Tama Leaver dot Net Tama’s thoughts about digital culture, whatever that might mean …

Annotated Digital Culture Links: February 8th 2009

Links for February 5th 2009 through February 8th 2009:

• Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community [Center for Citizen Media] - Dan Gillmor, on the challenge for journalism educators in the C21st: "Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers — by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.

  In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.

  For media consumers:

  • Be Skeptical
  • Exercise Judgement
  • Open Your Mind
  • Keep Asking Questions
  • Learn Media Techniques

  For media creators (after incorporating the above):

  • Be Thorough
  • Get it Right
  • Insist on Fairness
  • Think Independently
  • Be Transparent, Demand Transparency"

• Stimulus package Facebook activism [Larvatus Prodeo] - "Thanks to commenter Bird of paradox on a previous thread for drawing my attention to the creation of a Facebook group “Come on Turnbull, don’t take away my $950 bucks !”. As of this morning, it was the largest political Facebook group in Australia with 5000 members and a goal of 8000 by 9pm tonight. They’ll easily reach that. When I checked in five minutes ago, there were 7887 members. Another 60 have joined now. The group creator describes his motivation this way: 'We are sending a clear message that Australians need this boost. As a uni student I need help to buy my text books, my mother is a single parent who needs help and my brother is heading into year 12 and he needs it... Think about how much difference this bonus will make to you and your families…' The group page also provides information on how to lobby Senators. Very interesting indeed." (Checking today there were more than 34,000 members!)
• Australians desert MySpace for Facebook [The Age] - "Facebook celebrates its fifth birthday this week and the company has much to crow about, as new figures reveal the social network has twice as many monthly users in Australia as its nearest competitor, MySpace. According to web traffic monitor Nielsen Online, Facebook attracted 4,682,000 unique visitors in December, compared with just 2,362,000 for MySpace. Furthermore, each Facebook user viewed 381 pages on Facebook but MySpace users looked at only 252 pages.
  The figures show Australians appear to be deserting MySpace for Facebook ... In Britain, the BBC reports, Facebook has 17 million users or three times as many as MySpace. Globally, ComScore released figures late last month showing 222 million people visited Facebook in December, versus 125 million for MySpace."