Friday, May 26, 2006
Media literacy
It's worth taking a wider look at why you're studying new media in the first place:
Whilst we may treat the comments of politicians with suspicion, you'll surely agree with Tessa Jowell after studying new media for the past six months. Literacy in a digital world means more than just words. Read the full article, linked below, or risk being media-illiterate!
Studying the media is the future, especially if you're a girl. Boys, you're restricted to fiddling with videogames.
The culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, has frequently referred to the challenge of equipping people to handle an ever-wider array of media sources as one of the most pressing facing society. "I do not exaggerate when I say that media literacy in its widest sense is as important to our development as was universal literacy in the 19th century," she said this year. "Then, the written word was the only passport to knowledge. Now, there are many more. And the most insidious digital divide is between those equipped to understand that and those who aren't."
Whilst we may treat the comments of politicians with suspicion, you'll surely agree with Tessa Jowell after studying new media for the past six months. Literacy in a digital world means more than just words. Read the full article, linked below, or risk being media-illiterate!
Studying the media is the future, especially if you're a girl. Boys, you're restricted to fiddling with videogames.
Not so grassroots
The Guardian has a really useful article which questions many of the assumptions made about the music industry in the digital age. Most importantly it debunks the myth that the Arctic Monkeys used MySpace to promote themselves.
The power of social networking, whether it's MySpace-type sites, Flickr-type sites, Blogger-type sites, YouTube-type sites (you get the idea), is an important consideration if focusing on the internet for the NMT exam. As I said in the previous post, there's a view that the internet, in partciular broaddband, is, well, the future of everything: relationships, learning, government and certainly entertainment. The seemingly democratic nature of it all is brought into question when you look even a little more closely at ownership: Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace, Google owns Blogger, Yahoo owns Flickr. Not so social any more?
The power of social networking, whether it's MySpace-type sites, Flickr-type sites, Blogger-type sites, YouTube-type sites (you get the idea), is an important consideration if focusing on the internet for the NMT exam. As I said in the previous post, there's a view that the internet, in partciular broaddband, is, well, the future of everything: relationships, learning, government and certainly entertainment. The seemingly democratic nature of it all is brought into question when you look even a little more closely at ownership: Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace, Google owns Blogger, Yahoo owns Flickr. Not so social any more?
Digitally divided
There's a risk when studying new media technologies that we quickly become advocates for all things new without giving proper consideration to the negative effects. The BBC has a short news article on a trial analogue switch off, in which it was discovered that particular groups in society had the biggest problems when faced with switching to digital TV. The elderly and those facing financial difficulty are both affected.
NMTs are more accessible to younger and more affluent members of society, so those claims for the democratic powers of blogging, self- web-publishing, podcasting and so on should all be considered in the context of a society in which only 10 million people have home broadband access. When you're using the technology, it's sometimes difficult to image those that aren't. Switching off the analogue signal will happen, but it may leave a significant minority experiencing exclusion, rather than the promised riches of a multi-channel, interactive platform.
NMTs are more accessible to younger and more affluent members of society, so those claims for the democratic powers of blogging, self- web-publishing, podcasting and so on should all be considered in the context of a society in which only 10 million people have home broadband access. When you're using the technology, it's sometimes difficult to image those that aren't. Switching off the analogue signal will happen, but it may leave a significant minority experiencing exclusion, rather than the promised riches of a multi-channel, interactive platform.
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