Archive for Media

| January 31, 2013
No comments

A Framework of Questions

Some questions to consider during my PhD project.

  • Why do local governments use social networks? Is it because the councillors think its a good idea? Because the managers do? Is there a push from the ‘citizen’ for social media use? Is it just what everyone else is doing?
  • How do local governments use social networks? Is it for consultation or broadcast? Do they only use it during unusual events like emergencies? Why do they do it this way?
  • What other participatory media are being used? Do they have wikis? What functionality do their websites have? Do councillors formally crowdsource motions, ideas, etc?
  • Are local governments using participatory media under a well-defined framework, or on the fly? Is there a broad strategy or ad hoc adaptation?
  • What is eGovernment and how does it apply to local governments? Do local governments pay attention to concepts like ‘eGovernment’? Do they know what it means?
  • What is participatory about local government? Is the citizen only relevant at election time?
  • What does the citizen think about all of this? Do they care?

If you think you can offer some insight into any or all of these, I’d be happy to hear from you. Leave a comment or tweet me.

Category: Media, Social Media, Uni, Web | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| January 21, 2013
One comment

Someone is going to get Mendelaid

Have you heard that Elsevier is buying Mendeley? No? Well, that’s probably because you don’t care.

In the hustle of daily start-up takeover news that has been the staple of TechCrunch and Mashable for the last few years, this one is small bikkies. But TechCrunch did report on it, which spurred others to re-report. Then someone started a feedback query in Mendeley protesting the rumour. It has 72 votes so far. Against the supposed $100million payoff, I doubt Mendeley has taken much notice of the protests. Blinded by green, you might call it.

I’m a user of Mendeley, but I’m not overly attached to it. It certainly is the best reference manager I’ve come across, but there are other tools out there, and really, what does it matter what I care about the deal anyway. The whole episode raises some interesting questions about the nature of academic publishing, and the players in that space. Not because Mendeley is “disrupting” academic publishing (according to TechCrunch’s source) but precisely because it isn’t as disruptive as it might be, as some have identified.

Despite my best instincts, I’m about to wade into an ongoing debate I have little expertise in, hopefully wearing all the appropriate personal protective equipment, especially troll-retardant. There is one very disruptive company operating in the publishing and information-sharing and gathering space that could do a very good job at spoiling the party for academic publishers wanting to own their own reference managing company – Google.

Google’s issues with privacy are well-known. Their mantra ‘Do No Evil’ has often been called into question. And, well, they’re a corporate blood-monster desperate to suck up all your spare cash and data and sell it to advertisers. But wait, there’s more: they are also very good at building truly disruptive products in markets they have little business being in. If Tom Tom or Garmin had seen Google Maps coming, investors would have sold out a decade ago. Microsoft’s Hotmail was equally as unprepared for Gmail and Google Apps. And their self-driving car technology has left the established auto-makers at the starting blocks. They haven’t quite cracked the social networking market, but they’ve largely infiltrated it by default anyway. Google Drive, Gmail, Google Plus, YouTube.

Then, there’s Google Scholar. It isn’t linked to from the Google.com homepage anymore, so you might think its on the way out, but Scholar has some very nifty features that could form the basis of a handy reference manager, with the added bonus of native connections to Google Drive. Researchers can already create professional profiles in Google Scholar, download citations to articles in a number of formats, and track the number of citations of particular authors and articles. Add to that the fact that Google is a publisher of new academic research.

Google Plus is already a niche network. It would be pretty simple for Googlers to link Scholar profiles to Plus and organise those connections around disciplines to build out an instant academic social network ready to become a reference manager as well.

Google’s mission is ”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Aside from their core search engine, what better fits that mission than user-generated citation lists written by experts?

Category: Media, Social Media, Web | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| January 21, 2013
2 comments

Starting a PhD

Following completion of my honours year in 2012, I applied for and received admission to a PhD program at the University of Wollongong, and an Australian Postgraduate Award.

I’m looking forward to beginning work on the project, but at this stage it is still in the very early developmental phase so I’m finding it hard to get genuinely excited about the work. Nonetheless, I think I’ve developed an interesting, challenging and valuable research proposal. Partly in a bid to launch myself into this project, this post outlines my research project – largely without the academic language that the actual proposal is littered with – and the key topics in my project. Then, whenever someone asks me what I’m studying, I’m handing them a URL!

The topic makes good use of my experience and studies in communications and media, and also builds on my interests in politics.

Title 

I set out to keep the title of my thesis simple, but my supervisor suggested it needed to include more detail. So, while I liked simply “Hyperlocal eGovernment”, it now is appendaged with: “participatory media practices by local government authorities in NSW”. Posed as a question, it would basically be ‘How do NSW Councils use participatory media?’ Ah, but what is participatory media? And what the hell is ‘hyperlocal?’ Read on!

Key Topics

  • Hyperlocal: this term has largely come from a new media form of journalism that focuses on neighbourhood news. ‘Hyperlocal’ news is specific to distinct small communities. It is a somewhat fluid term, but denotes geographic areas much smaller than Australian (and American) states, and also smaller than regions such as “the Illawarra“. For my purposes, I am finding the boundaries of ‘hyperlocal’ at the edges of local government/council areas.
  • eGovernment: short for ‘electronic government’, this term largely relies on communicative technologies and strategies. Governments of all sorts are beseeched to communicate more and better with employees, citizens, visitors, businesses and others. The term also refers to delivering government services and processes via electronic resources. I’m interested in how well this term applies to what local governments do with electronic tools, including the internet. Does the term apply to how they do business? If not, why not? Perhaps there is need of a new term, or perhaps the term needs to be redefined to encompass the practices of local governments.
  • Participatory media: participatory media in this context refers to the tools and processes by which the citizen communicates with and accesses the eGovernment referred to above. This relies on participatory culture, which links strongly to to participatory journalism (and hyperlocal journalism).

Key theorists

  • Jay Rosen, who theorises the “people formerly known as the audience” in a media context. These phrase could be rewritten as the “people formerly known as the citizen” in that the idea of a citizen as someone who votes once every few years is uprooted by opportunities to continually participate in government processes.
  • Henry Jenkins and Howard Rheingold have both both written extensively on participatory culture.

Methods

This project will involve development of a framework to collect and analyse data from Councils including published documents and plans that are both broad and related specifically to eGovernance. In addition to analysis of these documents, I anticipate that there will be surveys and focus group research with Councillors and Council-staff. The existing literature on e-Gov, and other research on local governments, will also be useful.

Significance

This study is intended to have a definite impact on the participatory media practices of local government authorities, both in New South Wales and elsewhere. It will develop a framework for effective use of participatory media which is intended to guide local governments in their thinking about e-governance and participatory media. Further, the challenge to the efficacy of the term ‘e-governance’ could have wide ramifications in communications, media and political academic circles.

Category: Media, Politics, Social Media, Uni, Web | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| November 7, 2012
No comments

Television and the Nation

While buzzing around the University of Wollongong website yesterday, I came across this little news story talking about the role of television in constructing ideas about the nation. The story talked about a seminar at UOW today titled ‘Television, Popular Memory and the Nation’, which is very similar to the topic of my honours thesis. Despite already having plans for the day, I decided to attend and listen to the discussions.

The sessions went like this:

  • Panel 1: Television and the Nation
    This session talked about the role of nation in structuring television studies, and wondered whether other geographies (like regions, states, supra-national areas, etc) had been missed. It asked what the geo-political approaches to television have been and raised television as a site of social practice and as a material object. We were also asked to consider what is ‘Australian’ about Australian television. The panel consisted of Stephanie Hanson, Sue Turnbull, Kate Darian-Smith and Graeme Turner, moderated by Jinna Tay.
  • Panel 2: Television and memory
    This panel raised questions about institutional, personal and popular memories and briefly addressed the CNN Effect and the Vietnam Sydnrome and discussed the importance of government organisations in memorialising television. On this panel were Fay Anderson, Chris Healy, Geoff Lealand, and Paula Hamilton.
  • Panel 3: What is television?
    This question seems pretty straightforward to anyone but cultural studies scholars and students. It covered the ‘limits’ of the object of television, the nature and future of television, and television as users rather than as technology. The prospect of television as a shaper of the ‘modern subject’ was also raised and discussed. The idea of television as a nebulous cloud was discussed by Sue Turnbull, and I made the following tweet, quoting Sue.


    The members of this panel were Frances Bonner, Alan McKee, John Hartley, and Sue Turnbull.

After the last session, a book titled Remembering Television: Histories, Technologies, Memories, edited by Sue Turnbull and Kate Darian-Smith was launched. You can get it on Amazon.

I tried to keep quiet for most of the day (always a challenge for me) in deference to the much more learned people in the room, and the discussions were fascinating. I did take issue with the term user-generated-content (UGC) being thrown around without much distinction as to who the ‘users’ were. I’ve always found ‘UGC’ to be a bit problematic, especially in relation to YouTube as there is a lot of content on YouTube that is created by professional organisations, including mass media. So I think UGC is essentially a misnomer.

Nonetheless, it was a great day, and congratulations to all those who organised it. I only wish it had occurred before I finished my honours thesis!

Category: Media, Uni | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| November 7, 2012
No comments

A Simpsonised Year

I’ve wasted half my life, Marge. You know how many memories I have? Three! Standing in line for a movie, having a key made, and sitting here talking to you. Thirty-eight years and that’s all I have to show for it! – Homer Simpson, The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace

At the end of a long-ish year, I’m very happy to have handed my honours thesis in. Now, the nerves are setting in as I wait to hear about the marks.

The work turned into a response to Michael Billig’s call for more detailed examination of banal nationalism in the everyday and the popular. It also dealt extensively with Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities. I was able to map the representational practices of nation in the show, and especially those presenting the United States. I highlighted exclusionary practices in the representation of nations, pointing out that nations were often described as much in opposition to other nations as they were in any positive sense. Certainly not a world-changing piece of work, but worthy I think of the effort.

I wouldn’t have even been back at uni this year if not for the encouragement of my nan. She wanted me to make the best I could of myself, and with very few people in our family ever having obtained any higher qualifications, she really wanted me to push ahead with my PhD. Nan passed away less than a day before I handed this thesis in, but I was lucky enough to have the chance to show it to her and tell her I had finished it. Below is the acknowledgements section from my thesis, which includes my public tribute to my nan for her role in my life. I was able to talk more about her life and her influence on our entire family at her funeral.

Acknowledgements

Well, this certainly seems odd, but, hey, who am I to question the work of the Almighty? Oh, we thank you Lord for this mighty fine intelligent design! Good job! 

- Ned Flanders, ‘The Simpsons Movie’

As much as Ned Flanders might disagree, there is rarely only one being involved with the creation of anything worth being thankful for. Ned failed to notice that the multiple-eyed purple squirrel he talks about in the quote above was the product of a whole heap of (toxic) stuff being spewed out into the atmosphere and mixing with some pre-existing elements. This work started as a bunch of ideas in my head about the role of ‘the media’ (that big amorphous conceptual beast that no-one can quite define) in shaping ideas about other big concepts. Without giving ‘the media’ too much credit for their role in establishing and contesting such concepts, it does seem that many people take strong heed of the content produced. One of my favourite media artifacts is, of course, The Simpsons, and it then seemed logical to ask some questions about what Springfield had to say about the world. Thankfully, I found in Dr Dean Chan a supervisor who was very happy to guide me through those questions, usually by asking well chosen and carefully worded questions of his own. My thoughts poured out onto paper and, like the waste from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, mixed up with other stuff that was lying around. Somehow, it flowed through the work of those scholars of nation who have meant so much to the theoretical frameworks in this project. Through the whole process, Dean was there to mop it up and keep it flowing away from disaster. Without Dean, and not to labour the analogy too much, I would have been like Rainier Wolfcastle flailing about while several tons of sulfuric acid raced toward him in the episode Radioactive Man. The goggles would have done nothing. For his support and guidance, Dean has my gratitude and thanks.

Thanks also to my partner Meghan. Like a Marge to my Homer, she has been a long-suffering party to my schemes and ideas, no matter how half-thought and risky they seem. She has supported me financially, emotionally and academically in this endeavour and I hope the result is worth it for her sake at least as much as mine.

Finally, thanks also to my family. My brother, parents and grandparents have always been there for me and I would not have been able to achieve half as much without their love and support. In particular, my grandmother Olive has always encouraged me in every aspect of my life. She has been my safety net when needed, and I am sure it was our many Scrabble matches and debates that have taught me to think critically and carefully. I could not have had better training for this project. I am sure that when she tried to stop me watching The Simpsons as a kid, she would not have dreamed that I might have made as much use of it as I have.

Category: Media, Uni | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
« Older Entries  

Switch to our mobile site