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Meanland: Marshall McLuhan is stalking me from beyond the grave

Marshall-McLuhanNot a fan of media theorist Marshall ‘the medium is the message’ McLuhan? Okay, I don’t go in for the technological determinism either, but you can’t deny that the man was uncannily prescient when it came to predicting how our culture would develop – a ‘global village’, electric technology ‘reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life’ – and how these changes would be feared – ‘we drive into the future using only our rear view mirror’. He even divined the demise of print culture, and ‘electronic interdependence’. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 24-03-2011, 10 user comments

On waking up

2010-2011_Arab_world_protests.PNG: *Arab League: Serg!oEgypt. A revolution on the scale of the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, the Women’s Revolution. Millions are changing everything because they can’t bear the oppression any longer; because they’ve captured the imagination of another way.

Iran, Yemen, Bahrain … Egypt’s imagination inspired by Tunisia. Tunisia inspired by … Facebook? Well, clearly Facebook is just one moment in a long history. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 22-02-2011, 3 user comments

Meanland: On participatory revolution

Egypt and twitterLast week media theorist and writer Jay Rosen coined a new genre; ‘Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators’, it’s called. The genre takes some knowns:

• Since the invention of social media there have been uprisings and revolutions: Iran, Moldova, Tunisia, Egypt, and more

• Social media helps ‘sex up’ the reporting of these situations through its dynamism, immediacy, on-the-ground reporting

• Some ‘get carried away’ by the sexing up, mistaking it for journalism

• Some others get worried about all this focus on social media as ‘revolution’, so have to remind people that ‘it’s not that simple’

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 21-02-2011, 11 user comments

I’m not saying Glenn Milne’s a liar…

open_letterGlenn Milne, regularly published pontificating about his numerous anonymous sources, lowered the bar of journalistic standards yet again yesterday when he filed An ALP insider's open letter to Julia Gillard at ABC’s Drum. The piece consists of an introduction by Milne, followed by an unsigned open letter to Julia Gillard from an anonymous Labor party member – ‘one of the best Labor thinkers going around’, according to Milne.

There is so much wrong with this piece, from its origins to its argument, it’s hard to know where to begin. With the misuse of anonymous sources, political manipulation of the media and sexism, it kind of epitomises the state of journalism today. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 7-01-2011, 4 user comments

Wikileaks reveals what the leaders debate didn’t

In last night's puppet show, the topic of Afghanistan emerged only briefly but sufficiently long for both candidates to pledge ongoing war until the 'job is done'. Courtesy of Wikileaks, we now have a much greater idea of what exactly that job is.

The whistleblower site has begun releasing a trove of new documents containing an almost blow-by-blow account of the Afghan conflict. Here's what the Guardian says:

Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called "blue on white" events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 26-07-2010, 14 user comments

On Manning, Lamo, WikiLeaks, Greenwald, new media and old journalism

I have an article up at Drum about all of the above:

How has the online temperament of news changed journalism? In Katrina Fox’s article on objectivity, transparency and advocacy in journalism, “What’s your bias?”, Marcus O’Donnell, lecturer in journalism, explains:

[O]bjectivity was a trust mechanism we relied on in media that didn’t do links. But now we can make it perfectly clear where we are coming from, what our sources are and what our values are, and it is this transparency that is the new trust mechanism that both readers and writers have to rely on.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 21-07-2010, 1 user comment

The personal is political

Quarterly Essay 38The post below is a slightly different version of a piece currently on the ABC Drum site.
Basically, I was writing something for Drum on the personalisation of politics when news of the spill broke out, and so I hastily tried to illustrate the argument in terms of the Rudd-Gillard contest. Because of the spill coverage, the article didn’t run the next day, and I went back to it once details of Gillard’s ascension were a little clearer. This morning, I was about to send the amended version when I saw that the previous version had already been published

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 25-06-2010, 13 user comments

Meanland extract – The great paywall of Murdoch

Murdoch wants to put our news behind a paywall, beginning with The Times and The Sunday Times, via a new payment model supposed to kick in in the very near future. Doubtless this is something he’s been planning since his first forays into the internet – like the purchase of MySpace – proved financially fruitless.

Bloomberg’s Matthew Lynn claims the project is doomed to failure:

It's too late to start charging for newspapers online. The content isn't good enough, and newspapers themselves are a product of technologies that simply don't work in a digital economy. All Murdoch is going to achieve with this move is to kill off one of the most famous media brands in the world.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 17-06-2010, No comments

War = Dead children

One of the things about working with very young children for a long time is that when another 21st-century catastrophe is revealed to us, the first thing one tends to visualise is the actual concrete effect on children. And the thing about these catastrophes – wars, economic meltdowns, terrorist attacks, illegal occupations and so on – is that children are always affected, are, in fact, usually in the middle of what’s talking place – underneath the missile strike, in front of the tanks and bulldozers, in the middle of the family with the suddenly unemployed parents, walking to the shops past the wired-up suicide bomber, riding in the backseat of the family car as it approaches a US army checkpoint. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 9-06-2010, 21 user comments

Thanks, newmatilda

Tragedy strikes Australian independent media: newmatilda will cease to publish in a month. As the editorial states, the reasons are financial. Advertising has not risen to meet the losses from subscriptions.

The publication has gone from strength to strength in every other way, with readership doubling every year for the last three years. NM has consistently tackled the issues that are being overlooked, and rapidly become one of the few outlets for investigative journalism in a changing media climate.

I started writing for NM in its early days around 2005, and have always felt very loyal to the site. Not only because the editor, Marni Cordell, is a friend, but because the editorial vision, genuine support for media diversity and quality journalism, and humour have been such a wonderful staple in my media diet. I have also appreciated the fearlessness and willingness to take risks – with content, structure, and delivery. Plus they paid me. Which is important as hell. ... read more

Written by Jennifer Mills on 27-05-2010, 1 user comment

What your atheism costs you

Suddenly the world is awash in burqa suspicion and vitriol.

In the past fortnight, headlines have been dominated by bans and proposed bans in Belgium, France and Denmark (home to only three women who wear the burqa), to our own shores, and the boorish postulating of Cory Bernardi:

In my mind, the burka has no place in Australian society. I would go as far as to say it is un-Australian. To me, the burka represents the repressive domination of men over women which has no place in our society and compromises some of the most important aspects of human communication.

As Parliamentary Secretary and spokesperson for the would-be Prime Minister and the Liberal Party, Bernardi’s comments can hardly be dismissed lightly. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 19-05-2010, 46 user comments

Pathological anti-Islam

For the last few weeks, we’ve learned, over and over again, why the burqa must be banned. A visible face is, apparently, central to Western modernity (which is why, one imagines, that new-fangled device known as the telephone will never catch on). Besides, outlawing the burqa is a feminist cause – to preserve women’s right to wear what they want, we must legislate so they can’t wear what they want. Or something.

You’d think that that the anti-burqa crowd would cheer the victory of Lebanese born Rima Fakih in the Miss USA contest. That pageant requires entrants to parade in swimsuits as well as evenings gowns. Fakih is a Muslim woman prepared to show rather more than her face. Good news, right? ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 18-05-2010, 18 user comments

Leonardo Da Vinci castrated for graffiti crimes

BanksyI came across this online Age newspaper article by Kylie Northover, ‘Graffiti is enough to give a critic an art attack’ (8 May 2010), a response to ‘Hey Banksy, graffiti is vandalism not art’ by Charles Purcell (4 May 2010). I was duly horrified.

Purcell concludes his smug, ignorant rant with the following outrageous suggestion: ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 13-05-2010, 9 user comments

On Deveny’s dismissal: you’ve tapped into the wrong outrage

Let’s be honest now: is there anyone who truly believes Catherine Deveny was advocating for or supporting paedophilia? The only crimes we can charge her with are bad taste and an inability to judge public reaction, hardly hanging offences.

What other commentators have failed to grasp about the whole debacle are the sinister implications of Deveny’s firing, and the problems this poses for the position of ‘the writer’ today. Alongside the increasing commodification of the author is the idea that authors are a brand, and as such, are expected to build their brand name. They’re thrust into the world of social media, websites, endless self-promotion, celebrity and accessibility. They have to be ‘themselves’ (the reason they were hired in the first place) while promoting their talents, idiosyncrasies and opinions, and within reaching distance of their thousands of followers. They are effectively private contractors who no longer have the support of their institutions or the conditions that go with this. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 7-05-2010, 17 user comments

From ‘sex kitten’ to educating the sexes

In 2009, a choreographer from the television programme So you think you can dance said his routine involved ‘a bit of a peep show’ explaining, ‘They’re such hot looking girls, why wouldn’t I portray them as sex kittens?’ I then pulled the face that causes my teenaged daughter to exclaim, ‘I hate watching television with you!’ And because she was not interested to hear my speech on a soapbox, and because despite a ‘long history of advocating for social change, equality and the disadvantaged’, Bronwyn Pike (Minister for Education in Victoria) has not significantly mentioned the gender issue as part of her platform for Victorian education reform, I bring my concerns here to you.

Did the public express outrage at this blatant sexism? The show’s online opinion forum suggests, no, it did not. Would there have been a response had he said, ‘They’re so African-looking, why wouldn’t I portray them as American slaves?’ ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 23-04-2010, 31 user comments