The document discusses several topics relating to digital media including fears about new technologies, online surveys to evaluate university courses, guidelines for writing research essays, and themes to consider in the digital mediascape class. Key themes are how digital media relate to each other through links and shared practices, how they relate to and shape users, and how new technologies change culture through interactivity, virtual spaces, and new tools.

1. The Digital Mediascape: Week Twelve
The Digital Future: fears, ghosts and mediums

2. The online Subject Experience Survey (SES)
The online
Subject Experience Survey
is now available for this subject
The Subject Experience Survey (SES) is an online
survey to help the University monitor and improve
the quality of its subject offerings.

3. The online Subject Experience Survey (SES)
Log in today to complete the survey:
https://subjecteval.unimelb.edu.au
(or via the ‘My Surveys’ module on your LMS ‘My Home’ tab)
also available on mobile devices
The survey closes on Sunday 4th of November

4. The online Subject Experience Survey (SES)
Your response is completely confidential
• Your response is not linked to your identity
• Results are always reported in aggregate
• Departments and teaching staff will NOT have any
information that can identify you or your response
Teaching staff could only guess who you are if you specifically mention something to
identify yourself in your comments.
More information is available from the SES Website:
www.feedback.unimelb.edu.au/ses

5. Research essay pointers
Futures
Outline Fears of technology
Catfish (Schulman & Joost 2010)
Course thematic overview

6. Can be handed in as a blog.
But otherwise to be handed in to
John Medley 2nd floor school
office by 5pm with cover sheet.
Need envelope if you want
feedback. Otherwise there will
Essay be no feedback left on your
essay.
10% per DAY late! (cruel and
unusual)
Contact me if you need an
extension BEFORE IT IS DUE

7. Case study questions
Can be a media form, can be a
specific film, game, website,
software, whatever
Essay
Can choose something off-the-
wall
Can choose something not from
the course

8. Always, always have an
argument
Don’t ask rhetorical questions
(unless you plan on immediately
An essay answering them, but even then,
is a genre don’t do it son)
Own your argument (“I argue...”
not “I would like to argue...”)

9. Don’t try and build surprises in
your structure
An essay Don’t use PR or journalistic
is a genre language
But do be lively, if you want

10. Australian spellings: analogue,
digitalisation, etc
Decades look like this: 1980s,
Style ‘80s. Not 1980’s, 80’s
Don’t double space at the end of
sentences unless you’re working
on a typewriter

11. Star Wars (George Lucas 1977)
Portal (Valve 2007)

12. Do you hate this article because
you disagree, or because you
aren’t interested?
If you can’t say it simply, you
probably don’t understand it very
Research well
Don’t let your quotes be the most
interesting thing about your
essay
Get jargon right

14. The Digital Mediumsscape
Medium = singular
Media = plural

15. Don’t begin with a grand
statement
Usually not actually anything to do with what
you’re arguing
Also usually completely unprovable and
meaningless

16. Use the Academic Skills Unit

17. Be specific

18. Why Futures?

21. 1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re
born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and
before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and
creative and with any luck you can make a career
out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is
against the natural order of things and the beginning
of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been
around for about ten years when it gradually turns
out to be alright really.
Douglas Adams: ‘How to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet’

24. L’arrivée d’un train á La Ciotat (Lumiére Brothers 1895)

30. The
Moral
Panic

44. Is the trailer fake?
Is Megan fake?
Is the film fake?

45. The untruths of the image
The untruths of the word
The untruths of people

46. Themes of
The Digital Mediascape

47. How do digital media
relate to each other?
- appropriation, structure, remediation,
history
- through innumerable links
- through a common set of cultural
practices

48. How does digital media
relate to us?
- as part of a singular being
- as a shaping force
- through processes of work and leisure

49. How does digital media
change culture?
- through interactivity and structure
- through frameworks for space
- as new/altered/shaping tools

50. Thank you!
And GOOD LUCK!