An interesting and timely article. The political agenda about 'new media' has always been about structure, bandwidth and to a lesser extent (these days), who owns what.

I must admit some ignorance about some of the terms used by others to criticise Prof Hartley's article but his point is well made re creativity. The notion of mass media and niches isn't new, nor is the idea of clutter.

Back in the early 60s communications theorists were worried about 'communication clutter'. They thought the media were going to be simply channels that everyone used to 'yak' and that it would be a tower of babel. They were coming from a particular cognitive approach. God only knows what they'd make of the internet.

Underpinning some of that thinking was the notion of creative content. While they held the epistemology of print media to be sancrosact (see Neil Postman and others), they also realised that unless we start ramping up our creative productive facilities (and unis and TAFEs help a bit) we'll be doomed either to repeats of repeats of MASH and Hogan's Heroes or else 24/7 reality shows.

Malcolm King

Err Cheryl....

Aren't we already buried in repeats of 70's and 80's television shows and bombarded with "dumb and dumber" reality TV shows?