Drones in the Cloud: Attending to Snapchat
I don’t know enough about you To be kind, to be kind to you Don’t you even think about me — Cymbals, “The Natural World” The Cymbals’ electro-pop lament of unrequited attention (‘love’) has the same...
View ArticleVirilio and Vision of the Self-Projectile
[This is an extract from a lecture on “Pics or it didn’t happen”.] For Virilio dromoscopy is the art of the dashboard, which “displays inanimate objects as if they were animated by a violent movement”...
View ArticleJournalism Jobs
The ABC is reporting on a leaked “issues paper” from the University of Queensland (UQ) and that UQ apparently plan to merge most of their Communications offerings. Part of this process is allegedly...
View ArticleVox the News Cycle
Interesting discussion at Nieman Journalism Lab triggered by a recent post by Vox Media’s VP of Engineering, Michael Lovitt, on launching Vox.xom as a nine week development project. Vox.com has some...
View ArticleEducation and Cluster Funded Explanations
The way fields of knowledge are split into teaching and research clusters in higher education in Australia is confusing . We have Field of Research codes through which we align our research outputs...
View ArticleThe Australian Newspaper Outrage Cycle
Media editor of The Australian, Sharri Markson, has produced an article titled ‘Activism a threat to journalism‘. In it she draws on sources to argue that ‘activist journalism academics’ on ‘social...
View ArticleNieman Lab 2015 Predictions for Journalism
Last week I delivered the first lecture in our Introduction to Journalism unit. I am building on the material that my colleague, Caroline Fisher, developed in 2014. One of the things about teaching...
View Article#thedress for journalism educators
Black and Blue? Gold and White? What does #thedress mean for journalism educators? At the time of writing, the original Buzzfeed post has just under over 38m visitors and 3.4m people have voted in poll...
View ArticleFacebook Research Critiques
Engineers at Facebook have worked to continually refine the ‘Edgerank‘ algorithm over the last five or six years or so. They are addressing the problem of how to manage the 1500+ pieces of content...
View ArticleEconomy of Culture
Boris Groys’ On the New would’ve productively informed my essay on the how the media event of True Detective could be understood as part of the revaluation of cultural values. We are reading it as...
View ArticleRefugees and the Discourse of Compassion
The image of Aylan Kurdi washed ashore has had a dramatic impact on the character of the refugee debate in Australia and elsewhere. Most responses from across the political spectrum have recognised the...
View ArticleWhy did the harrowing personal essay take over the Internet
The ‘strap’ for the Slate article on the rise of the first-person journalism genre asks the question: Why did the harrowing personal essay take over the Internet? But it does not actually answer the...
View ArticleBreitbart and American Sniper
I scraped Breitbart’s all posts from Facebook page. This is a representation of all ‘engagement’ (likes, comments and shares) for each month. The first six months of 2015 saw tremendous growth in...
View ArticleCritical News Literacy and Young People
There is a study released today about news consumption habits by young people 8-12 and 13-16 years old: News and Australian Children: How Young People Access, Perceive and are Affected by the News....
View ArticleTowards a post-normative communication and media studies
Twitter has announced a call for research submissions that helps them “identify indicators of conversational health that are even more specific to Twitter and its impact.” I expressed my skepticism...
View ArticleThe meta-organisational capacity of lures
Sianne Ngai’s concept of minor aesthetic categories was developed to think about “aesthetic experiences grounded in equivocal affects”. I worked to think through the concept of ‘meta’ as it circulates...
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