Community Media - Interactive World

A recent article argued that Social Media should be banned for those under 16. Outrage! What are the warning signs that we have been imprisoned by our screens? Is it possible that the addiction to social media could be harming our physical, mental and spiritual world? I would be the first to admit that there are worse activities such as mindlessly TV channel-surfing.But I have noticed the addiction in others ! You all make so many excuses for spending so much time online. For many people this is not a cause for anxiety at all. We are increasingly cyborgian, and any wish to return to the old ways (3-5 years ago) is nothing but a futile, hopeless and romantic nostalgia. Having allocated myself a timetable that now stipulates a progressive increase in my time away from the screen I have noticed an improvement in my general health and sense of well-being. Perhaps the experience of having recovered from cancer last year has led me to rethink the primacy of direct interacti...

Video is now cheap and omni-present What is it? Visual auto-ethnography is a form of participant -authored audio-visual storytelling. Still confused? Think video diary and you're almost there. In recent years the availability of more affordable camcorders has meant that researchers and participants can engage in more effective research. Real examples of practical use of video In recent projects I have used flip cameras with participants from ethnic minority communities who were recording their experience of  adult learning as enrichment. In another project we used more expensive cameras in a health setting in order to examine what the priorities were for service users. The footage has had multiple benefits and we continue to develop the use of visual technologies and methodologies: to empower and support the participation of service users and clients; to provide evidence and documentation of outputs and project delivery; to support the creative personalization...

    If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, there would be 57 Asians 21 Europeans 14 from the Western Hemisphere , both north and south 8 Africans 52 would be female 48 would be male 70 would be non-white 30 would be white 70 would be non-Christian 30 would be Christian 89 would be heterosexual 11 would be homosexual 6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States . 80 would live in substandard housing 70 would be unable to read 50 would suffer from malnutrition 1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth 1   would have a college education 1 would own a computer So much for the march of technology, science, globalization and progress.