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Sage College Publishing Podcast
Current Trends Shaping the Field of Mass Communication
Join best-selling author and educator Vincent F. Filak as he dives into the dynamic world of mass communication. Uncover the thrilling evolution of the field, feel the pulse of new technologies, and join the journey into the future of this ever-evolving discipline.
Hello everyone and welcome to the first of sages focus on Mass Comm podcasts. This series will take a deep dive into the ever evolving world of mass communication and explore the current trends shaping the field. I'm Vicky Velasquez, the Product Marketing Manager for Communication and Media Studies at Sage Publishing. Together, let's navigate the dynamic landscape of Media Technology and Society. Today, I'm joined by Vincent Filak. Vince is a professor of multimedia journalism at UW Oshkosh in the Department of advertising, multimedia, and PR. Vince, do you want to go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:Sure, great. Thanks for having me. My name is Vince Filak, and I have been teaching at the college level for about 25 years, been here at Oshkosh for about 16. And I tend to teach across multiple areas within the field. So I teach writing it to reporting, I've taught blogging, I also taught public relations and advertising. And really, I like my philosophy on education to be more about the students having it very student centric. So I try to give them what they need based on what I learned from them and where they want to go. In terms of things that I do outside the classroom, I tend to write a number of journal articles I've done about 30 or so in my career. And I also write textbooks, which is one of my great joys, I get the opportunity to help students who are not mine, but are who are also out there and help professors to kind of bridge some gaps if they have them or, you know, try to reinforce some things that they think are important.
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:That's great. I like that philosophy of how you engage with your students. And as you mentioned, you have several textbooks, including a new intro Mass Comm textbook, Exploring Mass Communication, that will publish with Sage in January 2024. So today, I'd love to get your thoughts on the evolution of mass communication, the impact of new technologies and education and the future of the discipline. I'm sure you're gonna have a lot of great insights to share with our listeners, from your time, both as a journalist and as a professor. So let's just go ahead and get started.
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:That sounds great. Thanks.
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:So how have you seen the discipline of mass communication change over the years?
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:Well, I think there are a lot of changes that we have to look at. But I think there there are a few major ones that I think a lot of people can see. Pretty obviously, one major change is that people used to be really concerned about platforms. While now they're more concerned about content. So when people say, now I'm watching a TV show, it no longer means that they're all gathering in front of a big piece of furniture in the living room at a given time. And they're consuming this over the air program. They might be watching a live broadcast or something, but they'd be watching it on their computer, or they might download it on their phone and catch it later. They might end up catch clips of various things through social media and then decide to add a streaming service that's going to provide that content to them. So it's less about the old fashioned way of looking at devices, and more about what do those devices that we all use provide us with in terms of the content that we tend to enjoy. I think the second big thing, though, is the way in which time shifting and the kind of advent of niche content have taken place. So it used to be that we would all sit down at say 10 o'clock at night, and we would catch the news. Or we would, you know, go to pick up the same newspaper. And we would all read a print edition while we were commuting to work on public transit, or, you know, we'd sit down at the breakfast table and all kind of swap sections of that newspaper. Instead now what we get is we get news on demand, we get push notifications through apps that we've chosen to download, or we get information emailed to us by colleagues. We get social media posts that alert us to something important, and then we decide how deep we want to dive into that through, you know, search engines or through some of our more familiar media platforms. So we're now operating on this really 24/7 Digital cycle. And even more what we are doing now is we're redefining what we each individually consider to be newsworthy information. So we don't all share that same view of this as important. So that's really where the niche content comes in. So for me, it's Something important might be a lawsuit that's attempting to block Chet TPTs use of web scraping. due to privacy concerns, were to my teenage daughter, it might be okay, when's the next season of too hot to handle gonna hit the streaming service for you?
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:That's interesting. And the thinking about how students are consuming content also in different ways. I mean, it's no longer just a printed textbook, right? And I'm curious is that led to your students interacting differently in class, because now they all have these devices that they can instantly look at?
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:Absolutely, I think there are two things that stick with me. One is that I go back to 2526 years ago, when I started teaching at the college level. And I would have these classes that were two hours or three hours, you know, a lab and a lecture. And I would always give them a break in the middle of that big time period. Now back then, when I'd say let's take a break, immediately, what would happen is they don't reach for their coats, and they grab their packs of cigarettes, and then we go run outside and catch a smoke. And then they'd all come running back in and the whole place would smell like an ashtray for the next hour and a half. Now, when I give them the break, they all react the same way, which is they immediately grabbed for something, but they're grabbing for their phones, right. And they're all consuming something different. So they're on Instagram, looking to find out what people were posting, or maybe they're catching up on Snapchat so that they don't lose any of their SNAP streaks. Or in some cases, they've gotten text messages from friends. And they're trying to respond really quickly, before I start the second half of lecture. But the other thing is that we don't have this shared sense of what is important. So they're all consuming content. And they're all consuming it on sometimes the same platform. So they might all be on say Instagram, or x or Snapchat. But what they're consuming is completely different from one another, even though Demographically speaking, they should all be in that same basic zone. It's no longer the way it used to be when everybody grabbed a print, copy the student newspaper, and they discussed whatever was on the front page.
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:Right? Yeah. So speaking of kind of platform, social media, considering your vast experience in journalism, blogging, and social media, how crucial Do you think personal knowledge of these platforms is for writing about mass communication today?
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:Oh, it's extremely important. Understanding these media sources really matters a great deal, because we need to have some sort of shared sense as to what's available to us, and how trustworthy the material is on those sources. And how to, I think the big thing is that we need to really think critically about what we're being given. It used to be that we had kind of a monolithic media. So we got used to the idea of trusting kind of the single centralized sources, like your local newspaper, or your local TV anchor, or what have you. So I kind of go back in my mind to this example, from when I was younger, and I visited my grandma on a Friday night. And she was absolutely bereft because she went to the Kelley Senior Center for fish fry, that she had read about in the local newspaper, the cut of a reminder, and the fish fry wasn't there. And she just did not understand. Now, I was in college, and I was working in journalism, and I tried to explain, you know, sometimes newspapers make mistakes, or, you know, maybe it was just a, you know, you read it and you didn't, you know, and she was just no, she was adamant, it was no, I read about the fish fry, and the reminder. And in her way of thinking, if the newspaper told her there was a fish fry Friday, at the Kelley Senior Center, well, dammit, there had to be this fish fry Friday at the Kelley senior center, it was like, you know, God did Moses Moses to the kind of a reminder in terms of this information. And that's how a lot of people thought during that time period, because they'd gotten used to really trusting that, you know, individualized, centralized source. Now, we don't have these kind of all powerful gods of information that really once ruled the print pages in the airwaves. You know, anybody with an internet connection can hop on and chime in, which is good in some ways, because it widens that pool of voices, it eliminates that barrier to entry that we used to have. But it can also allow for some significant problems. If we take this content, at face value without an eye towards critical thinking. So what we really need to do is look at content regardless of where it comes from, and better understand who is telling us certain things, where those bits of information are originating, how reliable those sources are, and why these sources can be trustworthy to us. So that's really kind of where the textbook comes in, is to try to get people to get into that mindset of Well, let's look at this content from a much more critical thinking perspective, I guess is probably the best way to put it.
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:Yeah, and I mentioned that critical thinking piece verse students is essential, especially if they're just starting out in mass communication, or just their academic journey. These are skills that need to learn and exercise along their way.
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:Absolutely. And I think one of the things that I try to push in pretty much anything I write for student consumption is learn to think critically about what you're being told, regardless of where it's coming from. I talk about a concept that I like to call being a nondenominational skeptic, which means what it's coming from your best friend or your worst enemy, think about what you're being told and be ready to kind of push back on it a little bit. So that you are better prepared to kind of test the rigors of that information. I think in a lot of cases, students over say the past decade or two have gotten used to the idea of kind of learning for a test. So we've kind of got this mentality of pour information into, remember, as much as possible, dump it out of your left ear on to the test paper, get your good grade, move on to the next one. What we need to see more of especially in mass communication these days, is somebody stopping and thinking about when that information is coming in and say, Wait a minute, let's talk about that. Let's investigate that let's kind of poke a little bit more, so that we get something clear in our head that this really is the way it is as opposed to well, I guess somebody said until it's good enough.
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:Yeah, definitely. So what methods do you feel helps students better understand complex topics related to mass communication?
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:That's a really good question. I think that I try. As an educator, as a writer, I try to come at things and I try to come to the table from an audience centered point of view. And what I mean by that is, I tried to think less about, okay, here's this thing that I want to tell you. And this is how I'm going to say it and more about kind of, kind of mentally asking the question, okay, what matters to you, as the student as the audience member? And then how can I tell it to you in a way that makes sense to you based on your life experiences. So this means I need to kind of tailor my approach to the content based on my audience and what I know about who they are, and what they've done to this point. So in a lot of ways, I'm a huge fan of analogies, as I'm quite certain any student who's ever taken a class with me with a test. So I'll compare things like how do you write a sentence more tightly to grocery shopping on a budget, or I'll discuss the idea of student media editors and advisors and how they work together through like references to movie scenes that everybody has seen. My favorite though, is when I have students coming in, and they're trying to get their first job. And they're feeling this pull and tug in this kind of silence from I put my stuff out there, and they're not getting back to me, like, what do I do? Am I being too needy or whatever, I compare it to a bad dating process. So it's kind of like you're trying to go out on a date with somebody and form this relationship. And all the students who have gone through it tell me I'm dead on the ones that haven't gone through yet. Or like, that doesn't sound right. And then they go through it. They're like, Oh, my God, you're so right. This is like the worst dating experience in my life. So the point really, is that when they can see parallels among the various ways in which their lives mirror the things that we're discussing, they tend to get the concepts a lot more easily. So that's especially true when we talk about things like NASSCOM theories. A lot of times what I'll do is we'll introduce the theory and we'll talk about it or will, you know, when I write something out, I'll kind of lay out the basics of what that theory is. And then I'll say, Okay, let's kind of talk about this in an example that might be more akin to what you see on a daily basis. So I kind of pin it into what their lives are about, or what they have experienced. And not only are they likely to remember it, but they're gonna find ways to apply that. And that's learning. I've had a number of students come back to me, after they've done the theory thing. And they come back and they're like, you know, I was like, dealing with my roommate last night. And I thought about you and that theory you were talking about, and that was exactly what was going on. And I'm like, okay, that's learning. You're starting to see how what we talked about kind of in the ethereal realm kind of comes right down to the practical realm. Yeah,
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:that's great. They're applying it in their real lives, right, which is what exactly Do what you want. And I would think it makes it less intimidating for students. You know, sometimes you hear theory can sound scary, but when you kind of boil it down into relate it to their lives, they're much more likely to digest it.
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:Absolutely, you know, we will, we will do things in class where I'll ask them about certain things they've experienced, or I'll ask them about certain things they've read or things along those lines. And then all of a sudden, they start to see, you know, you start to see the light bulb, come on, you start to see the nose or the hamster happen on the treadmill, and their brains are gearing up. Hey, wait, no, I see how that works. I see what that does, I see why that is that way. And then they kind of look for it. And they kind of start seeing it in other parts of their lives. In a lot of ways, once you're able to kind of break through that mystique of the theory, and show them what it really physically does in their day to day lives. It's a lot like those old posters that they used to have, where there were all these dots on them. And you had to stare at them to try to see a three dimensional object. And I remember staring at those things for forever, not being able to see it, but all of a sudden, something would click, and then you'd see like the big ship that was there, the big car. And after that, you always see it, you can see it without having to really put in additional work, but it's breaking through that boundary. And I think that in teaching theory through these analogies and examples, a lot of times, they can then immediately see, okay, I've broken through that barrier. And now I can start really working.
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:Yeah. And again, related to the kind of application to real life, you briefly mentioned kind of careers and job opportunities. So what job opportunities within mass communication are often overlooked by students who are interested in the major. You know,
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:it's funny, when we talk about this, I think a lot of people look at jobs, with the idea of kind of that old silo approach where it was, you go to school to be a newspaper journalism major, you become a newspaper reporter, you become a newspaper editor, and then you kind of keep on that track, or you do the same thing with TV or radio or whatever. And that way of thinking just doesn't make sense in today's media world, because nobody is just one thing anymore. And nobody works on just one platform anymore. The key to Mass Comm education, at least to me, is that if you do it, well, you're putting tools in the toolboxes of the students. And they can use those tools in a variety of ways throughout their careers. And I tend to like to think about it this way. When I was working on one of my earlier textbooks, when I was working on dynamics of media writing, I remember picking out professionals that I wanted to feature in each chapter. So we had a professional in each chapter, who would speak about their experiences. And what was interesting to me was that every single one of them had started in one aspect of the field. And they had transitioned to another aspect of the field, whether they started in PR and then moved to add, or maybe they were in radio, and then they transition to marketing, or they were in marketing and they went into news or however the the iterations work. And what we found was that all of the skills, the tools in the toolbox, so to speak, were transferable. So when I said to them, how hard was it to make that move? Their answer almost always was it wasn't that hard, it was just kind of getting used to applying what you've already learned how to do, just in this new area in this new field. So it was more more adjustment than kind of reboot. And so I like to think about those tools and how important they are. So I think about teaching things like how to write clearly and directly like putting a hammer in their toolbox. So you can use a hammer for a ton of different things. You can build a birdhouse with a hammer, you can hang a picture on the wall with a hammer, you can demolish a wall and do some, you know, restoration work with a hammer. But I think the big thing is that in Mass Comm education, we need to do more to add tools to that toolbox throughout their experience. So text is a great tool, but it's not the best tool for everything. Again, a hammer is a great tool, but I'm not going to use that thing to change a light bulb. So you need to be able to make sure that they have a full toolbox going out. And I think that a lot of good Mass Comm educators see that because they watch how their students change careers over time and they move into these different areas. And if you've given them a full toolbox, and you've given them the ability to understand what each tool can do, they can then take that with them and do anything with it. So I guess if you put it in another way If you can find a career out there where you don't have to gather information, you don't have to ask people questions. You don't have to synthesize what you've learned, and then tell it to other people in a clear and meaningful way, through a variety of audio, video or written content. I'll buy everybody in this place a brand do fish and sweet. So
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:right? You're I mean, you're equipping them with those essential skills that will be transferred into anything they might do in the future, right? Because your career is a journey, we will move from one thing to the next. But you'll always have those core skills.
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:Absolutely. And what's even funnier is we're entering I think, the fourth edition of that media writing book. And a lot of the pros I stick with because they have such compelling stories, but when I checked back in with them, so many of them have also changed jobs. Again, they're they've changed. So they continue to have that same experience of I'm doing well with my toolbox. Even as I moved from what we were originally talking about to maybe one or two stops. Yeah.
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:But that shows students the possibilities, right, it shows them what's out there, what what they can do with their degree.
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:Absolutely. And I think that again, Mass Comm in general, provides you with that wide array of skills that are valuable to people in ways that even your professors aren't thinking about when they're giving you those tools. I think a lot of times, when you get into the field, you'll start to realize that there are things where people will say, hey, we need somebody who can do this. And you're like, I can do that. And they're like, Wow, okay, you know, that's something that we hadn't expected when we hired you. But now we've seen even more value out of you.
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:Exactly. And I want to talk a little bit about technology, which I think is something very relevant to students now and to future careers and jobs. What impact of new technologies had on the way students study and understand mass communication?
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:Well, I think in a lot of ways, we're talking about a few different things. But the big thing that we're talking about these days is artificial intelligence. Exactly. First of all, and really, this is important to understand AI is not new, we just kind of perceive it to be in this field. Basically, at its core, artificial intelligence is the idea of taking cognitive processes that humans performed, and getting a machine to do them for us. So that's a lot of stuff that we've had, for a long time, we've had digital calculators that help us do math, or we've had, you know, chess programs and computers that allow us to play a game without a human partner. What is new is that we've always kind of assumed that there were certain things that were outside the reach of artificial intelligence, like writing essays, or creating poems or doing photos or videos. Now, when AI broke down that wall, that's when we started seeing more people on the academic level start to panic a little bit. In short, we kind of started, we kind of stopped knowing what was real and what was synthetic. So as far as its impact on Mass Comm, AI can really do some amazing things like creating lifelike images out of millions of bits of data scraping, in a way that we can't even begin to understand how they can do it. Now, what that does for us, however, is that puts the onus on us to be more critical of what we're seeing and what we're reading. And it also kind of pushes us to push our students to do the same. So again, we have to be critical thinkers, we have to be nondenominational skeptics, when we're consuming this content. Not everything can or should be taken at face value, just because we read it or we see it. We used to be able to say something like Well, seeing is believing. Now, seeing plus, digging around a little bit might lead us to believing or disbelieving. One of the things I think that is important about what AI has done in regard to Mass Comm education, is it really kind of forces us to think not just what we want students to know why we want them to know what and how we think it's best for them to show that they do know what. So there was an article, I'm sure you read in the Atlantic that the headline was, the college essay is dead. And basically, the idea was that AI can create a 500 word reflective essay on a certain work of Shakespeare or something. There was another one where they had the AI program do all of the assignments. Freshmen would be expected to write it at Harvard and I think the computer program got something like a B or B plus so it could pass Harvard. Well, I don't know if we're killing the essay or I don't know if we're killing. You know, these kinds of Early courses have kind of broader learning. But what it really does make me think about is this, why do I want a kid to write a 500 word essay on a topic? You know, what do I want them to get out of the experience? And then can I adequately explain that to the students so that the student will get some value out of the task that I've assigned. So I think in a lot of ways, we've kind of been on autopilot when it comes to some of these assignments. And we just kind of figured, well, you know, they're getting something out of it. But we haven't really spent a lot of time reflecting. And now we have to, because AI can step in, and take away that that kind of easy, standard cookie cutter assignment thing that we tend to, to hand out a lot. The best teachers I've ever had, were not only able to get me to, you know, understand how to do the work, but also why I was doing like, what was the purpose of what I was doing. So I'll give you this example, my doctoral program, I had to take statistics. And I was scared to death of statistics, because I hadn't taken any kind of math based anything since my junior year in high school. So I'm like 1214 years away, having actually had to touch numbers. But I had a really good professor. And once we kind of got into the him explaining how stuff worked. He used to make us actually do all of the equations by hand, for some of these high end statistical processes, like analysis of variance between groups. And it was really tedious, it was really time consuming. I mean, you're talking 10 pages of notes, doing all of these math equations by hand. And you could really make a mistake it at any point because of human error if you really weren't careful. So we were doing these things. And we would just complain and grumble about look, a computer can nail this thing down in the fraction of a second, why are we doing this? And he explained it to us, he said, If you don't understand this process from this very micro level, and you can't adequately complete each step effectively, you'll never know, if what you put into the computer was coming out in the right way, you'll never understand the way in which everything moves from point to point. So you'll never understand, you know, if you're in the right area, you'll never be able to discern for yourself if the computer is being in some way limited by something that's part of the data or what have you. So he understood, he understood that we were not happy about it, but he could explain why he was doing what he was doing. And that also helped us to better understand not only what the statistic did, rather than just showing the result. But it also helped me to kind of internalize that and hang on to it. And that still sticks with me, you know, 2030 years later.
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:Yeah, and I think for your students fear explaining why they're doing an assignment, they're more likely to be engaged with that assignment.
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:You know, in a number of cases. Students will complain about my assignments, and there's there's no good way around it. But in each case, I can show them very specifically, these are the things that I want you to get out of this. These are not only the objectives, but also why you're going to need this tool in your toolbox. Like most things, you can explain why people will internalize it, and then they'll buy into it. Even if they don't like it. They'll they'll kind of say, Okay, I see what you're doing here. Yeah,
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:they can still see the value. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Vince for taking the time to talk to me today. It's always great to hear from our authors. Do you have any final thoughts or parting words you want to revisit before we sign off?
Vince Filak, Mass Comm Professor and Sage Author:I think the one thing that's important to understand is that mass communication is always going to be from from long ago, but definitely from this point forward, changing, evolving, developing, and we need to be kind of lifelong learners, if we want to be able to stick with this field. And if we want to be able to make sure that our students are getting the best education they can.
Victoria Velasquez, Product Marketing Manager for Psychology at SAGE Publishing:Definitely very well said. Thank you so much. That concludes episode one of Sage's Focus on Mass Comm Podcast, and the next episode, we'll be back with Vince to discuss the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in education. And we'll focus on the impact it has within mediate mass communication. Make sure to subscribe to the Sage College Publishing Podcast Channel to get the latest updates. And we'll see you in the next episode.