Using Modern Media For The Common Good

Posted October 15, 2018

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Video is an incredibly powerful medium.

It can hold your attention in ways that print simply cannot. It can move you emotionally. It can educate you. It can change the way your think.

We are a society that is domainated by this medium.

The average person spends 11 hours a day, every day, staring at a screen.  8 of those hours are spent watching TV or video.  That is an astonishing statistic.  Whether we realize it or not, video dominates our lives.

Up until now, the control of the content of that video - of what was placed on all those screens, was in the hands of a very small number of massive media conglomerates.   Some 7 corporations produced more than 95% of the content that we see. That is power.

The vast majority of that video content is used to either inform us, entertain us, or, a good deal of it, to sell us stuff.  

The advent of the smartphone or the iPhone, married to the Internet, presents an opportunity to expand the number of people who can become content producers - who can use this very powerful medium to get THEIR message across.  We call this 'video literacy'.  

Video literacy is more than just pointing a phone at someone or something and hitting the record or send button.

Next summer (2019), Lisa and I will be teaching a course, as members of the faculty, at The University of Oxford in England, the first course of its kind ever at Oxford - entitled Using Modern Media For The Common Good.  The course was their idea, and a very good one.  

We will be teacing not just how to use your phone to create perfect video, but also how to shape that video to get your message across in an architecture that leverages off of what video, as a medium, does best.

Then, we will explain how to use all the tools and levers of the Internet and social media to make sure that your video content, information, or message is seen by as many people as possible.

We like to think of the smartphone as the Gutenberg's printing press of the 21st Century. It makes it possible now for anyone to 'publish'. That's a revolutoin in itself. Now, we apply that vast power and potential to the Common Good.

Join us at Oxford, July 13-20, 2019.  

Here's the link.