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Western Tourists as Reporters

Zacha's picture
Wed, 03/12/2008 - 15:06 — Zacha

You can blog it, you can flickr it, you can Twitter it. The only difference with being in the middle of a big news story is that more people you don't know will pay attention to it.

The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 was no more tragic for having western tourists present. But their presence did the make events more immediate and understandable to people in their home countries. The practical effect that having video cameras and mobiles intended for holiday use in so many of the locations meant a lot of footage of the events that would not have otherwise been shot.

Western tourists are everywhere at the moment. On cruise ships attacked by pirates, talking with reporters on their mobiles from Mumbai, or describing what it's like in Bangkok without an airport. Are there many countries at the moment without western travellers on the ground? Will that change with the economic downturn? And does that really matter as cameras and phones get cheaper and local people in all these places have the resources to send their own stories abroad?

Creativity Matters!!

Tue, 14/10/2008 - 21:58 — ralphkerle

Ralph Kerle

How can our tertiary education sector move away from their institutionalized, governance-driven and regulated process of education that is obsolete before it begins?

www.newmediaminded.com.au is the type of creative business model innovation that Australian industry and government desperately needs.

It is the brain child of Scott-Bradley Pearce, Strategic Business Development, CBS Interactive, a digital media pioneer who has worked in and co-owned some of Australia's leading digital agencies, including Big Hand Asia Pacific, Brainwaave Interactive and MediaZoo and as a result has developed a specific interest in that old-fashion notion - convergence.

The site's purpose is to offer students in digital media studies an opportunity to engage with each other whilst working in the real world using real challenges offered by prospective employees in the process gaining practical on the job experience.

This may seem relatively simple as a business model at first. Get students to do your work at piecemeal rates was my initial cynical perspective.

However, that thinking would be cliched and deceptive. Pearce's business model is really creating a very specific collaborative ecology through building a framework for the potentiality for convergence to occur. Bring all the stakeholders together, the producers, the designers, and the clients and let's see what develops.

Globally (dis)connected

tamaraplakalo's picture
Tue, 25/09/2007 - 01:21 — tamaraplakalo

 Digital divide is only one problem we're facing in realising the promises of a unified, Internet-enabled virtual future ...

SARAJEVO - I had an interesting conversation with my boss the other day. As I am currently stationed in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a place where democratisation and transition experiments are mixing with the post-war recovery, he wanted to know if there are any interesting Internet-related projects happening here. He assumed that here, like everywhere else on the planet, social and economic activities are gravitating towards the virtual space.

Digital divide notwithstanding, it was an interesting idea to assume that in a country struggling to rebuild basic infrastructure, where the 20 cent difference in the price of bread has serious social consequences requiring state intervention, and the population is begging the international community (this is their mess!) to remove its democratically elected politicians for their lack of sense and a refusal to agree on anything of consequence, one would expect a vibrant debate about a (more) virtual future.