Review of Friction.TV
Just reviewed this site for the JournalismEnterprise.com blog, run by Paul Bradshaw over at Birmingham City Uni. You can read the full review over there.
What do they say it is?
“Friction.tv believes that disagreement - or friction - is a vital element for a healthy debate, to reach new insights and to find out what’s really going on in society. We need disagreement before we can start to find some answers… an interesting and stimulating alternative to the sanitised, agenda driven mediocrity of the conventional mass media.” What do I say it is? A formulaic video publishing site that relies too much on the soapbox for its claims to be an alternative media platform
Read the full review on JournalismEnterprise…
The Google generation?
Being born quite a way before 1993, I don’t qualify as part of the Google generation: made up of Western-born individuals who have grown up with the internet, ‘a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web’. I can remember life before the web. It wasn’t bad. Travelling in 1994, no-one knew where I was for months, and there was no way I could regularly communicate back home. As I said, not bad.
A recent story at Pandia.com looks at a new report released by the British Library and JISC conducted by the CIBER center at the University College of London. It contradicts or at least challenges the belief, first put forward by Mark Plansky (coiner of the term ‘digital natives’) that:
today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.
Pandia.com notes that… Read more
Controlling your digital identity
Reading one of my regular neuroscience blogs and I picked up this story about QDOS, a site still in pre-register beta status, but which aims to give you “a starting point for managing and taking control of your online status. Be seen how you want to be seen.”
The premise is that consumers (i.e. users) should be more in control of their data, but in the world of Facebook and its ‘you can never leave’ mantra, we need to go further than this, and that users should have more say in their digital identity: how others see us; how others make us seen (do I really have 157 ‘friends’? The language is critical here). That’s based on some research they did: Read more
Get blogging
All journalism students should have a blog. That’s the clear message from the leading journalism bloggers and educators. For MAC 250 students the opening quote on this discussion should make you think about what to do after the module’s over. Take a look at Dave Lee’s blog as an example: the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade recently called him ‘probably Britain’s leading student journalist blogger’.
Make sure you read Neil McIntosh’s comment too: ‘blogs are the minimum’. Get your site up and running now. See where it takes you, well before you think about that journalism or PR job.
Is the internet an institution?
Went to the annual Bagehot Lecture at Queen Mary last night, with Andrew Marr talking on the subject of ‘History and Journalism’. Was an entertaining hour, if not illuminating, except it was great to hear first hand that ‘If anyone tells you the government did not bully the BBC over the Hutton Enquiry, they are wrong, because I was on the end of the phone’. Marr spoke… Read more
