For a world rapidly moving into specialization of everything it is sometimes easy to forget how important in many skills.

 

Personally starting in a very specialized economics stream I quickly moved to professional communications. A key goal of uni is pick up experience, or another way of saying it, interdisciplinarity. 

 

Specifically the idea of interdisciplinarity is the idea of being skilled in all forms of communication. Instead of just being good at PR or advertising a range of skills in many forms is crucial. Similarly disciplinary agnostic is not preaching to one stream but understanding that many exist. 

 

As an example the article, “Women inmates: Why the male model doesn’t work” (Melanie Deziel 2019) is a piece of Journalism paid for by Netflix to encourage publication of their hit show ‘Orange is the New Black’. Despite the seemingly straightforward approach ALL the disciplines of communication are well used.

 

Images, easily identifiable is a great use of media.

The article itself is a piece of journalism, funded by Netflix but still researched and truthfully written.

The whole article is itself a piece of advertising, aimed at telling the Netflix show.

And PR is used by dealing with the public and showing how Netflix aims to tackle issues for society. 

 

In similar ways, the “Godfather of Fake News”(Anisa Subedar 2018), Christopher Blair, has made quite the success of himself through utilizing interdisciplinarity. Publishing fake news intentionally he is constantly able to understand public interests and get them out to the world, in the forms of fake news. Though very unethical it is indeed journalism as most of his publications still have some fact allowing them to be somewhat believable. 

 

Through many just want to specialize, I have found it crucial that unless you have experience in more than one thing, it is almost impossible to survive in the communications world.