Jun 9, 2010 |
https://vimeo.com/12427029
My work with Punch Records on Protest, the internet and the notion of Remixhibitions took an interesting turn today.
Local community radio station New Style Radio is in the midst of a battle between its staff and the board. Station volunteers have been locked out of the building and are trying to raise awareness of their struggle.
They maintain that the station itself is entirely sustainable, but that the board has been siphoning money into the Afro Caribbean Millennium Centre – the building that houses the station.
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Apr 18, 2010 |
Photo by “lapolab”
I’ve been talking about this a lot recently, and it seemed appropriate to try and capture my thoughts about it here in blog form while it’s still pretty fresh.
Most of the ideas aren’t mine, but like all academics, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants in order to see a little further. The particular giant carrying most of the weight in this instance is Marshall McLuhan.
The central premise of this is that media are environments. That is, we don’t consume media – we inhabit them. That sounds a little needlessly obtuse, but it’s really quite simple: throughout history, we have lived in a world saturated by one media form or another, and that changes over time. And by ‘media form’ I mean ‘the main way in which we take in our information’.
Our brains get information about the world through our senses. Our senses are connected to whatever the main media happen to be at the time. And when those media change, we change. And like a frog slowly boiling, we generally don’t realise it’s happening to us while it’s happening.
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Mar 17, 2010 |
Photo by mfophotos
Without wanting to tread on the toes of any of my colleagues – notably Paul Bradshaw, who is a world-beating expert on all things online journalism – I had a thought today about the crossover between newspapers and the internet.
Don’t think of this so much as an “idea” like the other ideas I’ve had so far. Think of this more like a thought experiment, and an invitation to have a conversation in the comments.
Personally, for what it’s worth, I believe the idea of a blanket paywall for online news content is a huge mistake, because I think it misunderstands the internet, media consumption in general – and specifically, the different ways that people use newspapers and news content.
And I think that if you do consider some of the ways in which newspapers are consumed, a slightly different possible approach to the monetisation and development of newspapers in the digital age starts to reveal itself… and I don’t think anyone’s thought of it yet.
Though it’s entirely possible that they have, but not told me about it.
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Feb 15, 2010 |
Our glamorous campus. Photo courtesy Birmingham City University
Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research
Research Studentship worth £16,680
Popular music and radio in the digital age
The Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research is a rapidly developing centre of research excellence based at Birmingham City University with a community of over thirty academics and research degree students. Centre staff conduct research into all aspects of the media and popular culture, but have a particularly strong reputation in work about the changing form of popular music and radio media.
The research would form part of the work of the Interactive Cultures group, and you would be supervised by Prof Tim Wall, Dr Paul Long, and Andrew Dubber. Their work in popular music, radio and cultural politics is internationally recognised with both academic and media communities, and you would have the opportunity to be involved in a number of major research and knowledge transfer initiatives including the Music and Radio Innovation and the Music Consumption in the Digital Age projects.
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