Reflective Media

Reflecting for reflection sake is mind wandering. Reflection as a process is as organized as any other method of inquiry. As I have developed my reflective practice online, I now operate with a four step process :

Review

Recognize

Route

Record

Review

Since not all media is text today, review depends on the context of reading, listening or watching. Review includes beginning with a natural affinity as to what will be reviewed, though at the beginning I have no idea whether what I am reviewing has value. The value will be drawn from the other three steps. At the review stage, it is simply following with an open mind, but also with personal interest. Over time we can get very good at knowing what will perk our interest and minimizing content that simply consumes our time.

Discernment is a power we can cultivate during the review stage of reflection. While the flow of material that can attract our attention is abundant and vast, we are the masters of our own attention. There is little value in pointing the finger at how we are led or conditioned, other than it is OK to voice this frustration, but frustration is not a review, it is simply lost focus. We can get focused mainly on the main people we regularly follow, but it is important to keep an eye open to intriguing, new and fresh voices. Fresh voices that lead to more intriguing voices means we have picked an individual who has considerable depth, but we only know that depth after we see what and who this individual is referencing.

Recognize

If we are reading and listening or observing, we need to make use of the technical ability we have to both interact and follow through. Recognition is seeing the hidden value of what we are paying attention to. In the world of old media, media was a broadcast and we were a captive audience. That is no longer the case. The media we recognize is no longer a linear relationship. The application of hyperlinks provides us jumping off points to expand our inquiry.

Why is it that we still apply a linear response to reading, writing or watching and follow a learned behaviour of responding to an author. Recognition is not about responding but recognizing the value of the media we are paying attention to. This is an important difference in applying reflective media, because the value we are gaining is from having an open mind that is creative in its reflective purpose.

In responding we disengage reflective media and get back to serving the needs of the author. Responding is the natural default state we have all learned, but recognition has to be self-taught, and what we recognize depends on the level of our own understanding, our capability and how adaptive we are with our learning.

Route

Reflective media differs from social media in that from what we develop recognition for allows us to formulate new routes to discover, even when we have not finished reflecting on the media we are paying attention to. Here we are are developing our adaptive learning capability. We are training our brain to be more open to new information.

This new information does not necessarily have to come from the hyperlinks we are provided. Again if we have some affinity with the hyperlink, then we can let our passion follow it, but we are routing from the original source media, so we don't want to spread ourselves too thin. At the same time if something triggers in our mind, that was outside the points being made by the author, then we are open to follow that route. This is not a natural thing to do, because if we think it is simply following some links, we will most likely be driven to distraction.

The reflective part of following routes is in finding meaning , as well as dig for value in the media we are engaged with. I normally log the original link (should I later want to recall the original source material as our reflective media). I log details of the person who brought us to a particular piece of information and that is simply to set a time stamp memory. Images help us here for recall purposes far more than text. What we are doing at this stage is navigating our own learning purpose with the media. Our normal habit may be deferential to the original author, but reflective media is developing ourselves as if we are a kid in a candy store of knowledge. When we can only see such a tiny amount of all knowledge shared, as we develop the route of our thinking, we are no longer at the mercy of media given to us, but find media that has the most relevance to us.

Record

The final part of the reflective media process is record. If we are deferential to the author or we still operate in the confines of linear based author-reader relationship, then we continue an age old tradition. Dynamic and adaptive thinking is a personal choice and requires us to unlearn some of socially deferential habits.

If we leave 300 comments per year, unless those comments are social niceties such as giving one word forms of appreciation, the amount of content we should be able to produce becomes phenomenal, and yet if we think about what our last 100 comments were, they are just thoughts that are blowing in the wind or again we are not engaged in reflective media, but traditional media based on an author-reader basis.

When we start recording, what we are recording is the immediate value gained from attending with our attention, but additional and new avenues of value that we route through recognizing the value that we paid attention to that was immediately available. Recording what we find on our routes may seem laborious, but we are logging hopefully what is a valuable and value creating learning pathway.

The great difficulty with reflective media is that we are so mired in habits of exchange, that we are stuck in the world of traditional learning, where people sit at a desk and listen to a teacher or an instructor. That is what we are doing when we engage media in a traditionally learned manner. Reflective media requires the process of recording a summary of our attention, and what ah-a moments we experienced that are most personal to us.

Thus reflective media is us approaching learning with wonder. That does not mean we are abandoning the author-readership relationship. We can still engage that relationship, but we are being more and more innovative but learning to see new directions, greater meaning than the author ever intended and we are following our learning pathway and creating a unique pathway of value in the process, enhancing what then becomes reflective media. by us and for us.

Reflective Media

Review

Recognize

Route

Record

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