Strands of Genius: Critical Ignoring, The Adults Not The Kids, ROI of Rebrands
Plus: 8 Key Concepts of Media Literacy
WRITING FROM | Beersheba Springs, TN
WORKING ON | clear eyes, full hearts, not losing
LOOKING AHEAD
Oct 29 - Oct 31 | Chattanooga, TN
Oct 31 - Nov 5 | Beersheba Springs, TN
Nov 5 - Dec 21 | Chattanooga, TN
Dec 21 - Jan 2 | Isla Mujeres, MX
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
Well folks, it’s that time of year again — where the USA subjects the rest of the world to our political chaos. We’re writing this on Monday, November 4th, with Rosie having already early voted. (Faris pays taxes to the USA, but is still denied the right to participate in the vote since he’s a green card holder — which is pretty crazy right?!) It seems like the race will be close, which also seems crazy to us. We totally get having different political perspectives as a more general idea, but the fact that one of the candidates is a literal criminal who wants to run a fascist dictatorship, and yet the Republican Party is still considering him a viable candidate as a ruler of our country… is just wild. And yet. We’re going into the election feeling better than in years past.
We never realized just how much having a house, or really a space of our own, would help us to feel grounded and safe. And while we live in one of those dreadful red states, we’ve realized that not all of it is so dreadful. In fact, there’s a whole lot to love about living in Tennessee. We are pretty sure that we don’t share political views with our neighbors, and yet we still share peaches and other produce, muffin tins & mason jars, garden tours and weed eaters, and plenty more. It’s been a good reminder that not everyone who has voted for Trump is an actively ‘bad’ person. And that even if they don’t share our political views, we can still have a relationship of some kind.
If you’re in the USA, we hope you’ve made a plan to vote (or that you’ve already voted) — and to the rest of the world, so sorry to put you through this all over again!
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
our Wholemeal crew - Josh & Elea & Alex & Collin & Morgan & Colin & Aisha & Kevin & Steph & Betsy, Debby and the lidded jars pottery class, Chef Kenyatta Ashford for the delicious meal on Saturday night, South Cumberland State Park - Stone Door, Greeter Falls, tarot readings, the Horrible Therapist game, Luigi’s Castle, and the beautiful leaves and crisp fall weather!
:: THE LINKS ::
CRITICAL IGNORING
While critical thinking is still taught in school, there’s a new skill that we also need to be cultivating: critical ignoring, or the ability to thoughtfully allocate our attention. Consider watching Russel Brand only to find yourself fact checking every other sentence (and finding that he’s not really the most reliable narrator). By giving him attention, we’re giving him exactly what he wants. The authors of this paper, define critical ignoring as such: “Critical ignoring is the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. Critical ignoring is more than just not paying attention – it’s about practising mindful and healthy habits in the face of information overabundance.” They have three strategies to help with practicing critical ignoring: 1) self-nudging (ie turning off notifications, turning your phone to grayscale) 2) lateral reading (learning about the organizations publishing the information and if they deserve any of our attention) and then 3) do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic (resist debating or etiolating against these attention seeking users.) This is a really great read, and I hope critical ignoring becomes more of a standard part of media literacy. (The Conversation)
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT, IT’S THE ADULTS THAT ARE A PROBLEM
As our friends with kids start to enter the age of kids having their own phones, it feels we’ve had many more conversations around phones and addiction. Adults are worried about their kids getting addicted to technology, but seem unwilling to diagnose their own addictions. Katherine Martinko helps people think about curbing digital media use, especially as it relates to kids, but was surprised when a grandmother raised her own hand during a recent presentation. She said while she was worried about her grandkids excessive screen time, at least they got a break when they came over to her house. But her own adult kids, the parents of his grandkids, got no reprieve. Martinko said that the question stayed with her and that she’s been thinking what if it’s not “How do we keep kids from being obsessed with devices” that we should be asking but instead “How can I get off my own phone so that my kid doesn’t see that as normal?” Some really interesting thoughts on how we should stop harping on the kids and instead think about our own behaviors: “We are the ones who are supposed to know better, and it is time for us to start taking more responsibility for the patterns we establish and normalize in their eyes. We owe it to them.” (Substack)
ROI OF REBRANDING
How much ROI should one expect from a rebrand? This is an impossible question but that didn’t stop Faris from trying to answer it when we was asked recently, not for the the first time. With the illusion of information adequacy in mind, he considers new Mountain Dew (formerly Mtn Dew) and the Mountain Dude. How companies do measure ROI of rebrands and how should they?
(Warc)
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:: 8 KEY CONCEPTS OF MEDIA LITERACY::
1. Media construct reality. “Media represent subsets of real experiences that are made to seem like accurate representations of life. E.g., photographs are realistic, representing objects as seen from a distance, angle and perspective, but are subsets of reality because they are not three-dimensional and do not move.”
2. Media construct versions of reality. “Each message is biased in two ways: reflecting the biases of its medium and the biases of its creator. A bias of a medium might be a photograph’s reduction of three to two dimensions and its freezing of one moment in time. A bias of a creator might be a photographer’s decision to omit an element from a photo or to photograph it from a high or low angle. These biases combine to influence the ways an audience makes meaning from the text.”
3. Audiences negotiate meaning. “Concept 3. acknowledges the audience’s role in the meaning-making process. Prior knowledge of form and content are critical in the meaning-making process. Activating content prior knowledge is important because it will facilitate new information being synthesized with existing information. Activating form prior knowledge is equally important because it will optimize a consumer’s ability to glean information from the text.
Because each audience member is unique in prior knowledge and life experiences, each member negotiates a unique meaning from a text. No two people see the same movie, read the same message, hear the same podcast, visit the same website”
4. Media have economic implications. “It is important to acknowledge that while many media texts are produced by a profit-making industry, more and more are produced just for the pleasure of making and sharing them with a small community. (Andy Warhol is quoted as saying, ‘Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.’ In the WWW age, the quote has been modified to ‘Everyone is famous to 15 people.’)”
5. Media communicate values messages. “Media messages inevitably communicate values messages that extend into the lives of their audiences. Audiences need to be able to recognize and assess these values messages.”
6. Media communicate political and social messages. “Because media messages are shared, discussed and sometimes emulated, they need to be explored within a sociopolitical context to assess how they are influencing—or are influenced by—consumers.
7. Form and content are closely related in each medium. “Particularly important in the production of media texts because it refers to the fact that the unique codes and conventions of each medium influence—and are influenced by—the content of the messages. It is also an important concept because it acknowledges the unique language of each medium.”
8. Each medium has a unique aesthetic form. “Concept #8 acknowledges the pleasures that media texts provide, either through their entertainment value or their effectiveness.”
Click here for the full document from the Association of Media Literacy - see our slide below.
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie | your friends over at geniussteals.co
(still want more? @faris is still “tweeting” while @rosieyakob prefers instagram stories)
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. We have a distributed team ourselves, an accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
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