After a long, relaxed and let’s face it, extraordinarily lazy six weeks of holidays, semester two of uni was into full swing as soon as we entered the lecture theatre on day one. The subject Networked Media began with an interesting yet slightly overwhelming (not going to lie..) lecture, essentially about where our media degrees are going to take us and how.  Adrian Miles drew  particular attention to the ideas of scarcity in the industry, with some of his main points summarised as follows…

– The scarcity of industrial media (print, TV, radio) – eg. minimal broadcast channels which only allow for one program to be screened/aired at any one time.
– The PREVIOUS scarcity of equipment, which now exists abundantly (access to equipment used to be a major reason for studying media at university in the past).

Immediately I felt somewhat alarmed, and very surprised, at this peculiar way of introducing a subject. His points however were eventually justified in the way that the study of media at RMIT has been adapted to account for such scarcity (phew!). Instead of focusing on knowing ‘what,’ our course intends to highlight ‘knowing how.’
If we were given say a detailed guide on how to operate one brand of camera, or how to use one particular editing program, this learned information would soon enough be useless. New technologies are continuously emerging, so instead of merely learning instructions (the WHAT), we need to have the capabilities to mould our knowledge and skill base to keep up with change (the HOW).  For this reason, this degree is very much self-driven – there is no ‘formula’ to success in this industry, and our lecturers cannot give us the ‘answers’ to be able to walk into a job. It is very much about experience, application and adaptation. Bit of a reality check to say the least, yet motivating all the same.