Tag: Media Theory
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Has mass media slipped the surly bonds of programming?
Terry Heaton has been laying down some serious thoughts on the future of television as unbundled bits of media, and his model scales to newspapers easily enough. One of the features of the “pull” technology deployed in everything being called Web 2.0 is the natural-but-new condition of the separation of program and schedule. We think…
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Intelligent Machine Debate at King Library this afternoon
I must have missed this in the SJSU Events feed, but Rudy Rucker debates Noam Cook today on the question of “Will Computers Ever be Alive or Intelligent?” 430-600pm in 225B at the King Library. If I get lots and lots of work done this morning, maybe I’ll duck in for a few minutes. Maybe.…
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The faster the rabbit, the deeper the hole
Ever heard of Moore’s law? The amount of processing power that can fit onto a microchip is constantly getting larger, while the price tag gets lower. In a decade or so, we max out the power of silicon and move on to other mediums – organic polymers, oleds, etc… Now take that principle and apply…
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A convener of communities…
NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. at last week’s Online News Association conference: The New York Times is “exploring becoming a convener of communities.” Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits calls that “a leap” coming from the Times, but they did buy About.com some time back, and there’s been talk of turning it into one big stable of…
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Online Journalism – Where are we going, who is our audience, why are they paying attention?
In the course of my regular reading on online communication this week, I’ve come upon a few things I’d like to tie together here to address the questions of Who is using the Internet to communicate What, Why, and How. (Pardon the j-school cliche usage.) Danah Boyd, a PhD student at Berkeley (if I’ve kept…
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My suggestions for upcoming changes in the JMC curriculum
There’s been a lot of talk within the department here about what/why/how the curriculum should change to include more instruction dealing with Online Journalism and its buzzwordy comrades — Convergence, Multimedia and Interactivity. Although I’ve been nudging a few faculty members in directions regarding my ideas on the topic, this is the sort of thing…
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Mass Commons Meeting Tonight
Hey SJSU/JMC Graduate students – tonight’s the second meeting/get-together/exercise-in-socialiazation known as the Mass Commons group. Stop by the Mission Ale House on Santa Clara & 3rd Street after 6pm Friday night and look for the folks reading Communications Policy and the Public Interest. [Ed. note: we won’t be reading.] We’ll be talking, eating, drinking, and…
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Workaround for students trying to read the NY Times Opinion Pages
As many folks have pointed out, a stable of New York Times columnists have been locked behind a paywall online. I agree with everyone who thinks this is a load of crap. Hiding content behind a cash register serves only to further remove the NYT from public discourse. But that’s a given. Anyway, if you…
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Bricks and Baseball Bats Win the Day in Toledo
In the Media Law class I’m in this semester, we’ve tossed around lots of fine examples of the First Amendment in action, including your classic cases of the Klan being allowed to march, speak, and get harangued by onlookers. As I’ve said before somewhere, everyone has the freedom to be an asshole. The theoretical response…
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So what was this about anyway?
A Canadian J-School student asks about the purpose of journalism in the context of trying to nail down which elements of print carry over to the online medium. He chooses “to hold the powerful to account” as his top priority, but I’m not so sure. For me, it’s something like “to tell truths that wouldn’t…