Arthur Howell’s Post

📢 The latest 'Children's Media Lives 2024' from Ofcom, via Revealing Reality, heightening again the need to define what we mean by social media in any discussion of it. 🖋 "Children are primarily looking at visual media – images and videos – not interacting with other people. The content they see in their feeds is increasingly professionalised and commercialised – as social media has become bigger and bigger business, it’s changed the way people use it." 🔎 These important reports do highlight the critical need for real time monitoring of impacts, and the challenge of longitudinal research. ✔ Much to digest, but the 5Rights report, from Alexandra Evans and colleagues, and its reference to cumulative harms is spot on: 💰 "Most of what children now see on social media was created by someone with the deliberate goal of capturing attention, garnering ‘likes’ or building a following – and it’s often their job to do this."

Read and clearly understand what we don’t want for the next 4 years.

My latest In 2016, Stanford researchers found that people often take a website or article they read as fact, especially if it has slick images or graphics. Lateral reading is a great way to check whether your reading is accurate and based on reality or is misinformation. You can use lateral reading in two ways: to verify a source’s credibility and to discover what other sources say about a particular subject. Find out more helpful tips on being a critical consumer.

As some of you know (especially if you've been following my updates these last weeks), I'm in the midst of writing up the research, data and conclusions about the current mental health crisis in various media professions - film, TV and cinema, games, journalism, advertising, music, social media. Today I wrapped up a chapter on the history of research and reports on professionals struggling in these industries, dating back to early studies and observations from the 1950s (in, for example, Hollywood). I'd like to share the concluding paragraphs of that chapter, summarizing what I've learned from this past, before delving into the current context, FYI:

How do we know an image is real in this day and age? An average person can no longer be certain of the authenticity of images or, increasingly, even videos through individual sleuthing. The A.I. is that good and is getting better. (That’s why the classic media literacy advice — do your own research — doesn’t work anymore.) This makes it difficult to know what to believe, except through a key mechanism: trusting sources and trusting that they have either taken the image or video themselves or carefully vetted it as authentic.

Please read one of my most recent articles:

𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝘆𝗽𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗰 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿, 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲? Join us live on Wednesday 9th October to explore: 🧠 The impact this topic has on a young person’s brain. 📈 What ways it can influence their behaviour. ⚠️ How such exposure can create pathways to harm. ☑️ Secure your place https://bit.ly/3ZNvBKR

🎬 What do young people want to see in entertainment media? More fantasy, more friendship, less romance, and less cringe-y depictions of social media, according to UCLA's Center for Scholars & Storytellers’ report. See what else young people ages 10-24 care about as it relates to media:

Election season – no better time to go back to perusing the Freedom Forum's daily postings of front pages from around the country. Around 20 years ago, we began shipping PDFs of our A-1s (or 1As if you prefer) to the Freedom Forum. Post-mortems are a daily part of #newsroom life, essential for honing content standards, practices and workflows across all departments in the quest to produce superior products night after night. As the digital era dawned, we quickly graduated from perusing physical copies of a half dozen or more #newspapers in and around our coverage area to being able to compare our previous night's work with that of our peers coast to coast. The range of approaches on Sunday's 1As surprised me a bit, given the clear imperative to downplay or hold many a planned centerpiece article/package. Sunday front pages in particular are heavily planned, with much work done in advance on the showcase content and space reserved to handle news of the day. And to be sure, smaller outlets more closely hew to the "local-local" mantra. Also, check out the Monday (7/15) front pages of many Gannett papers, and you can clearly see the effect of centralized design/production on their print products. #journalism #information #design #graphics #news

Thanks to WMUK for this media coverage for the website launch of Wonder Media: Ask the Questions! Here's the first! Check out www.wondermedialibrary.com to learn more about how to be a smart, savvy consumer of news, information and all media.