September 2010

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

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

Questions

Marcia Forbes PhD

Payola not confined to music

Marcia Forbes PhD

POWER of New Media
Reggae Sumfest 2010, renamed ‘mudfest’ by some, has come and gone but remains indelibly etched in my memory for bringing clearly and resoundingly home to me the POWER of social media. At the event I wrote 24 tweets about Chris Brown, many with picture attached. A tweet is a microblog comprised on a short sentence of 140 characters (about 17 words).

Marcia Forbes PhD

Leaving Ja.

As we prepared to depart Norman Marley Airport I questioned the Immigration Officer about the plane parked close to the cargo area. Rumors were that it was American and there to help Jamaica with extradition matters. The Officer dispelled that by asserting that the plane was Russian and with supplies to Haiti. That piece of information got tweeted immediately. After all, it was from an authentic source and I was playing my part in quelling rumour-mongering tweets.

Marcia Forbes PhD

Trigger Topic

Marcia Forbes PhD

Wrong Day & Not a Blog

It’s Friday afternoon. From everything I’ve read this is not a good day to blog. In any event this is not a blog but a mere few words of comment (LOL) which will not go to blogsphere, wordpress or any blog site—only to my lowly website and shared with my tweeps.

Marcia Forbes PhD

Back up the Chat!

Together we can work to ‘back-up the chat’ with facts when we talk about Jamaicans and use of new media technologies.  This list is being generated toward precisely that end.  Because music and music production is so important to Jamaica and Jamaicans, a list of Music Producers who are on Twitter would also be useful. You are invited to send me your names and Twitter ‘handle’.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS LIST OF DJs/Singjays/Singers on TWITTER

Marcia Forbes PhD

Internet not ‘one size fits all’
Writing about the internet in Trinidad some ten years ago, Miller and Slater (2000) sought to understand “how members of a specific culture attempt to make themselves a(t) home in a transforming communicative environment, how they can find themselves…and at the same time try to mould it to their own image.” It is not just whether a country has internet access that matters but, importantly, what they do with that access; how they mould it in their image.

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