Mediaphile

The Internet

So the time has come to see what my relationship with the media is really like.  I kept details of the time I spent on the internet, watching TV and reading over a period of ten days from 13 March to 22 March.  Let’s start with the largest part of my media consumption; the internet.

Scary stuff, I spend the equivalent of six and a half days on the internet. That’s over half the time that I undertook this study (ORLY?)  A much simpler way of looking at the time I spend on the internet is through a pie chart.

According to the survey that the JOUR1111 cohort completed at the beginning of the course, the average amount of time that we spend on the internet everyday is about two to three hours.  My average is about fourteen and a half...

Now I do spend a lot of time in front of a computer, but there are other reasons why my internet usage is so high.  In my browser I have all my regularly visited sites bookmarked for convenience.  So I can open several tabs with most of my bookmarks open.  This shows that I don’t just sit on Facebook for several hours, then go to Youtube, then to Blogger.  It shows that people are generally doing more than one thing at a time when they use the internet.

According to the survey 77.3% of us have an internet enabled smartphone, I am part of this group.  I have a HTC Incredible S (iPhone’s are too mainstream for me) and have unlimited access to Facebook and Twitter.  Days when I’m at uni and have a massive break (five hours every second Tuesday, thanks SI-net) I constantly check Facebook on my phone because I’m so bored.  It seems bad that I spend so much time on Facebook, but that’s what 91.9% of us spend most of our time doing on the internet. 

I finish uni at about six o’clock each day and don’t get home until seven thirty, which means I stay up doing work and have the internet open.  When I do work I listen to music on Youtube and compulsively check Facebook.  I also prefer watching TV over the internet which does take up a fair bit of my time.

Television

Like I said before, I prefer to watch TV over the internet but I still do watch it like normal people.  I have a table to prove it and everything.

According to the survey people spend about one or two hours a day watching TV, my average is 1.7 hours.  Days when I watch a fair bit of TV is because I am catching up with them online.  The survey also said that 36.6% of us stream TV shows from the internet which is probably a sign that we prefer this method of television as we can watch what we want when it suits us.

Music & Radio

Radio is considered old fashioned by some and is struggling to compete against other forms of media.

As the graph shows from the survey, most people only listen to a few minutes of radio every day.  I don’t really listen to any.  That is because I don’t put the radio on at home to listen to and rarely travel anywhere by car, which are the two main ways people would listen to the radio.

In saying that I still listen to music, just not usually through radio.

So I clearly utilise the two main mediums that the cohort uses to listen to music; the computer and i(one of their products).  However I mainly listen to music through CD’s and it does surprise me that more people don’t use them.  I download music like most other people yet still enjoy buying CD’s and thought that some other people would be the same.  I use CD’s a lot because I use my stereo to drown out the distractions in my house when I’m trying to do work (I still get distracted, so it doesn’t really work).

Reading

I like to read quite a lot because I’m quite nerdy.  So I thought that would be worth noting for this assessment.  And by publications I mean things like newspapers and magazines.

Because I’m a uni student I spend most of my time doing academic reading and only read leisurely when I’m travelling to or from uni or when I’m procrastinating.  I do read some newspapers, but I mainly read publications like Time and New Scientist as I usually get my news from online news sources.  As the survey shows more people get their news from online “newspapers” than from regular newspapers.

Old VS New Media

I am clearly a new media person as I spend the majority of my time on a computer.  However, I still do find time for old media and find it still to be a valuable resource.

Media Production

Even though I spend a lot of time on social media websites, I would say that I am definitely more of a consumer than a producer.

During the ten days, on Facebook I posted eleven status updates, three photos and one link.  On Twitter I tweeted four times and I posted twice on Blogger.

I think I consume more than I produce because I like to observe things rather than be the centre of attention.  Then again, as I explore the media more through my studies I think I will become more of a producer while at the same time still consuming quite heavily due to my interest in other people’s opinions and what not.

Argh Newman!

So yeah, I'm not happy about the results from yesterday.

Not that I overly like Labor, I'm just too much of a left-wing nut to support any sort of conservative government.

I'm now preparing myself for the worst. And this picture pretty much sums up my feelings about having the LNP in power.

Smile!

For someone who hates having their photo taken, I quite enjoy photography. And pictures are usually what keeps me interested in news stories because I'm easily distracted.

And as cliche as it sounds, they describe things that pictures can't. Can anyone here really describe these pictures?

Back to the boring stuff, the first time an actual photo was included in a news paper was in 1879 and since then they've become an integral part of the news story telling process.

I guess what you can say is that even though visual news has had a fairly long history, there hasn't been much change in terms of production. But what we can say is that there has been a change in what we value in visual communication. This clip pretty much says it all.

The point of photography and visual communication is to show life from a difference angle. However, people in media manipulate and distort our perception of reality. So I guess this leaves us wondering what we can trust in the media.

I still believe that there are people with good intentions conveying news and ideas through visual means. Take for example these pictures that have received the Pulitzer Prize.

I guess my beliefs in visual communication can be summed up with the words of Finnish photographer Eetu Silanpaa:

"A picture has no meaning at all if it can't tell a story."

Some of the pictures I've included in this post have been quite depressing, so I'll leave with this. I don't know if this is considered photography as such, but it's pretty amazing. These photos were taken by Suren Manvelyan, an Armenian physics teacher. His work is definitely something to have a look at.

Ipswich Politics

Here comes the obvious, the state election's coming up guys. I don't know about everyone else but I'm completely underwhelmed by the topic. The sad thing is that I'm a politics student and don't care, good to see that I'm studying something I'm so interested in...

In case you weren't aware; I'm from Ipswich (don't panic). And I'm possibly going to perpetuate the stereotype further with this post, but I'm just pointing out the actions of one individual here.

So we've got your usual candidates running for the Ipswich seat in Queensland Parliament. Labor, Liberal National, the Greens and Katter's Australian Party *sniggers*, they're all here. And of course there are the independents. 

One of this years independents is Patricia Petersen. She's quite anti-Labor. There seems to be a lot of unresolved issues between Patricia and the Labor Party. Most of her campaigning is based on protesting Labor policy and initiatives. Her latest stab at Labor is concerning her doctorate. I'll let you guys make what you want of it.

Only in Ipswich, hey?

Read Only

You guys remember newspapers, right? You know those book things with words, a picture here and there. Well, they’re still going. Hard to believe I know.

Getting to the point at hand, print journalism is still a thriving industry. And contrary to popular belief, print doesn’t just mean words printed on paper. Online news can still be classified as print media as it is using words to get the point across.

We got a break from Brucey to learn about print journalism/media from Skye Doherty. Skye has had a pretty awesome career in print journalism working around the world as a freelancer and as part of some of the largest publications of Fleet Street. Learning from the best really.

The first things you could say about text is that it’s:

• ·         Fast
• ·         Flexible
• ·         Portable
• ·         Searchable
• ·         Dominates online

Being technologically illiterate (it’s amazing that I’ve figured out how to use this blog at all) the prevalence and importance of print media makes me quite happy. It’s because I’m quite fond of writing and using language in print rather than presenting visually or aurally.

But beyond our basic ideas, Skye also said that text is:

• ·         Story content
• ·         Headlines
• ·         Standfirst
• ·         Captions

Text seems to go beyond bulky sentences and paragraphs. Text is the effective use of written language. Headlines, by-lines and what have you are the simplest statements with the most meaning and power to draw people in. Writing headlines is almost an art form (to quote Skye on that one), because such a short statement must: have a verb, be true and be simple unless you can think of something witty (which you REALLY SHOULDN’T do unless you are quite witty).

Text does seem like a really simple media but it’s actually evolving. Social media and Web 2.0 have meant that things such as emails, blogs, tweets, Facebook, comments and forums count as text. Whether or not this is a good thing, I don’t know. Counting them as text shows that this is a dynamic and exciting medium. On the other hand, it seems to take away the focus on traditional print media which I love oh so much.

And text can also be interactive, which is a pretty strange notion. Posting links to create hypertext and take the reader to multiple facets of a story is making people more interested in news. Never in the history of print journalism has the reader been able to follow related and supplementary information until recently (see what I did there?).

Print journalism is alive and well and that definitely makes me happy. I'll leave it here because I'm purposely leaving out images from this post because I'm talking explicitly about text and I know that a big block of text isn't that fun to read ;-) (I'm so bloody clever)

The Elders of the Internet

The Interwebs and What Have You

I'm 17 (despite looking old and haggard) and the media that I've grown up with is now out dated...

Newspapers, TV, radio and print in general is now "Old Media." I thought (and still do think,) that the internet is in its infancy. Only to learn that the web has gone through phases and is again changing.

This clip really sums up my understanding of the internet...

So, let's talk about what the internet actually is (that I've learnt from people who actually know what they're talking about). 

Web 1.0 

The "Information Web" as they like to call it. Web 1.0 came about in 1989 was pretty much a read only type of thing. Searching for information was difficult and slow due to the content of websites rarely being updated. Web 1.0 was the perfect platform for advertising as searching for information would bring random and (unsurprisingly) irrelevant results. Web 1.0 became synonymous with the term "brochureware."

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 was the birth of New Media. This phase began around 2004/2005 with the advent of Google. The internet became more user friendly as information could be easily delivered and the advertisers changed their tactics. Web 2.0 also gave birth to social media which allowed people to come together (virtually) in a variety of ways. Advertisers used this electronic playground to target social groups and bring them specific products rather than the usual mass media approach of exposing everyone to everything.

Web 3.0

Web 3.0 isn't quite here yet, but it is definitely on its way. We are heading towards the semantic web where advertising is tailored to individuals. Advertisers have access to people's web history and activities via smartphones. Rather than sending out an ad to a social group hoping that the majority will take note of it, advertisers can send specific ads to people based on their online profile and habits. 

If in doubt about any of my explanations, this guy seems to explain it better than me: http://www.cscan.org/presentations/08-11-06-MikeEvans-Web.pdf

The DEATH of Journalism

Newspapers have had a monopoly over public knowledge and current affairs reporting game since they were invented. But online news and the internet in general are changing this...

Newspapers made their profits from the sale of space in their publication, in the form of classifieds. Since Web 2.0 brought eBay and other forms of self-promotion, classifieds (with a price) have lost their purpose. 

And with citizen journalists and free online news we have to ask ourselves: will newspapers survive?

People don't have to pay for newspapers anymore. They believe that news should be free due to the need to know. To quote Dr Redman (our lecturer): 

Will people pay for something they believe they are entitled for?

Newspapers have moved to the internet as well as selling hard copies of their publication. However, to continue making a profit they have gone behind a paywall to prevent readers from accessing their information for free. They fill these subscriptions with incentives such as discounts, competitions and giveaways, but is it really enough? Personally, I just want to know. I don't want to know something AND get half price tickets to the footy this season. Publications seem to be devaluing themselves just to hold on to people rather than relying on their commitment to finding the truth to keep readers.

In My Most Humble Opinion...

Personally, I don't think newspapers are going to die. People still want credibility from their news sources. While the internet can provide you with information, who's to say that it hasn't been written with some sort of agenda? Take the Kony 2012 campaign. While it is a good cause, the video that has gone viral isn't telling the whole truth. There are exaggerations about Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army when it comes to their actions and motives (which are reprehensible, no questioning). They also aren't talking about the future beyond the capture of Kony, such as repairing the social, political and economic damage done by the LRA. The entire campaign is based on the agenda of Invisible Children rather than appealing to people's reason in order to bring social change.

Journalism seeks the truth, to understand the roots of an issue, to inform and anticipate what is going to happen next. For a while I was convinced that newspapers would die. It wasn't until I read Page One: Inside the New York Times and the Future of Journalism that I became hopeful for this form of media. I've gone on for long enough so I won't bore you with the details, but essentially it contains many arguments and essays about media, news and The New York Times. It outlines the need for print media and  the challenges that it faces, which it should overcome.

All we know is that technology and the internet is changing. Journalism faces a battle with the New News but should come out of it relatively unscathed. At some point my generation will no longer be technologically savvy. We'll be like this someday.

  

If It Bleeds It Leads.

So my journey into the world of journalism begins...

When I first mentioned that I wanted to study journalism one of the most common thing people said to me is that it is a dying profession. The internet and social media have made news so accessible that traditional media, particularly newspapers, are becoming less and less relevant. I became nervous about my choice to study journalism and wondered if it was worth the risk.

However, in my first lecture of JOUR1111 I learnt that this is just a test to see who the versatile and committed journalists are. Journalism will be a challenging career. Constant changes in technology and an increasingly aware and knowledge thirsty public is just the beginning for us.

Early I've learnt that there are a range of perspectives on journalism, from the positive.

To the cynical.

(I'm a massive fan of Tina Fey.)

And, to the negative.

I see journalism as the quest for knowledge and the desire to inform. How else do we learn about the events taking place in the Middle East? How do we know about the actions of the government?

I understand that journos face a lot of bad press (even though they are the press). But I think that as long as there are those who are committed to the truth and will stop at nothing to get the word out, journalism will remain a thriving and respected profession. There's a common saying amongst journos: "If it bleeds, it leads." As long as people bleed, there will be journos to lead the public to the story. Until people stop bleeding (metaphorically), journalism will remain a lively profession.

So, lets get to it and begin our lives as journos.