Código 3: Hiperconexión

Preguntas de código abierto en espera de respuestas sociales

Por Jorge Alberto Hidalgo Toledo

Código 3: Hiperconexión

Conexión es la palabra clave de nuestros tiempos. El mundo, las personas y los objetos, hoy se vinculan en redes, nodos y puntos digitales de encuentro. No importa, dónde ni a qué hora. Más de 250 millones de usuarios entrelazando sus vidas en Facebook; 4,000 millones de teléfonos celulares[1] enviando mensajes SMS/MMS en los que se intercambian textos, audios y videos que resumen un momento particular en la vida; 145 millones de iPods[2], 100 millones de blogs[3] que por momentos permiten vivir en modo simultáneo y paralelo la existencia.

Interfaces, dispositivos, aplicaciones, redes, nodonautas; un verdadero continente digital. Un mundo plano en el que toda manifestación cultural se intercambia persona a persona a través de hipermediaciones y conexiones.; a través de comunidades virtuales que fungen como canales de distribución de intereses e información significativa.

Hoy, la principal motivación de la Generación Mi Medio es la hiperconexión; el mantener la existencia permanentemente en línea; el autodescubrirse y autodesarrollarse en la interacción on-line con los otros.

Las grandes tribus telefónicas movilizan su espacio de comunicación privada; se comunican fuera del ámbito controlado por los padres; intiman desde cualquier punto; se expresan a través de múltiples narrativas y desde cualquier lugar. La vida entera se construye en la marcha; y en movimiento se expresan odios, se prueban los límites, manifiestan deseos y actuamos de intermediarios.

La vida móvil, la vida en línea, la vida portátil permite la vinculación omnisciente; permite estar siempre ahí, compartir la vida en tiempo real; permite expresar de un modo poco análogo el “pienso en ti”.

La hiperconexión es el mensaje. Es un modo de consolidar la colectividad; de socializar la identidad; de expandir el compromiso y la lealtad.

Estar en línea es un modo de exposición de ideas, de denotar la personalidad, de establecer puentes dialógicos. En línea todas las fuentes de información se interconectan y la privacidad desaparece. La nodonautas profundizan en el universo e intentan participar en él. En línea se selecciona, organiza y procesa la cultura; desde ahí establecen conexiones nuestras mentes pues como afirma Castells el hipertexto está dentro de nosotros (Castells, 2001). Nosotros mismos somos el punto de la convergencia, el corazón de las narrativas transmediáticas.

La hiperconexión genera un capital emocional que implica al sujeto con el contenido, al contenido con la interface, la interface con los sentidos. Ser y estar en línea, construir la existencia en modo relacional, en tono participativo.

¿Qué es lo que la gente ha descubierto en línea exactamente? Quizá la posibilidad de confrontar su vida entera con la cultura popular; de profundizar en su sistema de valores; de tener una nueva visión del mundo; de mantener intercambios significativos; de implicarse con la vida de los otros. Nuevos significados, nuevas cosmovisiones producto de la intertextualidad galopante.

El hombre en hiperconexión se sabe constantemente observado, localizable. En la red todos se saben parte del mismo ecosistema. La esfera pública se encoge. En línea nos volvemos todos ciudadanos vigilantes, aparentes sujetos inactivos en espera de poder actuar (Lévy, 1997). Un nuevo estilo de vida se perfila; el paisaje mediático se redefine; nuevas expresiones resuenan y se recontextualizan.

De la hiperconexión derivan las hipermediaciones, que como señala Scolari (2008): “apuntan a la confluencia de lenguajes, la reconfiguaración de los géneros y la aparición de nuevos sistemas semióticos”.

Nuestra precepción, cognición y metanarraciones se modifican. Se transforman nuestras experiencias comunicativas. La hiperconexión se ha vuelto la nueva clave reticular. Todo se conecta con todo; personas con objetos, objetos con objetos, objetos con dispositivos. La hiperconexión es la unidad semántica digital que permite la inmersión informativa y existencial. Tras la hiperconexión, todos somos nodos, puntos de acceso a secuencias sonoras, documentos, gráficos, palabras e imágenes. Somos vértices multimediales, navegables, textualidad fragmentada, interface de interactividad.

La experiencia, la expresión y el intercambio han cambiado (Scolari, 2008). La vida se modifica y reconfigura. Frente al punto de conexión somos un punto de intercambio; espacio y lugar de vinculación; territorio de los bits desterritorializados. El hábitat se ha transformado, la vida digital segundo a segundo registra el cambio mediático; sin duda, en la era glacial digital, hemos emprendido el éxodo hacia una tierra cuyo punto de acceso se encuentra desde una dirección IP, y seguro, al viejo mundo ya no hay retorno, como tampoco habrá módems de dial-up.

(Continuará)

AMIPCI (2009), Hábitos de los Usuarios de Internet. México: Asociación Mexicana de Internet, Recuperado el 18 de julio de 2009 en http://amipci.org.mx/estudios/temp/RESUMENEJECUTIVOEstudioAMIPCI2009UsuariosdeinternetFINAL-0334725001245691260OB.pdf

Castells, M. (2001) La galaxia Internet: Reflexiones sobre internet, empresa y sociedad. Barcelona: Ed. Areté.

De-Witt, P. E. (2009). “Where in the world are those 18.6 million iPod touches?” en CNNMoney.com Fortune Brainstorm Tech. Recuperado el 12 de septiembre de 2009 en http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/23/where-in-the-world-are-those-18-6-million-ipod-touches/

Lévy, P. (1997) Collective intelligence: mankind´s emerging world in cyberspace. EUA, Cambridge, Mass: Perseus Books

Hidalgo, J. (2008), Hábitos de Consumo Mediático y Entretenimiento en los Jóvenes Mexicanos. Informe de resultados. México: Cátedra FISAC-Anáhuac, Universidad Anáhuac

Howe, N. y Strauss, W. (2000). Millennials Rising: the next great generation. USA: Vintage books, Random House.

Jenkins, H. (2008). Convergence culture: la cultura de la convergencia de los medios de comunicación. Barcelona, España: Paidós.

Lawson, M. (Agosto 9, 2005) “Berners-Lee on the Read/write web”. EUA: BBC News

Lessig, L. (2009). Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York, EUA: The Penguin Press.

Morduchowicz, R. (2008). La Generación Multimedia: significados, consumos y prácticas culturales de los jóvenes. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.

Penn, M. y Zalesne, K. (2009). Microtrends: the small forces behind tomorrow’s big changes. New York, USA: Twelve Hachette Book Group.

Redacción (2008) “4.000 millones de celulares en el mundo”, en Pulso social, recuperado el 12 de septiembre de 2009 en http://pulsosocial.com/2008/10/01/4000-millones-de-celulares-en-el-mundo/

Rheingold, H. (2009). 21st Century Literacies: video Keynot speech. Recuperado el 19 de julio de 2009 en http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=218514&share_id=139140458624&ref=nf#s139140458624

Scolari, C (2008). Hipermediaciones: elementos para una teoría de la Comunicación Digital Interactiva. Barcelona: Gedisa.

Tubella, I., Tabernero, C. y Dwyer, V. (2008). Internet y televisión: la guerra de las pantallas. Barcelona, España: Ariel, Editorial UOC y Generalitat de Catalunya.

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[1][1] Según reporta el periodista Manuel Moreno se ha reportado en los últimos ocho años una progresión anual del 24%. Por otra parte se espera que el índice de penetración alcance un crecimiento del 61% (6,700 millones de personas) en lo que resta del año principalmente en países como Brasil, China, India y Rusia. Redacción (2008) 4.000 millones de celulares en el mundo, en Pulso social, recuperado el 12 de septiembre de 2009 en http://pulsosocial.com/2008/10/01/4000-millones-de-celulares-en-el-mundo/

[2] Tim Cook, jefe de operaciones de Apple afirmó en el informe trimestral de Apple que las ventas de dispositivos iPhone y iPod habían ascendido a 45 millones siendo 18.6 millones de la categoría iPod Touch y 26.4 millones a iPhone y 100 millones de ellos pertenecientes a los modelos anteriores. De-Witt, P. E. (2009). “Where in the world are those 18.6 million iPod touches?” en CNNMoney.com Fortune Brainstorm Tech. Recuperado el 12 de septiembre de 2009 en http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/23/where-in-the-world-are-those-18-6-million-ipod-touches/

[3] Con un ritmo de crecimiento de 15 más cada segundo, basado en Lawson, M. (Agosto 9, 2005) “Berners-Lee on the Read/write web”. EUA: BBC News

Planeación estratégica digital de 360 grados

Ponencia-Taller impartido por el Mtro. Jorge Alberto Hidalgo Toledo en Managua en la V Jornada de Comunicación

Planeación Estratégica De 360 Grados

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Economía de participación, Economía solidaria, modelos de negocio en la era digital

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Economía De Participación

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The Collective Unconscious 2.0

The Collective Unconscious 2.0

	The mythic imagination’s new operating system
	by Geoff Olson photo montaqe: Peter Sircom Bromley A FRIEND recently told me how she loved singing songs as a child at summer camp. “Most of them were goofy but they were part of the camp experience,” she added. When she returned as a director in 1987, my friend discovered most of the old tunes had disappeared from her childhood haunt. The only song the kids could sing was the theme from The Brady Bunch. The camp closed a few years later. A similar tale of cultural memory gone missing was recounted in 2004 in the Globe and Mail: a teacher conducting a session on media literacy at an upscale school in Toronto had her young students form groups and write a list of advertising jingles they were familiar with. “A jingle train is started, with groups each singing a jingle as it snakes its way around the classroom,” wrote reporter Hal Niedzviecki, who was “struck by the incredible number of jingles these theoretically more refined girls have lodged in their minds.” Children still occasionally sing nursery songs like Ring Around the Rosieand London Bridge Is Falling Down, but isn’t a theme song from a seventies sitcom like The Brady Bunch more in keeping with the times than tunes dating back to the Black Death and a Viking attack on England in the 11th century? Does it really matter what kids sing, as long as they’re singing? And isn’t all this just part of a culture moving on, which it always has, evolving new ways of doing and being over time? Perhaps. But in a time in which celebrity is another word for identity, and the camera’s eye is like a mother’s gaze, the young have entered into a strange, new Through-the Looking-Glass relationship with their media-mediated world. Their deepest desires and fears, co-opted by the world of public relations and advertising, are offered back to them with price tags attached. “The irony is that while the quantity of information doubles every few months, people generally seem to be less informed and increasingly apathetic and disenchanted,” writes Vancouver-based educator Brent Cameron in his 2006 book SelfDesign: Nurturing Genius Through Natural Learning. “Never before have we had such amazing ways of delivering information through television, books, photographs, graphics, computers, video, multimedia, and the internet. Yet so many children are bored and have become less and less motivated to learn about and understand the world around them,” Cameron states in his book. Although Carl Gustav Jung did not live long enough to witness the late 20th century assault on the physical and mental environment, the Swiss psychologist can offer some help in understanding what’s happening today. In Jung’s system, the deepest layer of the psyche is what he called the “collective unconscious.” While Freud viewed the sub-conscious as the part of the mind where unacceptable sexual impulses are pushed down, Jung saw the un-conscious as the part of the mind from which ancient images push up. In various, traditional myths from around the world, we find common archetypes, such as the hero, the universal mother and the trickster. Jung believed the recurring themes in these myths weren’t solely due to the cultural diffusion of invasion, trade or travel. The archetypes of the collective unconscious are dreamlike, symbolic figures representing universal human experience. They are expressive of the energies of the mind-body complex at their deepest levels. But what if the mental environment of media – the ads, television shows and movies, the chat lines and the twittering – penetrates into the aquifer of self, our deepest levels of being? Is it possible that today the deeper levels of our psyches are informed – or deformed – by this onslaught of information? Are we displacing the individual dream world with the dream world of media? I define this mass dream as the ‘Collective Unconscious 2.0’, a collective enterprise of advertisers, marketers, public relations experts, scriptwriters, bloggers, computer programmers, news editors, publishers and all the immense creative talent from Hollywood and beyond. This world of immersive fantasy and rubbery fact contains both darkness and light, beauty and ugliness, and every imaginable simulated shade of human experience. And it is an entirely novel phenomenon in human history. Jung’s collective unconscious is the dreamtime of Homo sapiens. ‘Collective Unconscious 2.0’ is the dreamtime of late-era hypercapitalism. The energies that inform Jung’s collective unconscious are for the most part biological: instinctual drives of fear, hunger and sex (along with the drive for psychic wholeness). The energies that inform the ‘Collective Unconscious 2.0’ are more abstract, related to the movement of electronic capital and the maximization of profit to shareholders. In his 1999 book Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, New Yorker contributor Neal Gabler described a bizarre feedback loop between mainstream films and the culture they draw upon. The author insisted that the domination of entertainment in American culture is so total citizens have internalized the narratives of films and television into their sense of identity. “Over the years our movie going and television watching has been impregnating the American consciousness with the contentions and esthetics of entertainment, until we have become performers ourselves, performing our own lives out of the shards of movies. One might even think of American life, including quotidian American life, as a vast production in which virtually every object is a prop, every space is a set, every person is an actor and every experience is a scene in a continuing narrative.” Gabler wrote this prescient passage years before American Idol and the instant celebrity of reality television. He also completed Life the Movieshortly before the tragedy at Columbine High School in the US, an event that turned out to be the first massacre of the digital age. (During the shooting, several students in hiding communicated with the outside world by cell phones, but quickly realized the killers themselves might be watching the school monitors and could discover their hiding places.) After the tragedy, the surviving students grieved for days – not privately with their friends, but in front of the school, with the television cameras present. The Columbine kids acted out in a festival of telegenic grief, Gabler wrote later. When the gaze of the all-seeing, identity-creating eye fell on them, they cried as if on cue. Some educators and psychologists fear that North American adults and youth are incrementally losing their ability to interact in a meaningful, deep way with others. “Interiority,” which theologian Paul Tillich described as imaginative capacity that allows us to read ourselves into others, grows from face-to-face, real-world encounters. For the young, interiority isn’t something that comes automatically through a cursor, keyboard or remote. In his Atlantic Monthly essay The Numbing of the American Mind, Thomas de Zengotita explains that we are being rewired in subtle yet deep ways by the constant barrage of media from all sources. This is why a couple of weeks out in nature doesn’t cut it anymore for some adults, he says. “You will virtualize everything you encounter anyway, all by yourself.” Having been raised on a steady diet of nature shows, “you won’t see wolves, you’ll see wolves. You’ll be murmuring to yourself, at some level, ‘Wow, look, a real wolf, not in a cage, not on TV, I can’t believe it.’” “Natural things have become their own icons,” de Zengotita writes. The author believes this process results in a kind of numbing. Using the new Times Square in New York as an example, de Zengotita observes that the entire space is “firing message modules, straight for your gonads, your taste buds, your vanities, your fears.” “These modules seek to penetrate, but in a passing way. A second of your attention is all they ask. Nothing is firing that rends or cuts. It’s a massage, really, if you just go with it. And why not? Some of the most talented people on the planet have devoted their lives to creating this psychic sauna, just for you.” Ersatz environments and colourful advertisements have been with us since the fifties, de Zengotita adds, but the multimedia blitz we experience now represents a whole new level of persuasion. “Saying that it’s just more of what we had before is like saying a hurricane is just more breeze.” It’s arguable that, in earlier generations, people related to one another more spontaneously and with greater affect – and still do, in places around the world that aren’t bombarded with 24-hour media penetration. Thousands of years ago, there was only one channel – the nature channel – and the source for high-bandwidth, real-time infotainment was other people. We were our own programming, and our world of rocks, trees, seas and other creatures provided the narrative bricks for the dreaming mind. In the daylight hours, after the chores were done, our ancestors couldn’t sit back and absorb their entertainment passively. Song, story and dance engaged the body and mind and belonged to no one but the community of participants. Interactivity wasn’t optional; it was mandatory. Thousands of years ago, human sleep cycles were circumscribed by the rising and setting of the sun. Today, many adults and even children watch late-night television or surf the web alone, during hours when their ancestors would have been in the early stages of REM sleep. Mood-altering drugs like SSRI antidepressants also result in a reduction in the overall amount of REM sleep over the night and the delay of the first entry into REM sleep. Electronic media and mood-altering drugs are, in effect, part of a vast, uncontrolled experiment on the human psyche. We are no longer dreaming our own dreams as much as those of corporate monopolies. Today’s mass dream, split from the organic foundation of the world and cobbled together from shards of television shows, newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements, films, ad jingles, ringtones – the whole mad fantasy of what’s hip, what’s not, who’s in, who’s out and the international villain du jour – is the raw stuff of the ‘Collective Unconscious 2.0’. One of Marshall McLuhan’s most important insights is that the electronic media space we inhabit is now like the air around us in its intimacy. It’s a thin atmosphere, depending on simulations of the real and simulations of those simulations – as in the superhero cartoon that becomes a film franchise that becomes a video game. This infinite regress results in a strange feeling of disconnection and unreality for the citizen/consumer. De Zengotita’s wolf – that can no longer be seen with pristine eyes – is one example. It all makes for a strange hall of mirrors, in which politics, celebrities and the news collapse into what De Zenogtita calls ‘The Blob,’ hearkening back to the fifties sci-fi film of the same name, about a gooey, amoeboid monster that absorbs everything in its path. For his part, the French poststructuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard called this simulated cultural space “hyperreality,” which he defined as a peculiarly American invention. I never totally understood hyperreality until shortly after the end of the first Gulf War. I was in a hotel room in Seattle, watching Henry Kissinger doing the weather on Good Morning America – something, he informed the hosts, “he had always wanted to do” – when I switched over to another channel and saw General Norman Schwarzkopf marching in a victory parade with Mickey Mouse. I recall the four-star general and Disney rat singing together in a downfall of confetti. A former Nixon advisor and accused war criminal pretending he’s a weather man. A real general celebrating a made-for-TV war with a fake mouse. Both within a few seconds of each other, courtesy a TV remote. Whether you call this sort of thing an example of hyperreality, ‘The Blob,’ or the CU 2.0, there’s no denying it’s as disconnected and random as a schizophrenic’s journal entry. It’s the way we live now. My experience in that Seattle hotel room took place six years before the epochal police pursuit of OJ Simpson in a white Ford Bronco, the pivotal moment when the line between news and entertainment collapsed entirely. Half a decade later when Yale’s most famous C-minus student entered the White House, hyperreality was no longer the obscure domain of goateed professors and their grad students. Although most of us didn’t know it by name, we were becoming used to the manufacture of the intensely strange into the nauseatingly familiar. By early July of this year, hardly anyone blinked when the media turned the funeral of a surgically altered singer and accused pedophile into a high-production festival in Los Angeles: “a variety show with a coffin” as writer Chris Hedges called it. As Gabler wrote in Life the Movie, mass entertainment has become a “cultural Ebola virus, invading organisms no one would ever have imagined could provide amusement” – including courtroom trials, resource wars and public funerals. “You won’t believe how bad television is going to be in 10 years,” writer Robert Bly noted in a prophetic interview in 2004. “You’re literally going to have to protect your children from it.” Arguably, Bly’s estimated time of arrival was a bit conservative. You can hardly watch the downward trajectory of the mass media’s offerings without thinking that some vast spiritual problem is being worked out. As the quality of Hollywood films declines further into gross-out comedies, sequels and superhero spin-offs, and the primetime offerings on network television plumb ever deeper levels of the abyss, with celebrity piffle dominating the cable news channels, one thinks of Jung’s concept of the “shadow.” He defined this as all of the darker feelings and impulses we repress in order to be able to believe the best of ourselves. Jung held that whatever negative, psychic issues were being suppressed, they needed to be brought to consciousness and faced before an individual could become psychically whole. Films like Training Day, Hostel and the Saw franchise aren’t just violent; they positively revel in a pornography of psychic and bodily destruction. There is a winding, psychic thread from these productions and television shows like 24 (with a plot that hinged on the utility of torturing terrorists) to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the “black sites” spread across the world. As the Empire expands, demanding that nations accept freedom at the barrel of a gun, we watch as all the unacknowledged ugliness of crony capitalism vomits from the media spillways. You can even hear it in the breathless excitement of embedded journalists describing the latest attack of a predator drone on “terrorists” who are as gunsight-ghostly as the avatars in a videogame. This is the shadow side of the ‘Collective Unconscious 2.0.’ Mainstream media culture currently has all the signs of full-blown psychosis. This is analogous to Jung’s shadow. Confronting the shadow is unpleasant on a personal level, but healing cannot be effected without being confronted with the truth – and as folk wisdom has it, the truth hurts. What is positive about this process is that we’re being forced to confront the very worst in the imaginal output of our great, untethered, free market economy. But we must not forget that the Internet is also part of the ‘CU 2.0.’ And as the mainstream media becomes increasingly removed from reality, the Internet has picked up the task of observing what Freud called the “reality principle,” or if you prefer, a “reality check,” even while offering endless distractions of its own. (Novelist George Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us while novelist Aldous Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.) “Imagination is more powerful than knowledge,” Einstein once said. Any idea and image expressed in the ‘CU 2.0’ began somewhere in some individual mind. Its success in being turned into a news broadcast, jingle, billboard, video game, film, television show or movie depended largely on market forces – but with the advent of the Internet, things go “viral” very quickly now and the mass manufacture of consent is becoming harder to achieve. There is ugliness in the mass dream we’ve weaved, but also beauty, and every possible representation of human good and evil, truth and falsehood, creativity and amateurism. Right now, the ugliness appears to be ascendant, but this may be necessary to purge western civilization of its lies. Even in the mainstream media’s most successful offerings, we can occasionally see portents of hope. The first Matrix film and even the film versions of Harry Potter communicate an essential message: that the world is a more magical place than its humdrum surface suggests, and it can be shaped by our intents. The final guarantor that something is impossible is the belief that it is so. We are, ultimately, the stories we tell each other of our past, present and future. We become what we seek. It’s up to us to rule the imagination or leave it in the hands of a select few to shape the future of the mass dream. As Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” As the terrible images and sounds pour from the ‘Collective Unconscious 2.0,’ let’s pray we’ll be able to tell more stories we want to hear, create more pictures we want to see, and sing more songs we want to sing – the work that resonates with our deeper, truer selves. www.geoffolson.com

A 2.0 Toolkit: A hand-picked set of free Web programs to take to school this fall

A hand-picked set of free Web programs to take to school this fall

By Shonda Brisco -- School Library Journal, 8/1/2009

Regardless of the subscription databases that are available in your library, there's always a sense of professional satisfaction when you're able to access and utilize free software programs to create an entirely new way to engage your users or fulfill a need. For some librarians, 2.0 tools have become a major component of their instructional day, virtually a "must-have" within their professional toolkit. But if you haven't tried some of the most popular 2.0 tools, here is our list (in alphabetical order) of the hottest ones being used by school librarians this year.

Animoto

Animoto is a free video program that allows you to create a 30-second music video using your favorite photos or other images. After uploading your files, Animoto provides the music to match the images and then renders a music video that can be shared or linked to Web sites.

Animoto became a hip, new resource used by librarians for creating quick library book trailers or attention-getting announcements. However, most of us quickly discovered that our hard work was often blocked by school filtering systems. Now, the service has helped us to solve the accessibility problem by providing their Animoto for Educator's site, which allows K-12 educators the ability to use the software to create exceptional clips for use in the classroom without the fear of unwanted content being accessed by students.

By completing the online application indicating that the product will be used in a K-12 classroom or library, educators can easily access the new version of this software. As one of the first really awesome tools to help librarians showcase authors, books, and even the library itself, Animoto is not only hot, it's on fire! Be sure to check out thecase studies that show how others are using Animoto in education.

Audacity

Free, cross-platform sound editor Audacity (available for download ataudacity.sourceforge.net) has become a mainstay for those involved in podcasting. The software allows you to record and edit programs quickly without the need for prior experience in sound editing. For those who want more information about using this software, there's an online tutorial/user's manual. Tech-savvy librarians who are more experienced with the program might check out Audacity Portable program, which you can download to your USB drive and take with you for impromptu podcast editing even while on the road.

Delicious

Delicious, a popular social bookmarking service, allows users to tag, save, manage, and share Web pages from a centralized source. For educators, librarians, and students, this tool provides immediate access to its bookmarks, regardless of their physical location. The power of Delicious lies not only in making your bookmarks accessible to you, but in making everyone else's bookmarks available also. By tagging your Web pages with brief one- to two-word descriptors, you enable a search to be conducted across the entire site for bookmarks with similar labels.

As a professional resource, Delicious provides immediate access to a wide-range of subject-related (or tagged) Web sites that have been discovered, bookmarked, and shared by others. So, for example, rather than spend hours searching for bogus sites to teach media literacy, librarians can search Delicious using the tags "bogus_websites" (176 results), "web_evaluation" (932 results), or "hoax" (1514 results) to locate possible sources. Delicious also allows users to search by more than one tag (a variation of the Boolean search) to locate more specific results. So by adding the aforementioned tags, the results show approximately 160 results, which match exactly what is needed. Mmm, delicious, indeed.

Google Applications

Google Applications—including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Sites—is perhaps one of the best free office suites available for classroom use. Students, teachers, librarians, administrators, and parents can easily create, collaborate, access, and share information resources, assignments, projects, calendars, and even Web pages, all using Google Apps.

Librarians can use Google Calendar to set up library scheduling online for access by teachers and parents. Students and teachers can utilize the Google Doc programs for everything from word processing to presentation software, while busy librarians can quickly add titles for an online "wish list" that others can see and share through the Google Spreadsheet application.

Find lesson plans for utilizing these resources here. For additional information on how Google Apps can work within your school, be sure to visit this page.

On the topic of Google, there's another powerful tool that's gaining momentum in school libraries. With iGoogle, students can create a personalized Web site that can be easily designed and accessed within most classrooms and libraries. Aside from the ability to add unique and fun resource links to an iGoogle site, students can also create links to the library's databases, allowing them the ability to locate and use those critical resources without moving in and out of sites.

Promoted extensively by information literacy experts such as David Loertscher, a professor at San Jose State University, iGoogle Web pages can function as a student's personalized workspace, allowing them to create the perfect site for storing their links for learning (and entertainment) in one place. Visit here to learn more about Loertscher's insights on the use of this hot 2.0 tool. This tutorial will show you how to set up your own iGoogle page.

Glogster

Glogster lets users create an online interactive poster, which can be shared or uploaded to wikis and other sites. By uploading photos, images, and even videos, Glogster transforms a static online Web page into a visually exciting and interactive online presentation.

Like most other popular 2.0 software sought after by educators, Glogster now provides an educational version of their program. Within this site are tutorials, lesson plans, and examples of how educators are using Glogster in the classroom and library.

As a unique visual literacy tool that's all about creativity and ease of use, Glogster is a must-have tool for school librarians.

SlideShare

The largest presentation-sharing community online, SlideShare has found its way into education rather quickly. In fact, SlideShare has an entire area devoted to educational presentations contributed by other members. Users can upload and retrieve presentations and embed selected ones into their Web page within minutes. Aside from the practical use of sharing information, SlideShare offers teachers and librarians who might be intimidated by 2.0 tools the ability to utilize more familiar software programs (such as PowerPoint or Word) and create an entirely new presentation online for their students to access.

A search on SlideShare using the term "school libraries" garnered over 5,000 presentations, including ones on collection development, information literacy, 2.0 tools in the school library, marketing the school library, and thousands more.

VoiceThread

VoiceThread is enormously popular in the K-12 community. Enabling the creation of collaborative, multimedia slideshows, VoiceThread accommodates images, documents, and videos, and allows users to navigate pages and comment in five ways: using voice (via microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Students can share VoiceThreads with teachers, friends, and others and allow them to respond with their own recorded comments. VoiceThreads can even be embedded to show and receive comments on other sites and can be exported to MP3 or DVD format.

Students and teachers will discover how easily this program can be used to promote presentation skills, digital design, or collaborative interaction within the classroom—or across the globe. Librarians can use VoiceThread to create presentations on information literacy. One of my library science students, Lisa Kennedy, presented story time using VoiceThread.

Wikispaces

Wikispaces has created its own educational following by providing K-12 educators with two highly desirable features: a free upgrade in available space and "advertisement-free" wikis upon request. Now educators can have all of the features normally available in the regular $50 subscription package, free of charge. Educators and librarians also have the option of making their wiki 1) available for public access (everyone can view and edit the page), 2) protected (everyone can view the pages, but only wiki members—your students—can edit them) or 3) private (only wiki members can view and edit the pages).

Depending upon the ages and grade levels of the students involved, Wikispaces provides a "just right" solution to the problem of introducing students (and teachers) to the world of wikis by offering options in privacy settings. Don't wait! Those free subscriptions are limited to 250,000 this year—you'll soon discover why they're going fast.

Zamzar

Zamzar has taught us to enjoy the weekends once again. Rather than spending hours trying to locate the correct software to convert a video file from WMA to AVI for a Monday morning presentation, consider Zamzar, which converts a wide range of audio, video, document, and compressed files into useable formats. Available for five free conversions a month, this software makes converting files a snap! To learn more about this product and how it can be used, visit www.zamzar.com/conversionTypes.phpand www.zamzar.com/url/overview.php.

Be sure to check out Donna Baumbach's wiki WebTools4U2Use or Joyce Valenza's wikito find even more resources and 2.0 tools to use in your library this fall.

---

Author Information

Shonda Brisco (sbrisco@gmail.com) is assistant professor/curriculum materials librarian, Mary L. Williams Curriculum Materials Library, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater.

"Top 10" Revelations, Ideas, and Things I have Learned

DAY, JULY 16, 2009

"Top 10" Revelations, Ideas, and Things I have Learned

1. How the brain works while watching advertisements and the different parts of the brain that are affected is very interesting. The limbic part of the brain that is our emotions and feeling is highly targeted in media. As well, as the reptilian part of the brain that targets the fight or flight processes that humans have. When we show ads to our students slow them down and talk about the different frames, music, images and words that pop up on the screen. The brain can only track eight frames per second and TV shows 30 frames per second. Teach students to ask questions about the media. Just do not watch the commercial or see the advertisement by analysis it.

2. Eight trends in our 21 century media culture shows us that the media is always changing. From words to image (Epistemological), from analog to digital, from mass media to personal, from discrete to convergence, from regulated to deregulation, from commercialisms to corporate, from objective to subjective, from privacy to surveillance.Deregulations and corporations are the driving forces of or media today. Free market to children today with more than 40 billion ads. Before 1984 there were only 4.2 billion ads marketed to children. The goal is to hook children into products and have them for life. ( Brand Loyalty) “You are what you have, you are what you buy, you are what you own”, if you do not have it you are know one. That is pretty much our philosophy today with people. It is shallow. It is about me attitude in our culture today. We are super consumers and will consume more than anyone else.

3. Media education is about access, analyze, evaluate, and produce. Questioning Media: Seven Basic Principles of Media Education will be a great teaching tool to help students evaluate ads. We need to be knowledgeable, and skilled to deconstruct and analyze production techniques. We need to be a media activism. That means we need t teach students to question, teach write, support, volunteer, seek out, produce, establish, host and affiliate. The seven basic principles of media education are keys when deconstructing and analyzing media. Teach students see ask, “what stories are not being told and why?”

4. I will be using the handout, developing a Media Education Language: from Persuasive Techniques to Analytical Tools,with my students when deconstructing and analyzing ads. I like the idea of having a poster hanging in the classroom representing each technique. This will be a great media education assignment for my middle school students. These posters will be a stimulus for critical reflection and also a reminder as they hang in the classroom where students will be able to see them on a daily bases.

5. I plan to use some of the media activities from the 18 Easy and Fun Media Activities from ACME as I teach my different units.I will be adding media education into my drug and alcohol unit, nutrition and fitness unit, and body image unit. Some of the activities that will work well with middle school students will be; print ad dissection, live radio spot, media and me journal, and feeling media’s mojo.

6. I learned a new term this week that is differently a 21^st century term; ambient awareness. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and blogging are all social networks that have brought about opening conversations around the world. I have not experienced a lot of use with Facebook, Tweeter and blogging but now feel I will be trying to use these mediums more as I have learned more about them from the course. You do need to have time and interest to get on the computer (or cell phone for some people) to take advantage of these wonderful new of ways of communication. But, I am a lot like Suzie and would rather be doing something active. I do have more confidence in technology after taking this course and I am excited to try new things, such as blogging more, using Twitter to form interest groups and Facebook to keep in touch with friends.

7. The books FEED was interesting. I found FEED hard to read at first, but as I got into to it I found it very interesting. How could the author know that this is how we are living today? It is so true that corporate marketers and government agenciesdo have a huge influence on how we live our lives. So much of our life focuses around the internet and television. We do live in a corporate and media dominated culture. We are bombarded today with what the corporate world wants us to know. FEED really shows us how media really attacks teens.

8. Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, opened up my eyes to television and the media and showed me how the electronic media is reshaping our culture. TV is turning all public life (religion, politics, education) into entertainment.Image is undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word. Our media environment is vastly different now than it was in 1985. Multitasking is standard today. We spend many hours using “screen time”, and that involves computers, cell phones and TV sometime all at the same time. Today, teachers are not considered good if they do not entertain their class. Students do not want to read today. We live in a world today much different than in the past. We read shorter stories, have fewer face to face conversations and spend more time in a media saturated world that influences our every step.

9. I learned how to video tape and put together a short video clip.I have never done anything like that before. I liked visiting Channel 17 and experience what it takes to put together a video clip. It was interesting watching the dotcom people get so involved in using the equipment. Creating our video clip in class was fun. David was great in showing me how to add audio, graphics and edit. It was fun using the video cameras and shooting shots around Best Buy and Majestic Theater. I feel that I can know down load some clips, graphics and music to my computer. I only have my students for such a short period of time and so much to do that I do not think I will be able to do any video production with them.

10. The five afternoon video were all very interesting. Consuming Kids was great. It would be a great video to show parents.Mickey Mouse Monopoly video showed The Mirror Project and how images of females and males are stereotyped. High school age students could benefits from watching this video.Wednesday’s videos where interesting and made me see how to watch the news in a whole new way. I will definitely be questioning the news from now on. Toxic Sludge is Good for You, showed how corporations are unregulated. I did not likeReal Bad Arab. It was a very difficult show to watch because I have trouble with violence and refuse to watch anything that shows guns. I understand the point behind the video and totally agree that Arabs are stereotyped in one way. Overall, the class was great and I learned many media education techniques to teach my middle school students.

Three “still to do “items I plan to do to move forward with teaching media education with my middle school students are:

1. Create poster using the persuasive techniques to hang around classroom.

2. Have students bring in magazine advertisements and dissect them using the general principles and persuasive techniques as a guide.

3. Have students keep a media and me journal for a day.Discuss how many minutes they spend using different media and how does it affect their life.

Ethnic Stereotyping, Alcohol Glorification in Media

As a Native American, I was especially interested in what the class had to say about typical stereotyping in media. Alcoholic, proud, lazy, one with nature, can't master English (language is broken), behind the times. My group brought up the government stipend the Native Americans get through the casinos. Even though I am 1/4 Cherokee and other tribes, I have been unable to obtain one dime of those stipends, because the federal government refuses to accept our tribe. So...not all Native Americans fit these qualifications.

In the assigned readings, I was appauled that "33% of high school seniors reported that they had consumed 5 or more drinks on one occasion in the previous two weeks." As a mother of a soon to be high school senior, that's particularily alarming. That's one in three students. If my son is not drinking, one of his friends is....who's driving? These are the students the alcohol ads are targeting. They make their money on the binge drinkers and alcoholics. Unfortunately, their ads pay too big a chunk of our entertainment dollars for them to be "black balled". It wouldn't hurt my feelings if they were put out of business.

The last 2 articles on teaching media literacy in the schools made me reevaluate this class. There is so much in media today: hidden messages, values, stereotypes, etc. that I feel my students should know. Actually, I think everyone should know it. I didn't know most of what we learned in class before last week. I can easily see how billions of dollars are leaving the consumers hands through unknown "duping" of the public through media sources. Personally, I would rather be a more informed consumer. I'm positive everyone else would feel the same way after learning what I have learned in these last 2 weeks. Thank you, Mary, for teaching this to us.

Media Literacy: Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media by George Siemens - July 18 09

As new and old media pervade so many aspects of our lives, it is very important that everyone learns to decode and interpret messages and images and to ask critical questions about who is creating them and for what purpose.

Photo credit: Nancy White

Inside this Media Literacy Digest:

• Addressing Problems of Faculty Resistance - James Morrison tackles the topic encouraging faculty to expand their range of instructional strategies and increase utilization of technology in the process.
• Social Media Guidelines - Organizations have to tell their employees how to use social media.
• Tools and Our Brain - Norman Doidge, in his text The Brain that Changes Itself, provides many compelling examples of how technology, tools, and experiences can substantially rewire the human brain in a short period of time.
• Social Media and Social Divisions - Does the internet - social media in particular - act as a unifier? Apparently not, according to several researchers.
• That Brain of Ours - Researchers are in the early stages of understanding the dynamics of the human brain.
• Consumer Voices - Trends can build and develop for long periods of time without significantly impacting status quo.
• Five Ways To Run a Deadly Online Seminar - Alan Levine reflects on his experience attending an online seminar:

New media technologies are the new means to explore, study, research, experiment and discover. Understanding and making sense of how these new communication tools work, allows everyone to communicate more effectively and to develop the new job skills required in our information economy.

Here all the details:

eLearning Resources and News

learning, networks, knowledge, technology, trends

by George Siemens

Addressing Problems of Faculty Resistance

James Morrison tackles the topic encouraging faculty to expand their range of instructional strategies and increase utilization of technology in the process. A great discussion follows the original post.

Obviously, you don’t need technology to be a provide a great learning experience. Creative, engaging, and participatory learning is an educational mindset, not something that requires blogs, wikis, Second Life, and podcasts.

What technology does, however, is expand the range of options for interaction.Classroom walls give way to global connections. Single educator models are replaced with distributed networks.

A bit utopian? Perhaps. But, once control shifts to a network of learners, the prospect arises for the creativity that exists in open source software and with application developers (i.e. iPhone, Facebook) can be applied to education.

Social Media Guidelines

You’d think that certain things are obvious and don’t need to be explained. For example, a company like Intel deals with pretty cutting edge technology. This requires some fairly intelligent people.

Apparently, even then, organizations have to tell their employees how to use social media:

“These are the official guidelines for social media at Intel. If you’re an Intel employee or contractor creating or contributing to blogs, wikis,social networks, virtual worlds, or any other kind of social media both on and off intel.com - these guidelines are for you.”

Tools and Our Brain

We often hear about how technology doesn’t change the brain. Or, at least that technology doesn’t impact how we think in the short term. Evolution, we are told, takes much, much longer.

This argument then forms the basis for treating technology only as a tool - something that we use and select for particular tasks (for a review of the differing views of technology, see Heather Kanuka’s excellent article(.pdf) on the subject).

Norman Doidge, in his text The Brain that Changes Itself, provides many compelling examples of how technology, tools, and experiences can substantially rewire the human brain in a short period of time.

While we may disagree about the impact of technology on humanity, it is difficult to argue that technology does not alter mental functioning.

Computers, mobile phones, and web search form the basis of a network of and for cognition. Consider this study of how tools become part of the body. We have a reciprocal relationship with tools: we use them, they change us.

As McLuhan stated: first we shape the tools, thereafter the tools shape us.

Social Media and Social Divisions

Does the internet - social media in particular - act as a unifier? Apparently not,according to several researchers.

Instead, social media amplifies existing social structures. Or, as Danah Boyd states, “pervasive social stratification is being reified in a new era”.

Technology doesn’t (immediately) alter human nature. It provides new views (mirrors) for seeing what we are.

The desire to associate with people who share our beliefs, values, and economic conditions, migrates to new social spaces - digital or physical.

That Brain of Ours

Researchers are in the early stages of understanding the dynamics of the human brain.

Discoveries (interesting word - how do constructivists respond to the notion of discovery?) to date are causing shifts in views in fields like law and the legal code.

If I commit a crime, and it is due to a brain lesion or a developmental disability, should I still be punished as if though it was a free will choice?

What I find most interesting in developments in neuroscience is the growing understanding of the brain as a complex system and knowledge / thought as connection-forming and patterning (we had a short discussion of the support neuroscience offers for connectivism during CCK08 last year).

Two resources on this topic:

1. How chaos drives the brain - a short, but intriguing video of patterns (waves) of thought activity.
2. Olaf Sporns presentation from 2007 where he discusses the brain as a complex systems that produces networks configurations often noted in sociology and mathematics (i.e. small world phenomena).

Consumer Voices

Trends can build and develop for long periods of time without significantly impactingstatus quo.

Periodically, the trends coalesce and offer an expression of the nature of change. YouTube, for example, has had moments where it exerts its growing influence on existing political discourse (US presidential elections) and entertainment (pick any of the dozens of YouTube-created celebrities).

Occasionally, an example of the depth of the power shift from The One to The Many arises.

Dave Carroll’s damaged guitar, at the hands of United Airlines, resulted in this music video. Approaching 500,000 views, it has become an embarrassment to United and a rallying cry for frustrated travelers.

The appeal of this video is largely based in the shared experience of suffering indignity and of “voice-less-ness” when dealing with large corporations.

There is in this video, I think, as sense of expression given to our collective feelings of being powerless... followed by a sense (hope?) of the ability for emerging media to alter power relationships.

Five Ways To Run a Deadly Online Seminar

Alan Levine reflects on his experience attending an online seminar:

“I recently felt like this wistful gal during a recent online seminar- isolated, lonely, and wishing to go outside and play.

With nose-diving budgets and more work moving online, it’s time to raise the bar on how we run online events.

Like a horrendously designed PowerPoint, no one sets out with a plan of creating a deadly dull online seminar, but they seem to happen often enough.”

The move to online meetings parallels the experiences I had in the late 90’s/early 00’s with teaching online.

The initial assumption is “no problem, I know my stuff. I can teach this online”. But, the online medium is different from face-to-face - different orientation points, cues, distractions, etc.

As with teaching and learning, the goal is to transform the experience for the environment, not merely transfer it.

On a side note, Alan delivered an exceptional presentation at ED-MEDIA a few weeks ago on 50+ web 2.0 ways to tell a story. He used Cooliris as the presentation tool - visual and effective.

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on July 17th, 2009 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About the author

To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".

Photo credits:
Addressing Problems of Faculty Resistance - kmitu
Social Media Guidelines - Irina Tischenko
Tools and Our Brain - sgame
Social Media and Social Divisions - jjavo
That Brain of Ours - pablo631
Consumer Voices - Mikael Damkier

George Siemens -
Reference: eLearnSpace [ Read more ]

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El dilema de la dimensión antropológica de la Industria del Entretenimiento

El dilema de la dimensión antropológica de la Industria del Entretenimiento 

Jorge Alberto Hidalgo Toledo**

Introducción

Hace poco más de veinte años los medios de comunicación masiva dieron un giro radical a la cultura y sus aproximaciones hipermediales. El nacimiento de la cadena musical MTV había gestado una generación de usuarios que tenderían a ver el mundo como un videoclip: edición rápida, historias paralelas, pensamiento no lineal, alteración del contexto visual por sobre información, la conjunción de discursos: visuales, auditivos y narrativos y yuxtaposición de texturas y colores. A partir de ahí, los jóvenes consumidores de medios no volvieron a ser los mismos. Una nueva sintaxis estaba definiendo la estructura gramatical del consumo mediático. Posteriormente, se categorizó a la Generación click, aquella altamente familiarizada con el discurso mediático establecido por las computadoras personales, el nacimiento de la nueva carne en que la máquina y su inteligencia artificial, intentan ser una reproducción a imagen y semejanza de cada persona; a la Generación Red que nació y creció empapada de la lengua de Internet deseosa de hacer extensiva la naturaleza del ser humano al entorno global; y a la Generación M presentada por Donald Roberts en el año 2005 en el estudio realizado para la Kaiser Family Foundation llamado Generation M: Media in the lives of 8-18 year-olds. Esta Generación altamente mediatizada, en línea y medianamente tolerante a los contenidos publicitarios dio paso al registro de My Media Generation; es decir, aquellos jóvenes entre los 13 y los 24 años que nacieron y crecieron con los medios interactivos e inalámbricos. Esta Generación, evolución de la reportada por Donald Roberts, posee un gran número de medios portátiles propios; adoptaron como suyas las tecnologías de información móviles e Internet; usan los medios tradicionales únicamente para saber de moda, belleza, celebridades, actitudes a imitar; son multitasking y están altamente acostumbrados al engranaje mediático publicitario. (Roberts, Foehr, Rideout, 2005; Hidalgo, 2006).

Nuevas industrias, nuevas tecnologías de información, nuevos medios, nuevos consumos, nuevas generaciones, nuevos usos… Ello implica también ¿nuevas dimensiones éticas y antropológicas de la industria del entretenimiento? El presente texto pretende establecer una aproximación ontológica de las tecnologías de información, su impacto sociocultural y las transformaciones que están sufriendo los usuarios de la comunicación por dichas modificaciones.

Una nueva revolución simbólica/antropológica se está viviendo; los resultados: cambios profundos en la personalidad, nuevos modos de interacción, diálogo y significación. Necesariamente toda nueva sintaxis establece una nueva semántica y por ende, una nueva pragmática. He ahí donde se teje nuestro reflexión, en el repensar preguntas básicas alrededor de la persona humana y su destino trascendente ante la conjunción de entretenimiento, ocio y tecnologías de información y sus implicaciones éticas.

La imagen tradicional con que cada persona se aproximaba a los medios de comunicación está cambiando y ese cambio lleva oculto algo más que una nueva descripción, implica un nuevo pensar, un nuevo explicar y un nuevo captar el valor en sí de la persona.

José Luis Molinuevo apunta en su texto Humanismo y nuevas tecnologías (Molinuevo, 2004) que la deshumanización llega cuando se da la pérdida de identidad para ganar otra nueva. ¿Estaremos ante un caso así?, ¿es tiempo ya de repensar en el ser humano y su relación con aquello que hoy día llena más del cien por ciento de su tiempo? Bienvenidos sean pues a las estepas de la dimensión antropológica de las tecnologías de información, el ocio, el entretenimiento, la diversión y en sí, a quien se encuentra detrás de todo ello: la persona misma. He aquí el ser humano y su laberinto; que sólo los cobardes huyan ante la mirada de la bestia.

¿Medios o fines?

¿Hasta dónde intervienen los medios en la vida del ser humano moderno?, ¿Son real y solamente un utensilio para conseguir algo o es la persona el instrumento de los medios para conseguir un aparente bien mayor?, ¿Hasta qué punto se puede hablar de una interacción de usos equitativos? Un medio, nos recuerda el profesor David Buckingham en su ya célebre texto, Educación en Medios: “es algo que utilizamos cuando deseamos comunicarnos con las personas indirectamente; es decir, sin que medie contacto personal o los interlocutores se vean cara a cara (…) Los medios no nos ofrecen una ventana transparente sobre el mundo. Ofrecen cauces o conductos a través de los cuales pueden comunicarse de manera indirecta representaciones o imágenes del mundo. Los medios intervienen: no nos ponen en contacto directo con el mundo sino que nos ofrecen versiones selectivas del mismo” (Buckingham, 2005: 19).

Intervención, representación y selección; en pocas palabras, mediación intencionada y velada. Dar cuenta que en el corazón de la interacción ser humano/medios se encuentra una relación de uso o servicio; es dar cuenta que en medio de esa relación se puede estar cultivando una paradoja que fundamenta a la persona como una cosa más al servicio de un sistema lo que da por ende una crisis de significación de la antropología y la ontología mediática y del mundo del entretenimiento.

Veamos con mayor especificidad este apartado. ¿De qué manera intervienen los medios en la vida del ser humano?, ¿Qué uso damos al entretenimiento?, ¿Qué lectura están haciendo las jóvenes generaciones de los textos mediáticos?, ¿Los medios sociales (los wikis, blogs, podcast, mensajeros instantáneos, videocast, skype, radio por Internet, etcétera), los videojuegos, Internet, el cine, la publicidad, la música son con y por las personas? Con el uso dado, ¿permiten responder las interrogantes de la existencia en una forma participativa, interactiva, personal, como lo dicta la propia ontología de las tecnologías de información? (Ver Diagrama 1 y 2)

Diagrama 1

Nuevos medios

Fuente: Propia

El ser humano, como afirma Ernst Cassirer es una “criatura constantemente en busca de sí misma” (Cassirer, 2000: 45). Muchos jóvenes en el proceso de creación de identidad han encontrado en las nuevas tecnologías de información y el mundo del entretenimiento, aparentes respuestas a muchas de sus dudas existenciales. Paradójicamente los niños y jóvenes no sólo han aprendido a “leer” y “escribir” en los medios mensajes, conocimientos y habilidades; también dicen estar aprendiendo a interpretar y valorar positiva o negativamente su existencia.

Diagrama 2

Naturaleza de los hipermedios

Fuente: Propia

En el dinamismo del proceso mediático un nuevo orden moral plantea referentes e interrogantes complejas para entender la mutación de nuestra naturaleza o aquello que permite adentrarnos en ella.

Los medios y el entretenimiento hacen cada vez más evidente su condición de omnipresentes e inevitables. Sus recursos simbólicos están presentes en todos los momentos de la vida. Como bien señala Roger Silverston, “están ahora en el centro de la experiencia, en el corazón de nuestra capacidad o incapacidad para encontrarle un sentido al mundo en que vivimos” (Silverston en Bukingham, 2005: 23).

Si pensamos en el valor cultural que tienen los medios y el entretenimiento en la vida de la ahora denominada My Media Generation[1], que los entienden como sinónimo de diversión, tiempo libre, ocio y pasatiempo, se vuelve fundamental estudiarlos y entenderlos para describir la respuesta existencial que están encontrando al involucrarse y empatar simbólicamente con las actitudes y formas de conducta que promueven.

My Media Generation

En el año 2005, Kurt Bensmiller dirigió el estudio denominado Truly, Madly, Deeply Engaged: Global Youth, Media and Technology, para fundamentar la entrada de Yahoo! en los mercados emergentes más importantes del planeta. Con la investigación generada, logró identificar el nacimiento de una generación para la cual:

• Los medios juegan un rol fundamental en sus vidas.
• Tienen un mayor compromiso, profundidad y pasión con los nuevos medios.
• Son poco receptivos a experiencias mediáticas pasivas.
• Sus principales canales de comunicación son la música, Internet y los dispositivos móviles.
• Filtran publicidad aceptando sólo lo que consideran relevante, entretenido y significativo.
• No pueden vivir sin los nuevos dispositivos tecnológicos. (Bensmiller, 2006)

Detrás de todos estos elementos se manifestó que la principal motivación era la interconexión; es decir, adoptan las tecnologías y formas de entretenimiento que les permiten: desarrollar un sentido de pertenencia (comunidades virtuales); grafitear el mundo con su voz y ser valorados por lo que son, sin importar con ello expresarse de modo irreverente y anárquica (autoexpresión); y finalmente, dar testimonio simbólico de su identidad (personalización). Los medios o vehículos de entretenimiento que mejor permiten establecer la triada semántica son la música, Internet y los dispositivos móviles. (Ver Diagrama 3)

Diagrama 3

Interconexión es la principal motivación de My Media Generation

Fuente: Bensmiller, 2005

My Media Generation, reportada por Kurt Bensmiller, está altamente acostumbrada a dos fenómenos particulares: el multitasking (actividades múltiples) y el media meshing (engranaje multimediático), ambos derivados de la necesidad de realizar al mismo tiempo varias acciones por sobrecarga de preocupaciones y presiones, más que por una habilidad de inteligencia mediática. La tecnología para estos jóvenes ocupa un lugar determinante en sus vidas pues ven en ella un modo de mejorar su calidad de vida; les permite mantenerse interconectados con su núcleo fundamental portador de sentido (familia y amigos). Los jóvenes que buscan contenidos exactos para verlos cuando quieren, donde quieren y en la plataforma en la que quieren, nos llevan a repensar en el planteamiento de Nicholas Negroponte en el que insistía en que la tecnología habría de transformar no sólo al mundo, a la sociedad sino a las personas (Negroponte, 1997). Y no cabe duda, hoy la tecnología es el eje rector del entretenimiento. (Ver Tabla 1)

Tabla 1

Macrotendencias que moldean a My Media Generation

Fuente: Propia basada en Bensmiller y Roberts

An entertainment way of life

Videos, dispositivos electrónicos, televisión y radio satelital, computadoras personales, Internet, son parte de las transformaciones que han afectado cualquier aspecto de lo que hacemos. Hoy, los mercados globales, la economía digital, el dinero electrónico, la comunicación instantánea y electrónica, las transmisiones satelitales se entrelazan como un grito para confrontar el silencio eterno y celebrar la mundialidad. Pensar la globalización nos lleva, como apunta Anthony Giddens en un ver lo de afuera, para sumergirnos en lo de adentro (Giddens, 2005); en un contemplar la transformación que se vive en el interior de los sistemas familiares, los valores humanos y las afectaciones directas e indirectas en la persona humana. Las presiones hacia arriba y hacia abajo confrontan las identidades. Fluyen nuevas voces ideológicas desde el corazón mismo de las industrias culturales. Una nueva conquista se está llevando acabo: la conquista de las identidades. Las industrias del entretenimiento son los nuevos misioneros; la ruta de las especias son los contenidos; las Indias Americanas son los niños y jóvenes cuya naturaleza corre el riesgo de sembrar en su interior la semilla de una extraña hibridación entre ocio, divertimento, entretenimiento y la vida sin sentido.

Hoy todo es entretenimiento. Entretener, suspender, colocar por encima de o fuera de, es la condición existencial de la sociedad centrada en la información y los servicios. El entretenimiento, un nuevo fundamentalismo, está creando su propia tradición, sus ritos, sus interpretaciones, sus modos de negociación, diálogo e identidad. El espectáculo de la nueva identidad se está montando en el fangoso terreno de la mundialidad. Más de veinte macrosegmentos se encuentran hoy reunidos en el orden del Entretenimiento. Tan tan sólo en 2004 facturó $1.3 trillones de dólares y se espera que para el 2009 alcance la extraordinaria cifra de $1.8 trillones, presentando un incremento promedio anual de 7.3%. Dicha industria, tan sólo en América Latina se espera que facture $47 billones de dólares para 2009, con una tasa anual de crecimiento de 8.2%, siendo la segunda región más importante en desarrollo después de Asia/Pacífico (Winkler, 2006).

Los segmentos que hoy día se contemplan como industrias del entretenimiento de modo directo son: 1) Industria cinematográfica; 2) Televisión abierta y por cable; 3) Distribución de producciones televisivas: cable, satélite y microondas; 3) Industria discográfica; 4) Radio; 5) Publicidad por Internet y servicios de conexión; 6) Videojuegos; 7) Información corporativa; 8) Edición de revistas; 9) Edición de periódicos; 10) Edición de libros; 11) Parques temáticos y parques de diversiones; 12) Casinos; 13) Industria deportiva; 14) Publicidad exterior; 15) Teatro; 16) Moda; 17) Arte y Cultura; 18) Mercadotecnia y comercialización de productos; 19) Marcas, contratos y derechos de autor; y, finalmente, 20) Comunicación móvil.

Los factores que han favorecido el incremento de la industria del entretenimiento son:

1. Un entorno económico favorable para la inversión en medios y entretenimiento.

2. Aumento de los ingresos derivados de la banda ancha como:

o Videojuegos por Internet y para dispositivos portátiles

o Servicios de pago para alquilar películas por Internet

o Distribución de música digital por medios legales

o Descargas de música a teléfonos celulares

o Video bajo demanda

o Radio satelital

o Libros electrónicos

3. Maduración y popularización de los servicios de Internet, televisión de paga y comercio de DVD’s. (Hidalgo, Perez & Rebeil, 2006).

En la mayoría de los países, los niños y los jóvenes pasan más tiempo consumiendo medios que en la escuela. Sus modos de socialización se centran en ver cine, televisión, hojear revistas, navegar por Internet, jugar videojuegos, escuchar música. Los medios, son el pasatiempo más significativo de su tiempo libre.

La importancia de los medios y el entretenimiento no está sólo en el plano económico, social y cultural. Los medios están sustituyendo a instituciones como la familia, la Iglesia y las escuelas. Se han vuelto omnipresentes e inevitables. Proporcionan los recursos simbólicos más significativos de la vida de los chicos; forman actitudes, conductas y creencias. Promueven estilos de vida, incluso, indeseables; corrompen, son vehículo de placeres superficiales, sustituyen los valores, manipulan, discriminan y atentan contra la salud social cuando se lanzan contra su función de promover la verdad, la belleza y el bien.

La paradoja de la expansión del entretenimiento está en que la sintaxis con la que está redactando las líneas del mundo, especialmente entre las generaciones jóvenes, produce oraciones y sentencias que no apuntan del todo a llenar los espacios vacíos con que se responden a los grandes problemas de la existencia.

“La televisión y los otros medios”, como señala Anthony Giddens, “tienden a destruir el propio espacio de diálogo que abren, a través de una trivialización y personalización inexorables de la cuestiones” vitales (Giddens, 2005: 91). La fluctuación entre el show y la representación que promueven los nuevos medios y las tecnologías de información han vuelto borrosas las maneras de cosechar grandes frutos a favor de los usuarios. Una ruptura entre la naturaleza, las normas humanas y el modo de entenderlas se está dando.

La disciplina impuesta entre el mundo del entretenimiento y My Media Generation, nos recuerda mucho el entorno deshumanizado planteado por Aldus Huxley en Un mundo feliz: no esfuerzo (todo a la mano), no amor (simples relaciones y conexiones), no experimentar el dolor (la nación Prozac y la felicidad de farmacia), no afrontar las difíciles elecciones morales (la ética Light[2] y el zapping axiológico[3] producto del relativismo moral). Por ello vale la pena cuestionarnos: ¿En dónde radica el gran riesgo del entretenimiento?

El riesgo del entretenimiento está en su poder seductor, en la sobre estimulación, en su condición repetitiva y en la desconexión que produce en el usuario. Esa triada semántica coloca al joven a un paso de la apatía ante los estímulos y la desilusión del deseo no consumado. El entretenimiento, fácilmente puede erradicar de su interior toda significación y sentido. Si el ocio y las actividades realizadas en esos espacios desencantan, se produce la ansiedad, la melancolía, la tristeza, la depresión y la infelicidad. (Ver Tabla 3)

Tabla 3

Nuevos hábitos

Fuente: Propia basada en Buckingham, Bensmiller y Roberts

Si el joven se vuelve esclavo servil a la supuesta felicidad que produce el entretenimiento, estamos ante un grave problema ético. Un problema por la frivolización de los deseos, las intenciones, los rasgos y los comportamientos naturales. En sí, la gran transformación se viven en la manera como puede afectar la grandeza de los fines humanos.

El entretenimiento en sí, no es un bueno ni malo. La categoría ética se impone cuando indagamos el uso dado y el fin perseguido y más cuando la cultura actual pareciera atentar contra el orden moral que proviene del interior de la propia naturaleza humana.

Esclavos de una felicidad servil

El riesgo de una vida centrada únicamente en la fórmula del entretenimiento no es sana ni satisfactoria pues se puede correr el riesgo de erradicar de la existencia aquello que nos hace ser humanos, pues no poseen las características que nos otorgan dignidad humana.

El texto mediático del entretenimiento y las tecnologías de información se combina claramente con su poder económico e ideológico. Es de suma importancia poner al descubierto las fuerzas ocultas del entretenimiento que no forma ni eleva las categorías humanas.

Nuestra apuesta está en la desmitificación del entretenimiento y las tecnologías de información, para hacer ver la importancia que tiene ofrecerle a los niños y jóvenes herramientas suficientes para que ellos mismos puedan sacar provecho a esas herramientas y utensilios mediáticos. Que sus contenidos y mensajes, sean útiles para que permitan el crecimiento y el desarrollo personal con miras a la construcción de una vida más feliz y productiva.

El mundo del entretenimiento también puede estar al servicio de la dignidad humana y permitirle así, a cada persona, descubrir su propia grandeza para con ello, ayudarle a vivir bien y actuar como personas en comunidad (Baran e Hidalgo, 2005).

El entretenimiento están en condiciones de hacer consciente a cada ser humano de su dignidad; le puede permitir comprender los pensamientos y sentimientos de los demás; puede servir para cultivar un sentido de responsabilidad mostrando a cada persona a crecer en la libertad personal, respetando la de los demás y tendiendo puentes de diálogo entre todas las personas y culturas.

Para ello, estéticamente los contenidos deben promover el desarrollo humano respetuoso del conocimiento, la sabiduría y la belleza, impulsando las formas plásticas sanas y útiles que reúnan a las familias y a las personas a resolver problemas diarios y elevar sublimemente su espíritu. En su forma debe estimular y celebrar las tradiciones, preservando y enriqueciendo el patrimonio cultural.

Es importante no perder de vista, que incluso en el mundo del entretenimiento, la persona y la comunidad humana son el fin y la medida del uso de todos los vehículos de comunicación. El entretenimiento no puede dejar de ser una oportunidad para crecer y florecer en el ámbito físico, intelectual, afectivo, moral y espiritual.

Conclusiones

Si se aprovecha el carácter interactivo, personalizable, generador de comunidades; así como la condición lúdica de los juegos, se podrían ofrecer herramientas a los niños y jóvenes para que cuenten con el conocimiento y la experiencia necesaria para dotar de valor y sentido su existencia a partir de la mediación que establecen con la tecnología y el entretenimiento.

Una educación hipermediática[4] se hace fundamental para dotarles de una conciencia crítica y activa que les permita sacar lo mejor de sí y de cada medio.

“Ser digital es poder crecer” (Negroponte, 1997: 60) predicaba Nicholas Negroponte, Tal cual, pareciera que los jóvenes han tomado como suya la sentencia anterior, pues son ahora ellos quienes han decidido tomar el control, buscando contenidos exactos a sus necesidades informativas para ver cuando ellos quieren y donde quieren. Basta ver el éxito de plataformas como YouTube, los blogs, el phonecast, el videocast, la televisión en demanda, el sistema TiVo, las tecnologías persona a persona como el BitTorrent, las producciones caseras y la publicación web, los videojuegos en línea, las comunidades virtuales, el consumo televisivo en espacios públicos y el consumo de Internet, de DVD’s y videojuegos durante los horarios de prime time que antes pertenecían a la televisión.

Esta traducción del mensaje del mundo digital se encarna de múltiples maneras, pero quizá la más interesante tiene que ver en cómo la sociedad de la mente de Marvin Minsky se construye por el comportamiento inteligente, el aprendizaje, el trabajo colectivo y el poder de la selectividad.

Los medios sociales, aparatos y soportes digitales permiten a la sociedad actual estar, como señala Giovanni Sartori: “informadísima de muchas cuestiones y a pesar de ello no comprenderlas” (Sartori, 1998: 79). Ese es el caso de las nuevas generaciones, que han tendido formas de relación muy interesante pero poco comprensible para ellos en el fondo.

La convergencia, la digitalización y la hibridación cultural/mediática, está interconectando códigos y maneras de comunicación. Por un lado descentraliza la información, pero por otro centraliza la incertidumbre y la inseguridad; por una vía su alcance se vuelve universal, pero en el fondo no permite alcanzar la propia existencia; su uso es cada vez más fácil, pero se vuelve más difícil compenetrar en las necesidades del otro; establece anchos y vastos rangos de horizontalidad entre usuarios activos y participativos, pero le cuesta diagramar rangos verticales con aspectos profundos y elevados como la espiritualidad, la ética y la moralidad.

Las tecnologías de información y comunicación, así como el entretenimiento, tejen laberintos de sufrimiento, miedo y poca esperanza para quien se pierde en ellos. El ocio también debe permitir a los seres humanos a ser lo que son y llegar así, a ser más personas. Si el entretenimiento no ofrece un sentido de la vida, como pudiera, en principio hacerlo la interacción constante entre usuarios, se vuelve crítica la situación pues entonces se ha perdido el interés por lo humano y sólo importa el intercambio de información, más no el entretejido de la comunicación.

Comunicar nos permite ser en relación. El dinamismo que ofrecen las tecnologías de información no puede ser una ausencia significativa cargado de intenciones vacías. La comunicación que se establece con el entretenimiento debe también apuntar a convertirse en un diálogo íntimo; un encuentro con la propia naturaleza. Ese hablar sobre cosas, es un significarlas. Si la relación que establecemos con el mundo depende en gran medida de las aproximaciones que hacemos vía el lenguaje y la comunicación, es fundamental no contaminar el ocio y el entretenimiento con el vacío. Si no queda lugar para el alma, para la finalidad y para la significación, lógicamente no puede haber interés por las personas. Yo me entretengo, yo pienso, yo soy podría ser nuestra línea de interacción.

La proliferación de hipermedios[5], la comercialización y globalización de los mercados mediáticos, la fragmentación de las audiencias masivas, la aparición de la interactividad, los medios sociales, el código abierto, también puede fragmentarse la individualización. Las nuevas generaciones que se muestran más abiertas, democráticas y conscientes del uso tecnológico y el consumo del entretenimiento, deben contar con las herramientas necesarias para poder autogestionar los deseos de expresión, descubrimiento y autodesarrollo impulsados por las tecnologías de información.

Si las generaciones cambian, si los modos de entretenimiento y sus niveles de penetración cambian, también deben cambiar nuestros modos de aproximación ética al problema. Debemos de cuidar que no sean vistos sólo como mercado potencial, como un modo de ob-tener.

El entretenimiento, sin duda, no puede producir un cambio tan radical como planteamos por sí mismo, todo dependerá de cómo se use. Procuremos que el uso no pierda la mística natural que guardaba como medio para revitalizar la condición humana. La naturaleza cambiante de los textos mediáticos, aunque esté mutando, no debe perder de vista que su fin último es el ser humano.

Estamos aún en posibilidad de hacer eco entre los jóvenes para que se sensibilicen con la parte de verdad, belleza y bondad que sigue viva en las tecnologías de información y el mundo del entretenimiento.

David Buckingham nos recuerda: “Los medios constituyen en este momento un entramado de redes muy amplias de poder social, económico e institucional, y es vital que los jóvenes comprendan las formas complejas y a veces contradictorias que dichas redes tienen de actuar” (Buckingham, 2006: 67).

En esa dialéctica de adentro y afuera planteada por Anthony Giddens se eleva la esencia del ser humano. Si logramos que el entretenimiento afine y desarrolle las innumerables cualidades espirituales y corporales de los miembros de la My Media Generation, haremos más humana la vida social. La dimensión antropológica del entretenimiento radica en que actúe de acuerdo con la naturaleza humana; que las personas no pierdan de vista que son un fin para sí mismas. Si el entretenimiento está tomando la esencia de la cultura: es decir, ser la forma espiritual de una sociedad, más nos vale que se exprese como un significado patente, como un desafío a la estructura natural que permita a los sujetos a hacer un frente visible a las murallas del vacío y la vida carente de significado. Comunicar y entretener deben ser sinónimos: utensilios para desplazarse por el mundo como seres históricos, trascendentes, libres inteligentes y realizados y no como tierra baldía; noche nublada que absorbe toda la luz del amanecer.

Referencias

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** Investigador Titular del Centro de Investigación para la Comunicación Aplicada (CICA), de la Escuela de Comunicación de la Universidad Anáhuac

[1] Jóvenes entre los 13 y los 24 años que nacieron y crecieron con los medios interactivos e inalámbricos. Poseen un gran número de medios portátiles propios; adoptaron como suyas las tecnologías de información móviles e Internet; usan los medios tradicionales únicamente para saber de moda, belleza, celebridades, actitudes a imitar; son multitasking y están altamente acostumbrados al engranaje mediático publicitario.

[2] Expresión usada para referir al relativismo moral existente en el que existe una falta de compromiso ante lo trascendente y se toman decisiones con una ligereza que no da cuenta de las implicaciones en la vida de los otros.

[3] Término empleado para referirnos al momento en que las personas cambian constantemente su jerarquía de valores sin consistencia o coherencia según lo que estén viviendo emocionalmente en el momento.

[4] Educación hipermediática o también conocida como alfabetización digital.

[5] También denominados nuevos medios o medios digitales.

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