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Contents
Abstracts
Jock Given
Australia’s broadband: How big is
the problem?
Four conclusions are drawn from the most recent data about broadband takeup in Australia and overseas. First, performance shouldn’t be judged against a single criterion or against the same criteria over time. Second, on the simplest measure of fixed broadband takeup, Australia has caught up considerably after a slow start to a position now above the OECD average, but is still well behind top-ranked countries. Third, on other factors such as the availability of higher speeds, prices, bitcaps and the relationships between them, Australia does not perform as well, particularly on bitcaps. Fourth, even if Australia’s performance has improved on some measures, few suggest existing infrastructure will be adequate to maintain that improvement in the years ahead on the measures that will matter
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John de Ridder
What drives broadband takeup?
This article summarises an econometric study undertaken by the author for the OECD which found several key factors explaining the level of broadband takeup in different countries. On the demand side, they are price, income, education, weather and the size of the addressable market. On the supply side, they are urbanisation, unbundling of the local loop and competition. Most of the factors that drive broadband takeup are beyond the reach of government regulation and policy.
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David Barbagallo
Why FTTN is the answer
The case for additional broadband capacity in Australia is compelling. Broadband allows and promotes the next order of magnitude change in the way we do business and live. It is no longer just about communications, if it ever was. FTTN is the only currently available working technology capable of delivering vastly greater capacity. Mobile can help with the last mile and in sparsely populated areas but cannot take the place of fibre in areas that require massively high throughput. FTTN will be seen in retrospect as the most fundamentally important piece of physical economic infrastructure built in Australia in the twenty-first century. We need a resolution of the policy, regulatory and business issues about FTTN yesterday. If the new government wants an agreement on building FTTN infrastructure before the next election, it will need to negotiate with Telstra.
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L.H. Campbell and J.R. Holmes
Regulating service providers’ acess to an FTTN network
To date, the major deployments of FTTN or its fibre-rich cousin, Fibre to the Premises, have been driven by clear government policy (Republic of Korea, Japan) or competitive pressure from cable television companies (US, Netherlands — planned). Without these pressures, the business case for deploying FTTN is uncertain. The additional revenues from higher-speed internet access are likely to be slight, and new revenues from pay television are uncertain and likely to develop only over the medium term. The business case for investing perhaps A$9 billion or more for an extensive FTTN deployment in Australia is therefore weak. National governments, however, see many benefits in widespread deployment of high internet access speeds and may provide incentives for FTTN deployments if competitive pressures are absent. This article explains some of these incentives in the Australian context, especially the steps taken so far to regulate access to the fibre networks proposed by Telstra and the so-called G9 consortium.
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Simon Molloy
Why a single national FTTN network is no answer (but competition is)
The government’s conviction that there is a ‘broadband emergency’ has persuaded it to look for a single, national solution, a Broadband Big Bang. No one can provide that kind of solution more easily than Telstra. There are several problems with this. The rapid growth in broadband adoption over the past three years means it is far from clear there is a ‘broadband emergency’. Mandating a single technology is overly prescriptive and the particular characteristics of FTTN make it difficult to regulate an incumbent’s technology. A single national roll-out risks a significant reduction in competition, whoever wins. This jeopardises the gains consumers have made where competition has emerged in the telecommunications industry. Ultimately, competition will probably only be embedded into the Australian industry by structural change, perhaps along the lines of the extensive facilities-based competition that exists in the United States between telcos and cable companies. Perhaps, eventually, someone will have to bite the structural separation bullet.
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John Sinclair
The shock of the new: Old media strategies in the digital age
This paper provides an outline and analysis of the strategies with which the ‘old’ media empires of print and television have met the challenge of ‘new’ media in Australia, notably the internet. It places particular emphasis on the protection of, or the gaining of access to, advertising revenue as a motivating factor in such corporate strategies since the early 1990s. In order to achieve some historical perspective and narrative continuity on this process, the discussion is divided into a rough periodisation. The first period saw the beginning of internet advertising and media organisations establishing a web presence, before the dot.com crash of 2000. A period of more cautious consolidation of positions then followed, and internet advertising became differentiated into categories of search, directories, classified and display, leading up to the corporate discovery of social networking in 2005. The paper concludes with some observations on the recent influx of private equity capital, particularly noting the agile response of ‘old’ media proprietors.
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Jeanette Delamoir
Star bodies/freak bodies/women’s bodies
An exploration of the contexts surrounding images of female celebrities in Australian weekly women’s magazines complicates any simple cause-and-effect relationship between women’s behaviour and celebrity glamour by revealing parallels between the construction of star personae and the discourses surrounding the display of sideshow ‘freaks’. This paper focuses on a series of stories about the weight loss and gain of Renee Zellweger, over the 18-month period during which Zellweger filmed her second Bridget Jones movie. The articles illustrate the freakshow contexts in which images of Zellweger are embedded, and establish a dynamic of attraction and disgust that is possibly more compelling than unalloyed admiration for celebrity bodies.
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Dean Durber
The paedophile and ‘I’
The year 2004 saw the release of three separate American films which had a focus on paedophilia. The dominant cultural — and legal — response to any and all adult–child sexual relationships is one of intense condemnation. Unexpectedly, however, these films addressed this highly controversial topic in a manner that avoided sensationalism, while simultaneously exposing the complexities of the relationship between the deviant paedophile and the normal sexual self. This article offers an analysis of the differing representations of the paedophile and paedophilic relationships in The Woodsman, Birth and Mysterious Skin. Using a queer theoretical approach, I consider the extent to which these contemporary representations of an otherwise abhorrent sexual form challenge the assumption of and the desire for sexual normality for the viewing subject. In viewing representations of the paedophile, I may hope to see in ‘him’ what I desire to know to be alien to the self, but such a level of sexual comfort is denied me in these films. While none of the films can be said to promote paedophilia, they nevertheless all manage to challenge the distance assumed to exist between this deviant sexual other and the normal sexual self.
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Kitty van Vuuren and Libby Lester
Ecomedia: Of angelic images and environmental values
The prominence of media events in 2006, including the release of former US Vice President Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the publication of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even the death of ‘eco-celebrity’ Steve Irwin, suggested a need to devote an issue of Media International Australia to media and the environment. The study of environmentalism through the lens of media, journalism and communication is all but absent in Australia, with some notable exceptions. This issue of MIA goes some way towards redressing the absences identified by Tom Jagtenberg and David McKie in their influential book Eco-Impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity, published more than 10 years ago, which claimed for the environment an equal status with traditional research foci: class, race and gender. The current public interest in environmental issues emphasises this point, although it is not unprecedented. History shows that environmental issues move in waves to and from the heart of public debate. As well as showcasing some of the field’s distinct approaches and traditions, the articles in this issue contribute to a better understanding of this current wave and its likely aftermath. In doing so, it goes some way towards moving the environment in the direction of a more
central position on the research and public agenda.
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Charlotte Craw
The ecology of emblem eating: Environmentalism, nationalism and the framing of kangaroo consumption
This paper investigates the alignment of environmentalist and nationalist narratives through an examination of discussions of kangaroo consumption in popular media such as newspapers and cookbooks. In her bible of contemporary home cooking, The Cook’s Companion, Australian chef Stephanie Alexander remarks that using kangaroo meat must, as an indigenous product, ‘qualify a dish as Australian’. And, she adds, such usage makes environmental as well as iconic sense. As I discuss in this paper, Alexander’s comments are indicative of the framing of native foods: indigenous ingredients are billed as the solution to both the search for an authentically Aussie cuisine and the plight of the continent’s devastated ecologies. Using John and Jean Comaroff’s work on the politics of ecological discussions, the paper examines the entanglement of territory and ecology — the slippage between the ‘native’, the ‘natural’ and the ‘nation’ — to reveal how the realm of ecology, conceived of as ‘natural’ and therefore exterior to politics, is used as a forum for very political questions of ‘belonging’. The paper demonstrates how the framing of environmental discussions in the public sphere cannot be separated from wider questions of the politics of settler (post-)colonies. back to top
Dan Brockington
Celebrity conservation: Interpreting the Irwins
Interactions between celebrity and conservation are proliferating. This paper reviews theories of celebrity, explores different perspectives on the role of celebrity in conservation and outlines a typology of celebrity involvement. It then examines the work of the late Steve Irwin and his daughter Bindi, and public responses to them, using these cases to illustrate how and why conservation and celebrity are becoming interwoven. Finally, it considers the long-term implications of celebrity conservation and the dangers of promoting conservation through para-social relations with nature.
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Soenke Zehle
Dispatches from the depletion zone: Edward Burtynsky and the documentary sublime
The scope of China’s contemporary transformation is measured by many observers according to the environmental crisis it has engendered. One of the most ambitious attempts to document this transformation has been the recent work by Edward Burtynsky. The China series is the latest contribution to the Canadian photographer’s grand tour of industrial landscapes. Burtynsky employs the same approach and rules of composition across terrains and topics, and there is indeed nothing radically new in terms of subject or composition in the China series. Yet, linked to the question of scale that is so central to Burtynsky’s approach, the question of the sublime offers a useful point of entry for approaching the China series, not only because it is so routinely inscribed in this (heterogeneous) tradition, but because the concept has also played a key role in the refashioning of Chinese aesthetics to stress the heroism of Chinese industrial ambition. And the suggestion, evident in the attentiveness to the scale of environmental devastation, that the sublime can no longer be invoked to legitimate a techno-feudalist course of development, can initiate a political conversation, even if the photographer’s aesthetic does not offer an idiom with which to engage the complexities of cultural difference.
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Emily Potter and Candice Oster
Communicating climate change: Public responsiveness and matters of concern
Since climate change captured global attention in the 1990s, the private individual, addressed as a member of a concerned public, has occupied a focal position in the discourse of environmental amelioration. Recently, a range of prominent books, films and television programs — for example, Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers (2005), Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and ABC TV’s Carbon Cops (2007) — have promoted the role of the individual as the ‘starting point’ for effective environmental action. These texts assume that the provision and comprehension of sufficient information to the public about climate change will change individual habits and practices. This accords with the ‘information-deficit model’ in environmental communication research, a concept that asserts a direct connection between individual awareness and response, and collective action. This paper discusses the limitations of this model, pervasive in both popular and official approaches to climate change. It will interrogate the philosophical assumptions that underlie it, in which nature and culture are polarised and the human is positioned in a certain, and separate, relationship to the non-human world — an inheritance of the very logic that enables the continued exploitation of nature. Applying Bruno Latour’s notion of a ‘matter of concern’ to climate change, where the gathering of a range of irreducible forces and im/materialities continually produce these phenomena, this paper proposes that, in thinking about climate change as essentially unrepresentable, a different mode of public engagement with the issue is asserted.
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Catherine Collins
Environmental narratives and media conventions: Strategic frames and value-based argument
Our understanding of environmental issues and our contribution to environmental degradation are shaped by the way our stories are framed, the value hierarchies they advance and a familiarity with the chosen narratives that are so conventionalized that this may deter recognition of how narrative choices limit our interpretive process. Textual arguments and image choices within these narratives have the potential to expand or restrict the audience’s commitment to and participation in the belief or action sought by the message. In this article, I am interested in televised documentaries that argue for environmental preservation. I argue that, guided by journalistic conventions and stock environmental narratives, well-meaning appeals frequently make the wrong strategic choices. By examining a case study of similar documentaries employing different narrative choices, we can begin to see how particular narrative structures and substantive appeals advance or restrict audience adherence to the proposed environmental action.
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Chris Russill
The billion-dollar Kyoto botch-up: Climate change communication in New Zealand
New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased significantly since 1990. This article examines how the fact of increasing emissions is discussed and given significance in New Zealand’s national public discourse on climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions became a serious public concern on 17 June 2005, when the New Zealand government estimated a $307 million Kyoto Protocol liability in its 2005 financial statements. Conservative media coverage of this report emphasized governmental miscalculation, the financial liabilities generated by Kyoto Protocol regulations and a struggle between Climate Change Minister Peter Hodgson and industry voices over how to define the problem. This article links the arguments and discursive strategies used in the 17 June 2005 newspaper coverage of increasing greenhouse gas emissions to the institutional actors shaping New Zealand climate change policy. The increased effectiveness of industry challenges to government climate change policy is noted and discussed.
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Geoffrey Craig
Aotearoa/New Zealand print news media reportage of the environment
This article is based upon a month-long survey of the reportage of New Zealand environmental news in the country’s metropolitan daily and Sunday newspapers. The study examines topics such as the coverage of different environmental issues, the frequency and distribution of different types of sources accessed for the news stories, the distribution of environmental news across different sections of the newspapers, and the ratio of news stories to opinion articles. The article concludes that ‘the environment’ is often interpreted through an economic and business framework in newspaper reportage. This is reflected in the prominence of particular kinds of environmental issues in the survey, such as climate change and electricity/energy production and consumption, and the dominance of bureaucratic and corporate/industry group sources in environmental news. The increasingly problematic nature of ‘the environment’, and the growing importance of the impact of environmental change on economic life, particularly in a national economy that remains heavily reliant on agriculture, is evident in a high proportion of ‘op-ed’ articles in the survey and a high proportion of environmental news stories in the business sections of the newspapers.
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Jane Johnston and Steve Gration
Coastlines, CAGs and communications
This paper layers communication theory over a cultural context by examining how Community Action Groups (CAGs) have responded to development along Australian coastlines. It analyses how communication and media strategies and techniques have been adopted by the third sector to challenge commercial and government organisations which have proposed coastal development. As noted by Huntsman (2001): ‘It is this appropriation of the beach for the purposes of capitalism, and the contesting ideas about the beach that have captured the attention of critics.’ Indeed these critics, who in this paper are members of strategic alliances, or CAGs, exist all along the Australian coastline. The paper seeks to highlight how the connections that are felt with Australia’s coasts provide a special impetus and motivation for CAGs which have emerged in response to development along Australia’s coasts, from Western Australia to New South Wales and Queensland.
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Reviews
Edited by Kitty van Vuuren
Anderson, Kay, Race and the Crisis of Humanism
Andersen, Robin, A Century of Media, A Century of War
Bakir, Vian and Barlow, David M., Communication in the Age of Suspicion: Trust and the Media
Cammaerts, Bart and Carpentier, Nico (eds), Reclaiming the Media: Communication Rights and Democratic Media Roles
Carlsson, Ulla (ed.), Regulation, Awareness, Empowerment: Young People and Harmful Media Content in the Digital Age
Creedon, Pamela J. and Cramer, Judith, Women in Mass Communication, 3rd ed.
Dewdney, Andrew and Ride, Peter, The New Media Handbook
Gauntlett, David, Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences
Goodlad, Lauren M.E. and Bibby, Michael (eds), Goth: Undead Subculture
Ha, Louisa S. and Ganahl, Richard J. III (eds), Webcasting Worldwide: Business Models of an Emerging Global Medium
Hastie, Amelie, Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History
Homan, Shane (ed.), Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture
Jenkins, Henry, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture
Rossiter, Ned, Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions
Roy, Olivier, Secularism Confronts Islam
Scannell, Paddy, Media and Communication
Shyles, Leonard, The Art of Video Production
Sissons, Helen, Practical Journalism: How to Write News
Geller, Valerie, Creating Powerful Radio: Getting, Keeping & Growing Audiences for News, Talk, Information & Personality Broadcast, HD, Satellite & Internet
Swett, Pamela E., Wieson, S. Jonathan and Zetlin, Jonathan R. (eds), Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-century Germany
Talbot, Mary, Media Discourse: Representation and Interaction
Vesna, Victoria (ed.), Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow
Young, Sherman, The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book)
Carter, David and Galligan, Anne (eds), Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing
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