September 2010

Marcia Forbes PhD
Marcia Forbes PhD

The first part of the title of this article was the topic of a presentation I watched on-line by a young, female Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Adichie. It fired my imagination to apply the essence of her thoughts to Jamaica and our present conditions. She made the point that by showing a people as one thing over and over again, that is what they become. Many of us in Jamaica can easily relate to this as we consume the all too frequent images of our country as a ‘murder capital’, rife with dons, drugs and dancehall.

Marcia Forbes PhD

After a few false starts I finally arrived in Cairo, Egypt. As one photo exhibition pronounced, “Yes, Egypt is an African country”. It’s situated right up there to the north of the huge continent. Cairo is one of the largest cities in Egypt and boasts anywhere from 15 to 18 million people, depending on who you believe.

Marcia Forbes PhD

I distrust hearsay and second hand reports, preferring to see and hear for myself, especially when politics is involved. So I dropped everything to sit in front of the TV for the Parliamentary debate on terms and conditions of the IMF Deal. Additionally, a media house had billed it as offering “fireworks” and I love a good display. One Minister rushing to Parliament said, “there may be fireworks, but hopefully no fire.” Well what I caught was good. Dr.

Marcia Forbes PhD

Policy formulation takes time. It also takes focussed determination and a driver to stay with the process and follow it through to completion. My less than one year as Permanent Secretary in the service of the Government of Jamaica has allowed me the opportunity to actively participate in working toward the completion of four policies—the Draft Comprehensive National Minerals Policy, the Draft ICT Policy (formerly the Telecoms Policy), the Draft National Energy Policy 2009 -- 2030 (formerly the Energy Green Paper 2006) and the Draft Carbon Emissions Trading Policy.

Marcia Forbes PhD

Purist Christians may oppose me for seeming to challenge the biblical writing about pouring new wine into old wineskin. Using this as a metaphor with reference to the social media revolution now on in full swing, I am loudly proclaiming the gospel that new wine can and should be poured into old skins! Persons 50 years and older sometimes have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the world of new media. Not so this old wineskin. Although sometimes intimidated, I embrace the new technologies and what they allow us to do.

Marcia Forbes PhD

Advertisers buy ‘eyes and ears’. Yet, if the all island media surveys by MRSL are to be believed, some advertisers may be having a hard time as audiences become increasingly fragmented, with some media houses failing to grow or actually loosing audiences. At the end of the day though, all marketers know that global audience figures do not tell the full story. Companies are usually more interested in time slots and programmes or in the case of newspapers, with the writers/colunmist.

Marcia Forbes PhD

‘Twits’ may be a better name for ‘Twitter’. It more aptly describes some of the ppl (internet language for people) and the things they do and say via the brave new virtual frontier of Twitter-sphere. Having been tweeting regularly for about three months, I confess that the point of it all continues to largely evade me. I keep at it though, since tweeting is now an integral aspect of social networking, a subject which is of great interest to me. Everyday I try for about eight tweets and for all that work I am blessed with the grand number of about 60 followers.

Marcia Forbes PhD

The recent launch of the timely and important book Media & Violence in Jamaica edited by Marjan de Bruin and Claude Robinson, not surprisingly, saw discussions regarding the influence of media on audiences. In the panel presentation I spoke to research findings pertaining to the subject and through this medium want to widen the dialogue.

Marcia Forbes PhD

The furor over whether or not there should have been a Jamaica House meeting with the now infamous Gully Gaza protagonists was expected. Damned if you do! Damned if you don’t! Symbolism is necessary. Unfortunately, it is never sufficient. We must now move beyond simply ‘meeting’ to the more important matter of working together toward solutions to the ongoing trace outs among our musicians.

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