Posted: Monday, February 3, 2014 12:00 am
The Breeze
A question was posed to me the other day, one that I hear often in my position as the guy in charge of university communications. Students, faculty, staff, alumni, members of the local community — even my own family — ask, “How come I didn’t know about that event at JMU? What the heck!” My response is typically along the lines of, “Gosh, there’s so much happening on campus, it’s no wonder you might have missed it.”
The casualness of my response, however, belies my keen interest in meeting the challenge of keeping the JMU community informed.
Since I am an administrator at a respected university, chances are high that I will run into someone much smarter than me on campus. Surely enough, just after getting the question about missed events the other day, I was in a meeting with a senior faculty member whose intellect I respect a great deal. So I asked, “Do you ever miss campus events because you didn’t hear about them?” Glancing up from his iPad, he said, “Yes.” I then asked, “Did you know that every university event is listed on the JMU home page, and you can even get the listing on your smart phone?” He said, “No.” I thought, “Crap.”
Implicit to the questions I receive about missed events is a suggestion that maybe the university doesn’t do enough to communicate about events. In many cases I am sure that is true. But because there is so much happening on campus people begin to ignore the channel, carrying the promotions when every event is promoted. Think of university bulk email: organizations all across campus use bulk email to promote their events. But when was the last time you actually read one? Honestly.
There is a social issue here larger than simply missed art openings or badly-attended guest lectures. I’m no sociologist or anthropologist, but I do have a theory. Because we now possess and carry with us at all times enabling devices that deliver content we’ve chosen to receive, we assume that we will know everything we need to know. Certainly, such a convenience is a modern wonder. But it has flipped a fundamental reality: many of us no longer feel a compulsion to be informed because it should simply just happen via our devices. So if I am uninformed it’s no longer because I didn’t pay attention or wasn’t curious, it’s because the system didn’t work.
Traveling before the days of GPS required using actual paper maps. The first step in finding your way using a paper map was to locate yourself, which in unfamiliar territory could be a real challenge. We no longer have to do that because GPS enabled maps to tell us where we are. We are the dot at the center of existence while the Earth rotates under us and our destinations rush to greet us. This is astounding technology. But I wonder what it might be doing to the workings of our minds, or to our innate curiosity and inclination to seek.
If you have any ideas about how the university might communicate better, my email and phone number can be found on www.jmu.edu, right near events.
Andy Perrine is the associate vice president of communications and marketing at JMU. Contact Andy at perri2ad@jmu.edu.
More about Jmu
- ARTICLE: Forgetting August hopes to renew interest in alternative pop-rock
- ARTICLE: New gallery exhibit calls attention to historic downtown Harrisonburg
- ARTICLE: Darts Pats
- ARTICLE: JMU needs to conserve resources
More about James Madison University
- ARTICLE: Forgetting August hopes to renew interest in alternative pop-rock
- ARTICLE: New gallery exhibit calls attention to historic downtown Harrisonburg
- ARTICLE: Darts Pats
- ARTICLE: JMU needs to conserve resources
Posted in
Opinion,
Columns
on
Monday, February 3, 2014 12:00 am.
| Tags:
Open all references in tabs: [1 – 3]