Analogue's Allure Obscured By Digital Determination

Discussing traditional university structures and their relevance into the future during this week’s tutorial, I found myself leaving feeling surprisingly positive about my time at UoW ­­­­and at a polar opposite to the bleak vocationally-oriented outlook I demonstrated in last week’s post. Prior to the tutorial I worked my way through the set readings, beginning with Arvantikis’ (2009) utopian dream of knowledge democratization, making educational material freely available to all for the purpose of creating a new form of biopolitical knowledge production that would treat education as a cultural commons. I am all for the distribution of knowledge of any form to anyone motivated enough to consume it but I thought this dream was still a fair way off, that was, until I came across The Cost of Knowledge movement. This online petition implores academics to boycott journals that oppose the free exchange of information and charge exorbitant subscription fees, namely Elsevier, and after reading the blog post that spawned this movement (Gowers 2012) along with an article celebrating the 10,000 signature milestone (Neylon 2012), I couldn’t help but feel appalled that this is how a number of the sources I use in everyday university research come to be published.

I was further dismayed by the worrying trend of universities outsourcing academic labour and moving away from the tradition tenure model as outlined by Schell (2009) and by the time I got to the end of Miller’s rant (2010), I couldn’t see a clear future for the form of tertiary education I am currently participating in. It wasn’t until I arrived in Charlotte’s tutorial that my view was reversed, with class discussion making it obvious to me that a purely online approach is just as ineffective as an educational approach based solely around the canon of yester-year and that a combination of both is the best way for education of all kinds to progress into the future. Furthermore, this discussion made me value the uninhibited, intelligent debate only available in a physical classroom and has made me aware of how much I missed intelligent debate with intellects similar too and greater than my own during my two year leave of absence.

References:

Arvanitakis, J 2009, ‘The Autonomous University and the Production of the Commons, or, “Pirates were like Ninjas, they Learned to Use their Environments”’, Toward a Global Autonomous University, The Edu-factory collective, Autonomedia, New York, pp.154-156

Gowers, T 2012, ‘Elsevier — my part in its downfall’, weblog post, Gower’s Weblog, accessed 17/4/2013, http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

Miller, R 2010, ‘The Coming Apocalypse’, Pedagogy, vol.10, no.1, pp.143-151

Neylon, T 2012, ‘Life after Elsevier: making open access to scientific knowledge a reality’, The Guardian, 24 April, accessed 17/4/2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/apr/24/life-elsevier-open-access-scientific-knowledge

Schell, E 2009, ‘Online Education, Contingent Faculty and Open Source Unionism’, Toward a Global Autonomous University, The Edu-factory collective, Autonomedia, New York, pp.114-118

If Everyone's A Journalist, Then What Am I?

This week’s reading and tutorial discussions revolved around participatory journalism; an increasing trend that has seen the role of content creation shared with users who would traditionally be defined as part of the audience rather than solely disseminated through top-down channels. Institutionalised journalism has historically existed independently of society, objectively observing events from the outside and reporting their findings. Over-time, society has become more complex and it is this complexity that has spawned participatory journalism.

Institutionalised media outlets inherently wield the power to select the information they process and distribute and in a hyper-complex society, this will of course result in unavoidable gaps and silences in reported issues. Quandt (2011) raises the concern that “journalists might manipulate information or take sides as they move through the various news production stages” and that this potential abuse of power operates with information that is generally inaccessible to the public. Furthermore, popular interest is becoming increasingly fragmented, spawning highly specialised topical interests that require individualised information that is simply outside of institutionalised media’s abilities.

This is where participatory journalism comes in, mobilising would-be journalists to have their say on issues that they are contextually specialised in and democratically benefitting journalistic independence through an expansive pool of voices. Of course, including these new journalistic voices into a heavily entrenched medium is going to be difficult, if it is even going to happen at all, and it is in this interesting time that we find ourselves as media students who will soon be seeking a career in the industry. The future of journalism in a shifting media landscape has been called into question and after finding myself back at university due to the publishing company I worked for not being able to keep up in the digital age, I for one am nervous.

References:

Quandt, T 2011, 'Understanding a new phenomenon: the significance of participatory journalism', Participatory Journalism in Online Newspapers: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex, pp.155-176

Time Flies When You Don't Prioritise

With the month of April ticking over this week, I thought it would be a good idea to at least familiarise myself with what will be required for my BCM310 assessments, namely the Research Proposal and subsequent essay. As this is to be based on the topics discussed between weeks 4 and 12, I decided to have a look through the subject outline and skim through the required readings for the weeks to come. After coming to the end of these readings, I decided that the topic I am most interested in is one that I'm already quite familiar with and one that I discussed in last week's blog post; the need for Australia's classification guidelines to be brought in line an ever-shifting media landscape dictated by rapid technological convergence.

I have a number of other assessments due in the coming week and have decided to prioritise them as April 15th is still some time away. Still, this brief research into the first assessment has made my path of action clear. Over the next week or so I will need to begin collecting sources from all sides of the argument for media classification reforms in Australia. Even at this early stage I'm quite confident that I will continue to side with the recommendations made by Flew (2012) but I know personally that my opinions are always open to change after the discovery of new evidence and I look forward to tackling this issue in depth.

References:

Flew, T 2012, ‘Media classification: content regulation in an age of convergent media’, Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, vol. 143, pp5-15