Contemporary Media Issues - MEDIA!

How much media do we use each day?:

• Social events - Pancakes!
• Film watching - DVD/cinema/downloads
• Games - Xbox/mobile/etc
• Reading books - News/magazines
• Online reading
• TV - Watching live or recorded
• Chatting - Phone/Skype/Facebook

We use much more media now than ever because we have a larger choice. Everything is a t our fingertips. Technology allows us to delve deeper in to whatever we are looking at. There is a whole world inside one subject - everything links on the internet/through technology.

Media producers nowadays need:

• Knowledge of different platforms
• To know that people don't buy any more/but people do advertise
• To provide for the largest audience there has ever been
• More opportunities to show media
• To be global - Audience is now more dispersed

It has advantages and disadvantages of being a media producer, but there has never been a better time to be one because of the multiple platforms that we can work for.

Henry Jenkins - Convergence Culture (Book) talks about Lovebytes and Emotional Capital. We have emotional investment in media content - become attached to it. Participation is a large part of this culture. They want us to keep watching/buying/investing.

Hollyoaks use social networking to give characters a life outside of the screen. This gives the audience a way of communicating and then they buy in to the franchise. They become more engaged with the content.

We are 'Information Hunter Gatherers'.


Ted Nelson - Traditional media is like ice (containable and not changing), digital media is like water (flowing, living, not containable and moving)


Marshall McLuhan - Rear view mirror - the past. Comparing new to old, everything stays the same through familiarity, this could be restrictive. (i.e. book page - web page).

This lecture was to show how much of the media that we use in every day life compared to the past. Since the internet came around, there has been no stopping the media machine. The internet provides the world with access to everything at your fingertips. We, as media students, need to learn how to use these technologies to our advantage when we eventually become professional media producers.

After talking about the media, we looked at the Wiki's that we have just created. My group looked at deforestation and how this is portrayed/advertised/given through the media. We decided to see what everyone thought about Wiki making, here are the points made:

• Superficiality
• Clumsiness of technology
• Issues with writing styles (different people)
• Everyone started at the same point
• It makes your writing public (could sensor yourself)
• Condensed writing
• Conversation?

The reason we spoke about Wiki's was because we have all unanimously said that we dislike using them. The lecturers wanted to know why so that they can change what they use for next time. I think it is mainly the poor quality of technology and the boring layout of Wetpaint, personally.

Speak soon!