Nicole Dickson

[kcb206group10-blog]

Over the years television has become much more than just the shows they broadcast. With an array of different TV shows targeting different audiences the network executives understand that to keep these viewers engaged they must do more than just broadcast a show, they must engage with and...

[kcb206group10-blog]

Society tends to change quite a lot, especially looking back over the years in terms of the media in relation to their audiences and employees. As previously spoken about in Mikaela Charlton’s blog post, the audience has become much more involved in the process of spreading information and...

[kcb206group10-blog]

New Media and the Entertainment industry practically go hand in hand in this technological era and within the music industry it is incredibly prevalent. The transition from consumers to producers is one of the most noticeable changes in the music industry over the past few centuries and this is...

[kcb206group10-blog]

Communication barriers have broken down over time with the introduction of a new technological era. A concept called Mediated Communication or Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) as referred to in Theresa’s lecture is seen as a use of tools or technologies to communicate and record information...

[nicole---dickson-blog]

Secrets and Lies or Shielding our Minds? Transparency in Politics.

It is practically common knowledge to know that power relationships are what the media industry is built on. There is this top down approach in which information is gathered and distributed by the big businesses, to their liking. Now this media hierarchy sounds very old fashioned and out dated but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, in saying that, it’s also not completely good. I’ll explain.

Politics are one section of business which relies on new media very heavily. Brian McNair (2011) has made mention to many ways in which politicians have used new media. Not only does it work to inform and educate the public but it also opens up a platform for public opinion which will either provide them with advocates for their campaign or put them under scrutiny. Either way they will receive publicity from it. Again, this is starting at the top and pushing information down the chain of command using the hypodermic needle effect as referred to in my blog post on Public Produced Content when the ‘higher ups’ supply information and this knowledge travels through masses and is accepted as truth.

There are three perspectives on the power of new media as looked at in Theresa’s lecture (2014) and those are Mobilisation/ Activism, Transparency and Campaigning, Censorship and Propaganda. To look more into these power relations I’m going to focus on Transparency. With the era of new media technologies the industry of politics has become a lot more transparent with more opportunities to reveal the real truth behind media stories as well as access to real time information. Sifry (2011) makes the comparison that ‘transparency is fuel, connectivity is the engine and personal democracy is the journey’. He also makes mention to the notion that people are seeing themselves more as active players in the political process and not just passive consumers.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2010/11/wikileaks-lessons-consumer-privacy

One of the most obvious examples of transparency in the media is Wikileaks where back in 2006 Julian Assange founded the organisation in hopes to hold governments and other organisations accountable for their wrong doings. If you can handle seriously graphic content have a look at the following video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

This is one of the stories Wikileaks uncovered in which they forced people to open their eyes to, in this case, a corrupt government. While it is good to expose the wrong doings of the government as they are, will there ever be a point where things are too transparent, is a world without secrets really possible?

As noted in Sifry’s article, Assange comments that the more powerful you are the more likely there is to be danger thus more transparency needed however he adds that there is just as much danger in being transparent.

It’s hard to determine whether transparency is for better or worse and as usual there is quite a grey area on the topic. That being said, there is also a need to find the balance between being open with political information and protecting the public from harmful information.

    Reference List

McNair, Brian. 2011. An Introduction to Political Communication. 5th Ed. London: Routledge.

Sauter, Theresa. 2014. “Week 8: New Media Politics and Engagement.” April 17, 2014. http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_4_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fcontent%2FlistContent.jsp%3Fcourse_id%3D_108110_1%26content_id%3D_5232450_1

Sifry, Micah. 2011. “WikiLeaks, Assange, and Why There's No Turning Back (Exclusive Excerpt)”. The Huffington Post, November 2. Accessed April 14, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/micah-sifry/wikileaks-assange-micah-sifry_b_820671.html

[nicole---dickson-blog]

Media Development; Public Produced Content

Media has not only advanced in terms of the technologies and content but also in relation to public input. The audience has moved from being just the receivers of content to also being the producers. The large media companies used to be in full control of the content that was being released into the public and was a part of what Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins refer to in their book The Handbook of Media Audiences as the ‘hypodermic needle model’. This is when the large media producers ‘inject’ or supply the public with information and it is absorbed and travels through the masses and is accepted as the truth. Times have changed in that with social media we now supply the content that gets broadcast as well as receive it. A common phrase used to describe this platform shift is ‘produsers’ which simply means both content producers and content users. Much of what is being published by the media has shifted to allow for the general public to have their say as well. As Jay Rosen has said in his blog post The People Formerly Known as The Audience, printing presses have turned into blogs, radio has turned in podcasts and TV has turned into Youtube. This has also coined the phrase Web 2.0 and has led to a redistribution of power throughout the media society. There is no longer a willingness to just accept what is being published by the agencies and people have not only began question what those people say and if it is all truth but they’ve also put their own ideas out there. As an example, a recent Australian news story depicted a snake eating a crocodile in North-West Queensland which went worldwide and this went viral all because a girl took pictures of it on her phone and put it online. Like any new ways of thinking there are always downsides and disadvantages to the concept. People tend to say that produsage leads to inaccurate and untrue stories and articles being published. There are also people who think that there will be inequality in content, that there is no one left to listen to what’s being broadcast and also that people are being exploited by the larger agencies. These sort of companies have been known to make profit and gain free advertising from this user generated content. Many larger companies combine these commercial and sharing economies to easily benefit them and spread their content quicker and cheaper. This is known as a Hybrid Economy and generally again, can be looked at two ways. Either said company is exploiting the users and just finding an easy way to advertise or the fact that these users are contributing because they want to and without coercion can be considered which shines a brighter light on the idea. There will be a constant debate as to whether or not public produced content it better or equal to that published by the networks but either way it is a new media revolution and won’t be going away any time soon.

Reference List:

Green, Joshua and Henry Jenkins. 2011. “Spreadable Media. How Audiences Create Value and Meaning in a Networked Economy.” In The Handbook of Media Audiences edited by Virginia Nightingale, 109-127. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell

Rosen, Jay. 2006. “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” PressThink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine, June 27. http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html

[nicole---dickson-blog]

Week 1 Blog Post

1997 can be known as the year that social networking first began when a website called Six Degrees was created. This social networking site was really just a simplified version of the now billion dollar company, Facebook, and the mid 2000’s were when social media really rose in popularity and began the argument on whether it was doing more harm than good.

While networks allow connections to new and old friends and create a level of personal support for people, it does also create a sense of worry around these sites due to the fact that people can remain faceless and dig into others private lives without the victims even knowing. This new techno-social world has created a massive grey area between people’s public and private lives on the internet. While brands or businesses do benefit due to the fact that people can Google them and be directed straight to said business and be provided with information, the same can also happen for any given person’s name which is where the public start to worry. Clicking on a Facebook page can lead you directly to a person’s hometown, workplace and possibly even their phone number or email address and again, while this may be good for business it also breaks down the walls of personal privacy and potentially allows anyone to access this information.

The reliance on social media is also affecting people in everyday life. Adolescents especially are still growing emotionally and while popularity was once based on who had the most ‘real’ friends now, as Judith Donath and Danah Boyd (2004. Public displays of connection., BT Technology Journal 22 (4) pp.71-82.) have stated, ‘public displays of connections’ have become much more significant. While people constantly change and never really do stop growing what has become much more apparent is that people create themselves differently around different people and in different situations, especially online.

Speaking to your parents in comparison to your boss or your friends shows a clear identity change as you take on different roles and though this has been around for a while people now adapt an online personality which tends to be much easier to manipulate. Developing as a person and experiencing new things in life has become much more dramatic and cinematic in that what is said and captured in these social networking sites is now permanently online and viewable by anyone. Keeping people up to date on your life has become much more of a performance and a person’s private life is now made very public.

Looking again at privacy in relation to creating an online personality, people will decide for themselves whether losing privacy is more or less important than the satisfaction of adding to their online interaction and online persona. Even when Six Degrees was the main networking site people had understood that they were broadcasting something that once may have been a personal achievement however as it’s progressed people have seemed to become less phased by the fact that someone half way around the world could very well know more about you than the person sitting beside you.

If you’d like to read more about public displays of connections, check out Judith Donath and Danah Boyd’s journal article on the topic through the following web address:

http://www.danah.org/papers/PublicDisplays.pdf