Binnsy's Hovel

Read this.

Since my last post I’ve finished The Colour of Magic and am now reading the next Discworld book, The Light Fantastic. These books, I must, add, are highly recommended. Even for those not usually predisposed to fantasy or science-fiction, the plain humanity and ridiculous humour are very accessible, and offset the way the reader is plunged headfirst into this unorthodox and extremely confusing world.

Due to personal reasons my blog posts may be infrequent for the time being (I know I’m not that frequent anyway, but you get my point), but I’ll try to post as often as I can.

My public relations exam is on Tuesday and I’m doing my best to study for it. What follows is a brief explanation of the course content, and, I hope, a chance for me to test my knowledge thus far, and identify areas that I need to work harder on.

In essence, public relations is all about creating and maintaining favourable relationships between organisations and their stakeholders, and monitoring the status and quality of these relationships. The various roles of PR are wide and varied, but can include promotion, publicity, propaganda, issues management, crisis prevention and management and many others.

Prominent Australian PR case studies in the past few years – and those that have featured most often in our lectures and tutorials – are the James Hardie asbestos case and the Mars product recall.

The roles of PR can be described in one of six ways – they can be pragmatic (useful, adding value, practical business), neutral (a phenomenon, trend or concept that needs to be studied), conservative (defending the interests of those who wield power), radical (the promotion of reform or drastic change), idealistic (serving the public, for public gain or benefit, for mutual understanding) and critical (part of a larger system, evaluated in regard to ethics).

The various stakeholders of an organisation are also called publics, and these are characterised by social features and cognitive features. Social features are the public’s role in society – e.g. shareholders own stock in the company, customers buy products. Cognitive features are a public’s attitudes, opinions, beliefs, values and thoughts.

As far as an organisation communicating with its publics, the communication and retention of messages is relatively easy. Acceptance, changes in or the formation of attitudes and changes in behaviour are harder to effect.

Until next time…

I am clearly a trend-follower, rather than a trend-setter, when it comes to the whole ‘online self-expression’ phenomenon. For instance, I blog, like millions of others across the globe. However, perhaps this is where the similarities end.

Hundreds of thousands of others use MySpace to collate their thoughts and online trawlings. MySpace is essentially a ‘Create Your Own Website’ for completely technologically inept types such as emo teenagers, members of rock bands and middle-aged businesspeople who really have nothing better to do in their spare time.

I refuse to even visit MySpace simply because of its sheer mass-marketing stigma. Everyone has one, it seems. It is the butt of the jokes of late-night talk show hosts. It appears in MIRC funny quote archives. A myspace.net/something address appears very near the contact details on many a band’s website.

MySpace is very nearly the new terrorism. Mayhap the anti-terrorism. The reverse stigma – a ‘positive’ and not nearly as explosive or destructive counter-force – of the twenty-first century.

Blogs are good in their own way. Some people are against blogging, and that’s fine. But MySpace takes the language-based self-expression of blogs (normal text blogs – not photoblogs, vidlogs or moblogs) and combines it with a sort of Geocities / Yahoo / Google-customisable-homepage functionality and markets it to the lowest common denominator in the hopes of exploiting the ego-driven, narcissistic personalities therein.

Good luck to them, too.

Until next time…

Well, clearly it has been far too long since I’ve blogged. And for this I sincerely apologise.

Since my last decent post I’ve finished another semester of uni, knocked over a second draft of my script, read the last three books of the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, quit my job at Subway, got a Christmas casual position at the Body Shop and been to see U2 at Telstra Stadium.

I handed in my last assessment yesterday, an exam in a weeks’ time and I did my last shift at Subway on Saturday night.

I’m presently reading Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic and procrastinating with a fair amount of success in avoidance of studying for my Public Relations exam next Tuesday. The exam shouldn’t really be too hard. It’s comprised of sixty multiple choice questions and the theories are pretty simple.

I probably need a day off anyway. Yesterday started at 7am with my getting up to go for a swim, then I had to go into uni to finalise this last assessment (group projects shit me, they really do; but that’s another post in the wings), then come home and get ready to drive into the city for U2.

The show was awesome, apart from the support act. If you liked rap, then he was fine. But if you believe rap is actually spelt with a silent ‘c’, then, like me, you would’ve been bored hellishly for about an hour. Come about 8:45, U2 finally came on, and it was very very cool. A great mix of old stuff and new stuff, and an encore that lasted 45 mins. No The Sweetest Thing, though, which was boring, but still awesome nevertheless.

I am also presently in the middle of watching Patriot Games. How can you be ‘in the middle’ of a movie, you ask? Well I’m flat out with all kinds of stuff at the moment, so I treat movies much like novels. I stop when I have to and keep going when I can. Just put it this way – I love DVDs for that reason. Scene selection is a godsend.

So yeah, that’s about the state of things at present. Will post again soon – promise.

Until next time…

Don’t panic folks, I haven’t forgotten the blog.

Just exams and general uni stuff is hellish at present.

I’ll be back though.

Meantime, I noticed I’ve picked up some hate commenters! Hurrah!

Thus henceforth all comments are moderated. Take that hateful and spiteful folk.

UPDATE: I’ve updated the template (will customise in the next week), and have reverted to Blogger commenting for the time being.

Until next time…