Lecture Week 4

Well some of you know Im from Mexico, so I thought it would be interesting that some of you could learn a little bit about my country.
While I was reading the lecture I remembered that in mexican indigineous cultures its happening something very weired. As globalization is spreading around very quickly, all the media is invading people. For some of us its great, because we have a lot of facilities and its making our life much easier. But have they ask us if we want this. Well this is my point, in Mexico a lot of indigenous cultures take technology as an invasion and they don’t want to know anything about it, because they think this will end with their traditions. For example in Mexico they are some foundations that are dedicated to create campains with the purpose of collecting money for providing poor people with computers, goods and to learn english. But some of them the most cultural and tradicional refuse to this help. This could sound strange but I respect it because its good for them and for my country that some people still believe in their ancestors and in their culture.
So technology it’s not always helpful, some of them see it as destructive and invasive.

Another example I want to talk about is that media its making easier communication between people, now its easier to talk with someone that its in another part of the World, as we read in the text about skype, e-mail, mobiles, and so many others. But its also making relationships much colder and growing apart. Now we dont frequent people so often, we are concentrated in our computers so we don’t make new friends, and I could keep going on. So until what point is media affecting or helping us?
Yo can check out this page to read more about this.
http://www.glresources.com/51.html
I think we really have to be awared of what technology can make to us, so we can take advantage of it but also know where we have to stop. Some psychologists are afraid that all this can really affect people in the future, starting with kids and teens and then affecting all of us, to the point of generating depression or anxiety and this will cause new problems, leading us to new ways of therapy.

2010
03/22
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Mediation: Time – ‘Contemporality’, E-geographies, and Impermanence

This week I have considered the role of temporality, time, and dailiness in dissolving ‘the nation state’ and the emergence of new identities; new “virtual communities…  coexistence in time, not coextension in space.” (Hartley, p.263). Exploring the nature of these new, digital ‘e-geographies’ as I have termed them, inspired me to consider my own sense of ‘self’ and meaning derivative from my daily routine. Also from this week’s readings, more so Hartley’s, I was particularly interested in the shifts in power and truth in public writing by virtue of increasing time frequencies.

Scannel’s discussion of the seasonal temporality of radio broadcasting in wartime modernity on p.155 brought forth the idea of time transcending space in communication; traditional celebrations of annual public holidays such as Christmas enjoyed across distances through the one broadcast radio program; an idea of giving scope to ‘dailiness’ and perhaps, as I saw it, an early form of broadcasting and high frequency media creating new communities, a way in which we are “worlded”. I admired the way Scannel uses “world” as a verb to add meaning to our ‘dailiness’.

Excerpts from the readings,

“News can be a textualization of high frequency rumor, gossip, and information. But equally news can express much lower frequency rhythms in the guise of quotidian narrative.” (Hartley, p.267)

and…

“That truth can be lost, or systematically and wilfully distorted or finally even denied… of societal modernization in which truth has been down-sized to the sum of knowledge and power…” (Scannel, p. 169)

…prompts me to raise an issue of temporality that I think deserves more attention with the rise of new media, and thus shifts in power (dissolution of entry barriers to the ‘fourth estate’, perhaps), which is its impermanence. Web journalists not only have the ability to produce news instantaneously, but the ability to edit, change, delete, or slightly manipulate content at these frequencies; a scary consequence to mediation through new, contemporary time frames – as I have labelled it, ‘contemporality’ –  and an issue that can be further explored in regards to the ethics and credibility of contemporary journalism.

This week’s readings have been challenging, but relevant. There is definitely a lot more I could say here, but in the interests of not confusing/boring anyone to sleep, I’ll leave it at this! I would love to discuss some of these points further if anyone is interested.

Lauren.

2010
03/22
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week3 post : Mediation: time – where we read Dailiness and The frequencies of public writing…

While reading Scannell,P.(1996). “Dailiness” In Radio, Television and modern Life. Blackwell London, pp144-178, I found that it was a bit confusing. However, to me, it seemed as though he was talking about how Media affects our daily life- broadcasting in particular, which he believes creates a schedule for people to base their lives on.

“The institutionalization of broadcasting can be interpreted as a routinization” pg 145

For example, how he states that back then after tea-time children would go to bed. However, these days they stay awake for ‘family viewing time’ which goes until about 9 o’clock, which then switches to ‘adult time’ which includes broadcasts that contain sex, violence and bad language. This implies that Television sets a time-zone for each day.

“Broadcasting, whose medium is time, articulates our sense of time.” pg 152

He emphasises that news like Today, gives him a sense of he fullness of days. Saying this, I think he means that, not only does it create routine but it keeps the day busy by keeping him updated as to what has happened since he went to bed, what happening at the moment, and what’s coming up later in the day. In addition, it also gives people something to talk about.

However, I found that Dailiness was easier to read than Hartley, J. (2004). “The frequencies of public writing: Tomb, Tome and time” In Jenkins,H and Thorburn, D.(Eds) Democracy and new Media. MIT press, USA, pp. 247-269.

In this article I found that, He was talking about how time in communicative life can be understood by its frequency. He states that in each part of public writing has its own frequency, such as the speed of creation, the frequency of circulation and the wavelength of consumption.

He links news and time in a way that makes it a bit confusing for me to understand. I don’t think that its because its news but because he uses the term frequency, what does he mean by frequency?

Frequency as in the number of time it comes up was what I thought at first until he brought out the term “wavelength”.

“In news, the frequencies of production and consumption are designed to match that of publication. A premium is set on high-frequency news gathering” pg 248

To be honest I have a couple of pages to read left, but it was too confusing to me, I believe that to understand the last bit I have to understand the beginning and the middle.

Always,

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2010
03/21
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Hey.. this is just a post to see what im doing.. can everyone see this?

2010
03/16
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