Mobile Media Production & Training https://www.facebook.com/transmediaNT
What I've learned from dipping my toe into the world of digital literacy this year is that it may not be a panacea for all but in my never-ending quest to engage the disengaged it has been amazing. It is not and should never be a replacement for reading quality literature – I still feel it is my duty to open this world up to them – but as an aid to writing I couldn't recommend it highly enough.
There’s a relationship between democracy and privacy, and it is changing the nature of the political relationship between the individual and society. One way to understand this is to consider the audio dynamics of cocktail party conversations. As Wired Magazine helpfully pointed out, there is a precise formula for the right number of people in any given party. It depends on the size of the room: no more than one person per 21 square feet. Too many voices, and the decibel level of the conversation next to yours will be such that you have to raise your voices, raising the volume of the noise in the room which requires everyone else to do the same and it gets noisier and noisier.
Take the analogy online. Try holding the attention of an audience online for any length of time when there are so many distractions in the form of other online conversations. One solution is to get louder – upping the rhetorical ante, posting the most scandalous images or outrageous claims. This prompts other online groups vying for the attention of your group to adopt similar tactics and like the party noise a rhetorical chain reaction ensues.
If we think of the internet as a virtual public sphere, and take an approach inspired by Jürgen Habermas which places importance on sustained, civil and rational debate, the prospects for online democracy are not improved by large-scale participation on social media.
Even at a time when the global economy has been buffeted by strong and dangerous forces, all communities have capital and skills that can be deployed to create or preserve jobs. Investors may be more willing to create jobs locally if they trust other people and the local government, if they feel attached to their community, if they know about opportunities and can disseminate information efficiently, and if they feel that the local workforce is skilled. All these factors correlate with civic engagement. Those correlations, plus the other evidence cited in this report, lend some plausibility to the thesis that civic health matters for economic resilience.
Australia’s dispersed population and its vast tyrannies of distance has created a major, ongoing, cultural divide.The relative costs of consuming culture between bush and city are starkly skewed in favour of the city, and may be getting worse as culture goes digital and the disparity in access, speed and reliability of broadband makes the bush relatively worse off.
The bush-city disparity between communications services in general, and broadband specifically, was one of major factors that drove key independents to install the minority Labor government last year.
Arts Minister Simon Crean wants Australian culture to play a significant role in binding the social fabric of the nation. This needs to play out not just in terms of publicly-funded culture reaching beyond the established middle class supporter base, who already possess significant cultural capital. It also must be centrally about addressing our great geographical cultural divide.
Read more here.
The iTaNGO Knowledgebase contains a library of resources and references to encourage community service organisations (CSOs) to:
The Gertrude St Projection Festivalis calling for proposals for the July 2012 Festival on the theme “Elements”.
If you are a projection artist, artist, filmmaker, design professional or student, download an entry form via the Gertrude Association and submit by 5pm, 4 November.
Proposals must be for site specific, moving image or still projection installations that respond to buildings or sites along Gertrude Street, Fitzroy.
*Deadline: Friday 4 November 2011 *
