One Day without the Media: Findings and Revelations

One Day without the Media: Findings and Revelations

Date: 7 November 2011 (Monday)
Speaker: Prof. Clement So (School of Journalism and Communication)

What do you do first thing in the morning?

Forty years ago, our parents might get up and switch on the radio.

Now, the first thing comes to our students’ mind might be to slide open their smartphone – to check if the other party has received the message sent through “what’s app” last night; to check if the post on Facebook has been “liked”. To the young generation who are super familiar with the electronic media, the new media are not only important tools to build up social network, but also important for obtaining information, and, killing time.

We educators, seeing our children and students being unable to live without media, often get concerned about their study attitude and see electronic media as (perhaps necessary) evil.

As an extension of our last lunch seminar “Between Plugged and Unplugged”, this time, we have invited Prof. Clement So of the School of Journalism and Communication, director of the Hong Kong “Unplugged” research , to share his observation and findings. Indeed, as early as in 1988, Prof. So conducted a similar study with CUHK students. Compared with 20 years ago, the daily time our university student spent on media has been largely increased from 3.5 hours to 13 hours on average. Some described themselves as “addicted” to the electronic media and some observed the media are so omnipresence, hard to avoid.

In this seminar, Prof. So will report the findings and revelations from these two “media-starve” experiments conducted two decades apart. What are the characteristics of our digital-natives? Is media a “drug”? Should we “correct” our students or are they the only ones “addicted”? Perhaps most importantly, as teachers, how should we and how can we grasp the teachable moments?