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Contents
Abstracts
Junk food or junk TV: How will the UK ban on junk food advertising affect children’s programs?
Anna Potter
The implementation of a partial junk food television advertising ban in the United Kingdom is adding to the woes of commercial broadcasters already under pressure in a fiercely competitive multi-channel environment. The UK free-to-air channel ITV1 recently announced the closure of its children’s programs production unit and children’s television production in the United Kingdom has been described as being ‘in meltdown’. The United Kingdom represents a crucial market for Australian producers of children’s programs, who have traditionally sourced up to 80 per cent of their production budgets from UK partners. Australian cultural policy is adding to the challenges facing these producers, through the demands inherent in the ‘C’ classification. If Australia is to remain committed to the provision of dedicated children’s programs, alternative sources of funding will have to be found.
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Changing newsroom culture by putting Readers First: How Australian journalists reacted to a corporate change program
Jacqui Ewart
This article explores the attitudes of journalists towards the introduction of a corporate-change program in the newsrooms of 14 regional daily newspapers in Australia. It draws data from a survey of journalists working for one of Australia’s largest regional media corporations, Australian Provincial Newspapers. The article examines the journalists’ attitudes towards the change effort, a year and a half after its introduction. The program had two over-arching aims. The first was to bring about a change in the relationship between journalists and their communities; the second was to get the journalists to use more ‘real’ or ordinary people as news sources. The study found that support for the corporate-change program remained high in the 18-month period between its introduction and the survey.
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Publishing the perished: The visibility of foreign death in Australian quality newspapers
Folker Hanusch
The issue of media coverage of death has been under discussion by only a few scholars, and there have existed some disagreements as to just how present death is in public discourse in the Western world. This study adds to the literature on death by investigating the Australian media context. Specifically, it examines how journalists at two Australian quality newspapers, The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, cover death in their foreign news reporting. It finds that journalists express preferences for certain types of death, as well as for certain nationalities. Further, it sheds some light on just how visible death is in the news by arguing that, while present in the written word, the visual representation of death is still highly marginalised.
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Wireless technologies and cultures: Towards an agenda for research
Melissa Gregg and Gerard Goggin
Governments and big business tout the affordances of new technologies, but there is little research available that tells us why wireless connectivity should be or is desirable, or shows that its benefits have fully been established. In our minds, wireless technologies and cultures have not been given the sustained attention they deserve. Informed by these concerns, our hope is that this special issue, which follows on from a 2006 workshop sponsored by the ‘Cultural Technologies’ node of the ARC Cultural Research Network, will promote debate and further research into wireless technologies and cultures in the Australian and New Zealand regions.
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Talking over water: History, wireless and the telephone
Jock Given
For a third of the twentieth century, the only way Antipodeans could talk with people on the other side of the world was by wireless. The submarine cables that traversed the oceans from the 1860s carried messages in Morse code, ‘telegraphy’, but not voice. From 30 April 1930, the wireless telephone service made it possible to conduct a conversation in real time between England and Australia. This article explores the old era of international wireless telephony at a time when wireless is again transforming social and economic possibilities. It examines the economics and politics of the era, the man most closely identified with the Australian services, the technology employed and the way the service was used, identifying similarities and differences between this period and the present.
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Freedom to work: The impact of wireless on labour politics
Melissa Gregg
As the use of wireless communication technologies begins to settle into particular
patterns, this essay considers the impact of such devices on workplace culture
— particularly that of the professional middle class engaged in information work.
While the study of workplace culture is usually the domain of sociology, management
theory or organisational behaviour, media and cultural studies methods such as
semiotic and discourse analysis, media consumption and theories of everyday life have
a useful role to play in understanding how technology is marketed and subsequently
used in and outside work contexts. As a starting point for this kind of approach, the
paper combines an account of recent wireless advertising in Australia with research
that is developing in ‘production-side cultural studies’ (Liu, 2004; Du Gay, 1997).
In recognising the significance of new media technologies in contemporary labour
practice and politics, it aims to move discussions beyond the notion of ‘work–life
balance’ as a research endpoint to allow more variegated notions of freedom and
flexibility for the workplaces of the present and near future.
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The case of the e-tuktuk
Jo Tacchi and Ben Grubb
The e-tuktuk is a mobile information and communication centre located within a three-wheeled auto rickshaw. It operates out of the Kothmale Community Multimedia Centre in Central Province, Sri Lanka. In this paper, we examine this innovative use of new technology through drawing an analogy between the technology of irrigation and the technologies of information and communication. We argue that it is the particular context of Sri Lanka, and the culturally significant notion of reaching out to villages, that makes the e-tuktuk meaningful in this place at this time. We describe how a particularly Sri Lankan form of community media began in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s, and how it has since developed. The e-tuktuk is presented as a recent and
interesting example of participatory community media that uses radio and mobile technologies to reach out to villages. It is, in this context, a highly meaningful set of social, cultural, political and symbolic behaviours that have clear modern and ancient precedents.
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Spectrumscape: The space of wirelessness
Zita Joyce
The radio signals transmitted by wireless technologies create a form of space that is pervasive but intangible to human senses. The multiplicity of radio waves is most commonly represented through the trope of ‘radio spectrum’, but this paper argues that this construct is too limited to communicate the extensive presence of radio waves in the environment, their relationship with human subjectivity, and the technical, economic, political and cultural dimensions of wireless transmission and reception. The space of wirelessness is conceptualised in this paper as a ‘spectrumscape’, a dynamic presence in the environment that is also a dimension of global flows, imbued with relationships of power and financial interests.
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Wireless networks and the problems of over-connectedness
Adrian Mackenzie
The idea of connectivity underpins much recent investment and innovation in wireless networks. This paper suggests wireless networks such as Wi-Fi actually put the ideal of network connectivity in question in some ways. The paper constructs a set of contrasts based on different wireless networks in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. It argues that many different ideals of network connectivity intersect in wireless internet networks. Rather than being the examplar of connectivity, the practices, spaces, cultures and politics of wireless networks display forms of overconnectedness irreducible to the ideal of connectivity. They entail deep entanglements between the political economy of information, visions of technoeconomic progress and market competition, feelings of proximity, connectivity and mobility, and sensibilities of change.
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Ubiquitous computing and the digital enclosure movement
Mark Andrejevic
Popular portrayals of ubiquitous computing tend to downplay the surveillance implications of emerging forms of mobile, networked interactivity. This essay seeks to supplement such accounts with a critical analysis of the emergence of digital enclosures that limit access to interactive networks and services to those who ‘freely’ submit to increasingly comprehensive forms of monitoring. If land enclosure helped produce the spatial conditions for the exploitation of wage labor, digital enclosures enable the exploitation of information generated by users as they go about their daily lives. Describing interactive networks, in both virtual and physical spaces, as forms of spatial enclosure helps to supplement privacy-based critiques of surveillance with questions about the ownership and control of data collected within the enclosure.
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An Australian wireless commons?
Gerard Goggin
In this paper, I reflect upon the Australian experience of wireless technologies and cultures, especially focusing on Wi-Fi, WiMax and broadband wireless. It is arguable that the development of these new wireless technologies has taken quite different forms in Australia than it has done in other countries. To approach this question, I consider the concept of a wireless commons and what it signifies, and look at how it could serve to open up Australian debates.
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REVIEWS
Edited by Kitty van Vuuren
Ashantha, Sanjay, Innovative Practices of Youth Participation in Media
Atkins, Robert and Mintcheva, Svetlana (eds), Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression
Beder, Sharon, Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values
Bloy, Duncan, Media Law
Bose, Derek, Brand Bollywood: A New Global Entertainment Order
Chris, Cynthia, Watching Wildlife
Gray, Jonathan, Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality
Hackett, Robert A. and Carroll, William K., Remaking Media: The Struggle to Democratize Public Communication
Hall, Mitchell K., Crossroads: American Popular Culture and the Vietnam Generation
Jones, Steve, Antonio Gramsci
Kerr, Aphra, The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework/Gameplay
Kumar, Krishna, Promoting Independent Media: Strategies for Democracy Assistance
Levine, Elana, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television
Marsen, Sky, Communication Studies
Papoutsaki, Evangelia and Rooney, Dick (eds), Media, Information and Development in Papua New Guinea
Rennie, Ellie, Community Media: A Global Introduction
Spariosu, I. Mihai, Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age
Sun, Wanning (ed.), Media and the Chinese Diaspora: Community, Communications and Commerce
Yoda, Tomiko and Harootunian, Harry (eds), Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present
Zhang Zhen (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
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