Lesson 6 Tasks

Each group has a set of questions that they must answer, in detail, on their group blog by the end of the lesson.

Media and Collective Identity
What collective does your example illustrate?
How has the representation of that group changed over time? What examples do you have to support this claim?
What are the advantages to representing this collective in this way?
What are the disadvantages to representing this collective in this way?
How can you express your identity in the world? What barriers are there to expression, what facilities are there to express identity?

Contemporary Media Regulation
Who is regulating what?
What authority do they have – who gave them that authority?
Who needs protecting? Why?
Who/what are they being protected from? Why?
What examples do you know about where media regulation works? Why does it work in that example?
What examples do you have of when regulation doesn’t work? Why didn’t it work then? What could have been done to prevent it?

We-Media
How has we-media evolved in your media area and what evolution (possibly technological) caused it to occur?
What do you think are the concerns that media institutions have about we-media in their area and why?
What do you think are the advantages to we-media in your chosen media areas?
What do you think are the disadvantages to we-media in your chosen media areas? (Give me some specific examples of cases where we-media has been a negative thing).

Media and the Online Age
How has the internet changed how products are made and how consumers access products in your media area?
How were products made and how did consumers used to access those products prior to the internet?
How do you think this has changed the industry?
What is technological convergence?
How has technological convergence changed or effected your media area? Give specific examples of how this works in action.
How can you relate wikinomics and the long tail to the specific examples from your media areas?
Wikinomics is a term that describes the effects of extensive collaboration and user-participation on the marketplace. Companies are being forced to change their business model in order to be successful in an online world.The Long Tail - Our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.