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What's next on the agenda after the Pope?

Tue, 22/07/2008 - 12:32 — jim.macnamara

Jim MacnamaraAn ever-widening mediascape brings the hope that a greater plurality of views, issues and attributes will see the light of public attention.

Last week while the Pope was in Sydney and World Youth Day dominated the media agenda, the founding father of media agenda-setting flew in for a quick visit after speaking at the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference in New Zealand and, while attracting a much smaller audience, had some interesting things to say.

Professor Max McCombs who gained worldwide attention in 1972 after publishing research with his colleague Donald Shaw showing media set the agenda of issues during the 1968 US Presidential election, has evolved his views since, but says the media are still setting and framing the agenda of issues and debate.

But now there is a much wider range of media bringing issues to public attention and giving them salience...

The YouTube election that wasn't

Thu, 29/05/2008 - 10:25 — jim.macnamara

Jim Macnamara

Claims that the recent Australian Federal election was the "YouTube election" or an ‘e-election' are greatly exaggerated.

There was a lot of hype about how Web 2.0 technologies allegedly influenced the last Federal Election. However, research shows that much of the claimed impact of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, blogs and other ‘new' media remains questionable at this stage. 

From July through to November as the election campaign rolled out traditional print and television media were awash with claims that wikis, blogs, vlogs as well as websites like Facebook, and YouTube were changing the way we deal with our politicians, and the way they deal with us.

A study carried out by the Australian Centre for Public Communication at the University of Technology Sydney found that most Web 2.0 type applications used by politicians and political parties failed to take advantage of the interactive ‘conversation'  features this technology provides.