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Wed, 27/02/2008 - 17:37 — tamaraplakalo
Can reporting too much of the bad stuff actually create more bad stuff? People buy perceptions. Malcolm Gladwell did a great job of illustrating this in his book Tipping Point when he described the role of graffiti cleaning action in combating the crime wave in New York back in the 1980s. It was, by all accounts, a matter of focusing on perceptions that the NYC chose as the way of creating a feeling of more security and crime-rate reduction in what was becoming an unlivable city, full of fearful residents. More importantly, the strategy was successful. By choosing a few variables to focus on, and creating the perception that things were improving (among other things, graffiti were disappearing from public places and metro carriages as fast as they were appearing indicating that the city was winning the 'war'), things really improved. If this sounds like a bit of new-age mambo-jumbo, think again. The role of perceptions in collective human psychology is a powerful one. Public relations practitioners understand this well. As do companies, organisations and individuals that use them to support whatever ends they want.
Mon, 04/02/2008 - 11:00 — tamaraplakalo
Does Australia need a National Innovation Policy? A recent initiative by the Victorian Government to create a co-ordinated national approach to innovation suggests the country's top policy makers believe that it does. The argument underlying the initiative suggests that Australia's current contribution to the global pool of knowledge (2 per cent), is not enough to sustain future growth or maintain current levels of social and economic prosperity. In the climate of industrial-age driven economic boom, which positions Australia as a satellite economy fuelling its growth through primary resource exploitation, innovation is a term that mainly refers to the innovative ways of increasing productivity levels to satisfy short-term economic demands. The real challenge, however, lies in developing the national ability to respond to long-term challenges Australia is facing not only as an economy, but as a society as a whole.
Mon, 21/01/2008 - 08:25 — tamaraplakalo
A sociology lecturer once gave me a valuable piece of advice: “If you want a government to act on an issue, make sure you tell them how much it is going to cost them if they don’t.” Understanding that this suggestion was probably truer today than at any other time in history, I recently set out to find some information on the cost of not providing paid maternity leave to the working women of Australia. Surprisingly – or not, I have found no information of the kind. It has to be interesting that one of the most contentious social policy issues in contemporary Australia has been fought on economic grounds only when justifying the absence of a unified, committed, national policy on paid maternity leave.
Thu, 17/01/2008 - 13:04 — tamaraplakalo
So, let’s see … in the last seven days the Australian share-market lost ground on each consecutive day with no recovery in sight … the Australian Embassy in Kabul was attacked by the Taliban in a guerrilla-style attack … one child has died from malnutrition while you were reading this sentence … someone, somwhere has made an amazing discovery ... Yet, the “buzz-iest” news item in the Australian mediascape over the last week was the story of the Victorian party-boy Corey ‘I don’t take my sunglasses off indoors or outdoors’ Delaney, whose contribution to the newsworhiness-starved staple of the mainstream media has been … well, what exactly?
Tue, 11/12/2007 - 17:52 — tamaraplakalo
Social media is changing the nature of information exchange, but it is information itself that is suffering an identity crisis. If Marshall McLuhan’s global village is to be understood as a toponym for a digitally connected world, then social media have to be seen as a cross between a village meeting point and its informal information (ie gossip) network. Questions of its purpose, utility and effect are puzzling sociologists, CEOs and communications strategists alike. The possibilities of expanding its economic function are not easily understood beyond connectedness and access to a deluge of raw information. And the transformation of traditional media sources into social media-rules-driven platforms is confusing to anyone who cares about the distinction between useful information and, well, everything else … It has to be rather ironic that I am using a blog to voice an opinion on the great information noise that has flooded our communications channels since the advent of social media. But, as a respected communications strategist, Roger D’Aprix, recently pointed out, we are all drowning in sound bites and instant judgments, drowning in opinion, drowning in raw information … and in this supposed democratisation of information exchange, we have somehow lost sight of the value of the currency being exchanged – information itself.
Mon, 26/11/2007 - 15:55 — tamaraplakalo
Last weekend, Australians voted in another election -- the Croatian one, causing some serious electoral crankiness abroad. As Australia strode into its first post-ALP-win Sunday, my eyes and ears opened to another election day, this one some 18,000 kilometres away – in Croatia. The said election was, in fact, not as far away as it may seem, given that Saturday was the day all dual citizens of Croatia in Australia could vote to keep the incumbent conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ)-led government in power, or give the new mandate to its archrivals – the Social Democratic Party (SDP). For anyone who knows anything about the Croatian political environment, the previous sentence was a moment in a TV skit where audience should have been prompted to laugh. Let me explain. The eleventh electoral unit, also known as the diaspora vote, is what in Australian political terms would be described as a “safe seat”, no matter where its boundaries begin (Bosnia and Herzegovina), or where they end (New Zealand). Almost as one, they vote HDZ (the current election count has the HDZ diaspora vote at 76,53 per cent), with other conservatives and a few independents picking up the rest of the vote.
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