This week Dom wrote a post about Mrs. Doubtfire’s house. I was recently in San Francisco for two weeks and I am absolutely devastated that I didn’t go and see it. It was one of my all time favourite movies as a kid, and Robin Williams will always be one of my favourite actors of all time.
Rebecca wrote this interesting post about Instagram finally crumbling to advertising pressures and another interesting film review about the movie Her .
Solid work this week Rebecca!
This is great! Apparently they accepted his offer. Good riddance.
This weeks reading by Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts looks at the relationship between culture and technologies. They look at answering questions such as what impact does technologies have in our lives? How do we live with them? Are technologies neutral in themselves, that is, does the way in which they are used determine their cultural impact? Or do technologies have intrinsic qualities that shape the culture into which they are introduced?
All of these questions are interesting in their own right, but the final idea about whether or not technologies are neutral in their own right or not made me think.
A definition of technological determinism is given as being the belief that technology is an agent for social change. They use the example of the phrase ‘you can’t stop progress’ as a good example of this belief.
Honestly that’s as far as I got in understanding this reading. It seriously hurt my brain, and after completing 2 essays in 2 days I gave up.
I blame technology!
Everyone downloads media content today. That’s how it works. Sadly those media mega owners (*cough cough old mate Rupert Murdoch) have cottoned onto the fact that they can’t make money off people that don’t pay.
The latest example can be seen with Game Of Thrones where Rupert Murdoch is preparing to make a big push into the Australian broadband market.
This weeks symposium merged into the land of education and in particular VCE. The point was raised about what we really learnt and retained from our high school life. Ellen wrote an interesting blog post about some statistics she found on this article which states that medical students forget 25-35% of basic science knowledge after just one year, and have forgotten up to 80% in 25 years.
I must admit that I completely agree with this research and to a degree think I would have lost more than 35% of my learnt knowledge after my first year out of high school. I’m the sort of student that can walk out of an exam (and ace it) only to forget everything by the next day.
It’s interesting to think about how we are taught and if these methods are working in todays technologically advanced society.
With more and more schools investing in ‘learning technologies’ such as iPads and laptops it will be interesting to see if these statistics will change throughout the school life of these ‘tech savy’ kids that today’s schooling system is pushing out.
If studies such as this one by National Geographic and this one are anything to go by then iPads and other new technologies seem to be the only way to go.
Dom has a great post about Hypertext. He starts by providing multiple examples of ways hypertext can be used. He links to other people blogs, other photo’s and uses words and images as the link.
He looks at the way’s in which people use hypertext today and explains how this weeks reading by Landow examines electronic linking and how it can also be used within e-books. He goes on to explore how this allows readers to navigate a text with ease and efficiency, such as skipping to a specific chapter of a novel at the touch of a button. Or, in some instances, to other texts entirely.
I find it interesting how these links create an intricate world of endless interconnected texts. It allows a more three dimensional world, branching out from traditional print literacy to an existence of networked literacy.
This post was helpful as I focused on the second reading instead by Jay David Bolter about writing space.
Dominic Chambers has a great example of hyperlinks in his blog and also has a brief rant about the readings, I must admit I often have a similar sense of frustration when I open up the readings. Simone Lau has a good summary of this weeks reading about Hypertext by George Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization.
This weeks reading was a chapter in Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space and was titled Writing as Technology.
Bolter believes that the role of writing is for “collective memory, for preserving and passing on human experience”.
I for one really enjoy this definition and idea of writing. I love to look at the world around me, listening and looking for potential blog post ideas. I believe that everyone draws from experiences in their own lives as inspiration to write a new story, or create a film. The best emotions spring from life experiences, love, hate, vengeance and happiness, these raw feelings are the building blocks to great writing.
Writing enables us to “arrange verbal thoughts in a visual space”. Writing is definitely therapeutic. Ask anyone who owns a diary. Putting your feelings out of your brain and onto some paper is one of the best methods organising thoughts. It’s not only calming but largely productive. Thoughts ping around our minds, doing loops, circles and often disappearing entirely, only to pop back up again at 3am and proceed to keep us awake all night. By writing things down our minds can settle and our thoughts won’t end up lost in the depths of our minds.
This reading suggests that the power of writing and more importantly the power of words is so vast it can transcend time.
It’s encouraging to think that even though our writing technologies and publication methods are changing our writing can have an everlasting impact. The idea that what I am writing this very second will one day be read. Whether it be tomorrow, next week in class or at my eulogy. Even in 200 years time. Who knows. But it’s a pretty exciting thought.
As briefly discussed in my early blog post the propaganda model tries to explain media behavior by looking at certain pressures that influence and limit news content.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky first introduced the model in 1988 in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
The propaganda model argues that news passes through five filters before the population sees or reads about it. These filters control what events are deemed ‘newsworthy’, how they are covered, where they are placed within the media and how much coverage they receive.
In today’s climate of online news I find it interesting to see how this model has changed and if it still applies today. It gives another interesting perspective on the question are online media sources less trustworthy, or has the news always been untrustworthy? Sorry once again for my cynicism, I really need to be more of a glass half full person.
These are the five filters:
1. Ownership
Concentrated ownership (think Rupert Murdoch in Australia) of mass media firms share common interests with other sectors of the economy, and therefore have a real stake in maintaining an economic and political climate that is favorable to their profitability. They are unlikely to be critical of policies that directly benefit them. Therefore these money hungry media owners (aka Rupert) click their fingers and anything that is not conducive to them and their money making ventures will not appear in their publications.
2. Funding/ Advertising
Advertising is a primary source of funds for media outlets. It would be against the interests of these news outlets to produce content that might provoke advertisers. For example if a large company, that has an advertising contract with a certain media company, does something that would usually be considered ‘newsworthy’ (for example an oil spill), it may not be covered by news sources at the risk of losing the advertising contract and the consequential funding.
3. Sourcing
This refers to a reliance on information provided by “expert” and official sources. Elites, such as business leaders, politicians and government officials are typically viewed as credible and unbiased sources of information. This pool of reliable sources are often needed for news stories and to report something negative that would affect these sources would be to risk losing them as an ally.
4. Flak
Flak refers to negative commentary to a news story that can work to police and discipline journalists or news organizations that stray too far outside the consensus. Flak includes complaints, lawsuits, petitions or government sanctions.
5. Anti-communism and Fear
This filter calls to the public’s need of an external enemy or threat. Although called anti-communism, this filter still applies today, especially since the events of 9/11 and consequential war on terror. This filter directs the population against a common enemy, for example terrorism, while demonizing adversaries of state policy as unpatriotic or as being ‘in bed’ with the enemy.
This model really confuses my opinion on trustworthy news sources. In my previous blog I had come to the conclusion that we can’t trust anything that we read on the Internet as any Joe Blogs can write something and call it ‘news’. Now I feel as though I can’t trust anything we read in mainstream mass media, thank god for the era of the blogger.
So I’m once again signing off my blog as being confused. University is once again hurting my brain.
