Media Awareness 9/10/2012 – In The Habit

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My media awareness experiment continues – simply, keeping a journal about what I consume media-wise, and why, and seeing what it teaches me about culture, media, and psychology.

I noted earlier that we’re just saturated with media.  The flipside is that our media consumption is very, very habitual.  Just watching oneself – or others – will make you painfully aware of how we access media habitually, and at times mindlessly.

Sitting down and flipping on the TV just because.  Surfing the web on your phone just because.  Lining up for a film premiere just because.  Watching something just because you do.  We’re putting information into our heads and playing games for no given reason just because we do.

There are doubtlessly good reasons for some of our habits.  I suspect many of them also are the result of larger forces as well, and ones that don’t always have our best interests in mind.  That’s something to address later, but the sheer FORCE of habit really amazed me as I began watching my own media habits.

It also got a lot more amazing as I watched other people.  I not only saw their habits clearly, but how they were like mine.  Very humbling in a way.

Just consider:

  • How often people will schedule time around a particular TV show – even with timeshifting.
  • Watching the end of a series even when it jumped the shark so hard it flew into orbit.
  • Surfing the web on a phone just because its there.
  • Surfing netflix or tv even if there’s nothing on, just searching the channel buffet for something.
  • Lining up for any “event” on TV, games, etc.

As I said, we’re pouring a lot into our heads just out of habit.  I suppose it’s a lot like eating-based habits we may all have.  Note they’re not necessarily bad or destructive – but they are unconcious.

I found myself that I had a lot of time-wasting media habits that had evolved for good reasons – most, interestingly enough, connected to my desire to keep up on news and technology.

Unfortunately, these habits also mean that we’re pumping things into our heads without knowing why – and frankly, wasting time because it’s easy to fill space with media.

We even have new ways to waste time and get new media habits with each gadget, gizmo, and streaming service.

I suspect some of this – perhaps most of it – is really because we’re not used to thinking about or media consumption in any large-scale way.  We’ve got so much of it, so much of it is good or amazing (or at least mediocre) and we haven’t had this much media stuff in all of human history.  It’s not a situation that easily leads us to go “hey, what are we doing here?”

More as I think about it.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

The Recruiting Nightmare: Sounding the Wake-Up Call

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As I’ve been documenting in my repeated rants the last few weeks, recruiting is a nightmare for many reasons, from the craziness of resume spam to the general hate recruiters get.  To be in recruiting these days is to face great challenges and irrational situations that border on the surreal.  To overcome them . . .

Well, I discussed what we can do to ease the problems recruiters face.  I detailed how we can improve our job searching despite the problems.  I speculated on ways we geeks can change recruiting or at least do some things to help.  It’s my hope all this advice pays off for everyone.

Look, the system is terribly broken, it’s not working, and in a few cases it seems to be working backwards.  We’re gonna have to do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t affect us, our friends, and the recruiters we know.  No one is going to save us, so we have to save each other.

It’s just not enough, in the end.

The problem isn’t going away I’m afraid.  We can raise some individual islands of sanity, but the mess of crazy hiring rules and the challenges recruiters face still surrounds us and affects our friends and family and the world.

At some point we’re all going to have to wake up from the nightmare.

How we’re going to do that I don’t know, frankly (though Roddenberry knows I’ll be speculating on it here).  I’m not sure how we’re going to fix a very broken system beyond a few minor starting points.  I am very sure that like any nightmare, you need to wake people up and that’s where we start.

Let people know the system is broken, that recruiting is challenging, that hiring really doesn’t work.  Wake them up to the fact that things really, objectively, are lousy.

Let people know the solutions I’ve shared and that you found, so they hear about ways to fix things, at least in the small.  Wake them up to the fact they can solve at least some things.

Let people know we bloody well we’ve got to fix this.   Wake them up to the fact that they’ve got to wake others up.

It’s a start.  We’ve also got to fix a fractured world economy.  But we might as well do something.

Out of the various people we shake some sense into, people we help, we may find ways to make things better.  We may build alliances.  We may awaken that one person who can get things moving to unriddle the mess of recruiting and hiring these days.

Hell, that one person might be you and you just didn’t realize it yet . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Smoked Paprika Dressing

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Saw this recipe at All Recipes and wanted to give it a try – with a few tweaks to my taste.  So here’s my one serving version.  I left out the sugar as I saw no reason, somewhat upped the garlic because hey garlic, and dropped the onions since it was a bit too complex a prep and I wasn’t sure what they’d add.

  • 2 tsp red wine vinegar
  • 1 1/4 tsp honey
  • 1/4 tsp ground mustard
  • 1/4 tsp lime juice
  • 1/8 tsp ground black pepper
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/8 tsp smoked paprika
  • 1/8 tsp crushed garlic (about 1/8 a clove or so)
  • 1/8 tsp oregano
  • 2 tsp olive oil.

Pretty much just mixed it up and blended it then served it over baby spinach.  And the result . . .

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