How I Would Do The Second Assignment

STEP ONE:
Pick a Topic
Try to pick a topic you’ll be willing to stick with for the final assignment. The point is that this assignment helps you do the readings for the final one.

Let’s say I opted to go for the ‘make your own question’ option. The main goal of the course is to get you thinking about the power relationships inherent to the act of human communication. That’s what media is about. So I’ve chosen the topic:

“How has the rise of Web 2.0 affected how we understand ‘subculture’?”

The question is about how a trend in media has impacted upon how people interact, particularly people within smaller scale, more cohesive communities, particularly those with a sense of ‘resistant’ or ‘countercultural’ politics. Thus, it fits into the general aims of the course perfectly.

STEP TWO:
Research
You need to find eight sources relevant to your topic, as per page 14 of the course guide. Here’s how I’d do it:

(a) Find Two Refereed Journal Articles
Go to the library website, click on databases, click on ‘search by subject’ and scroll down to ‘Media’. I’d probably use either ‘Communication and Mess Media Complete’ (which is run by EbscoHost) or ‘Communication Studies A Sage Full Text Collection) (run by Sage). Those are the largest. The second one is full text. MediaScan is run by Informit, which features more Australian content, and JSTOR is primarily older content. I’d avoid it, as I would Margaret Gee’s Australian Media Guide – which has a pretty haphazard search engine.

(b) Find two academic monographs.
An academic monograph is a book by one or more authors. You can tell it’s not an anthology because it will say ‘By So and So’ not ‘Edited’ or ‘Compiled by So and So’. You can find them through the library website. The best approach is to find a few things that look useful, jot down the Dewey decimal numbers and then browse through the stacks in the library.

(c) Find an academic anthology
This is pretty much the same process as above. You can’t actually search for an anthology. Find the Dewey numbers for the topic you’re looking for, then browse until you find something with ‘Edited by’ written on it. It’ll include a collection of work by numerous authors all on the same topic.

(d) Find a Report
This is probably the hardest thing to find. Start searching through Google. Look for government or industry groups that have an interest in the area you’re studying .Find their websites and look for things that say “Publications’ or “Research”. Again, it’s a matter of browsing. Some classic examples are:

Australian Policy Online (Note the section that says ‘Creative Economy’).
http://apo.org.au/

Australian Communication and Media Authority
http://www.acma.gov.au/

Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellency in Creative Industries and Innovation
http://www.cci.edu.au/

Attorney General’s Website
http://www.ag.gov.au/

Office of Film and Literature Classification
http://www.oflc.gov.au/

Copyright Agency Limited
http://www.copyright.com.au/

Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
http://www.dbcde.gov.au/

(e) Advertising or Other Primary Source
This one is easy. It can be anything relevant to your topic – from a magazine ad to something on YouTube to your own Facebook profile.

(f) Newspaper or Magazine Article
Find an article or report relative to your topic. You can use the databases for this. Both JSTOR and EbscoHost are heavily loaded with non-refereed, journalistic material. Alternately wade through whatever magazines or newspapers you’ve come across recently.

STEP THREE
You need to answer all four parts of question three (as outlined in the reader) for EVERY source. Let’s consider the question I made up in step one, and apply it to an academic anthology:

Gelder, Ken and Sarah Thornton (eds). 1997, The Subcultures Reader, Routledge, London.

As a compiled overview of the major works to impact upon subcultural studies, Gelder and Thornton’s reader shows clearly the impact of Birmingham School theory, with its focus on British influenced academics and repetitive references to the rise of punk. That said, this retains its worth as a comprehensive overview of the most widely referenced work on subculture prior to the turn of the century. By providing key excerpts from conventional cultural studies, it outlines the toolbox with which most researchers have approached subculture in the face of Web 2.0.