Jorge's Blog

Photo: Gustavo Fring via Pexels · Pexels License C onsider a television sequence in which one person speaks, the camera cuts to somebody else's expression and the scene ends in silence. It is easy to assemble a story from those images. The first person has upset the second; the silence means disagreement; perhaps the relationship has changed. I can see how quickly a few moments become an apparently complete account. Of course, that interpretation might be reasonable. What interests me is how difficult it can be to notice where the recorded material ends and my explanation begins. My growing interest in audiovisual learning has made that distinction particularly useful. The scene has an ending. My explanation of it may still be unfinished. What the sequence gives me Moving images are unusually effective at making events feel continuous. We see faces, hear voices and follow a sequence that appears to lead naturally from one action to the n...

Photo: Anna Keibalo via Pexels · Pexels License A headline can do a remarkable amount of work in very few words. It can tell us what happened, identify someone responsible, signal urgency and suggest how we ought to feel about the story. It can also make an interpretation sound like an established fact. One useful moment for me occurs when I notice that a headline has led me towards a conclusion before I have read the article. That is not evidence of deliberate manipulation. Headlines have limited space, and editors have real decisions to make. But it is a reason to notice where the words end and my own inference begins. When I use the phrase “epistemic communication”, I mean something quite practical: paying attention to how claims acquire the appearance of knowledge as they move between people. The headline tells me what to look at. I still need to decide what the evidence allows me to conclude. A report is not t...

Photo: Max Bonda via Pexels · Pexels License I studied journalism long before I became interested in psychology, adult education and the questions about communication that occupy so much of my attention today. At the time, I probably thought of journalism as preparation for a particular profession. Looking back, I am beginning to appreciate something else: it also taught me a way of approaching information. What deserves attention? What needs explaining? What can be left out without losing something important? And how do we turn a great deal of material into something another person can actually follow? Those questions have followed me much further than I might once have expected. Journalism taught me that communicating more information is not necessarily the same as communicating better. The discipline of choosing One of journalism's most useful lessons is that information has to be organised. A report ca...

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 ...