Just heard a great keynote from Steven Barnett and Ivor Gaber about TV news (BBC One early/late evening bulletins, ITV1 late evening, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News, Sky News 24, BBC News channel). Their central argument is that TV news is not ‘dumbing down’ and has remained fairly consistent for the last 35 years – you can read the report here.
I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year. I came back from annual leave with a nasty cold, so bah humbug to that. Anyway from tomorrow til Friday I’m at MeCCSA 2012 in Luton, and I expect I’ll be blogging and tweeting from there during the conference. I am supposed to be presenting on Thursday morning (things got a little hairy with whether or not I was actually going for a while, so things are still a bit TBC). The conference organisers asked for some papers on policy, so that’s what I’ve prepared, and here are my slides, should you be interested:
I had my PhD viva yesterday, which is an oral examination in the form of the hardest ever interview you’ve had in your life. Seriously, I NEVER want to go through that again, although I suspect I will have to, albeit either as a supervisor or examiner next time (not sure if it’s quite as painful for them as it is for the participant, but Feona did say that one of the killer questions made her go ‘oooh that’s hard’).
Anyway, it may have been really hard, but the end result was that I just have to do minor modifications (which is what you want), and the modifications they asked for seem reasonably straightforward. So, hurrah. I filled in a form with the title ‘Dr’ for the first time today. That was weird.
Posted in Academia
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Tagged PhD
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Cliff Richard might not be the obvious name that comes to mind when you’re thinking about new media research, but I’m currently working on a project with lots of lovely Cliff fans and I’m looking forward to seeing their insights and turning them into publications. In 2000-01 I did my BA dissertation on online communities of Cliff Richard and Belle and Sebastian fans, and in 2010 and 2011 I’ve been revisiting those communities to see what is happening. The Belle and Sebastian communities have seen a lot of change – and some are non-existent now – but there’s been a lot of stability in the Cliff groups, particularly one group, MoveIt.
I’ve put up a sub-page for this research now. There’s not much there at present but I hope to populate it with news or with information for participants as the project develops.
Lots of my students are involved with the student magazine SHULife (including its editor, Tom). They’re doing sterling work, and this month have a Pete McKee exclusive.
They also have a nifty website up and running, so go and visit it.
Posted in SHU
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Tagged SHU, shulife, students
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I realise ‘hell’ is the sanitised version of the meme but I’m still curiously prudish when it comes to blogging here…
I feel at the moment that my knowledge of media (both old and new) is really pretty mainstream and sanitised, and given that I like to research and teach about online cultures, social media etc, I’ve decided I need to broaden my horizons.
I’m aware of lots of internet memes and like many people, use, recirculate them and incorporate them into my own online (and sometimes offline) discourse. I’m also aware that many of them originate and become circulated through places like 4chan, Tumblr, Funnyjunk and reddit, all of which I’ve kind of shied away from as the messier naughty younger brother of the social internet (as opposed to the somewhat ‘proper’ parent/older sibling environments of Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Blogger, YouTube, Flickr, vBulletin etc). So I’m interested in learning more about this side of the internet, finding out what other people have written about these places, finding out how they work and so on. At the moment it’s not with a view to writing/publishing anything formally though that may come.
Back in early 2009 I set up a Tumblr but I didn’t get it and it just became a random place to regurgitate blog and Twitter posts. So I’ve wiped its slate clean and started again with it. I’m using it as a place to experiment and probably link to some interesting research/articles etc. I don’t really know what I’m doing in Tumblr yet, but if you want to initiate me into its weird ways, you can find me here.
You may have noticed that I’ve been having various site issues. It seemed to stem back to me being dissatisfied with Suffusion and fancying a change, and then somehow the themes I tried muddied each other up and everything went a bit kaput. It’s not helped by my current database using a slightly outdated version of PHP and MySQL, which should be easy enough to upgrade, but navigating my host’s control panel is a labyrinthine mess. Anyway, I’m back up and running for now. And still fiddling. Choosing themes was hard, all the ones I liked seemed not to have Twitter widgets or be customisable in the way I want… but then I discovered that it was a simple matter of installing plug-ins. I’m still getting to grips with the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, to my shame. Anyway, this will do for now. I really need to learn how to design WP themes. I bet it’s not that hard, I’m just very out of practice with back-end stuff these days.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged blogging
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