Blogging

The interviews with Stephen Mayne and Trevor Barr were recorded for the website From Wireless to Web, produced in 2005.

Stephen Mayne was the founder and editor of independent news service crikey.com. You can view their full biographies at From Wireless to Web Trevor Barr is an author, professor and the Director of the Creative Industries Research & Applications Centre at the Queensland University of Technology.

The website is a selective history of broadcast media in Australia. Decade by decade, from radio and newsreels to TV and the internet, this history shows how the Australian broadcast media developed and shaped the way Australians see themselves.

From Wireless to Web is a Film Australia production in association with Roar Film.

Outcomes from this module

Students will learn:

• the creative implications and social consequences of blogging
• how copyright, privacy and access gain new significance in terms of the relationship between media technology and the circulation of representation
• how blogging and news media are inherently different

Curriculum links
National: The Statements of Learning for English- Year 9
Reading, viewing and interpreting information and argument texts

• Students read and view texts that entertain, move, parody, investigate,
  analyse, argue and persuade. These texts explore personal, social, cultural
  and political issues of significance to the students’ own lives.
• Students understand that readers and viewers may need to develop knowledge
  about particular events, issues and contexts to interpret texts.

Writing

• When students write information or argument texts, they make appropriate selections of information from a few sources and attempt to synthesise and organise these in a logical way.
• Students write imaginative texts in print and electronic mediums that contain personal, social and cultural ideas and issues related to their own lives and communities and their views of their expanding world.

This resource is also relevant to Media Studies- Audiences, Representation, New Media Conventions, Media and Society, the News Media.

These are extracts only. Teachers and students should consult their state’s curriculum and learning programs.
Go to The National Curriculum Statements for English

The advent of the World Wide Web radically changed the online experience. At last information could be interpreted and displayed in a standardised form across the vast 'web’ of different computer networks. Cyberspace was transformed, appearing as a seamless global information system, enabling users anywhere to search, browse and interact. Now the Internet and Web are redefining the nature of human communication, and challenging traditional limits to human relationships and communities.

Blogging
The advent of the Internet means that anybody can 'broadcast’ from home to a potential audience of one billion other Internet users. The Internet also enables readers to respond to such broadcasts.

The word 'blog’ comes from 'weblog’, meaning a signed and dated log of postings by an individual. Some bloggers simply post writing to their blog for people to read. Others make their blog an interactive experience. Interactive weblogs can allow a reader to add their comments to the blog which can escalate into conversations amongst readers and the blogger. Lately, some bloggers have become well-known commentators on the political scene. But blogging can encompass any topic or no topic at all. Some bloggers distribute their postings to other web pages or to readers directly.

Blogs illustrate the way that traditional broadcast media have been disrupted by the Internet. In theory anyone can become a published and recognised authority on the Web, because the barriers of entry to traditional broadcasting do not exist online. The Internet has no direct equivalents to news editors, producers, station managers and owners – the 'gatekeepers’ of content for radio and television.

Bloogz.com is both a blog search engine, and a website that ranks the popularity of blogs. Estimates for the number of active blogs worldwide range between 2.4 million and 2.9 million.

Answer the following questions from the Video Clip Context and the video clip itself:

1. What are the strengths and weaknesses that Stephen Mayne finds in blogs? Do you agree with him that blogs are mainly irrelevant to the mainstream media?
2. The traditional broadcast media filters the news. What do you think the advantages and disadvantages of this filtering might be?
3. Where does Trevor Barr see a role for blogging and the Internet? What does he see as the strengths of blogging?
4. Do you have a blog are do you read or access blogs? If you have or do, why do you? If you don’t, why not?

Go to From Wireless to Web for more about the history of broadcast media in Australia.

Media Studies Ca. The Paradox of Technology

Read Media new ways and meanings 3rd Ed. by Colin Stewart and Adam Kowaltzke. Jacaranda, Milton, QLD, 2008. Go to a sample of chapters online at Jacaranda Books