The Frequencies of Dailiness

I read something really interesting which I thought really captured my process of trying to understand these readings. Hartley brings this problem up while explaining the varying frequencies with in different professions. He terms it “Frequency mistunings… Journalist habituated to high-frequency public address, and academics, attuned to the rhythms of mid-frequency writing, find it hard to understand each other” (pg 256) This point was crystal clear to me as here I was a constant consumer of high-frequency public writing such news from web pages and TV, having a problems understanding these mid-frequency academic writings. Although I am slowly adjusting and tuning myself to this wavelength.

I found Scannell’s writing on Dailiness to be pretty agreeable, with his argument that the temporal structures of broadcasting is fundamental to how it relates to our everyday life. This I believe applied to everyone to a degree in today’s world of mediated media. As the only possible way to not experience the effects of dailiness is not to be connected with any type of technology at all. From the moment we get up to the moment we fall to sleep we are bound to a structure we must (unknowingly or not) follow.  The structures Broadcasting is programed for us, and in turn we find ourselves programed to these structures. Since Scannel’s time in the 1990’s, the emergence of digital and the internet reflects Dailiness being more prevalent today than in Scannell’s time.  Although these user programmable structures appears to allows us the freedom to access it’s content anytime, we are still influenced by a structure that’s was carried over from broadcasting we been so used to. For example, even though I am given the freedom of choice to access anything on the internet whenever I want, I still have a mental checklist of various websites I must access each and everyday, during a certain part of the day.

Here is an example of my own internet ‘programing’ .

Morning:
Overseas film news website, as it updates it’s content during the overnight time in Australia
Google news for the latest headlines overseas (again influenced by timezone difference)
Facebook

During the day:
Facebook
Various sites on my mental checklist

Afternoon: (if time permits)
Google news for latest headline in Australia/overseas
Facebook

Night:
Various sites on my mental checklist to see if there’s any new content
Facebook
Google news for all the headlines today.

While Facebook seems to have no particular structure, here it is a constant, it is very idea that it is of being accessed all day everyday fulfills the very the idea of dailiness. Could you imagine spending one day without facebook?  My point is, even though the internet seems to be allows us the freedom to program the a structure. I believe most of us programs a daily structure which fits into our dailiness.