But one of the skills you'll need as communications professionals is the ability to abstract information quickly from lengthy documents.
And get it right when you do.
How do you do that?
Let's start by saying what you don't do. You don't try to read every word. Instead, use a technique that is sometimes known as "search reading" and skim the text you want to read. According to a tip sheet on search reading from the Birkbeck School of Geography at the University of London:
Search reading consists of running your eye over the page(s) looking out for words which signal discussion of your questions. When you find such a word, you stop and read more closely the surrounding paragraphs and take notes as needed. You may not bother about the rest of the text.Search reading is closely allied with skim reading. The Birkbeck School explains:
Skim reading consists of running your eye over the page as a whole, taking in key words which indicate what the paragraphs are about. You can use the skim reading technique for rapidly getting the meat out of a book. Skim reading is used in conjunction with search reading, as, while you skim, you may find a section that you need to read more closely. The French call it ‘diagonal reading’, but the idea is the same: you run your eye in somewhat random fashion over the page looking for signposts.In a word, you're just eyeballing the text.
In short, today's complex national and international economic systems could not function without the media. Remove them, and crucial economic structures would collapse, with great harm to countless people and to society.
13. The media also can be used to block community and injure the integral good of persons: by alienating people or marginalizing and isolating them; drawing them into perverse communities organized around false, destructive values; fostering hostility and conflict, demonizing others and creating a mentality of "us" against "them"; presenting what is base and degrading in a glamorous light, while ignoring or belittling what uplifts and ennobles; spreading misinformation and disinformation, fostering trivialization and banality. Stereotyping—based on race and ethnicity, sex and age and other factors, including religion—is distressingly common in media. Often, too, social communication overlooks what is genuinely new and important, including the good news of the Gospel, and concentrates on the fashionable or faddish.
Abuses exist in each of the areas just mentioned.
14. Economic. The media sometimes are used to build and sustain economic systems that serve acquisitiveness and greed. ...
16. Cultural. Critics frequently decry the superficiality and bad taste of media, and although they are not obliged to be somber and dull, they should not be tawdry and demeaning either. It is no excuse to say the media reflect popular standards; for they also powerfully influence popular standards and so have a serious duty to uplift, not degrade, them.
The problem takes various forms. Instead of explaining complex matters carefully and truthfully, news media avoid or oversimplify them. Entertainment media feature presentations of a corrupting, dehumanizing kind, including exploitative treatments of sexuality and violence. It is grossly irresponsible to ignore or dismiss the fact that "pornography and sadistic violence debase sexuality, corrode human relationships, exploit individuals—especially women and young people, undermine marriage and family life, foster anti-social behaviour and weaken the moral fibre of society itself" (Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Pornography and Violence in the Communications Media: A Pastoral Response, 10).
On the international level, cultural domination imposed through the means of social communication also is a serious, growing problem. Traditional cultural expressions are virtually excluded from access to popular media in some places and face extinction; meanwhile the values of affluent, secularized societies increasingly supplant the traditional values of societies less wealthy and powerful. In considering these matters, particular attention should go to providing children and young people with media presentations that put them in living contact with their cultural heritage.
Communication across cultural lines is desirable. Societies can and should learn from one another. But transcultural communication should not be at the expense of the less powerful. Today "even the least-widespread cultures are no longer isolated. They benefit from an increase in contacts, but they also suffer from the pressures of a powerful trend toward uniformity" (Toward a Pastoral Approach To Culture, 33). That so much communication now flows in one direction only—from developed nations to the developing and the poor—raises serious ethical questions. Have the rich nothing to learn from the poor? Are the powerful deaf to the voices of the weak?
And this, from the conclusion:
27. As the third millennium of the Christian era begins, humankind is well along in creating a global network for the instantaneous transmission of information, ideas, and value judgments in science, commerce, education, entertainment, politics, the arts, religion, and every other field.There's more. In fact, you should go through the paper for yourself -- you'll probably find other passages that seem more important to you than the ones I pulled out. That's the way it goes. Each of us sees things a little differently.
This network already is directly accessible to many people in their homes and schools and workplaces—indeed, wherever they may be. It is commonplace to view events, from sports to wars, happening in real time on the other side of the planet. People can tap directly into quantities of data beyond the reach of many scholars and students just a short time ago. An individual can ascend to heights of human genius and virtue, or plunge to the depths of human degradation, while sitting alone at a keyboard and screen. Communication technology constantly achieves new breakthroughs, with enormous potential for good and ill. As interactivity increases, the distinction between communicators and recipients blurs. Continuing research is needed into the impact, and especially the ethical implications, of new and emerging media.
28. But despite their immense power, the means of communication are, and will remain, only media—that is to say: instruments, tools, available for both good and evil uses. The choice is ours. The media do not call for a new ethic; they call for the application of established principles to new circumstances. And this is a task in which everyone has a role to play. Ethics in the media is not the business only of specialists, whether they be specialists in social communication or specialists in moral philosophy; rather, the reflection and dialogue that this document seeks to encourage and assist must be broad and inclusive.
29. Social communication can join people in communities of sympathy and shared interest. Will these communities be informed by justice, decency, and respect for human rights; will they be committed to the common good? Or will they be selfish and inward-looking, committed to the benefit of particular groups—economic, racial, political, even religious—at others' expense? Will new technology serve all nations and peoples, while respecting the cultural traditions of each; or will it be a tool to enrich the rich and empower the powerful? We have to choose.
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