I got a notification on Google Alerts that I’ve been featured in New Idea Magazine, described on their Twitter as ‘Australia’s most loved weekly magazine’, so pleased that my insights into the importance of family communication is getting out there (it’s clearly linked with The Times).
Dean Kirby, Northern Correspondent for the iPaper, contacted the MMU press department yesterday, looking for someone to comment on the fact that he’s observed so many people walking into things because they are paying too much attention to their phones.
I’m very happy to have my words quoted in full, and as the final word on the article:
Dr Bex Lewis, a senior lecturer in digital marketing at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, says the issue should not be taken at face value and further questions need to be asked. ”It’s very easy to fall into the narrative that everyone is now engrossed in their phones, and that they are not paying attention to the rest of the world,“
Dr Lewis says. ”There are definitely some people who fall into this category, but we have a slightly rose-tinted view that before phones we were all chatting to each other, and paying attention to the world.
“One question we really need to ask is more about what people are doing on their phones, rather than how much or the fact that they are on them.
”I am quite likely to be using my phone whilst out because I’m using it as a map, or I’m out exploring and using the ‘Around Me’ app, or I’m getting some exercise by catching Pokemon. There’s no excuse for people not to be paying attention to people around them, and to traffic.
“It’s more likely that there are other reasons people won’t intervene when someone has their phone snatched,” she adds, “including fears of getting involved and becoming a target, and an expectation – particularly in a big city – that someone else will sort it out.”
Read the full article online (or in the paper tomorrow):
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And here’s the main bit where our half hour conversation is highlighted (there’s some other bits that I recognise from our conversation, but they are bits that most now see as “public information” as my thesis has permeated culture … I may not be rich, but who can say that, eh?)
Read full article.
I was interviewed by Ulrich Goll via email a number of times for Taz.de:
For those who care deeply about the future of journalism, the phone-hacking scandal could hardly have been less well timed. Professional journalism’s survival is threatened by the economic impact of digital technologies. The plurality and diversity of voice upon which representative democracy depends is in jeopardy. Needed urgently is debate about how well-resourced, professional news gathering can be sustained. Instead, tired 20th-century concerns about the ethics and ownership of popular newspapers are diverting attention from critical 21st-century realities.
The alleged hacking of Milly Dowler’s mobile telephone generated a moral panic that was seized upon instantly by a curious alliance of elite establishment and left-progressive opinion. At the same time, it diverted attention from a crucial debate that was beginning to gather momentum. That discussion, about whether professionally edited, fact-based journalism can continue to play the role of an estate, not just an industry, in the multimedia age will remain important after those responsible for phone hacking have been identified and punished.
There is a crisis in journalism that has nothing to do with hacking and relates directly to the conduct of public affairs. It started with recognition that the internet has weakened the authority of large-scale professional media organisations and progressed to predictions that the web will destroy it. Many thinkers in the field of journalism and media studies believe this and find the notion irresistible. They burble with delight at the possibility that the power of big media may be shattered by what laymen call blogging and they grace it with the oxymoronic title “citizen journalism”.
The essential difference between the two deserves definition. It is that much blogging is an amateur activity carried out by people with no understanding of journalism’s social purpose who operate with scant regard for facts. Like the activists who, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, published illegal newspapers seething with radical ideology and revolutionary zeal, they prefer opinion to evidence. Liberated by broadband from a free market in which their ideas have no traction because too few find them interesting, they bleat – and tweet – wild rumours, half-truths and conspiracies.
Read full story, which is largely an attack upon the ‘dumbing down’ of the press through the use of social networking… take this quote:
Citizens intrigued by events check in on Twitter and other social networking sites. But once alerted, many follow links to reliable news sites such as BBC News Online and newspaper sites.