Week 1: Media, be my friend?

My first blog for publics and publishing! I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never actually had an academic related blog before. Adding on to that, this is my first semester of studying anything media related. Having just transferred from a Commerce double degree, this is going to be a great adventure to not only understanding the world of media, but also changing and understanding perspectives on how I personally interact with it. Like meeting a new friend!

First off, what will this course be about? From my understanding, we’ll be exploring the history and changing nature of publics and publishing and what social impacts this change brings. Publishing is to make formally public the works of an author – for example, a web site, brain scan, software package, and data of various kinds, including metadata (Macquarie Dictionary). Basically, it’s making something public that might not have been before. I’m starting to see the impacts of this new information on the very nature of the ‘social’. Think about how we feel when we learn new information (from novelties like someone's favourite food to the tragedy of 9/11), how that changes us, now magnify that by the population of the world in contact with media - that's huge! I might go as far as to say that media is even connecting us together by sharing the same information amongst the world population.

A significant but simple comparison of the way advancing technology has impacted our interactions with publishing is our evolution from reading single books that we physically hold and flip with our hands, to ereaders that digitises our whole ebook library into one hand. Imagine actually carrying thousands of physical books with you! This change in our accessibility to information gives us further insight into the happenings of our world.

We live in a day and age where communication is spread across multiple platforms that have different usage dimensions; newspapers, television, books, phones, laptops and more! Right now, I’m typing on my laptop to the Internet, reading notes from my iPad and my textbook to name a few. I’ve found that, yes, they have impacted the way I communicate and publish to the public. We’re in a time where everyone can be a publisher. Updating your Facebook status? Bam. Publisher. Me writing this blog? Look at me now I’m a publisher too! Stay tuned as I delve into the depths of media and watch our friendship grow!