Susan Jacobson

I went to Boston to accept my dissertation award from the Media Ecology Association. Sadly, my camera ran out of battery power when I was there, and have no photos of the actual event. Bob Franco took photos of the event, and has graciously agreed to e-mail them to me when he gets them developed, so to tide my mother over, I took the photo above. One more photo for you Elmo fans.



The Convention was held at Boston College, a really lovely, gothic-looking campus in the far west of Boston, near Newton. I presented a paper on mobile journalism, and introduced some of the ideas that are bouncing around about the nature of mobile media. Specifically I spoke about how mobile devivces such as cell phones and PDAs are much more intimate personal devices than computers, and how mobile communication services tend to keep individuals in contact with a small group of people that they regularly interact with, while the Internet puts them in touch with strangers from around the globe with whom they share interests. The Internet delocalizes media and communication, and mobile media relocalizes it. At the same time, studies show that young people, the primary users of mobile media worldwide, are no longer reading newspapers. Where, then will they get their news?

Someone in the audience suggested that perhaps news would turn into something that was passed along from person to person within a personal network, rather than accessed from a professionally produced source. After thinking about this, it made me realize how much of my news I get from my LiveJournal friends - particularly pabagosy, insomnia and leigh137, who regularly link to interesting articles. I get all of my up-to-date China media information from the Danwei RSS feed. I recently asked my students to write about why they think young people do not read newspapers, and several of them said that they get information from "word of mouth," or from blogs, or incidentally while they were surfing the Web for other reasons. I am thinking of turning this into an article, maybe calling it "newstribes" or something like that.

A Modest Proposal

In other news, one of my former boyfriends co-authored an Op Ed for the New York Times today, where he proposes that American corporations should really save everyone money and outsource executive jobs to India and China as well. He-he. Florian and I used to work together at the Times.