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Research Survey Launched: Social Media and Influence of Photos on Body Image

August 4, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 2 Comments
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Social media has changed how people get information and communicate in many ways. We are not just consumers of media. With social media and new technology and tools, we also can easily make, change, and share media.

There are images everywhere generated by commercial activity and a wealth of research looking at the impact of mass media on body image of men and women.  Since the advent of social media, however, we now have access to a wealth of images that are predominantly not professionally produced.  There are over 2 billion YouTube videos, 500 million Facebook profile photos, and 70 million LinkedIn profiles and that doesn’t include the images you see on Twitter, Flickr, and a host of other social network sites.

One of the tenets of social media is that you can’t control your message, you can only participate in the conversation.  Has the flood of “real” images from social media influenced the conversation about body image and what we view as social norms?  Help us find out.

This study looks at the influence of the many media images on how people see and present themselves. Please participate!
Click here to take the Social Media Survey

Filed Under: Cognition, Social Media & Networks Tagged With: , , ,

Vote with Your Eyeballs for Positive Media Content

July 26, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge Leave a Comment
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Prosocial Augmented Reality: Celebrating Youth Achievement

Where you look matters.  Media producers count eyeballs and show you what you will watch.  Let’s celebrate achievement, such as the fifth grade chorus from Staten Island, instead of spending our time and money consuming media about outliers, like LeBron James’ basketball contract, or irresponsibility and bad behavior, like Lindsay Lohan’s substance problems and jail sentence. It’s time we started exercising our power through viewing choice and putting the powers of emerging media technologies to work promoting the behaviors we want to see in the media for our kids to emulate–not those we can’t help but see or wish we hadn’t.

Let’s use the excitement and engagement of emerging technologies—such as augmented reality—for prosocial ends.

We are long overdue to take some responsibility for the media content we choose to support. Let your eyeballs, remotes and wallets do the talking instead of your mouth. Media has to potential to create images for aspiration and inspiration, not in looks, but in substance. We can choose to support media technologies that affirm what we want to be as individuals and as a society, instead of looking for others to blame for what “media does to us.” Believe me, media outlets pay lots of attention to how you cast your eyeballs.

The August issue of Time Out New York Kids is a perfect example. It celebrates the achievements of the Webby-Award-winning fifth grade chorus from Staten Island with an augmented reality enhancement. By viewing the magazine cover with a mobile device, such as an iPhone or a Droid with Internet access, and the freely downloadable Junaio augmented reality mobile phone app, you can experience a jubilant performance clip of the chorus on video.

This is much more important news to discuss and celebrate than LeBron James’ NBA team choice. LeBron is a great example of hardwork, but the probability of having the right opportunity, work ethic, and genetic talent to achieve at his level is about .01%. That’s not 1%–it’s 100 times LESS than that, or 1 out of 10,000.

Yet, according to a 2008 study of urban youths ages 13-18, 70% planned on careers in the NBA. No big surprise that’s an attractive dream. For the 2009-2010 season, the minimum salary was $457,588 and the average salary was $3.4 million. Each year, 50,000 African American boys play high school basketball, but less than 50 will make the NBA. To put it in perspective, the average NBA basketball arena has approximately 20,000 seats, so imagine that all the seats are filled with basketball players that showed up to play, but they only let 1 player at every OTHER game onto the floor–and he may not even get to start. All the rest get to go home, many unprepared to take advantage of other career opportunities. Celebrating other achievements, such as the P.S. 22 Chorus, emphasizes opportunities that can be available to all kids. Participation is this kind of activity not only teaches about the activity–music, singing, beat, and teamwork in this case– but it demonstrates much more valuable lessons:

  1. learning takes time
  2. it is cumulative
  3. it is about effort not luck
  4. hard work is rewarding
  5. working as a team feels good

Research by shows that when we believe that our abilities can change with efforts, we try harder, and that when we have confidence in ourselves, and believe in our ability to act on our own behalf, we are more resilient and take more risks. Today’s youth are facing a world where change is the rule rather than the exception. They need much more than the ability to read, write and do simple math. They need the emotional resilience and cognitive flexibility to adapt to a changing environment and meet it as a challenge not an obstacle. It’s great that LeBron James has had such success and I’m happy for him, but the kids at PS 22 make much better role models.

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Photo by AWE Photo/Jan Somm-Hammel. Retrieved from http://www.silive.com/entertainment/music/index.ssf/2009/09/ps_22_chorus_scores_30000_from.html

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Filed Under: Augmented Reality, Culture & Society, Positive Psychology Tagged With: , , , ,

How Media Psychology Contributes to Ergonomics

July 22, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 1 Comment
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I received the following thoughtful question:

Human factors are investigated under the scientific discipline called Ergonomics for comprehending human cognition, or the brain system, in order to design information systems within human factor limitations.  How are ergonomics and media psychology related?

Human physiology and cognition are obviously central issues to ergonomics and they take into account human development across the lifespan from that perspective. Media psychology also looks at the experiential aspects of human interaction with objects and environments across the lifespan. It extends the usability to the perceptions of self and self-reflection, such as, identity, self-efficacy (competence), engagement and flow (in contrast to attention), persuasion, qualitative perceptions of aesthetics, and attribution or the meaning we give to our interactions.  For example:

  1. Did this experience make me feel competent or incompetent?
  2. Did I feel able to make a good decision as a decision-maker?
  3. Did I feel engaged at an appropriate level–not to hard or too easy–so that I feel effective and energized?
  4. Was the lay-out or design aesthetically pleasing contributing to my overall mood?
  5. How do I feel about using technology?  What do I think is the ‘normal’ way of doing this action?
  6. Do I trust the experience or information?

Since humans often attribute actions of others and situational context as reflecting back on themselves, these are important considerations that impact not just whether a person is able to use something, but if they will use it or be productive and effective using it.   Media psychology will look how the physical usability impacts these types of experiences, drawing on positive psychology, social cognition, learning theory, multiple intelligences, individual strengths,  developmental psychology, and cognitive mapping and schemas in addition to the cognitive and biological issues that ergonomics address.

Filed Under: Cognition, Positive Psychology Tagged With: ,

I’m ready for my iPhone 4; so is junaio Glue

July 6, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 1 Comment
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I’m still waiting for my iPhone 4 to ship.  I do have some trepidations because 1) I hate to be a guinea pig with the first generation of any technology, and 2) I’m hearing stories about AT&T problems (how can a phone designed for AT&T have problems with their network? Should I have waited for the Verizon version?). Nevertheless, curiosity and apps like Junaio Glue pushed me over the edge and I put in the order at the end of June when they released. The best thing about being a media psychologist is that we can justify pretty much any technology purchase.

junaio Glue combines geo-location features with camera recognition to improve the accuracy of information delivery. It won’t be long before we see AR popping up (pun-intended) to support all kinds of marketing and information services, not just those who can invest big bucks.  Developers can create their own junaio Glue channels because metaio has an Open API.

You can print out the junaio Glue man, download the  app and check it out when your new iPhone 4 arrives.  (Also works on the Android.)

Filed Under: Psychology

Media Psychology: What It Is and Why You Should Care

June 15, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 5 Comments
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Media Psychology is a new and emerging field, so the early entrants have the excitement and burden of defining the path.

What is media psychology? It’s a field with no consensus definition, no clearly-defined career paths, and no easy answers. In spite of that, it can add value anywhere human behavior intersects media technologies. Here’s why:

  1. Media technologies are everywhere
  2. People of all ages use media technologies a lot
  3. Young people use them most
  4. Older people worry about younger people
  5. Technology is not going away
  6. We all worry if this is good or bad or somewhere in-between
  7. Psychology is the study of people of all ages

Media psychology is using #7 to answer #6 because of #1 through #5

Psychology is key to understanding the implications of technology. Consequently, it seems like it should be pretty straightforward to define media psychology. For some reason, though, it’s not. I have had discussions with colleagues for hours (or at least it seems like it) about what constitutes media, mediated communication, and technology and what we mean by psychology in the context of media—and we’re not even philosophers. In this and the following two posts, I will discuss my definition of media psychology and why I think media psychology is so important.

Both media and psychology have made major contributions to western culture throughout the 20th century. Can you imagine The New Yorker without Freudian references or Jason Bourne without operant conditioning? The term “media,” however, used to be confinable to a bucket labeled “mass media.” Our awareness of media, however, has reached the collective consciousness, as if we all woke up yesterday, awakened by our programmable alarm with the iPod attachment, and over our coffee made automatically by our coffeemaker, checked our blackberry for emails and headline news and then looked up shocked to see that our kids are doing much the same. This awareness is leaving people clamoring for a new level of understanding. There is an infiltration of media applications and information technologies into nearly every aspect of our lives. What does it all MEAN? Just like Mighty Mouse (or maybe Underdog), media psychology emerged in a time of need.

The goal of media psychologists is to try to answer those questions by combining an understanding of human behavior, cognition, and emotions with an equal understanding of media technologies. Unlike some types of media studies, media psychology is not just concerned with content. Media psychology looks at the whole system. There is no beginning and no end. It is a continual loop including the technology developer, content producer, content perceptions, and user response. Just as Bandera describes social cognitive theory as the reciprocal action between environment, behavior, and cognition, so does media psychology evaluate the interactive process of the system. There is no chicken, no egg to this system. They all coexist and coevolve with each other.

There is no consensus among academicians and practitioners as to the definition or scope of media psychology. This is because the field must be representative of not only the work currently being done, but also the work that needs to be done. This is a field that changes every time iTunes releases a new mobile app.

The interests of the person doing the defining often drive definitions of a field. However the fact that both ‘media’ and ‘psychology’ are themselves broad and prone to misconception contributes to the definitional confusion. In spite of our awareness of media everywhere, when someone mentions media the metaphor we fall back on is often mass media. It’s a field where you must continually define your terms. Does ‘media’ mean television or does ‘media’ include computer interfaces that facilitate information management and distribution? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Psychology, Social Media & Networks Tagged With: ,
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