Police in Victoria have successfully served an intervention order on Facebook. This shows some of the changes brought about by digital media, especially social networking which has become more or less ubiquitous in recent years. This also highlights the case of internet bullying and harassment. The order was served after the police had made significant attempts to track down the perpetrator without any results.
The order was served by way of a video from the Senior Constable, talking directly to the accused, on their Facebook home page. VicPolice media officer, Katie Hall, states “Police will always pursue traditional means to enforce the law and to protect the community – but we won’t shy away from innovative methods to achieve positive outcomes, either.” The video below shows the order that was served via Facebook.
This is certainly an interesting case and touches on issues of online privacy and harassment. This posting relating to online bullying highlights the difficulty in escaping harassment online. Throughout this blog I have talked about some of the more positive aspects of digital media, and it is unfortunate that some negative aspects have also arisen. This will be my final formal post on this blog and I’d like to say thanks for taking the time to have a read!
The internet provides great entertainment and yet most people don’t really understand how exactly it works. Warning: The clip below from The IT Crowd doesn’t actually explain anything.
I thought it made sense to post a YouTube clip for this post as I seem to have been catching up on watching funny/weird/strange clips over the past couple of weeks. It’s great that this can all be shared so easily and I wonder if the ‘elders of the internet’ ever imagined how it would eventually be used. And just in case you were wondering, here is a sample of the ‘Top 25 YouTube Videos of all Time’.
I have been reading some interesting articles on how people spend their time on the internet. When the internet was first introduced to the world it quickly became a tool for communication and sharing information. Now in 2010, the internet plays a role in just about every business, non-profit society and organisation, and individuals life.
Some of the statistics reported by the Huffington Post relating to internet use by Americans showed that in a single month, a web user visits 2,646 sites and logs on 57 times – that’s a lot of information to be digesting! The report also highlighted the ever increasing popularity of social networking sites, with 70% of American internet users engaging in social networking. While in Brazil, a huge 90% of active internet users participate in social networking.
Another report in the Tech Chronicles of the San Francisco Chronicle reported how people are spending less time emailing and more time instant messaging. The report goes on to state that “In the past four years, people have been spending 37 percent more time getting news and entertainment online and less time communicating and making purchases online”.
Another article on TechPaparazzi listed the top internet brands – by percentage of online user visitors – with Google at 82%, followed by MSN/Bing (on 62%), Facebook (54%), Yahoo (53%), Microsoft (48%) and YouTube (47%).
Finally, this article published on TheOnlineMom highlights the increasing diversity of web users outside of the tech-obsessed younger generations. It shows that social networking rates higher than online gaming, internet and emailing in a ranking of the top ten sectors by share of US internet time.
These articles show an interesting shift away from simple emailing and data sharing, to more complex forms of internet usage. It also highlights the increasing popularity of social networking and the increasing desire for individuals not just to participate online, but to have an ‘online profile’ that is shared with the virtual community.
I signed up to hotmail before I even really understood what email was. I was just excited that I could get to use my own name! And I’ve pretty much used that account ever since – it’s a sort of time capsule of my life in correspondence since the late nineties. Sometimes I trawl back through old emails and have a laugh, or cringe, at what I wrote and who I was writing to.
My love affair with hotmail, however, is slowly dying. And it’s for two main reasons. Firstly, I get so much junk mail I have had to set my filter to the highest level, which means I periodically miss important emails that I should be reading. Unfortunately, I learnt a little too late that entering your email address into the world wide web in order to win competitions and prizes doesn’t necessarily come without a price tag. Secondly – and, I didn’t realise it until fairly recently – hotmail has decided to add a signature to each of my sent emails, with a one-line advertisement. Not too big of a deal when emailing friends, but pretty frustrating when you’re emailing your CV to a potential employer.
So I’ve started an affair with gmail. It’s less attractive than hotmail; the interface is strange, and the way it lists emails is confusing, but I’m getting used to it. There aren’t any interactive banner ads, which is great, and the emails seem to be arriving at their intended destination, but I’m still unsatisfied and sometimes I ditch them both to spend an evening with Facebook.
I’m always on the lookout for a better model so let me know if you have any suggestions?
I went to see a play on the weekend at fortyfivedownstairs on Flinders Lane in the city. It was a cool little venue and an interesting show; a take on photojournalist’s working in war zones, and the bonds and experiences they share, called Bare Witness.
In one sequence of the dialogue, some of the changes that have taken place recently in terms of digital technology were highlighted. Journalist’s no longer need to rely on physically shipping reels of images from geographically isolated areas with minimal infrastructure. Now, a simple click of a button and images are instantly available on editors’ news desks around the world.
The same is true of the paparazzi, who make big dollars by being the first to sell their images to the tabloids in a fast-paced, high turnover environment. This was highlighted in a documentary I watched, Paparazzi: Next Generation, in which young paparazzi were trailed around London as they stalked celebrities and instantly uploaded and sent off their photographs from laptops in the back of their cars. The only real barrier to the profession seemed to be acquiring the necessary equipment, and possessing the necessary bravado to avoid being muscled out of the next great shot of Paris Hilton leaving a club in Mayfair.
In the digital age, photography can be shared quickly and easily. And it’s not just journalist’s and paparazzi. People are documenting their own lives more and more through social media networks like Facebook, where you could spend an eternity trawling through photos of people’s lives.
Gone are the days where you would drop the film at the chemist and come back in three days, hopeful that some of them turned out ok!
Living off a laptop recently (that is to say, without a tv!) has highlighted some of the benefits and difficulties in accessing traditional media on the internet.
Below is a link to each of the channel’s online viewing platforms:
In some instances the coverage is excellent; for example, the ABC’s iView means that I can catch up on most ABC content at my own leisure, and I find that the iView platform is simple and easy to use. The commercial channels are less impressive, with unattractive interfaces, badly indexed content, and advertising that is frustrating and repetitive (although I recognise that advertising is a necessary component of commercial television). It means that, aside from ABC content, I have had little success in watching tv online in a traditional manner.
I think it would be great if you could access overseas content as well, but unfortunately most overseas broadcasters impose geographical restrictions on accessing their content online. Surely in a world of global advertising campaigns, broadcasters should recognise and incorporate their overseas audiences rather than exclude them.I guess that broadcasters are still navigating the path to online integration.
Nevertheless, I am grateful to be able to access content online and in some instances I will probably continue to watch online even when I’m back in tv land.
This election seems to have been one of the biggest anticlimax’s in history. The nation remains unsure who will govern for the next three years, and the fate lies with the four independents currently being courted by the major political parties. I can’t decide what a hung parliament stands for in terms of the democratic process. On this occasion, I think perhaps it highlights the similarities in approach taken by both the ALP and the Liberal/Nationals during the campaign process. The commentators seem to agree that this was a very scripted campaign, focussed primarily on ‘not screwing up’ rather than taking any bold risks on contentious issues. There was a very high informal vote count, dubbed by The Age as the ‘Latham effect’; for example, in the electorate of Blaxland 14.25% of all votes cast were informal, highlighting a sense of apathy and disdain amongst voters.
I was most surprised by the fairly bi-partisan approach to the issue of asylum seekers, and was disappointed that neither major party could offer a more empathetic approach to the subject. It seems clear that the campaigns were based primarily on fear tactics and smear tactics.
Crikey declared the ABC a ratings winner during the campaign. I think with such a negative campaign, shows like Gruen Nation and Yes we Canberra offered voters a welcome light-heartedness that was necessary to retain people’s interest. Interestingly, the Yes we Canberra ‘warm-up act’ for Lateline saw an increase in Lateline viewers during the election coverage.
I am still looking forward to finding out who will take office, but a week has gone by since the ‘non-result’ and I find that I haven’t really been giving it much thought. I wonder if I will feel more inspired when an outcome is actually reached?
I attended the Jay Rosen talk for the Walkley Foundation on Tuesday 17th August. This post is a brief summary and discussion of some of the points that were raised during the talk that I felt were of particular interest. As a brief introduction, Rosen is the author of the blog PressThink and is a professor of journalism at New York University (read more about Jay Rosen here).
Rosen opened with a reference to a scene from the 1976 movie Network in which a broadcaster engages with his audience by encouraging them to stick their heads out of the window and yell a mantra “I’m mad as hell, and I won’t take it anymore…” (see YouTube clip below).
This is compared to the current state of the mass media, in which viewers feel more engaged and connected with content and there is constant interaction between interested parties.Where there used to be an audience of readers, listeners & consumers, now we have an audience that is empowered to distribute and edit news through blogs, podcasting, email, YouTube and other social media.
On his blog, Rosen writes aboutThe Citizens Agenda in Campaign Coverage, which looks at the concept of engaging audiences more closely in defining the types of questions that they want answered by their politicians during campaign coverage. The post looks at the development of a “Citizens Agenda”, which Rosen argues should form the basis of serious discussion between politicians, journalists and key stakeholders during the course of the campaign.
The two main themes of the talk that I found particularly interesting were the concept of “Crowd Sourcing” and “Citizen Journalism”. Crowd sourcing is essentially outsourcing labour to a large group or community by means of an open call. Rosen gave two examples of crowd sourcing. The first, by the blog TPMMuckraker, who used their audience to help trawl through 3,000 pages of emails in search of information relating to the US housing crash. The second example given was Guardian.co.uk, who used crowd sourcing to scan through thousands of pages of documents relating to the expenditure of Member’s of Parliament during the British MP’s expenses scandal. In both examples, the public’s enthusiasm for the story of the day was channeled by journalists to assist in researching and disseminating the news with a speed that would have not otherwise been possible. This also no doubt helped readers to feel more engaged in the news-making and reporting process.
Citizen Journalism is the concept of members of the public playing an active role in the creation and dissemination of news and information. It is defined by Rosen in the video below.
Individuals are now empowered to set themselves up as content creators and sharers through a wide range of new digital media. In his talk, Rosen discussed the changing media landscape, pointing to the incorporation of blogs with traditional media sources and the ‘unbundling’ of the news as more people turn to the internet for content. He gave the example of Spot.Us who funded their story on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (and other stories) by soliciting donations from interested readers.
When you look at these examples, this new age of journalism seems to represent a kind of mass media utopia in which people from all angles are encouraged to participate and share knowledge (and sometimes wealth) – and in which most content is available to us free online 24/7. Rosen argues that there are positive and negatives to this new age of journalism (i.e. it makes open source journalism possible, but provides an outlet for terrorist organisations to plan and communicate). I found the talk very interesting and it gave me some new insights into the evolution of journalism and the mass media over the past few decades.
Following on from my previous post about politicians using social media to interact with voters, I would like to talk about two interesting aspects of digital media: a) how it encourages interaction between individuals that was previously unavailable in such a widespread way; and b) the flow on affects this has in terms of privacy, accountability and scrutiny – i.e. not only are people expected to communicate 24/7, but the messages that they send are more closely scrutinized. Take for example David Barker, the Liberal candidate in the seat of Chifly, who made racially vilifying comments on his Facebook page and was promptly dismissed (and rightly so) by the Liberal party. Not to mention the numerous instances of employees losing their jobs over casual remarks made on their Facebook pages that they doubtfully expected their bosses to discover.
The ABC has incorporated a Twitter live feed into its Q&A program, and while I can see how this helps the audience at home feel more as though they are part of the debate, I think that it cheapens the discussion because many of the ‘tweets’ are pretty meaningless – for example, “Imagining Bronwyn Bishop and John Howard doing it” commented by one viewer during the Monday 9th August program.
It’s not just politicians that are carefully managing their public profiles online. A recent article in The Sydney Morning Herald found that “Nearly 25 per cent of Gen Y guys said they actively manage their cyber profiles to project their ‘best self’ compared to 14 per cent of their female counterparts”. In a similar vein, this article profiles individuals who are juggling concerns over privacy online, whilst also attempting to be active participants through blogging and social media. It highlights how the potential to reach a large audience through online networks can be exciting and daunting at the same time.
The new age of online profiles, networking, dating, gaming, shopping etc. encourages participation and interaction across networks and between individuals. These WordPress blogs are a great example of the relative ease with which individuals can self-publish and reach an audience. I like that people can choose how, when, why and with who they interact online and will be interested to see what the future holds for digital and social media.
Music is now easily and readily available on the internet, allowing users unprecedented and instant access to music from around the world. Cheaper internet access and vastly improved speeds for downloading and streaming content have made access to music more convenient and easier than ever. The record industry however is suffering, with rapidly declining CD sales as more and more consumers turn to the internet to access music and entertainment.
Music streaming sites allow users to search a catalogue and create and edit playlists to listen online. Apple allows users to purchase content through the iTunes store, and sites like Pirate Bay and uTorrent encourage file sharing between individuals. Meanwhile, radio stations are offering online streaming and podcasts, and new social music services such as Rdio, profiled in this article on digital media wire, offer access to a large volume of tracks on a subscription basis and allow users to follow their friends and discover new music.
With the advent of file sharing, there has been a huge increase in illegal downloads which the music industry has had little success in extinguishing. I think that record labels should aim for increased access to their catalogues online, at a pay per track or per album rate, that allows listeners to ethically download tracks. Often the barrier to purchasing CD’s either online or from record stores is ease of access, and I believe that many consumers would happily pay (at a reasonable price) for simple, quick and instant access to music online. In a study on why consumers turn to the internet for illegal downloads, news.com.au concluded that convenience was as much of a motivating factor as money for people who downloaded content illegally. Furthermore, the study, which involved 7324 participants (all who had downloaded material illegally in the past 12 months), showed that more than two-thirds of the respondents would be willing to pay for the same legal service if it were available.
The problem for the music industry has been its unwillingness to embrace change in the new age of internet consumerism. If they were to move towards a model where consumers could stream, download and share content online, record labels could be leading the way in engaging directly with their customers online, rather than focusing upon pursuing legal action against individuals who illegally access content. Record labels could win over consumers by allowing greater ease of access to content and encouraging consumers to engage in ethical sharing of content, and thereby undercutting the pirate music market.
The industry needs to evolve in order to ensure that a wide range of quality content and a stimulating music culture remains available for future generations.
The order was served by way of a video from the Senior Constable, talking directly to the accused, on their Facebook home page. VicPolice media officer, Katie Hall, states “Police will always pursue traditional means to enforce the law and to protect the community – but we won’t shy away from innovative methods to achieve positive outcomes, either.” The video below shows the order that was served via Facebook.
Red Blog 