Friday 9th December Media Diary
5:30am iPhone alarm goes off with Kings of Leon ring tone. There are no other alerts or messages on my phone
5:45am turn on PC and check emails and my twitter timeline. Emails include a newsletter from one of my favourite online stores. Spend a 5 minutes looking at their sales, while glancing at my twitter timeline. I @reply a couple of the people I follow. Open up browser and flick through a few sites catching up on the latest news.
6:40am Head to work by car. Radio is on and listening to triple m’s breakfast show. There are a number of ads for new cars and insurance. There aren’t many billboards on my route however those that I notice are for mobile phones or mobile carriers. I notice a lot of store and business signs.
7:10am Arrive at work. Turn on computer and read emails and check calendar for the day. Write and read emails for 30 mins before heading out to the Refinery. The radio is on in the car and there are more ads for insurance.
8:00am Spend the next 2 hours in a one-on-one training session based on corporate web applications with the entire time using the intranet.
10:00am Return to office by car with the radio playing again. This time there is music playing for the 15 minute trip
10:15am Arrive back at work and check and write emails. Check cricket scores online. Google search to find solution for a couple of co-workers with outlook and excel problems.
Check private emails and tweets on iphone at various times during day.
2:45pm Head for home and put the cricket on the radio. Switch between that and commercial radio. Check stocks on iphone while at lights.
3:30pm Arrive home. Turn on PC. Check emails. One email tells me I have some Facebook notifications. Most of the others are newsletters. Open twitter to see timeline and Facebook to check my friend’s statuses. Write a few tweets and @reply to a few friends. Download latest episode of Bones and Grimm via Torrent.
6:00pm TweetDeck is on for the rest of the evening although I am only glancing at it most of the time. Watch an episode of Merlin on the PC that I downloaded about a month ago but haven’t watched yet.
8:00pm Transfer episode of Bones to digital media player and watch on TV
9:00pm play Skyrim on PC while glancing at Twitter timeline on Tweetdeck on the other monitor.
11:30pm Read book on iPad for 30min before going to sleep.
Summary
About 90 minutes listening to the radio in the car and seeing various billboards and shop signs, around 1 hour reading and responding to email, about 4 hours glancing at Twitter via TweetDeck, about 30min on the iphone checking emails, messages and stocks, around 30min reading a book on the ipad, around 3hours on the internet/intranet, about 90 minutes watching downloaded TV shows and around 2 hours playing PC games. The total comes to 12 hours engaging with some kind of media with most of it digital (apart from the times spent in the car listening to an analogue radio show and seeing physical advertising media).
Question 1: In table B3 which is the ‘independent’ and ‘dependent’ variable (NB: The independent variable is the one that is causing or explaining variations in the other variable)
The first independent variable is attendance at a tertiary educational institution and the second is combined household income. The dependent variable is the types of radio stations listened to.
Question 2: Identify what could be regarded as ‘high-brow’ or ‘low-brow’ forms of consumption in tables B3 and B8. Are there any stations or programmes where it is unclear as to whether it is a ‘high-brow’ or ‘low-brow’ form of culture?
The ABC radio stations and the News could be considered ‘high-brow’, while Commercial AM radio, Blue Heelers Sale of the Century and Film/movies could be considered ‘low-brow’. Commercial FM is almost evenly distributed between those that did and did not attend tertiary education and amongst all income levels, so it is difficult to suggest whether it is ‘high-brow’ or ‘low brow’ based on these independent variables. Home improvement is also split evenly amongst the two independent variables.
Question 3: In table B3 what seems to be the stronger determinant of a stated preference in particular for ‘high-brow’ radio stations – income or education? What about ‘low-brow’ preferences? Are there any other variables that you think could be influencing the percentages (eg living location, age)? How would this effect interpretation of the data?
For ABC FM Classical and ABC AM Radio National the determinant seems to be education rather than income. With ‘low-brow’ radio stations such as Commercial AM, the determinant seems to be both education and income. Age would also be a factor in determining listening preferences, however it wouldn’t necessarily reveal whether something was ‘low-brow’ or high-brow’ as we may find that while older people have a preference for ABC radio, they might also have a preference for Commercial AM.
Question 4: On the basis of these tables and your knowledge of Australian culture do you think we have a clear demarcation between ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow- tastes in Australia? What might you use as evidence in mounting your case?
There is no clear demarcation between high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ culture based on these tables, however, it would be more useful to measure this against more contemporary ‘low-brow’ culture such as reality tv to see whether education and income are determining factors on preferences towards watching these programmes.
SGY 120 Week 2: Exercises
The Pat Sheil newspaper article expresses a humorous reflection of public perception of sociologists. How does this compare with the academic perception expressed by Berger?
Sheil describes Sociologists as people who are intrusive and waste time with meaningless studies. Berger describes the Sociologist in a similar way when he describes sociologists as being “intensively, endlessly, shamelessly interested in the doings of men” (Berger 1963). While Berger discusses the sociologist in a serious manner, Sheil lanpoons the sociologists and their studies, although they both descibe the process of the studies in similar terms. Sheil comments that in her new study, “the terms of reference will be clear and precise” (Sheil 2003). Berger insists that sociologists conduct their studies according to “strictly defined frame of reference” (Berger 1963).
SGY110 Module 1 – Week 2: What is Sociology?
What did you find most interesting or challenging about the lecture and/or the reading?
The most interesting point about the lecture was the explanation of structure, culture and agency. While I remain unsure of what Mills () referes to as “the sociological imagination”, it is interesting to read how the author distinguishes between the individual experience of marriage, for example and marriage as a structure of society.
The idea that the more we can understand about why we act as we do, and about society as a whole, the more likely it is that we can have some control as individuals over our lives (Giddens), is interesting as it goes against the idea of structure and culture. The lecture describes this as agency.
How would you answer the question: ‘What is sociology?’ if a friend were to ask you?
If asked, I would say that sociology is the study of humans and their interactions with each other, as individuals, groups and societies (Giddens, 1986). Sociology seeks to explain the mundane in terms of why we do what we do and why are as we are.
What differentiates psychology from sociology?
While psychology is concerned with the individual lives and how factors such as family relationships, for instance, impact on lived experience, sociology is concerned with the interaction of the biological, the psychological and the biographical. While similar, it the addition of social categories, such as gender, age, class, cultural background
What differentiates journalism from sociological research?
Journalism can often involve opinions, while sociological research should never do so.
What social norms, other than those mentioned in the lecture, can you think of?
Queuing – Queue jumping is frowned upon yet there are times when the actual queue is not clear.
Drinking Alcohol Socially – There is often an expectation that people should drink socially and there is peer pressure to drink heavilly even though a person may not be able to handle alcohol
Drinking Tea or Coffee – there is often an expectation that people should offer and accept tea or coffee and there is surprise when someone drinks neither
Module 2: 2.2.2 Exercise: HTML Introduction
How do you provide invisible information on a Web page that allows you to only provide messages for people who read your HTML code?
Creating comments in your code is easy. All you need to do is:
<!– Write your comments here. The browser will ignore, however anyone you looks at the source code will see this –>
How can you make your text appear on a Web browser exactly as you typed it in your HTML code?
<body>
<p>You will need to first place your text inside body tags anf if you plan on writing a few paragrpahs you should place them in <p></p> tags
</body>
How can you provide additional information in HTML in the form of a small pop up message that is otherwise not apparent if you don’t roll your mouse over it?
You can use the “title” attribute. Not to be confused the <title></title> tag.
<p>If you want this sentence to have a tooltip to appear you when you roll your mouse over an abbreviation, such as URL, you will need to use a tile attribute inside an <abbr title=”Laugh out Loud”>LOL</abbr>.
How can you create a hypertext link that will allow you to link to a specific part of the same page?
You will need to use a named anchor inide the document and create hyperlinks to that name. Click the hyperlink at the top and you will jump to the name. Great for longer html documents
<a href=”#here”>Your link to the name will be here</a>
<a name=”here”>This is where we want to go</a>
If you were to create an empty table of two rows by two columns, what do you need to do to it to show the borders around each empty cell?
<table border=”1″>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>
How do you turn an image into a hypertext link? How do you influence whether or not such an image has a border?
Place the image source inside an <a href> element. You can set the border attribute to zero.
So the code would look like this:
<a href=”seanpryor.wordpress.com”>
<img border=”0″ src=”image.jpg” title=”my image” alt=”my image” />
</a>
How do you change the colors of your hypertext links? How do you change the background color?
I would use a style in the <head> to create different colours. You can do the same for the background colour or use <body bgcolor=”xxxxx”>
<head>
<style type=”text/css”>
body {bgcolor = purple”}
a:link {color = green}
</style>
