Wedneday 14th Dec and Holiday homework

Cover for Year 13 Media Wednesday 14^th December period 2

Read ‘We media and Democracy’ handbook from page 11 – Democratic, but dangerous too: how the web changed our world. P11-p15 – make useful notes and note down key words.

Complete Task 4 using the internet to source information.

Extension – visit the BBC Virtual Revolution website.  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/3dexplorer_start.shtml

Watch programme one ‘The Great Levelling’ – make notes

Homework for Christmas

Ensure that your Media Around the World presentations are ready to show on the first lesson back.  You should also watch the blog over the holidays as I will post any relevant We Media news events/links etc. 

Media around the World- Freedom of Speech Laws

Year 13 – ‘We Media’ and Democracy        Media around the World/ Freedom of Speech Laws

You can prepare your presentation using any format that you choose.  Include relevant pictures/ video footage etc.

•       What is the political system of the county? Democracy, dictatorship, communist? Who, or what party is in power now?

•       What is the country’s population?

•       Research the country’s media.  What are the major media organisations? Who owns them? How are they organised?

•       Find out about the ‘Freedom of Speech’ Laws.  Is there any evidence of ‘censorship’ taking place?  Have journalists ever been prosecuted, persecuted for their work? Give examples.

•       Find out how many citizens have access to the internet?  How does that compare as a percentage to our country.

Extension – Aim Higher

•       Consider the country in relation to ‘We Media’

•       Are the Freedom of Speech Laws different for Television/ Print than to information on the internet.

•       Is there any evidence of the internet being censored?

•       Which social networking sites are being used?  Are they monitored by the government? Give examples. 

•       Has the internet been used to organise any protests, uprisings, or activism?

Consider your findings in relation to our country.  What are the differences / similarities between their country and ours?  Think about recent incidents that we have looked at such as the London Riots.

Meg & Joe: Herbert Schiller

Wikileaks Documentary

Please follow the link to the You Tube full version of the documentary.


PLease be aware that this documentary contains some scenes of a distressing nature, you may want to skip through the footage of the American soldiers attacking Iraqi civilians.

Useful student video on Citizen Media

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9vEKPfTVg4&feature=related

Habermas and Social Media

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34z3ghoir6U&feature=related

David Gauntlett kindle link for enthusiastic students.

http://theory.org.uk/david/kindle.htm

Useful Media Centre link for We Media

http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php

Online Social Networking as Participatory Survellience by Anders Albrechtslund

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2142/1949

This is an excellent article which considers social networking in relation to Michel Foucault's theory of the Panoptican.

Excellent revision resources - excellent explanations of theories.

http://www.alevelmedia.co.uk/page35.php

How journalism changed after September 11th. Citizen journalism/internet/social networking

Please read this article and make notes for a discussion.

http://www.mediarhetoric.com/blog/how-the-internet-changed-after-911-citizen-journalism-social-media-and-mobility

Joe & Lauren: Beginnings of the Internet

More media quotations

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.’ – A.J.Liebling




‘If you don’t like the news…go out and makes some of your own.’ – Wes “Scoop” Nisker

Useful and amusing media quotations

 “All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.”  William Bernbach

“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”  Malcom X

“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values”  Marshall McLuhan

“The media tends to report rumours, speculations, and projections as facts... How does the media do this? By quoting some "expert"... you can always find some expert who will say something hopelessly hopeless about anything.” Peter McWilliams

“The media's power is frail. Without the people's support, it can be shut off with the ease of turning a light switch.” Corazon Aquino

“Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.”

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.” Robert Bresson

“It’s hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news.” Senator John Kerry

“Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.”  Marshall McLuhan

‘If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event... what kind of film would you use?’  ~Unkown Journalist Author

‘Harmony seldom makes a headline.’  ~Silas Bent

‘With all the mass media concentrated in a few hands, the ancient faith in the competition of ideas in the free market seems like a hollow echo of a much simpler day.’  ~Kingman Brewster, Jr.

The Internet is the world's largest library.  It's just that all the books are on the floor.  ~John Allen Paulos

Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the Net, it looks like very soon everyone on Earth will have 15 megabytes of fame.  ~M.G. Sriram

The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.  ~Andrew Brown

The Internet is clearly about more than sports scores and email now.  It's a place where we can conduct our democracy and get very large amounts of data to very large numbers of people.  ~Frank James

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.  ~Robert Wilensky, 1996

Television to brainwash us all and Internet to eliminate any last resistance.  ~Paul Carvel

The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control.  By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.  ~Vinton Cerf

The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years.  ~Rupert Murdoch

The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, "people without lives."  We don't care.  We have each other.  ~Dave Barry

Twitter is just a multiplayer notepad.  ~Ben Maddox

Blogs seem to have two magnetic poles, one attracting friends, the other repulsing relatives.  ~Robert Brault

Laying in bed this morning contemplating how amazing it would be if somehow Oscar Wilde and Mae West could twitter from the grave.  ~Dita Von Teese

On Twitter we get excited if someone follows us.  In real life we get really scared and run away.  ~Author Unknown
[W]e're into a whole new world with the Internet, and whenever we sort of cross another plateau in our development, there are those who seek to take advantage of it.  So this is a replay of things that have happened throughout our history.  ~Bill Clinton

Media student revision video.

A fun video made by media students to hilight some of the key issues in this topic.  May be useful for revision.


http://vimeo.com/18926042

We media - website

Please read this website and keep up todate.


http://wemedia.com/

Manifesto for Media Education

This is an excellent website which features contributions from the leadsing academics of Media Studies.  Please attache to your favouirites and keep upto date with contributions.

http://www.manifestoformediaeducation.co.uk/

Phone Hacking - February 2011

Dispatches programme on Channel 4 lifted the lid on the newspaper phone hacking scandal. Reporter Alex Thomson, more familiar from Channel 4 news, (follow him on Twitter @alextomo) took us through the background to the story and interviewed a range of people, from Max Clifford to Alistair Campbell, revealing a much bigger and more wide-ranging scandal than many people had imagined.

Last month, the Prime Minister's Press secretary, Andy Coulson, resigned from his post because of the continuing revelations from the phone hacking scandal that dated back to 2006 or even earlier. At that time, Coulson had been editor of the News of the World, when a reporter, Clive Goodman, was found to have hacked into the voicemails of members of the Royal Family. He always denied any knowledge of the reporter's activity, claiming he and a private investigator who did the hacking had been acting on their own, but as more evidence emerges, it was clear from last night's programme that it would be very hard to imagine that he had no knowledge of what was going on.

The programme showed how pressure on reporters to generate stories in the cut-throat competition of tabloid journalism led to them resorting to illegal means. It also pointed to the possibility of cover-ups at the highest levels, with interviewees suggesting that the police were reluctant to investigate because the News of the World had a history of paying police officers for information. The programme also alleged that other newspapers have been phone hacking for several years themselves, which explains why they have given so little coverage to the story.

Alex Thomson was shown just how easy it is for information to be gathered online about an individual, including finding their mobile phone number, and then the trick, which I won't repeat here, for getting access to their voicemail. Suffice to say that it is wise to change the pin code on your voicemail if you don't want reporters snooping on your messages...

The programme suggested around 4000 people's phones have been tapped, and that figure could be much higher, with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and many others now asking the police to see if there was evidence that they too had been victims of it. The newspaper regulatory body, the PCC, was shown to have little or no power as Thomson noted that it had been lied to by the News of the World.

So why does this matter? Well, it seems to me that this is an important question for media students and raises important issues about the media in a democracy. If journalists can get away with hacking into phones and publishing details of people's private conversations which they have collected illegally and then when the police are asked to investigate, nothing happens, that is quite significant.

Labour MP Tom Watson, who we met in a previous blog as one of the few defenders of videogames in Parliament argued in the programme that politicians were too scared to tackle News International over the phone hacking scandal and I think he's right. Tom is worth following on twitter too. @tom_watson And why are politicians scared? Because newspapers still have a lot of power and they are afraid that the Murdoch papers- The Sun, The News of the World, but also The Times and Sunday Times can turn public opinion against them. The stories from hacked voicemails that papers were publishing during the last few years were not just about the antics or personal lives of celebrities, they also included politicians.

Finally, the programme gave a pretty strong indication of why Rupert Murdoch would rush over from the USA to take personal charge of the response to the scandal now- he is attempting to buy the remaining 61% of BSkyB which he doesn't currently own and the government has to decide whether it is in our interests to have someone controlling even more of our media. If he gets a lot of bad publicity, then maybe the decision will go against him, but if he can smooth things over... Of course, he has the help of his son, James Murdoch and the help of Rebekah Brooks, the Chief Executive of News International who admitted to a committee in parliament that the organisation had been known to pay police officers for information. They helped by having the Prime Minister, David Cameron, over to dinner during the christmas break...purely social, nothing to do with any of these shenanigans. That's the same David Cameron who employed the dodgy Andy Coulson as his trusted Press Secretary...

Anyway, if you didn't see it, here it is on 4OD

Cuba tweets case study

Follow Julian McDougall's Cuban media case study via his tweets- lots of good links for WeMedia topics!




http://twitter.com/#!/JulianMcDougall

Why we need the news environment to be chaotic - Clay Shirky

Please read this articel by Clay Shirky.


http://www.shirky.com/weblog/

Picking a fight with Clay Shirky - Evgeny Morozov

Please read through this article by Evgeny Morozoz

http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/blog/5386

Dan Gilmore - 'We media'

Please use this link to access Dan Gilmore's 'We media' theories.

http://dangillmor.com/

Past exam questions and advice from an examiner.

Past exam questions.

How far can the media in 2010 be considered to be democratic?
Assess the claim that the media is becoming more democratic.
Discuss the meanings of the term ‘we media.’
Explore the claim that the ‘new’ media are more democratic than the ‘old’ media.
What is ‘we media’ and what difference does it make to citizens?
‘We get the media we deserve.’ Discuss, in relation to the role of media in a democracy.

So as you can see, several previous questions focus on old media v new media, some on what might be defined as wemedia and some very specifically on notions of democracy.

If we look at the bullet points in the Specification, which defines what should be studied, we should be able to relate them to the questions set so far:

• What are ‘We Media’?
• Where / how has ‘We Media’ emerged?
• In what way are the contemporary media more democratic than before?
• In what ways are the contemporary media less democratic than before?


The kinds of thing you might use as case studies include:
‘homegrown’, local, organic and potentially counter- cultural media
(eg blogging and digital film uploading and sharing)
You could compare potentially alternative / progressive ‘we media’ examples with other examples of more orthodox production and ownership models
you should know a bit about the history of such media before the web (fanzines, pamphlets, radical documentaries, etc)

This part of the exam asks you to do three more specific things, whatever topic you answer on:

1. You MUST refer to at least TWO different media
2. You MUST refer to past, present and future (with the emphasis on the present- contemporary examples from the past five years)
3. refer to critical/theoretical positions

For this topic, since a lot of what you look at is likely to be online, a comparison between online media and any form of traditional media (newspapers, broadcast news, film) would ensure you quickly meet the criteria for no.1

For no.2, the main thing is to ensure you have a majority of material from the past five years. This really should not be a problem when using online media, and to be honest I think you could use material from the last few months to construct a really good answer!

And for no.3 you should have a range of writers that you could use- for example Dan Gillmor who coined the term 'We Media'or sceptics of the power of social media such as Evgeny Morozov or some of the advocates of people power through social media such as Clay Shirky

In all cases, you should be looking for case studies which raise questions about how much the web and social media appear to offer more democratic options for the audience than what was there before. The work of Graeme Turner is quite useful for offering a critique of many assumptions about democracy and new media. You can preview his book here.

For this topic, it is likely you will look at news and citizen journalism, but you could also look at media such as reality TV and shows where ordinary people get to be stars through public participation (the 'democracy of texting'). You could also look at the creative options open to ordinary people such as youtube and how far this really does represent a change. David Gauntlett's work on creativity would be useful here.

G325 Section B: Contemporary Media Issues - exam requirements

G325 Section B: Contemporary Media Issues

Section requirements
One question to be answered from six topics. Two questions offered for each topic. 50 marks. 1 hour.

Students must understand contemporary media texts, industries, audiences and debates.

Students need to write academically about perspectives in media and culture, referencing examples, theories and arguments.

Understanding of contemporary issues must contain reference to two media and a range of texts, industries, audiences and debates.

Each topic has 4 prompt questions and students must be prepared to answer an exam question that relates to 1 or more of these prompts.

Reference should be made to the past, present and future in relation to the topic, with emphasis on the contemporary.

Definition of Citizen Journalism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcYSmRZuep4

G325 Glossary 'We Media' and democaracy

Blog
From ‘web log’, meaning a website updated regularly and chronologically by the author giving their views and opinions. Blogs have now become an important part of online journalism, The Huffington Post blog sold in early 2011 for $315 million.


Citizen Journalism

When members of the public engage in journalism. Examples include providing pictures or film of events to news organisations or reporting events in blogs. A key part of democratic media.

The Cloud
Cloud storage allows users to store data on a company’s servers rather than their own hardrives. This has now evolved into a service where games can be played from the Cloud (Onlive or Steam) or music can be stored and played from the Cloud (Amazon Music, Google Music or iCloud).

Convergence
Devices are no longer used for just one thing, new media technologies are not limited by how they can be consumed or distributed. Convergence means PCs now play music, iPods can play games and phones are internet devices.  Sometimes institutions plan convergence (the iPhone) but sometimes it’s the consumers who start it, Nook readers used as tablets for example.

Democratic media
The media used to be controlled by large institutions that had the money and power to print, publish and broadcast. Home computing and cheap media production means that anyone can be a journalist, film maker or broadcaster, making the media democratic. Blogs, video services, easy app development  and podcasts make it easy to produce user generated content.

Long tail
Chris Anderson defined the Long Tail as an economic state where products have a longer sales pattern when they don’t rely on shop storage because they’re either downloadable (iTunes for example) or they’re sold online (Amazon).  An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” The long tail is important for niche items. Anita Elberse criticised the Long Tail by claiming that it’s still mainstream and mass market products that dominate internet sales.

Net Neutrality
Net neutrality is the principle requiring Internet providers to act as common carriers and not discriminate among content or users — for example, by providing degraded service to rich-media sites, by throttling file-sharing services, by penalizing customers who watch or download a lot of videos or by blocking Internet applications and content from competitors

Peer to peer
A system where content is shared between users across a network. Peer to peer can be used for illegal downloads with a central hub like the Pirate Bay linking users to other users’ content.

Social Marketing
Marketing and advertising that reaches potential consumers via social networking website, such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. They appear at the edges of users’ profiles and can be targeted based on keywords in their profiles to match their stated interests or recent activities.

Streaming
Delivery and distribution of media content over an internet connection direct to your device without being saved. Youtube and Spotify are both streaming services. Onlive is an example of a streaming games service.

Synergy
Synergy is the working together of two different institutions, often relying on each other’s expertise and reputation. Synergy has been around for a long time now but in the online age it’s evolved into something more pervasive; Vevo on Youtube, Facebook and Spotify are to work together in Europe and Fifa 12 will feature more affiliates than ever before (Real Madrid and Everton used the trailer to launch their 11/12 season kits).

Top down/bottom up news
Top down news focuses on news that focuses on groups in power; governments and business for example. Twitter and blogs now allow news to be ‘bottom up’. The revolution in Syria is a good example; traditional media has been gagged there so news focuses on individuals because it’s being reported by them.

Trending
Happens when a topic is widely discussed on microblogs like Twitter. Trending allows a subject to become big news without pushing from an established news agency. Think about Ryan Giggs, the traditional media couldn’t discuss him but it was trended on Twitter.

Viral marketingA marketing strategy that encourages the audience to pass on the marketing material themselves. Examples include short films and clips sent by email.

Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web development and web design that facilitates interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. It is understood to be a democratic forum, a flat arena in which all users may contribute and speak.

Casual Gaming
This refers to games played online without a console, either on a PC or phone. Casual gamers do not fit the normal stereotype of gamers, most are female. Despite the name casual games can involve lots of financial and time commitment, Farmville for example.