Although my experience with the print and electronic media began insensibly and sensibly by 1950 after my conception in October 1943, the formal study of these media did not begin until I taught media studies at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education, now the University of Ballarat, from 1976 to 1978. I was then in my early thirties. In the 1990s, at the Thornlie College of Technical and Further Education(Tafe), now the Swan College of Tafe, I taught a subject entitled Media Studies. It was just one in a long list of subjects I taught in this TAFE college in Perth Western Australia through the 1990s.
When I retired from teaching in July 1999 I kept the three arch-lever files on media studies that I had accumulated over nearly 25 years. In the dozen years since then, 1999 to 2011, these three files have become six arch-lever files and four two-ring binders. Anyone wanting to know the contents of these 10 files can view the table of contents that I keep in my computer directory. Cinema studies and cinematic happenings under development are but one of many many interests now in these years of my retirement from the world of jobs.
It has been sixty-seven years since the media first became a part of my life. The radio and the record player, newspapers and magazines, journals and books were all part of my parents' experience when I was in the womb and then in the cradle. The story of the relationship between the print and electronic media and my life over these last seven decades is a long and complex one, far too long to write in any detail in an introduction to my media studies files.
Now, at the age of 67, I have a base in these files for the study of this important part of my life and the life of my society. A significant part of my writing now emerges from this study, this research, this reading and the cross-fertilization of this study with other aspects of my life and the life of my society and the religion I have been associated with now for nearly sixty years.
At the opening of another Bahá’í Plan, the 2011 to 2016 Plan, I update this introduction yet again and, as I do, I think to myself that this update will be followed by many an update in the years to come. If I am granted a long life, if I live, for example, into old age, the years beyond 80 to chose a timeframe in the lifespan used in one of the models of human development, there will be many Plans to come and, hopefully, many more posts in this Blog at CHUD.
Ron Price
25/11/'11
