My sincere apologies

Haven't posted a blog in an age and a half, sorry to anyone who gave a shit about my previous ramblethon.

Deadline day is looming, in around 18 hours to be precise. Hold on, can an estimate be precise? Damn, my second sentence and already i'm wrong. It's looking ominous.

So, I have an ever decreasing percentage of 18 hours, my favourite stand-up comedy albums organised into a big long playlist (Anyone else have stand up albums? i'm intrigued), enough red bull knock off drinks to kill a small mining village and a veritable treasure trove of ideas to pick and choose from. Let us begin.

Is there any point to analysing the media whatsoever? Think about this for just a second. Why do we analyse the media? What is the purpose of it? We analyse the media in two separate ways: Quantitative and qualitatve (now to be referred to as qaun and qual because my fingers are cold and i'm bound to make some kind of spelling mistake). So we analyse in quan and qual ways and ne'er the two shall meet. Unless you triangulate. Here is the major flaw with both - life, and everything encapsulated within it, is subjective You undertake some kind of content anaylsis, which harvests quan data. You operationalise an abstract concept and therefore add your own, subjective, meaning. Either that or you essentially count something that's already pre-defined, which is all fine and dandy - no post-modern quibbles on my behalf. The problem comes when you try and attatch meaning to these findings. No-one undertakes research without a clearly define objective, to prove or disprove something. How do you prove a theory with simple data? Before you criticise, every study like this has a reason. Calculating how many words the murder of an indian man recieved in the media as opposed to a white man is not simply undertaken just to find out to figures - the reason they picked the study is explicitely to gain some kind of response. This is where the subjectivity comes into play.

I won't delve in too deeply into why qual is subjective - everyone reading this is either on the same course as me or is, in fact, teachng the course. The condensed version is that it isn't feasible to gain results from everyone you're doing your research about - you have to use a sample which reduces reliabilty by a ton. The subjectivity comes into play when you realise that humans are like snowflakes - no two are alike. You can't gain accurate results for a large population with a sample, even the questions are subjective by their nature by their very nature - they must be formulated.

So what's my point? My point is that we can gain no fully objective fact about the media of any kind of higher importance through media analysis. I see no point in finding out the subjective importance of the media - do as you you see fit in your mind and detracters be damned.

It comes down to this - Everything in the world is subjective. This brings an end to my anti-realist rant. Hope this has entertained/annoyed you enough to think about what i've said.

Ollie