Academic Knowledge and Society as Media Audience

[highlight]Original title of this text is “Establishing connection between academic knowledge and society as media audience”[/highlight] and it is published in Kurzgesagt Reddit.

Even when beginning to write this text, I’m trying to find the shortest way to put my thoughts since every single day a generation of hyper-mediated society grows up and spends less time to read a long text source. I observe that when peoples [pullquote-right]Peoples have no intention to take responsibility for finding better information sources.[/pullquote-right]from different class / ideology (including all three definitions of it) hear about history of communication studies etc. they get more curious about it and realize why being able to select what to watch (via youtube / ted etc.) is most crucial ability that technology gives us, but with responsibility. And peoples usually have no intention to take this responsibility, even for finding out better information sources.

I know, this things goes till frankfurt school and mass society issues etc. But what I know is that academic knowledge should include an optional way to establish its connection with peoples from non-academic field. This step is not taken by regular media, but I believe even knowing historical background of the media changes a lot about awareness of peoples.

Simplest reality which is “audience is product of the tv channel that sold to advertisements” still the basis of youtube and every other free media channel and I believe audience should fight for a way to learn “what is price segment of audience of a specific tv show”, I’m asking myself when I see an advertisement “what was my value?”. But to question this kind of stuff requires understanding about how this system works. I’m not sure what I’m even asking, some can say that its just blabbering.

End of News Channels

Additionally, within this technological paradigm, I observe that peoples now can get “news” or “information” from very its source without any effort. Thus started to dismiss most news-channels that just ideologically comment on [pullquote-left]Billions of people talk about any NASA announcement from alternative news sources rather than following NASA itself.[/pullquote-left]”news” based on their audience. That is why those channels do not encourage society to take news from it’s source, but from themselves. For example: Why NASA have only 23M follower on twitter, and billions of people talk about any NASA announcement from alternative news sources rather than following NASA itself. This results bias, misinformation, clickbaits etc. And those “news channels” do not encourage their audience to follow NASA, since they use this injection of ideology or “interpretation” as income.

Just one month of effort to identify and follow “real information sources” and getting clean from “news channels” brings enormous ease. This problem correlates with the problem Kurzgesagt mentioned once in their How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views video.

I’m just trying to find a way to increase consciousness of media audience and society, but ofcourse I’m not sure suggesting “Kurzgesagt” or “TED” channels is solution or not in this paradigm. Just wished to write about it, and maybe one day Kurzgesagt decides to make a video about Joshua Meyrowitz, Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, and Harols Innis… (Yeah, I’m in love with Medium Theory).

Technological Advice

Reddit user Shaialon built an aggregator application which sends updates about new videos of Kurzgesagt, SciShow, Mental Floss and 10 other “Knowledge in a nutshell” channels via FB Messenger and Viber. You can start to use application by clicking this link, which would be greatest point to start following most valuable information sources hand-picked around internet by a science lover.