I’m increasingly annoyed with media studies— a field I’ve devoted years to — and this is why. My plea for interventionist academics. My colleague Rob Carr (an historian) suggested on Facebook today that academics need to ask “how is my research going to benefit society, and will it benefit society as much as another research topic?” “Marshall […]
Category: Academia
Canberra, by Brendan Ashton on Flickr On Wednesday March 1, 1899, the town of Bowral and it’s neighbours in the Southern Highlands joined other contenders hoping to become Australia’s capital city. Moss Vale-based newspaper The Scrutineer records that “there was fairly good attendance, between 40 and 50 gentlemen being present, including residents of Mittagong, Bowral, Moss […]
‘A Belgian Politician’, by Flickr user Phillipe Put, illustrates a well-known Belgian plagiarism case I’m in the latter stages of preparing my PhD thesis for submission, and I’ve been told I have to submit the whole thesis through plagiarism-detection software turnitin. But I’m not intending to do that, and here’s why. Firstly, I received an […]
Why I need to move my thesis into GDocs #phdchat
Springfield, Springfield,it’s a hell of a town.The schoolyard’s upand the shopping mall’s down— Bart and Milhouse (Boy-Scoutz ‘n the Hood) Springfield, as seen in The Simpsons Movie. (image copyright Fox) The town of Springfield, USA, is one of the most recognisable fictional places ever created. Alongside the cavalcade of characters, Springfield has everything it needs […]
Four of Australia’s regional television networks are urging viewers to campaign for changes to Australian media ownership laws which restrict their market penetration and dominance but they won’t come clean with audiences on what the changes could mean. The networks — Prime, WIN, Imparja and Southern Cross Austereo — feel imperiled by new media players including streaming apps from […]
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Thinking About the Hashtag
It often takes time to recognise a new medium for what it is instead of the content it carries, especially when we’re thinking about the wrong medium. In the history of media studies, there has often been years of focus on the content of a medium before anyone starts to think about its broader social influence. […]
New York City has always been a shimmering mirage of television, cinema, radio and newsprint. It only ever existed in ribbons of Seinfeld, Friends, The Simpsons, 30 Rock, Elf, and news coverage like that of September 11, 2001. Though this is an account of my personal mediascape, millions of others would have a similar view. […]
One of the methods pursued in my PhD research is an analysis of how the case studies are performed or constructed by users on Instagram. To do this, I sampled the hashtags #Wollongong, #Wollondilly and #Bowral from Instagram on selected days. Some quick stats: #Wollondilly #Wollongong #Bowral No. Posts 100 176 118 Total Tags 1385 1801 […]
Why rethinking memes might help inoculate against the viral marketing disease. A meme is rather like pornography — you don’t necessarily know what it is but you know it when you see it. And yet, it is possible to set out some general descriptions of the kinds of meme that circulate online and upon which business empires […]