Thursday 18th

Today we were unable to use our normal classroom again due to the other class needing it. This was a bit of a problem because we couldn't even access the internet in the first lesson meening we were unable to make any direct progress on the project, so intead we discussed how things were going, gave feedback to each other and planned what it was we needed to do next.

In the second lesson we were able to have use of a computer room, this meant we could access our emails and articles to make some more progress on the project.

David Gauntlett has finally replied to my email so i was able to read through the reply and plan what i was going to write.

Davids reply wasn't AS usefull as Simon Panruckers, but still very usefull, here is the email he sent me;


Hi Sam

Thanks for the email. I have answered the questions which were relevant – see below – and deleted the other ones (e.g. I wasn’t making videos before the internet, so I can’t comment on that) … which means it ends up being only 4 questions long. Hope this is ok. You can send me a couple of follow-up questions if you want.

Would you be able to send me a copy of the newspaper when you’ve done it, please? It would be nice to see it.
(David Gauntlett, School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, Northwick Park, Harrow HA1 3TP)

Good luck with the project.

Many thanks

David


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David Gauntlett - http://www.theory.org.uk/david Professor of Media and Communications, School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster d.gauntlett@westminster.ac.uk
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Did you make videos for an audience when you were at college or university?

No. Back then, around the start of the 1990s, it was reasonably hard to get hold of video cameras etc – although I might have been able to borrow one – but in any case there wasn’t much point making videos because you couldn’t show them to anyone. Well, you could show them to people you knew, if you could force them to sit down while you popped a tape into the VCR. But otherwise getting an audience was almost impossible – unless you happened to own a TV station.

How long have you been making videos?

Only for the past two or three years. I realised that YouTube would give me a good platform to share ideas and presentations with others.

How has the internet changed your current career?

I’ve been making the Theory.org.uk website – a site about media studies – since 1997, which is 13 years ago now. This made a substantial difference to me as it got my work and ideas noticed. I didn’t start doing it because of any particular hope of professional reward – in fact the internet was a kind of minority interest at the time, and colleagues perhaps wondered what I was doing wasting my time on the internet. But of course the internet turned out to be at the heart of media and communications today (as I predicted!).

How would you describe what you actually do?

I’m a professor at University of Westminster, so I teach and I do research studies and write about them, and write books which are often connected to those studies, in some way, but are about ‘bigger’ ideas. The internet is another way of spreading information about this work, and making arguments in a public forum.