Jason Wilson: Social Media, Political Tragics and the Future of the Journalism

[Jason gave the 26th May Uni in the Brewery presentation at Five Islands Brewery (Wollongong)]

Currently there are extensive public discussions about the “future of journalism”, with many concerns about the impact of new technologies on the bottom line of media businesses. With classified advertising going online, and a range of platforms allowing anyone to share news or be a commentator, many fear that the days of professional journalism are numbered. I will be presenting on this topic as part of the Uni in the Brewery Series on Wednesday 26 May, 5.30pm at the Five Islands Brewery, Wollongong. In this talk I will suggest that the relationship between new media and traditional media; journalists and the “political tragics” who are the keenest producers of user-generated content can actually be complementary. Indeed, the uses of platforms like Twitter suggest that they bring people together around broadcasting and mainstream media products, creating a whole new kind of audience for journalistic output.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me by commenting on this blog post.

Honours student Sally Evans – authorship in poetry

Honours student, Sally Evans

I completed Honours in Creative Writing in 2009, graduating with the University Medal for the Faculty of Creative Arts. My thesis examined the notion of authorship in poetry, and the individual, intentional and experiential basis that a reader presumes to govern a text. In essence, I argued that the authorial figure in a text is constructed from the text itself, not the other way around – that a collaborative text could still use the first-person ‘I’ or a computer-generated text can refer to human experiences that the program could never have. Ironically, the other component of my Honours project – a major collection of poetry – was hugely personal: a collection of short, observational relationship poems.