The Pop-Pickers Have Picked Decentralised Media: the Fall of Top of the Pops and the Rise of the Second Media Age

The BBC has recently announced that Top of the Pops, the long-running weekly popular music programme, will broadcast its final episode in the summer of 2006. This brief \'rapid response\' article considers how the conclusion of Top of the Pops\' 42 year history may be understood as representative or indicative of broader transformation in musical appropriation. As such it considers the fall of Top of the Pops in relation to the rise of what Mark Poster has described as a \'second media age\' (Poster, 1996). This second media age is defined by the emergence of decentralised and multidimensional media structures that usurp the broadcast models of the first media age. This article argues that the decommissioning of Top of the Pops, and the ongoing expansion of \'social networking\' sites such as MySpace and Bebo, illustrates the movement from a first to a second media age. In light of these transformations I suggest here that there is a pressing need to develop new research initiatives and strategies that critically examine these new digitalised forms of musical appropriation.Music, Digital, Digitalisation, Internet, Capitalism, Social Networking, Rhetoric, Second Media Age, Authenticity, Culture

Analytics and complexity: learning and leading for the future

There is growing interest in the application of learning analytics to manage, inform and improve learning and teaching within higher education. In particular, learning analytics is seen as enabling data-driven decision making as universities are seeking to respond a range of significant challenges that are reshaping the higher education landscape. Experience over four years with a project exploring the use of learning analytics to improve learning and teaching at a particular university has, however, revealed a much more complex reality that potentially limits the value of some analytics-based strategies. This paper uses this experience with over 80,000 students across three learning management systems, combined with literature from complex adaptive systems and learning analytics to identify the source and nature of these limitations along with a suggested path forward

Book review: radicals: outsiders changing the world by Jamie Bartlett

In Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World, Jamie Bartlett probes into the worldviews and lives of individuals, groups and movements who are seeking to change the way we live now and examines their ostensibly radical properties. Bartlett’s natural storytelling abilities, shaped by his sensitive yet probing approach, make for an engaging read that inspires both enthusiasm and caution about radical thinking today, writes David Beer, and raises questions regarding how radical ideas take hold and circulate

Social media’s politics of circulation have profound implications for how academic knowledge is discovered and produced.

As social media and other new forms of media emerge as influential ways to communicate academic knowledge, David Beer argues academics may need to pay more attention to the politics of circulation that increasingly define how academic knowledge is discovered and transmitted. If we don’t understand the politics of data circulations that define contemporary media cultures then we may also find that academic practice is reshaped without sufficient reflection and reaction

Measuring and engineering influence on social media: what does this mean for political power?

In 2016, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump resolutely demonstrated the political power of social media. David Beer asks how we might better understand ‘influence’ in the machinations of social media, and how this influence might be harnessed by those in, or seeking, office

Desaparición : Una historia del I.N.E.F de Buenos Aires, Dr. E. R. Brest

Este trabajo forma parte de un capítulo de la tesis doctoral: la cultura del Inef de Buenos Aires, durante la dictadura. El mismo intenta dar cuenta de la acción del instituto en tanto institución en derredor del caso de una docente del Inef de Buenos Aires, desparecida durante la dictadura. La docente Leonor Rosario Landaburu Zavaleta de Catnich. "Nony", fue secuestrada el 31 de agosto del año 1977 domicilio de la en horas de la noche en su localidad de Caseros, Provincia de Buenos Aires. Cabe destacar que Nony estaba embarazada. Previamente por la mañana, su compañero había sido secuestrado junto con tres obreros ferroviarios. Militante peronista, cristiano, obrero e intelectual, Nony reunía en su persona un conjunto de atributos que la hacían blanco predilecto de las prácticas desaparecedoras de la DICTADURA. Luego de finalizada la licencia por maternidad de Leonor, el I.N.E.F, a través del Rector inició inmediatamente los pasos legales a los efectos de intimarla para que regularice su situación, ya que esta no se había reintegrado al concluir su licencia por maternidad. A pesar de la presentación de un familiar directo en el instituto, donde da cuenta de la presentación de un habeas corpus, el departamento pedagógico, designa un suplente y la conducción del Inef, a través de dos direcciones diferentes y con acuerdo del director nacional, procedió a su cesantía. De esta manera considero factible suponer la presencia de una posible práctica institucional que adhería a los postulados y prácticas dictatoriale

Being trained by Twitter stats: Social media and the expanding ways we are measured in everyday life.

With the wider availability of real-time analytics on social media, what do all these metrics mean for the way that we interact with each other and for how we understand and judge ourselves? David Beer argues these developments could be seen as part of the broader metricisation of society. As we respond to performance metrics in our workplaces, so too we are now expected to react to measures in our leisure, communication and friendship networks

Sexismo y violencia corporal en el Inef R Brest durante la dictadura

Este trabajo forma parte de un capítulo de la tesis doctoral: la cultura del Inef de Buenos Aires, durante la dictadura. En el instituto las alumnas se encontraban dominadas por una dinámica discriminatoria, basada en el arraigo de los estereotipos de género, profundamente implantados en el I.N.E.F, donde encontramos la preponderancia de un pensamiento hegemónico, de carácter androcéntrico, que presidía y hegemonizaba parte de la cotidianeidad del profesorado. En no pocas entrevistas realizadas con alumnas que cursaron en la época que comprende este estudio, se manifestaron temores sobre la conducta de algunos docentes. Profundizando encontramos que algunos docentes llegaron inclusive a tocar indebidamente a una alumna y otros proferían palabras soeces, relacionadas con los atributos femeninos de algunas alumnas y las mostraban como ejemplo de cuerpo femenino frente a sus compañeras. Indagada la entrevistada en relación a la acción de elevar quejas sobre estas conductas, la respuesta fue: ?un grupo de compañeras nos reunimos con la Rectora y le manifestamos nuestro disgusto y absoluto desacuerdo con estos docentes .Nos respondió que no era para tanto, pero que igual hablaría con algunos de ellos. Situación que evalúo que no sucedió jamás porque estos docentes siguieron haciendo de las suyas impunemente?. Entendemos que si la denuncia por acoso es desatendida se generan en el denunciante, más sentimientos de agravio y humillación. Tipificando tres formas de acoso sexual, encuentro que varias de ellas, estaban presentes en el instituto como: Miradas insistentes, sugestivas o Insultantes a distintas partes del Cuerpo. Silbidos, sonidos, gestos, imágenes O dibujos ofensivos y denigrantes. Piropos de mal gusto, de contenido claramente sexual. Comentarios ofensivos sobre el cuerpo o forma de vestir de la persona con una fuerte carga de Carácter sexual. Insultos, amenaza

Systems of measurement have a productive power in our lives

Metrics already perform a powerful productive role in the social world; they vindicate and limit, they cajole and incentivise, they legitimate and justify. When we reflect on how metrics are frequently used to manage performance, to facilitate competition, to judge us or to compare what we do with others, it is crucial that we see metrics as being central to the power dynamics of the age in which we live, writes David Beer

Urban knowledge through popular culture. Some reflections on everyday encounters with the melodramatic city

I suspect that it is an obvious observation, but some time ago it occurred to me that a good deal of what I know about cities is a product of the cultural resources that I have consumed over the years. Various TV shows, musical works, films, books and the like have contributed to an accumulated general and sometimes more locally specific knowledge about cities