Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Electronic media are media that use electronics or electromechanical energy for the end-user, the audience, to access the content. This is in contrast to static media, mainly print media, which today are most often created electronically, but don't require electronics to be accessed by the end-user in the printed form. The primary electronic media sources familiar to the general public are: video recordings, audio recordings, multimedia presentations, slide presentations, CD-ROM which is a compact disk that is used with a computer; a large amount of digital information can be stored and accessed but it cannot be altered by the user. Online content, the entire internet falls into this category. Most new media are in the form of digital media. However, electronic media may be in either analog or digital format. Although the term is usually associated with content recorded on a storage medium, recordings are not required for live broadcasting and online networking. Any equipment used in the electronic communication process; for example, television, radio, telephone, desktop computer, game console, or handheld device, may also be considered electronic media.
Digital Media defines how content is represented, as a referential copy or original software generated asset, compared to original organic objects whose components are not sampled or created using software or electronic devices. Digital media often refers to a format or series of formats used for the dissemination of information via an electronic device, network protocol or electronic storage medium. Digital media assets can either be originally created using computer software or captured/digitized from analog sources. A flatbed scanner, digital still camera and digital video camera are examples of devices which can be used to capture analog content. Some examples include: a printed document, an outdoor scene, a child’s birthday party, respectively. This makes a digital representation of the original subject or matter. Digital media can be differentiated from computational computer data by its content structure and usage. Digital media assets are normally created or captured for reproduction and storage, public and private display, entertainment, aesthetics, or to retain a record of an event, idea or concept. The method of storage, as a digital file or stream, further differentiates digital media from other reproductive forms such as paper, analog transmissions and oral histories – though these may be captured and stored as digital assets themselves.
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the later part of the 20th century. New media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community formation around the media content. Another important promise of New Media is the "democratization" of the creation, publishing, distribution and consumption of media content. What distinguishes new media from traditional media is the digitizing of content into bits. There is also a dynamic aspect of content production which can be done in real time, but these offerings lack standards and have yet to gain traction. Definitions, meanings and the technology itself has a complexity I don't want to deal with here, any more than I already have. I leave it to readers to learn about it in their own ways.
STUDYING THE NEWSPAPER and PUBLISHING ONLINE
Students do a study of the newspaper in school these days as my generation, the war-babies and the baby-boomers, did back in the 1950s and 1960s. I taught the study of the newspaper in the 1970s and again in the 1990s as part of media studies programs at Colleges of Advanced Education and Technical and Further Education(Tafe) Colleges in Australia. My first memories of reading newspapers or parts thereof would go back to about 1951 when I looked at, but could hardly say I read, The Burlington Gazette and The Hamilton Spectator. These were newspapers in towns found in a part of southern Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe. At the time I was seven or eight years old. I virtually stopped reading newspapers in 2001, half a century later, when I stopped applying for jobs and when the internet began to have newspapers "online," as they say. And so did millions of others stop reading newspapers.
In the 15 years from 1996 to 2011, as the internet came to have an increasingly dominant place in society and in my own life, the hard copy newspaper became less and less important to me and it has virtually disappeared from my daily experience. It is not my purpose here to discuss the details of my half century of newspaper reading and browsing, and its use to become more informed and entertained, to find jobs and stuff to buy. Occasionally, now, someone sends me an article to read from a newspaper or recommends I read some item in particular and, out of courtesy as much as anything, I read or skim their selection. After half a century of being given things to read by teachers and lecturers, students and friends, colleagues and associations of various kinds, I am happy now to choose my own material to read from what is an endless list of print that I have an inherent interest in as I head into the heart of late adulthood, the years from 60 to 80 in the lifespan according to some human development psychologists.
In 2003 I began to collect information from and about newspapers around the world. The information was from: (a) newspapers which were coming online in the early years of this new millennium, and (b) a wide range of electronic journals about media studies, and journals about other subjects which were also coming online. I gradually came to have access to the best newspapers in the world which were slowly coming online to varying extents. The electronic journals were also a wonderful enrichment to my understanding of the print and electronic media. The main problem was finding the time to read not only what was sent to me--which was thankfully decreasing as each year of my retirement rolled on from the age of 55 to 60, to 65 and, soon, to 70---but the online newspapers and journals themselves. Given the burgeoning nature of my reading tastes and the burgeoning quantity of material available online, the task became impossible. I had to be selective, but this had always been the case at least since my four years at university when I was confronted with endless reading lists of books no human being could read in their entirety.
As my adult life has progressed from 20 to 40, 40 to 60, and beyond---my reading tastes widened and widened. It had already become impossible, as I say above, to read everything I was interested in long before the internet developed to the extent it did in this 3rd millennium. But a high degree of selectivity became even more essential than it had ever been during my student, my working and my teaching life. It seemed appropriate, though, to officially open this section of my media studies files with an introductory statement after eight years of serendipitous collecting(8/03-8/11). I can see a potential here for both the enrichment of my reading base and for the dispersing of my writing across a wide cross-section of the world's print and electronic media. It is a potential I have yet to really explore and take advantage of, but a beginning has been made.
Ron Price
2 August 2007 to 13 October 2011.
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Internet sites at which I have posted on topics relating to print and the media:
http://allpoetry.com/RonPrice
http://bahai-library.com/price_media_poetry
http://bahai-library.com/Ron-price
http://www.bookreaders-forum.co.uk/search
MY JOURNALS OR DIARIES: A SUMMARY
What follows is a summary of my journals or diaries, for I use the terms interchangeably even though I am aware that fine distinctions are made by specialists in the field of diary and journal-making. The diary and journal are sub-sections of life-writing, life-narrative, autobiography and memoir writing. They are relevant to this introduction to the print and electronic media since my journals contain much content about my reading and reactions to the content of the media. My journals are not those of an artist with paint, a sculptor with clay, but one of a person who slowly came to see himself, at least by his mid-60s and fully retired from the world of jobs/employment/earning a living---as an artist in the medium of words.
The summary found below is made after nearly 30 years of diary/journal keeping, January 1984 to August 2011. Those who work in the more familiar art mediums of painting and sculpture, pottery or one of the various forms of design, may find my post useful as a comparison and contrast point. Such is my hope. As I have said before in other contexts than this, keeping a journal/diary I have found difficult. I know many others do as well, artists and people in all sorts of walks of life. The Australian artist Donald Friend's work with his art journal has been helpful to me in this vein, in the vein of keeping and maintaining a diary. Also of value to me have been the diaries of Juliet Thompson, Agnes Parsons and a range of other diaries and quasi-memoiristic resources that have appeared online in recent years. I have posted on the subject of diaries and journals at many internet sites like the following:
http://www.wellness.com/blog
http://bookaholics.yuku.com/forums/15/Diaries
http://www.redbubble.com/people/ronprice9/journal
WITHOUT MR VANCE PACKARD
By far the most significant writer who has written popular books about American society and found a niche outside the academy in the print media from the late 1950's to the late '80's was Vance Packard. He was famous for The Hidden Persuaders (1957), Status Seekers (1959), Pyramid Climbers (1962) and a succession of books until his last in 1989. Through the publication of these books, Packard probably had more influence on the lay public regarding the social dimensions of American society than any other writer or sociologist. Packard's books frequently appeared on best seller lists and young scholars were routinely shocked to find that Packard's works were considered beneath respectable discussion in many classrooms and tended to be disparaged by professional sociologists and public intellectuals, perhaps because they displayed none of the more abstract theorizing that social scientists look for in sociological writings.
Packard was not fully trained in sociology but majored in English and then earned a Master's degree in journalism at Columbia, and from there embarked upon a career in journalism at the start of the Baha’i teaching Plan in 1937. Through the resourceful use of his talents as a writer and his unique insights into American society, he contributed significantly to public understanding of a whole range of topics typically studied by academic sociologists: family and childrearing, sexual patterns, the media, consumerism and wastefulness, isolation and loneliness, and the super rich. In the years immediately before and after I became a Baha’i in Canada, Packard was a very popular writer. My contact with his writings was limited because I had a massive reading list in the late fifties and early sixties in the humanities and my concentration was on just getting though and out into the marketplace.-Ron Price with thanks to “Internet Sites on Vance Packard,” Poetry Booklet Number 58, Ron Price, July 10th 2006.
I remember seeing your books
back in those years when I’d
first started hearing about birds
flying over Akka and martyrs
by the score in lounge rooms
on cold Canadian evenings
when I waited for the talks
to be over and the hot coffee
and cakes to arrive—they seem
like distant cousins, those years,
as distant as Packard himself
as I plowed through more books
than my little brain could stomach,
motivated as I was to make it in
the marketplace, get a job, marry
and raise a family ‘cause that was
what everyone did, eveyone whom
I knew and Packard was never on
reading lists and, my-god, I had more
to read than I ever thought I could get
through, but get through I did even
without the insights of Mr Packard.
Ron Price
July 10th 2006
media studies: introduction: volumes 1 to 5
Although my experience with the print and electronic media began insensibly and sensibly by 1950 after my conception in October 1943, the formal study of these media did not begin until I taught media studies at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education, now the University of Ballarat, from 1976 to 1978. I was then in my early thirties. In the 1990s, at the Thornlie College of Technical and Further Education(Tafe), now the Swan College of Tafe, I taught a subject entitled Media Studies. It was just one in a long list of subjects I taught in this TAFE college in Perth Western Australia through the 1990s.
When I retired from teaching in July 1999 I kept the three arch-lever files on media studies that I had accumulated over nearly 25 years. In the dozen years since then, 1999 to 2011, these three files have become six arch-lever files and four two-ring binders. Anyone wanting to know the contents of these 10 files can view the table of contents that I keep in my computer directory.
It has been sixty-eight years since the media first became a part of my life. The radio and the record player, newspapers and magazines, journals and books were all part of my parents' experience when I was in the womb and then in the cradle. The story of the relationship between the print and electronic media and my life over these last seven decades is a long and complex one, far too long to write in any detail in an introduction to my media studies files.
Now, at the age of 66, I have a base in these files for the study of this important part of my life and the life of my society. A significant part of my writing now emerges from this study, this research, this reading and the cross-fertilization of this study with other aspects of my life and the life of my society and the religion I have been associated with now for nearly sixty years.
At the opening of another Bahá’í Plan, the 2011 to 2016 Plan, I update this introduction yet again and, as I do, I think to myself that this update will be followed by many an update in the years to come. If I am granted a long life, if I live, for example, into old age, the years beyond 80 to chose a timeframe in the lifespan used in one of the models of human development---there will be many Plans to come.
Ron Price
21 April 2011
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TOTAL INTERNET SITE/ENTRIES
On 1 June 2011 any reader doing some googling will find literally 1000s of entries when they type Ron Price: poetry, history, literature, bipolar disorder, Bahá'í or Ron Price followed by literally dozens of other subjects, topics and words like: media, popular culture, religion, Christianity, philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, media studies, interviews, writing, inter alia. It was equally obvious that, with a little digging or a lot, depending on one’s search skills, that there were millions of people who came across my writing and read it in varying degrees.
There is no question that the sites at which I have registered and at which I post my writing as well as the entries on the internet at google, among a host of other search engines, at which I respond to the writing of others constitutes a major web site presence. Of course, ‘major’ is a relative term on the WWW with its 300,000,000++ sites and 5++ billion news, topics, subjects and information items as of 1 June 2011. My presence is really a dot on the cyberspace landscape.
My entries get mixed in with some 2000 other Ron Prices, yes, 2000!!---which I began to itemize but stopped after listing over 400 RonPrices, some men of fame and fortune and others of notoriety and varying types of discomfiture. If I go to the USA internet site: How Many of Me.com, I will find over 1000 Ron Price’s and Ronald Price’s. If I go to a site with the same name in the UK, I get over 300 Ron Prices. If I go to: ZoomInfo Business People, I get some 250 Ron Price's. Readers looking for my posts will also find that when they type the word Price into their search engine with whatever other words they enter, will get sub-sites having to do with prices and money. A multitude of other sites having similar subject matter to the subject matter that I post; for example, Baha’i, poetry, literature, psychology, sociology, history, inter alia, get mixed in with mine.
This makes the enumeration, the collection, the addition, of all my entries on the internet a complex, tedious and undesirable exercise after the first few hundred that any interested reader can find and list. This intermixing of my entries/sites with those of others has the effect of masking my presence somewhat. My guesstimation, though, of total entries on the internet is: 30,000 sites and sub-sites and, as I say, millions of readers.
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