Here's the Pitch...

The following is a MediaNote Classic. It was originally presented to MC101 classes in January 2017.

Your Aunt Mabel is holding a Tupperware Party. Friends, neighbors and relatives will assemble in the living room, relax over a bit of food and drink, and hopefully buy some Tupperware. It's a sales job, but it is also from someone you know. So you go and you buy.

The online version of this is the "Influencer." Influencers may post about a way of life or a product, but they're trying to sell you something. And tech-savvy young adults are more likely than most to be Influencers. NPR reports.

Questions...

•How do Influencers fit in with Paul Lazerfeld's 1940 People's Choice Study?

•According to the Indirect Effects Model, will the effects of an Influencer's message be predictable and uniform across the population seeing or hearing the message?

•Under the Transmission Model (SMCR), name the Sender, Message, Channel, and Receiver for the student Influencer in the story?

•In your estimation, are Influencers a passing fad, or are they here to stay? Why?

Ready for Trump Tweets?

This is a Medianote Classic. It was originally presented in September 2015. In Spring 2016, it will be presented to TTh classes only.

Political campaigning is a race for name recognition and connection with various groups of voters. And then motivating those groups of voters to turn out at the polls. It should be no surprise that social media has become a large and growing part of political campaigns. NPR reports.

Questions...

•In Chapter 1, we learn that all media messages are constructions. How are these media messages constructions?

•Is social media particularly effective when there are a lot of candidates to choose from? How?

•How is a campaign tweeting live (or nearly live) from a debate an example of disintermediation?

•How might a campaign adjust its tweets for particular groups of voters?

•How might social media be used in a campaign for GCC student body president?

Does the Internet Defuse Violence, or Encourage It?

Across America, the recent acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin has sparked intense, sometimes angry commentary. But there has been relatively little violence. Some experts believe that social media has helped to vent some of the anger that may have otherwise been directed to the streets. NPR discusses this issue on its Tech Blog.

By the way, here is a slide show of how various newspapers reacted to Zimmerman's acquittal.

Questions...

•Where in the traditional media have you heard commentary about the Zimmerman trial?

•Where in the online or wireless media have you heard commentary about the Zimmerman trial?

•Who are the commentators online, generally? How is this an example of disintermediation?

•What do you think about the idea that the Internet can be a giant vent for anger?

•Overall, do you think the Internet makes the world more peaceful, or more dangerous? Why?

The End of Cash?

We no longer have paper resumes or paper report cards, so is it any surprise that we may be nearing the end of paper money? Maybe cash is just a hard-copy version of money that only older, technophobic people will cling to.

This NPR story holds out the promise that digital wallets are right around the corner and that cash may become so 20th Century.

Questions...

•The Digital Wallet is an example of what from Chapter 1?

•What is good about Digital Wallets? What is bad about it?

•Who will benefit from Digital Wallets, and how?

Insanity Plates

Sometimes, trying to be funny can get you thrown off an airliner--or a bunch of tickets that you don't deserve.

Danny White of Washington D.C. thought it would be funny to get vanity license plates for his Chevy that said NO TAGS. Seemed harmless at the time. The DMV must have agreed, because they issued the plates. But then the increasingly hapless Mr. White began to get tickets--many, many tickets--issued to cars without license plates. Why? Because police officers in those cases wrote NO TAGS on the citation in place of the license number.

The NBC station in Washington did a story about Mr. White and his unusual legal problem.

Discussion of this Medianote should be pretty brief. Thinking back to the communications model we recently went through in Chapter 1...

•Who is the source of the NBC story?
•Is it interpersonal communication or mass communication?
•Of the three types of noise mentioned in the communication model, which type did Mr. White cause with his NO TAGS license plate?
•Why is Mr. White's unusual problem a news story?