rates shows the conservative states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Utah having extremely low unemployment figures. In 2009, South Korea, a conservative country with many Christians, had an unemployment rate of 3.2% in 2009.”

Certainly, there are some factoids thrown in there, but the implication is in the arrangement of those facts which reveals the intended bias. By linking conservative Christianity to employment numbers (which were gathered from a ‘recent map’, which they perhaps looked at between recess and lunch…), the website is making a correlation between a particular brand of religion and economic success, as though there were no other factors to consider in why certain states or nations have certain employment rates. By implication, the more conservative your religion and politics, the more jobs your state will have.

How do I know that’s true!? I read it on the internet.

Blog 11- Distractions

It’s time I sit down and write this week’s blog. But before I do, I’m just going to check my email, update my Facebook status, troll through the most viewed on YouTube, watch a quick movie, listen to this song, make a short phone call, eat a sandwich, update my Facebook status again to include what I’ve just written, answer a text, send a text, write a text but save it without sending, delete old emails in my Inbox, beatthisleveltagthesephotosbrowsethispornopokethisprofile, Huffington Post, TMZ, Perez Hilton, Tiger Woods, Jon & Kate, TomKatBrangelina, flip this channel, walk this way.

Now what was I saying?

Robert

If You’re Constantly Checking Messages, You’re Not Working

Joe Robinson
Entrepreneur.com
updated 8:41 a.m. PT, Fri., March. 12, 2010

Within the heart of your company, saboteurs lurk. Disguised as instruments of productivity, they are subverting your staff’s most precious resource: attention. Incessant e-mail alerts, instant messages, buzzing BlackBerrys and cell phones are decimating workplace concentration. The average information worker — basically anyone at a desk — loses 2.1 hours of productivity every day to interruptions and distractions, according to Basex, an IT research and consulting firm.

That time is money. Computer chip giant Intel, for one, has estimated that e-mail overload can cost large companies as much as $1 billion a year in lost employee productivity. The intrusions are constant: each day a typical office employee checks e-mail 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to RescueTime, a firm that develops time-management software. Such interruptions don’t just sidetrack workers from their jobs, they also undermine their attention spans, increase stress and annoyance and decrease job satisfaction and creativity.

The interruption epidemic is reaching a crisis point at some companies and shows no sign of slowing. E-mail volume is growing at a rate of 66 percent a year, according to the E-Policy Institute. More people are texting. More are using Facebook or Twitter for work.

“It’s worse than it’s ever been,” says Michelle Rupp, owner of NRG Seattle, an insurance brokerage with a staff of 12 who feel pounded by the avalanche of messaging. “It’s so hard to stay focused. Everything bings and bongs and tweets at you, and you don’t think.”

Yes, it is possible to blunt the interruption assault. But business leaders must go on the offensive in a realm most are oblivious to: interruption management.

The myth of multitasking

Human brains come equipped with two kinds of attention: involuntary and voluntary. Involuntary attention, designed to be on the watch for threats to survival, is triggered by outside stimuli — what grabs you. It’s automatically rattled by the workday cacophony of rings, pings and buzzes that are turning jobs into an electronic game of Whac-A-Mole. Voluntary attention is the ability to concentrate on a chosen task.

As workers’ attention spans are whipsawed by interruptions, something insidious happens in the brain: Interruptions erode an area called effortful control and with it the ability to regulate attention. In other words, the more you check your messages, the more you feel the need to check them — an urge familiar to BlackBerry or iPhone users.

“Technology is an addiction,” says Gayle Porter, a professor of management at Rutgers University who has studied e-compulsion. “If someone can’t turn their BlackBerry off, there’s a problem.”

The cult of multitasking would have us believe that compulsive message-checking is the behavior of an always-on, hyper-productive worker. But it’s not. It’s the sign of a distracted employee who misguidedly believes he can do multiple tasks at one time. Science disagrees. People may be able to chew gum and walk at the same time, but they can’t do two or more thinking tasks simultaneously.

Say a salesman is trying to read a new e-mail while on the phone with a client. Those are both language tasks that have to go through the same cognitive channel. Trying to do both forces his brain to switch back and forth between tasks, which results in a “switching cost,” forcing him to slow down. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that productivity dropped as much as 40 percent when subjects tried to do two or more things at once. The switching exacts other costs, too — mistakes and burnout. One of the study’s authors, David Meyer, asserts bluntly that quality work and multitasking are incompatible.

Brian Bailey and Joseph Konstan of the University of Minnesota discovered that sleeve-tugging peripheral tasks triggered twice the number of errors and jacked up levels of annoyance to anywhere between 31 percent and 106 percent. Their interrupted test workers also took 3 percent to 27 percent more time to complete the reading, counting or math problems. In fact, the harder the interrupted task, the harder it was to get back on track. (A Microsoft study suggests it takes a worker 15 minutes to refocus after an interruption.)

The damaging effects spread well beyond the office cubicle. Kate LeVan, a communications consultant in Evanston, Ill., coaches executives whose brains are so scrambled by electronic interruptions that they stumble during key face-to-face interactions: board meetings, investor pitches, sales presentations. “They can’t have an extended conversation for more than a few minutes,” LeVan says. “That’s the impact of having all this data going back and forth. They have problems in conversation because they can’t focus.”

Here’s how the brain behaves when your attention slips away from a task: The hippocampus, which manages demanding cognitive tasks and creates long-term memories, kicks the job down to the striatum, which handles rote tasks. So the gum-chewing part of the brain is now replying to the boss’s e-mail. This is why you wind up addressing e-mails to people who weren’t supposed to get them. Or sending messages rife with typos.
The striatum is the brain’s autopilot. And no part of your business should be allowed to run on autopilot.

Constant interruptions

In her 2009 book “Rapt,” Winifred Gallagher argues that humans are the sum of what they pay attention to: What we focus on determines our experience, knowledge, amusement, fulfillment. Yet instead of cultivating this resource, she says, we’re squandering it on “whatever captures our awareness.” To truly learn something, and remember it, you have to pay full attention.

E-interruptions are making it so hard to do that that Google, Microsoft, IBM and Intel are members of the Information Overload Research Group, formed in 2008 to collaborate on research, develop best practices and host forums to share new approaches. It’s self-preservation as much as anything; computer engineers were among the first to show symptoms of e-interruption exposure.

Ten years ago, Harvard Business School’s Leslie Perlow famously chronicled the interruption of a high-tech software company. Its engineers were interrupted so often they had to work nights and weekends. After studying the workplace for nine months, the source of the dysfunction became clear: No one could get anything done because of the bombardment of messages. Perlow came up with an intervention: Quiet Time. For four hours in the morning, the 17 engineers worked alone. All messaging and phone contact was banned. In the afternoon, communication could resume. Given time to concentrate, the engineers got a project for a color printer completed without the graveyard shift.

Intel is using Quiet Time at two of its sites. Other companies, including U.S. Cellular and Deloitte & Touche, have mandated less e-mail use, encouraged more face-to-face contact and experimented with programs such as “no e-mail Friday.” The results often are surprising: employees build rapport with colleagues — and they save time. Co-workers can settle something in a two-minute phone conversation that might have required three e-mails per person. Each change reverberates throughout a company, especially since — as a University of California, Irvine, study found — 44 percent of interruptions an employee experiences are from within the company.

Breaking the habit

Nearly everyone needs such boundaries to get anything done in this 24/7 work world. Count Chad Willardson among the converted. He’s a senior financial adviser at Merrill Lynch Private Wealth Management Group and operates a financial services practice with a partner for Merrill in Riverside, Calif. He used to check for new messages every five minutes, a potential 96 interruptions during an eight-hour day.

“The more I checked e-mail,” he says, “the more anxious I would feel over every request and question.” Now he checks e-mail manually, and only four times a day at prescribed hours — the schedule that Oklahoma State University researchers describe as optimum. He says he gets a lot more done, is more in control of his calendar and feels much less stressed.

In fact, stress-management seminars often reveal executives driven to wits’ end by their own inboxes. During one session at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin, many managers vented this frustration — until one raised his hand. “It’s not a problem for me,” he said. “I’ve gotten my e-mail checking down to twice a day.”

He explained that his staff knew he preferred to communicate by phone and they don’t send him e-mail unless it’s important that the information be in writing. And because he checked e-mail only twice daily, they had been weaned from the idea that they’d get an instant reply.

Chances are this wasn’t just good for the manager, but for all his employees, too. By modeling interruption-management, he was likely reducing the volume of interruptions throughout his division. Everyone understood that he viewed excessive messages as a drain on his performance — and by extension, theirs.

One thing was clear that day at Lockheed: When the manager volunteered his solution, it was as if he’d levitated. Other managers looked stunned. And envious.

Copyright © 2010 Entrepreneur.com, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35689822/ns/business-small_business/
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© 2010 MSNBC.com

Check it out:

http://dscriber.com/denver/1316-lost-boys-cory-haim-dead-of-apparent-drug-overdose.html

There is an epidemic of demise with these young actors. This refers directly to our Monday discussion. Hard to ignore

Blog 10- This is not a pipe

The Betrayal of Images

Margitte’s famous painting, “The Betrayal of Images”, reminds us that whenever we view media we must consider it semiotically. That is, we are at our greatest fault as interpreters when we mistake the image of something for reality itself. Thus, the figure on Margitte’s canvas is not a pipe; it is a representation that resembles a universal pipe we have collectively stored in our minds. To claim that it is a pipe borders on the ludicrous; yet how many times do we mistakenly consider what appears on our screen as actual, tangible and real? How quickly do we have to remind ourselves that the image is merely a representation of reality?

If Miley Cyrus appears on television, should the image be accompanied by a caption that reads, “This is not a girl”? Or if a montage from the local news provides us with imagery from a battle in Afghanistan, should the screen include, “This is not a war”? Hidden below each image is an unseen army of producers, lighting equipment and carefully crafted shots that help hone what we come to believe is reality- but to quote Paul Tillich, to mistake the symbol for the thing it points itself beyond to is little more than idolatry.

Perhaps most frightening about television, film and web saturated media is its ability to convince us that what we are viewing is reality, that the lines between the production of art and the thing it wishes to represent are vanishing and we as viewers are continually situating ourselves smack dab in the middle. What are the consequences of this blurring, when we can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is manufactured?

What are the consequences for our children and our students who don’t know that this is not a person, this is not a role model, this is not a war, this is not a wrestling match, this is not a size zero, this is not a police officer, this is not a slave owner, this is not a pipe?

Robert

Blog 9- I Am Not a Role Model

Watch Barkley’s NIKE ad

Basketball player Charles Barkley’s famous dictum, “Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids”, continues to provoke controversy, not in its literal sense (to which most would agree) but rather in its sentiment that athletes are not heroes, that sports figures should receive no more adulation than anyone, and that it is principally wrong to hold professional athletes to a standard beyond what we hold the average person. Charles Barkley may have been arrested for a variety of reasons, some violent, he may have accrued massive debts due to gambling, and he may say things that insight fervent discussion, but he has said upfront, clearly and unequivocally, that he is not a role model.

Does this admission, however, relinquish him from a public responsibility as a role model?

This persistent ideal of ‘public athlete as public hero’ returned to the airwaves this past week when victorious Canadian female hockey players celebrated their gold medal victory over the Americans with beers and cigars on the ice. Some have argued that even though the celebration occurred after the stadium had cleared, the women were somehow in violation of an unwritten code of “role models” and as such acted inappropriately. Others countered that they are all women of legal drinking age celebrating in a manner common to hockey. Furthermore, others have noted there seems to be double standard at work- Jon Montgomery, a Canadian skeleton medalist, celebrating his win by pounding back a pitcher of Canadian lager, yet there was no public outcry. But Montgomery is also an adult who is legally able to drink a beer. Does his action somehow diminish his position as a role model?

Why do we continue to idealize athletes as though their ability to perform on the field, the rink, and the track somehow indicates a moral superiority or valorization? Athletes maintain a special place in the public discourse as the embodiment of the “noblest” and best of human achievement- consider briefly the rhetoric of the Olympic games and what this kind of friendly competition can ennoble. Why does this mythology of good athlete/ good person persist?