Practice Activity
Practice Activity
- What value judgements are being made, or could be made, about the creative merit of texts in the following examples?
- Are these value judgements ‘political’? If so, how?
- Could the judgements and texts reflect non-political factors?
- Clip 16.1: Bronwyn Williams, Professor of English, discusses digitally mediated production practices:
- Text Poem [untitled]
txtinizmessin,
mi headn'meenglis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsed w/letters shesgetn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
&she's African
Hetty Hughes
- Mind Media Awards: A Review of the New Media Nominees:
Zarathustra blogs about the November 2011 Mind Media Awards.
I've long had an interest in how new social media can be used to promote constructive dialogue between those who use and work in mental health services, so I was very pleased to be asked to review the New Media nominees for the upcoming Mind Media Awards.
Those up for an award, in no particular order, are as follows:
The Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) ( is aimed at young men, the demographic most at risk of death by suicide. Among other things, they aim to break the taboo of young men talking about their feelings. It combines a wonderfully opinionated blog (taking to task Christina Odone ( and Morrissey ( among others, for their illjudged comments on mental health) with advice and campaigning. I especially liked the sleek and eyecatching web design, which makes it easy and enjoyable to browse and explore the content.
Dawn Willis is a campaigner and activist whose blog is devoted to "sharing the news and views of the mentally wealthy" ( As well as her own personal accounts and poetry, she also shares an impressively prolific stream of mental health stories from around the web. As is increasingly the case in social media, the boundaries between platforms (blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc.) are quite fluid, and Willis' blog titles tend to be hashtagged so that they can be found easily on Twitter.
Two years ago Rebecca Brown started vlogging about the compulsion to pull out one's own hair using a brisk video editing style that complements the honesty and wit of her accounts. Brown is an engaging and likeable spokesperson for this littleknown and often poorlyunderstood condition. Her Hurtful Trich Responses ( is particularly to be recommended.
There's now a large number of excellent blogs providing firstperson accounts of mental illness. One of the most popular is Pandora's Confessions of a Serial Insomniac ( Pandora writes with eloquence and humour about her condition and her treatment. Along the way she explodes a few myths about borderline personality disorder that people with BPD are bad people, that they can't form loving relationships, that they don't benefit from therapy, that (as her recent change of diagnosis ( refutes) they don't change or recover. Her ongoing account of psychotherapy is fascinating and genuinely insightful.
I'll refrain from saying who I think should win. Instead, I'd encourage readers to browse all these sites for a worthy snapshot of the continually evolving ways that new/social media can be used to talk about mental health.
(Zarathustra, 2011, in MIND, 2016 [online])
- Political humour on the About Entertainment website:
(About Entertainment, 2017)
5.How has social media changed the way newsrooms work?
Kevin Bakhurst|10:30 UK time, Friday, 9 September 2011
[…] For BBC News, social media currently has three key, highly valuable roles in our journalism:
• newsgathering - it helps us gather more, and sometimes better, material; we can find a wider ranges of voices, ideas and eyewitnesses quickly
• audience engagement - how we listen to and talk to our audiences, and allowing us to speak to different audiences - and
• a platform for our content - it's a way of us getting our journalism out there, in short form or as a tool to take people to our journalism on the website, TV or radio. It allows us to engage different and younger audiences.
The BBC already has a fair track record of inviting the audience to get involved in our journalism - web forums; debates; blogs and comments, and most recently incorporating comment within our website story pages, particularly on the live pages.
[…]
We've innovated, experimenting with branded hashtags to curate coverage; visualising Royal Wedding day tweets on our website; and work is under way to seamlessly integrate field despatches from our correspondents and reporters into our core news services and social media output.
[…]
For good or for ill - and sometimes it is for good, and sometimes not, social media has trashed many of the foundations on which "traditional" media stands. And in all honesty I can raise questions about this but I don't think we yet have all the answers:
• Privacy. In particular privacy of the individual, where are the boundaries? Are there any areas off limits? It seems we can all discuss pregnancies, affairs, ethics, finances, abilities, families. It's out there on Twitter and Facebook and there's no real protection for what, until now, has been largely personal or private.
It leaves traditional media in a very different universe. We mitigate this via very clear guidelines to our staff, which states that although content placed on social media or other websites "may be considered to have been placed in the public domain, re-use by the BBC will usually bring it to a much wider audience". They go on to say that: "We should consider the impact of our re-use, particularly when in connection with tragic or distressing events."
• Anonymity. Many people joining the debate or discussion or sometimes accusing, or attacking, have no name and no face and therefore no seeming personal responsibility for the impact or truth or validity of what they publicly say. Professional journalists, like ours, encouraged to engage in social media spaces but held to account for their views and values, often find themselves engaged in a wholly uneven discussion on coverage or stories with an invisible opponent.
• Ethics. Most of us work within an ethical framework. We won't report the death of a loved one until the family know; we won't just steal material from others; we try to establish facts before pushing a story out there. These are all fundamental and long cherished principles of the way BBC News operates. But not the ground rules of many using social media.
• The Rule of Law. We work within the laws of our land - we avoid libel; or contempt of court; or revealing the names of young victims or juveniles accused of crimes. We don't break court injunctions. Some social media users do many of these things.
Sometimes it has been argued they show up the failings of the laws of the land, and they may do, but often it is done in ignorance of the law, or simply on the assumption that it doesn't matter. And that can leave traditional media looking slow or stick-in-the mud or somehow part of an "establishment" that doesn't tell the whole truth. Look at the case of Ryan Giggs.
• The role of traditional media. Some of our role is probably gone. Will we be "First with the Breaking News"? Probably not in many cases. Someone on Twitter will be. Will we have the first still of a hero or victim? Facebook probably will have it. Will we get the first video out of Syria or Burma? YouTube will almost certainly have it posted first, although we'll often be one of the first to verify it's genuine (or not).
• Audience interaction. This can be a great way of hearing what your audience has to say, and answering questions or engaging. We have sophisticated ways of measuring what our audiences consume, and we keep an eye on what's being said to us and about our content, all of which we consider in our editorial discussions.
However there's a real danger lurking here - namely that we mistake the squalls on Twitter or the views of ten or 20 vociferous tweeters for the view of the audience as a whole. It may be that it is, but it often isn't, and we shouldn't necessarily be swayed in our editorial judgements by a noisy but small row on Twitter.
These are some of the challenges we face with social media and we grapple with them every day.
But you can take those challenges and say that the uncertainties they introduce can actually underline the strengths that established news organisations have, for a very large part of the audience.
In the sea of many voices and stories of claims and general noise, we know there remains an appetite for a journalism that is based on the values that news audiences of "traditional" organisations' like the BBC value most highly of all : truth; accuracy; integrity; verification; independence; and yes, speed. The new environment we are all living in can underline in the audience's mind the values of our journalism […]
Kevin Bakhurst is deputy head of the BBC Newsroom