Dr. Mark Hayes' Useful Links

[The Favourites, Fun Stuff, Music, and Assorted Weirdness is NOT Here!]

This Page Contains more Serious Stuff.

Here are some of my most useful Links, places or Web Resources I go to or use a lot.

InterNet Starting Points

Probably the very best place to start, especially for anybody with interests in news, current affairs, the media, and similar, is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's multi-award winning Web Site. The two starting points I use at the ABC are its Breaking News Page and the Radio National Home Page. Very useful for transcripts of RN programs.

Another excellent ABC Site is ABC NewsRadio. Check it out, because it's excellent and they go to a huge amount of effort to keep it current.

I prefer to have my browser's Home Page set to the Library Page of the University where I teach, Queensland University of Technology. Because I live fairly close to it, and thence use it a lot for research, I also Bookmark the University of Queensland Library Home Page.

Search Engines

None of these are perfect or comprehensive, but a fairly new one is well worth checking out. I find it so useful I've reset my Browser Default Search Engine code to it.

It might seem arrogant of Google to hype their 'I'm Feeling Lucky' search option, but it often produces a single useful site, especially if your search term(s) or queries are highly focused or very specific. That's often enough for most of my needs. Google also has several 'second opinion' links to other Search Engines like Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, HotBot, and Northern Light.

I can limit my search quite specifically to domain, date, language, or whether or not I want a page with an image of, say, somebody who's written a book I want to cite in a lecture and incorporate into a PowerPoint Slide Show and it's accompanying Web Site. I've put some of these elsewhere on my Web Site. I'm also usually too lazy to type in detailed Boolean operators, image delimiters, domain inclusion codes, and date excluders.

Here's almost certainly the best place on the Web to start learning about the insides of Search Engines and their several cousins, and to use to keep up with their constant changes.

Search Engine Watch's e-mail newsletter and their Subscribers Only Area are essential tools for serious Web users. Even better still, subscribers to Search Engine Watch can download a recent stand-alone Web Site (about 1.5 Meg compressed in .zip format) for off-line local browsing. Very handy for local quick checks and references.

Another very useful regular e-mail digest of Web developments is the Scout Report. I Subscribe to Scout's general e-mail list. But I don't read all the postings in detail. I save them in a folder and run a text indexing tool over the folder to give me a searchable index of all the postings I have received. Kind-of like a private and personal New Web Stuff Index.

Of course, I always apply my trained and experienced journalistic scepticism to everything I access off the Web, but here are three Links to 'How to Evaluate Web-Origin Information' I pass on to my students.

Lists of Links

I don't see any point in keeping a huge, cumbersome, complex, and continually out of date set of Links in my fields of interest, teaching, research, or professional activity. There are other people with much the same interests who get paid to, and/or or who make money out of, compiling these things. Most of the time, their Sites or Lists work fine for me, and if they don't, I'm more than sufficiently InterNet Savvy to find what I'm looking for.

Here are some of the 'Sites of Sites' I keep an eye on.

Belinda Weaver's OzGuide is an essential Starting Point for Australian journalists:

Duff Wilson keeps what he calls a 'Reporter's DeskTop' Site, laden with useful Links for, mostly, American journalists.

Reporter's DeskTop opens with a screen full of pre-set Forms linked to the major Web Search Engines' search fields, sort-of a 'one stop' Web search starting point.

Bill Dedman's Power Reporting Site is also laden with useful Links, again for, mostly, American journalists.

Most Australian media studies and journalism schools maintain good Web Sites of resources for their students, and, coupled with the ABC's Site and a good major university Library Web Site, usually provide sufficient Australian Links for our local needs across most of the territory well covered by sites like the two American sites listed above.

Here's two of the Australian University Media and Journalism School Resources Links Pages I know are rather good.

A browse through either or both of the above will quickly pull up all sorts of useful Australian Links - Commonwealth and State Government entry points, outstanding resource Sites such as the essential AustLII database of legal information, specific 'rounds' or 'beats' Links, major Australian media sites, and so on.

Here's a Listing of other Media and Journalism Schools and Courses world wide, maintained by the Journalism School at the University of Florida. It's by no means comprehensive, but it's a start.

Scholarly Links

A glance over my PhD Thesis will indicate that I have a range of scholarly or intellectual interests, in addition to my teaching and research interests and activities in media and journalism fields.

Here are some Links to some of the areas which occupy my mind. None of these are comprehensive or especially thorough, but they are good Web starting points.

As I argue in Chapter Two of my Thesis, anybody who translates 'herrschaft' as used by Weber from the original German into 'authority' in English either doesn't know what they are talking about, and/or is deliberately seeking to obscure or gloss over what Weber was really on about: Domination, in all its ferocious manifestations.

Regarding Ellul, one of the fascinating things about his critiques of technological society is how closely his analyses and conclusions parallel those of some of the leading Frankfurt School writers, such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and at least the younger Habermas. Ellul must have known about this work, but, at least in my reading of him, he has never cited Critical Theory. To my knowledge, very, very few commentators have picked this up and developed it.

When approaching any theory, I always apply the Weberian technique of 'forcing' to help me make sense of it. 'Forcing' involves burrowing deeply into the theory, finding its strongest points, and 'forcing' them to see how much strain they can stand before the theory falls apart. The other question I usually ask of any theory is, "What can one actually do with this?" in terms of enhancing my understanding of some social process or phenomenon. I'm always looking for the praxeological utility of theory, rather than the admittedly intellectually satisfying exercise of doing theory for theory's sake.

It was this thinking which led me to the conclusion that the only way that Habermas' 'theory of communicative action' could be grounded in praxis was through the application of nonviolence of a particularly rigorous form, Gandhian satyagraha. Not to do so would significantly enhance the probability of reproducing domination, against which, in specific and complex manifestations, activists are struggling against, within the campaign as well as afterwards.

My interests, and participation in, or at least close observation of, community media and public journalism derive from my approach to praxeology informed by strongly teleologically and ontologically laden theory precisely because these two areas can be theorised and interpreted as two ways in which the reflexive principles of contemporary critical theory are or could be grounded in 'real world' praxis by social movements with at least a strongly implicit opposition to domination manifesting in 'big media', which usually 'does things to people', over against community media, which essentially argues that it is empowering people to do things for themselves in and with the media.

'Doing Things' with theory and in the world necessarily involves grappling with ethics and ethical theories, and elsewhere on my Site I have a huge number of media and journalism ethics Links. Many of these Sites also have Links off to more general ethics sites on the Web.

My theological interests, particularly in political and liberation theology, stems from this praxeological orientation. The theologians and theologies which attract me often use critical theory to enhance their theological reflections upon and analyses of contemporary societies and processes. These theologians, and activist groups influenced by them, such as Sojourners, generally embrace and use nonviolence. My media interests inform and are informed by my theological interests not the least because these theologians are the masters of textural analysis and interpretation, often deploying exegetical tools of enormous sophistication and subtlty to both Bibical texts and contemporary texts. What one can do with these kinds of tools is demonstrated by Dr. Peter Horsfield, an Australian Uniting Church theologian and media scholar, and at a more popular level by the Christian Television Association of Victoria's Shoot The Messenger Web Site.

Computer Software

Because I use an Apple Macintosh, there are basically three places where I go for ShareWare, Software, and to see if there's anything new or useful I might want to try out.

Web Resources

There are a quadra-zillion of these Sites, and if you are into Web Weaving you almost certainly have your own favourites already listed.

As I explain elsewhere about how I usually create my Sites, I mostly use a powerful Swedish-origin Mac ShareWare HTML Editor called PageSpinner. Their Site has Links off to some very good Mac Web Resource Sites.

PageSpinnerLogo

Other Web Resources and Links.

I designed and maintain the Web Site for the Uniting Church's Queensland Synod Social Responsibility Advocate, Mark Young, and I also put Links there which lead to useful places or resources on the Web, particularly on the Resources Pages.