Jorge's Blog

Photo: Jakub Zerdzicki via Pexels · Pexels License T he news is almost always on around me. That does not mean I am always sitting in front of the screen, watching every story from beginning to end. Often it is simply there: a familiar voice in the room, a headline I catch while doing something else, a change in tone that makes me look up. I had never thought much about the distinction between watching the news and having the news on . Lately, that distinction has become interesting to me. It is a small habit, but precisely the kind of ordinary media behaviour I'd like to talk about today. Some media habits are decisions. Others can quietly become part of the architecture of daily life. A blind habit Some media habits are decisions. Others become part of the architecture of one's day. That sounds trivial, but research on news use makes habit difficult to dismiss. The Australian Communications and Media Au...

Photo: Macourt Media via Pexels · Pexels License C ommunication often begins with something we can control: the words we choose, the explanation we give, the image we publish. What happens afterwards is much less tidy. Psychology has made me increasingly curious about that second part. Once a message reaches another person, it encounters attention, emotion, trust, memory and judgement. I have started to realise that some of the most useful questions about communication begin precisely where control over the message ends. Communication often begins with something we can control, but what happens afterwards is much less tidy. From message to encounter Attention is now one of the first places I prefer to look. A message can be clear and accurate yet barely register if something else is competing for attention. Research on selective attention is a useful reminder that processing is selective rather than an exhaustive re...

Photo: KoolShooters via Pexels · Pexels License O ne of the stranger things about studying across several fields is that their boundaries look much clearer on course websites than they do in real life. Psychology has one subject code, communication another, teaching another. Yet the same problem keeps turning up: information can be available without being understood, understood without being usable, and usable in one setting without travelling easily into the next. What looked to me, throughout the years, like separate interests in psychology, communication, teaching, language learning, research and support work, are now increasingly feeling like a recurring question about the space between knowing something and being able to do something with it . I keep arriving at the same gap: between information being available and a person being able to use it. Same question, different places Communication makes this gap easy to ...

Photo: Kurt:S via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0 P roblems rarely begin where we first notice them. A misunderstanding may begin with what people do or do not share as common ground; a decision, with how the options are framed; a breakdown in trust, with what earlier interactions taught someone to expect. I don't believe every problem has one neat root cause, and I'm oftentimes interested in knowing what happened before the visible endpoint: what was communicated, what was assumed, what choices seemed available, and which relationship or earlier decision changed what came next. The point where a problem becomes visible is not necessarily the point where it began. What happened before that? A misunderstanding is a simple example. Correcting the final piece of information may be enough to move on. But experiments on common ground found that shared knowledge and assumptions affect how questions are formed and unde...

[Image: ALFINete ] I have been thinking about media literacy for years: reading the research, writing about it, building it into the way I think about communication and psychology. And yet the finding that stopped me most recently came from a group of Year 10 students in Australia whose first language is not English, who arrived here from somewhere else, and who were quietly doing something most adults I know don't do: asking "what do they want me to believe?" before sharing a political post. That detail is from Jennifer Alford's 2023 study , which I've written about at length over at EMPOWERVERSE. Go there for the full analysis: the research design, the five strategies, the supporting evidence, and what it means for adult education. What I want to do here is something different: sit with what it felt like to read it. The students who taught me the most were the ones navigating a world they hadn't grown up in, in a language they were still le...

  The Wizard of Oz (1939)                                                        [Image: Flickr ] W hat makes a political leader look powerful? Is strength something a leader possesses, or something a society collectively agrees to see? In a recent interview with journalist Nicolle Wallace , historian and Professor Timothy Snyder offered a striking interpretation of Donald Trump's political persona: "He lives entirely by the strength that is conferred upon him by people who believe the story," Dr. Snyder told Wallace. "It's like the end of the Wizard of Oz. In a moment you realise — wait a minute, there actually isn't anything there." Taken psychologically, this argument is less about Trump's private personality than about a fundamental feature of social power: power is partly relational . A leader may occupy a formally powerful positi...