Caffe Sospeso Stirs Selfless Spirits

Don’t speak Italian? Well, you needn’t know how to speak Italian in order to take part in caffe sospeso, an international initiative that coffee lovers are taking part in world wide. 

 

The Italian phrase literally translates into ‘suspended coffee’, and was born in Naples over a century ago, where baristas would allow patrons to pay twice for one item, leaving the second paid-for item ‘in suspense’; somebody of lesser privilege could later ask the barista if there was anything in suspense, to which the barista would prepare the paid-for item. 

This tradition spread over much of Italy over the last century, and has recently moved onto neighbouring countries such Bulgaria and Austria, and even as far as the United States. 

This simple act of kindness has become a form of competition between some magnanimous coffee drinkers, who try to out-suspend their coffee dates; this trend has spread to encompassing not only coffees, but also pastries and entire hot meals.

Through glamorising generosity, coffee house patrons have provided many homeless and underprivileged people with enough sustenance to survive the cold winters of Europe and North America, with tough economic times resulting in more and more people being forced out of secure jobs.

Photograph: Washington Post

Convergence: A Help or A Hinderance?

Media Convergence: bringing all needs to one place

Converging is defined as when several objects come together from different directions so as eventually to meet. Media convergence is the combination of old and new; it is newspaper meeting internet, hard news meeting satire, and public media meeting merchandise. The internet has played a huge part in media convergence, with newspapers converging towards being e-papers, and most television bulletins being published for free online as well as being televised. In the media realm, this form of content-based internet is called Web 1.0. 

While Web 1.0 covers the basics of news, information and other forms of content, Web 2.0 is what most youth of today are familiar with. This relatively new form of media is interactive, with social media bursting out of every corner of the web. Consumers of Web 2.0 have been labelled as ‘prod-users’, as they not only use the information presented to them on the internet, but also produce quite an extensive amount of content – whether the content is accurate, informing or otherwise is another matter entirely. This revolution in media has allowed consumers everywhere to not only take in the information that they’ve received, but project information that they obtain out into the World Wide Web, which has taken news from being a one-way affair to, in the matter of a decade, a two-way situation. Web designers and Internet moguls aren’t content with just that, however – they want news that’s specific to audiences, and they’re calling it Web 3.0. 

Web 3.0 has been dubbed as ‘hyper-local news’, as it feeds off information presented by the consumer to judge and arrange news stories, advertisements and entertainment that is specific to the customer. This in-production semantic web will have lots of advantages, the most obvious being that it will have precisely the information that clients will be after – if a customer wants to read about fashion and Arsenal FC, then they will be presented with copious amounts of information on those two topics. However, the draw back for this design is that it has the potential to create ignorance – if the customer is flying to New Delhi next week, and there has been a shooting in the city centre, the customer will not be aware of this, as the news on his computer is specified to fashion and Arsenal FC. This idea of oblivious audiences allows for many niche audiences being created, which can, in turn, result in job-losses for journalists. 

With old meeting new, news meeting the web and Web 3.0 meeting the personal interests of its consumers, the question that consumers have to ask is whether or not they are willing to jeopardise their knowledge of the world, for entertainment regarding their world.

Spider Strikes Again

A missing persons report has been made official in the early hours of this morning following a confrontation between a young girl and a serial stalker known as ‘The Spider’. 

An eye witness claims that the missing girl, 12 year old Muffet, was sitting in a local park enjoying a solitary meal when The Spider, wearing a black Spiderman mask, approached her. The Spider allegedly attempted to share the meal with Muffet, who responded by running into a nearby forest.

Muffet was last seen at 4pm on Thursday 7^th March, wearing a blue dress and wearing her hair in a braid. If anyone has any information regarding this missing girl, call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

My Face Book: The Rise of The Narcissist

If you’re anything like me, you have a couple of social media sites open on your browser right now – we’re talking Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, all of the good stuff. We all love how this can connect us as people. We have friends in Paris and friends in Amsterdam and friends in Buenos Aires, and we’ve had some pretty deep conversations with them, which tend to go something like:

hi

hi

hru

gud u

gud lol

lol

After all, if you know what someone looks like when they’re in their bedroom before a night out, or what songs they listen to when they’re feeling down, that means that you know them, right?

Wrong, actually. If we take a look at how we interact in contemporary society, we’ll see that these tools for connecting us on a broader scale are, in fact, shutting down our interpersonal skills. You just have to ask yourself when the last time was that you rode the bus and talked to the person across the aisle instead of scrolling through Instagram, and you’ll see that we’re not becoming more social – we’re becoming a mass of egotistical loners, who feed off the appreciation of strangers who we will never meet. 

If you take a minute to look at your own Facebook habits, you might notice just how much time you spend looking at Facebook – and more often than not, it’s not in order to talk to people, or hear about people’s achievements, or anything of the sort. It’s so that we can see how people are receiving our great news, our pictures, our funny little anecdotes, because let’s face it, if we put a selfie up and it doesn’t get at least five likes in ten minutes, then what’s the point of having it up there at all? 

Studies have shown that people with more Facebook friends are deemed more narcissistic, and are more likely to exploit those around them in order to gain praise. They are also most likely to accept friend requests from strangers so that they can receive some form of social support, but are far less likely to extend social support to others. Think about whether or not you do this, and if you do, don’t be too down on yourself: you might be your average narcissistic Facebooker, as the majority of participants in this experiment showed these signs too.   

While Facebook, along with its brother and sister networking sites, undoubtedly has its positives, it’s important to realise exactly how we’re behaving because of it. It’s fine to upload selfies and statuses and tweet to your heart’s content, but we all need some balance in our lives. If you feel like you are potentially becoming an all-about-me Facebooker, then perhaps it’s time to spring clean your friend list – after all, do you really need to see every update from that guy that you saw across the room at that party in 2009?

Commercial Media: The Future of Australian Media

As I sat down to pen this post, I thought to myself, “How can I explain commercial and public media in a way that will make sense to everybody who will read this? I best not explain too many complicated concepts; it will probably be beneficial to simplify the workings of these two forms of media so that everybody can understand it.” And then I realised…

 In Australia, a large quantity of media is owned by either one of two companies: Fairfax Media or News Corporation. These companies produce commercial media, which is profit-driven. They receive no government subsidies, and are funded by commercial spaces which they sell to advertisers, which means that advertisers are the people who keep the companies up and running. In order for advertisers to want to buy this commercial space, the companies must make the space attractive; this is done through attracting as big an audience as possible to see the advertiser’s product. In order to attract a large audience, companies need to make sure that their content is captivating the viewers and keeping them entertained. 

The most popular way to entertain while somewhat informing audiences on television is through ‘infotainment’, which combines aspects of news with entertainment and excitement. This method draws large audience numbers, but results in newsworthy issues being simplified or ‘dumbed-down’ in order to appeal to this modern day audience. Infotainment is known for highlighting only key points and divesting other information, which could be vital to the news story.  This is done in order to keep the audience alert and attracted to the show, and to keep the pace quick and lively to avoid boredom in viewers. In doing this, the companies are creating niche audiences, who begin to dictate exactly what they want to see on television; the companies oblige these niche audiences, as it is the best way to keep advertisers buying ad spaces, and in doing so, warp the quality of the news being presented. 

On the flip side of this, public media is built on the foundations of serving the public, rather than appeasing them. This form of media is government subsidised, and because of this no personal opinions on Australian political parties are allowed to be taken to air. Due to the government subsidies, public media does not traditionally sell advertising spaces; however this has changed in the last two decades, with broadcasters such as ABC Australia opening merchandise stores, and SBS Australia selling select advertising space and partnering with companies such as Dymocks to sell their merchandise. 

Through doing this, public media is moving in the direction of commercial media, which can raise the question: how long until all media is controlled by advertisers? If Australia’s one source of non-skewed hard news is shifting towards selling advertising space and merchandise, we may be witnessing the start of the end of true journalism in Australia.