Media And The Mind

A beautifully illustrated argument that reveals notebooks as extraordinary paper machines that transformed knowledge on the page and in the mind. Information is often characterized as facts that float effortlessly across time and space. But before the nineteenth century, information was seen as a process that included a set of skills enacted through media on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these mediated facts and skills learned? Concentrating on manuscripts created by students in Scotland between 1700 and 1830, Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks functioned as workshops where notekeepers learned to judge the accuracy, utility, and morality of the data they encountered. He shows that, in an age preoccupied with "enlightened" values, the skills and materials required to make and use notebooks were not simply aids to reason—they were part of reason itself. Covering a rich selection of material and visual media ranging from hand-stitched bindings to watercolor paintings, the book problematizes John Locke's comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa. Although one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment, scholars seldom consider why it was so successful for those who used it. Eddy makes a case for using the material culture of early modern manuscripts to expand the meaning of the metaphor in a way that offers a clearer understanding of the direct relationship that existed between thinking and notekeeping. Starting in the home, moving to schools, and then ending with universities, the book explores this argument by reconstructing the relationship between media and the mind from the bottom up.

Leading authority on media literacy education shows secondary teachers how to incorporate media literacy into the curriculum, teach 21st-century skills, and select meaningful texts.

Moral psychology and media theory: historical and emerging viewpoints / by Allison Eden, Matthew Grizzard, and Robert J. Lewis -- Universal morality, mediated narratives, and neural synchrony / by Rene Weber, Lucy Popova, and J. Michael Mangus -- A model of intuitive morality and exemplars / by Ron Tamborini -- Morality subcultures and media production: how Hollywood minds the morals of its audience / by Dana Mastro ... [et al.] -- The experience of elevation: responses to media portrayals of moral beauty / by Mary Beth Oliver, Erin Ash, and Julia K. Woolley -- Moral disengagement during exposure to media violence: would it feel right to shoot an innocent civilian in a video game? / by Tilo Hartmann -- Moral monitoring and emotionality in responding to fiction, sports, and the news / by Dolf Zillmann -- How we enjoy and why we seek out morally complex characters in media entertainment / by Arthur A. Raney and Sophie H. Janicke -- The psychological functions of justice in mass media / by Tobias Rothmund ... [et al.] -- The effect of media on children's moral reasoning / by Marina Krcmar

Patricia M. Greenfield was one of the first psychologists to present new research on how various media can be used to promote social growth and thinking skills. In this now classic, she argues that each medium can make a contribution to development, that each has strengths and weaknesses, and that the ideal childhood environment includes a multimedia approach to learning. In the Introduction to the Classic Edition, Greenfield shows how the original edition set themes that have extended into contemporary research on media and child development, and includes an explanation of how the new media landscape has changed her own research and thinking.

In a fascinating and comprehensive intellectual history of modern communication in America, Daniel Czitrom examines the continuing contradictions between the progressive possibilities that new communications technologies offer and their use as instruments of domination and exploitation.

Like any medium of communication social media has its own tropes which must be mastered in order to use it properly. In The Social Media Mind David Amerland illustrates how Social Media is a game changer. It challenges us to rethink our assumptions on almost every sphere where it is applied. Whether communicating through the web with potential clients, increasing the exposure of a business brand or collaborating with colleagues on shared projects, it demands that we rethink the standard responses which have guided us in the past and come up with new ones, for a new age. In carefully laid out arguments, backed by evidence and examples he answers questions like: Why do some social media marketing campaigns fail and not others?Why is social media so radically different from traditional marketing?How are social media success stories created?How can social media help save costs in business?Why is social media changing so many aspects of our world?What does it take to develop a social media mind?Over the next five years social media is going to change the nature of education, politics, business, science and even the arts. Its imperatives for greater transparency, responsiveness and engagement are behind the trends which are changing our world. This book is key to understanding how to prepare, what to do and how.

Living in a segregated society, white Americans learn about African Americans not through personal relationships but through the images the media show them. The Black Image in the White Mind offers the most comprehensive look at the intricate racial patterns in the mass media and how they shape the ambivalent attitudes of Whites toward Blacks. Using the media, and especially television, as barometers of race relations, Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki explore but then go beyond the treatment of African Americans on network and local news to incisively uncover the messages sent about race by the entertainment industry-from prime-time dramas and sitcoms to commercials and Hollywood movies. While the authors find very little in the media that intentionally promotes racism, they find even less that advances racial harmony. They reveal instead a subtle pattern of images that, while making room for Blacks, implies a racial hierarchy with Whites on top and promotes a sense of difference and conflict. Commercials, for example, feature plenty of Black characters. But unlike Whites, they rarely speak to or touch one another. In prime time, the few Blacks who escape sitcom buffoonery rarely enjoy informal, friendly contact with White colleagues—perhaps reinforcing social distance in real life. Entman and Rojecki interweave such astute observations with candid interviews of White Americans that make clear how these images of racial difference insinuate themselves into Whites' thinking. Despite its disturbing readings of television and film, the book's cogent analyses and proposed policy guidelines offer hope that America's powerful mediated racial separation can be successfully bridged. "Entman and Rojecki look at how television news focuses on black poverty and crime out of proportion to the material reality of black lives, how black 'experts' are only interviewed for 'black-themed' issues and how 'black politics' are distorted in the news, and conclude that, while there are more images of African-Americans on television now than there were years ago, these images often don't reflect a commitment to 'racial comity' or community-building between the races. Thoroughly researched and convincingly argued."—Publishers Weekly "Drawing on their own research and that of a wide array of other scholars, Entman and Rojecki present a great deal of provocative data showing a general tendency to devalue blacks or force them into stock categories."—Ben Yagoda, New Leader Winner of the Frank Luther Mott Award for best book in Mass Communication and the Robert E. Lane Award for best book in political psychology.

Where do you end, and where do media begin? In Media in Mind, author Daniel Reynolds draws upon naturalist philosophies of the mind from John Dewey through contemporary theories of embodied and extended cognition to make the case that the lines separating media from the minds of their users are not blurry or variable so much as they never existed to begin with. Through analyses of films and video games from 1900 to the present, Media in Mind shows how media forms and technologies challenge dominant models of perception and mental representation, and how they complicate theoretical understanding of concepts like the platform and the interface. In order to do justice to the profound and literally mind-changing power of media, Reynolds argues, we need to think not so much about the relationship between media and the mind as about the roles that media play in our minds. Through this crucial distinction, Media in Mind surveys more than a century of media theory to illustrate the ways that scholars of film and digital media have situated and reconsidered a series of divisions between media, user, and world, and how these conceptual divisions have reflected and inflected their ways of understanding the mind.