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 … [Read more...]
How Media Psychology Contributes to Ergonomics
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: Did this experience make me feel competent or incompetent? Did I feel able to make a good … [Read more...]
Pursuing a Career in Psychology, Education, and Interactive Media
I always enjoy getting questions from people interested in integrating media applications into their field of study or in pursuing a career in media psychology. The questions come from around the world and are always full of enthusiasm for learning, the potential of media technologies, and making a positive contribution to society. It is always a chance for me to remember not only how much I love the field of media psychology, but why I think it is so very important. Media psychology is a broad field. Recently I received a question from a new graduate in the Middle East about how to follow a path that integrates psychology and education using interactive technologies, particularly for special needs populations. I am posting my response since many people may have similar questions and this is a good way to get a conversation going. -- You can learn how to actually build the interactive programs by studying gaming and software development or how to implement them by studying … [Read more...]
