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Contents
Abstracts
Jim Macnamara
Internet media and the public sphere: The 2007 Australian e-electioneering experience
Internet media have come under increasing examination since the early 1990s within a number of theoretical frameworks, including their use and potential influence in the public sphere of political discourse. Increasing use of internet media was identified in the 2000 and 2004 US presidential elections, with the latter being described as ‘a critical turning point’. However, the development of what some call ‘new media’ or ‘social media’ based on Web 2.0 internet technology has overtaken many findings of previous research. Some of the most popular Web 2.0-based media currently in use were developed after 2004. These technological changes, coinciding with declining television viewing and newspaper readership, suggest that new forms of internet media need ongoing critical review. This paper analyses findings from a study of internet media use in the 2007 Australian federal election and explores their implications in relation to the public sphere.
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Michael Meadows, Susan Forde, Jacqui Ewart and Kerrie Foxwell
A quiet revolution: Australian community broadcasting audiences speak out
Around four million listeners in an average week tune into community radio stations around Australia, primarily to hear local news and information — evidence of a failure by mainstream media to meet their diverse needs. This discussion draws from the first qualitative study of the Australian community broadcasting sector to explore the role being played by community radio and television from the perspectives of their audiences. The authors argue that community broadcasting at the level of the local is playing a crucial role in the democratic process by fostering citizen participation in public life. This suggests a critique of mainstream media approaches and the central place of audience research in understanding the nature of the empowering relationships and processes involved. The authors argue that the nature of community broadcasting aligns it more closely with the complex ‘local talk’ narratives at the community level, which play a crucial role in creating public consciousness. They suggest that this quiet revolution has highlighted the nature of the audience–producer relationship as a defining characteristic of community media.
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Marcus O’Donnell
Jack Bauer: The smart warrior’s Faustian gift
Jack Bauer of the television series 24 is a highly charged contemporary mythic character who exists in powerful relationship to past and present real-world and fictional figures. If Rambo was a classic Reagan era cinematic ‘hard body’ (Jeffords, 1994), Jack is the archetypal Bush ‘smart warrior’ in a post-Patriot Act era. Like Rambo, Reagan’s displays of bravado were decisive and successfully staged; however, George Bush has faced a multiplying set of uncertainties. This sets up a more complex set of relations between Jack, George W. Bush and contemporary masculinities than those presented by the Reagan era. Jack is both an emblem of unimpeded presidential will and a parable of its Faustian consequences.
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Jock Given
Making media policy: Looking forward, looking back
Seeking papers for the media stream at the conference and articles for this issue of Media International Australia, our aim was to examine contemporary media policy issues that benefited from some kind of historical analysis. Rather than starting with history, confident that it served up powerful and useful lessons, the idea was to begin with the current policy challenges and see whether history helped. Unsurprisingly, most authors found it did — though not always, and for different reasons.
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Ellie Rennie and Daniel Featherstone
‘The potential diversity of things we call TV’: Indigenous community television, self-determination and NITV
The National Indigenous Television (NITV) service was launched in July 2007. NITV’s public service broadcasting model has arrived after two decades of successful community-based enterprise. Indigenous groups, guided by policies of self-determination, developed a robust grassroots media system based on community ownership and regional collaboration. The arrival of NITV raised important questions for the sector. Can locally sourced content provide the levels of leadership and national unity achieved by public service media during the broadcast era? How can Indigenous media play a greater role in the Australian public sphere? Can locally controlled media offer national narratives? Where does industry development begin and end? As the Indigenous media sector faces up to these issues, two distinct approaches are emerging. One presents a unified picture of Indigenous Australia; the other enables diverse groups to tell their own stories. This paper examines the tensions and possibilities of the new Indigenous media landscape by looking back at the self-determination governance model of the past.
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Georgie McClean
Special broadcasting: Cultural diversity, policy evolutions and the international ‘crisis’ in public service broadcasting
Public broadcasters internationally are facing challenges from technology, competition in multi-channel environments and criticisms of being out of touch with audiences. Some public broadcasters, such as the United Kingdom’s BBC and the ‘pillarised’ public broadcasting system in The Netherlands, were founded almost a century ago. Their models, based on particular views of the public interest and audiences, now struggle to maintain relevance in rapidly changing, culturally diverse societies. Pure market models do not cater well for the complexities of cultural diversity. Public broadcasters with specific remits to represent diversity, such as Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, Nederlandse Programma Stichting (NPS) in The Netherlands and Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), although themselves products of specific historical moments and policy contexts, allow for more responsive relationships to multicultural societies. Although traditionally seen as more marginal, these newer models may find themselves central to arguments for ongoing funding of public broadcasting.
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Gerard Goggin
Making the Australian mobile in the 1990s: Creating markets, choosing technologies
In thinking about convergent media and new digital technologies, the place of mobile services and technologies in the broader media policy field has not been addressed satisfactorily. This article reviews the beginnings of cellular mobiles in Australia to see what this piece of history can tell us about today’s policy challenges. My case study revolves around the technology choices made by the federal government in the 1980s, especially the decision to essentially mandate the second-generation Global Standard for Mobiles (GSM) digital standard. I examine the structuring of the mobiles market with three initial licence-holders, and look at the implications of this as mobiles developed through the 1990s. The article offers a brief comparison with the New Zealand mobiles market, and also the promising yet ultimately ‘failed’ technology of the public-access cordless telephone. I conclude with some observations about how such critical examination of history can help to open up policy vistas about mobile media.
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Julian Thomas
The old new television and the new: Digital transitions at home
Over the past decade, a major policy and regulatory problem for governments in Australia and elsewhere has been the implementation of strategies to switch from analogue to digital television broadcasting systems. Despite extensive debate, the transition to digital broadcasting remains fraught. What seems to be a technical matter conceals a range of intractable social, economic and cultural policy decisions. This article explores some of the challenges of digital television through the prism of an earlier, and often overlooked, transformation of television, namely the consumer-driven uptake of what can be called the ‘new television technologies’ of the 1970s and 1980s. These earlier forms of new television help to highlight several arguments: that television was not a stable object prior to digital broadcasting; that the connections between television and broadcasting have been contingent and provisional; and that a remarkable degree of innovation, disruption and adaptation has occurred at the fringes of the broadcasting system, leading to the creation of new audiovisual economies on the boundaries of the household and the market. The article then considers some examples of the ways in which this ‘household sector’ is developing as a new policy problem.
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Jock Given
A 50/50 Proposition: Public–private partnerships in Australian communications
The Australian government’s proposed public–private broadband partnership is the latest dramatisation of the constantly shifting roles of the private and public sectors in communications. Over the last century and a half, the sector has been a steady source of new institutional models around the world. This article examines the experience of Australia’s main wireless company, AWA, as a private–public partnership for nearly 30 years. Reconstructed as a joint enterprise in 1922 to establish direct wireless telegraph services between Australia and Britain and North America, AWA remained co-owned by the Commonwealth and private shareholders until 1951. Several features of this experience seem relevant to the proposed national broadband partnership: the level of political support for the structure; the implications of changes in the use of wireless technology over the life of the investment; the management of market power; financial performance; and the duration of the arrangement.
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Pat Laughren
Debating Australian documentary production policy: Some practitioner perspectives
On 1 July 2008, Screen Australia commenced operation as the main Australian government agency supporting the screen production industry. This article considers some of the policy issues and challenges identified by the ‘community of practitioners’ as facing Australian documentary production at the time of the formation of that ‘super-agency’ from the merger of its three predecessor organisations — the Australian Film Commission, the Film Finance Corporation and Film Australia. The article proceeds by sketching the history of documentary production in Australia and identifying the bases of its financial and regulatory supports. It also surveys recent debate in the documentary sector and attempts to contextualise the themes of those discussions within the history of the Australian documentary.
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Trevor Barr
Broadband bottleneck: History revisited
The vexed issues currently surrounding broadband policy in Australia remind us that the public sector has a great track record in building valuable telecommunications infrastructure. One lesson from the past 150 years is the constructive role played by the public sector by providing the vision and seeding capital for the creation of three major communications platforms: Australia’s overland telegraph in the 1870s, communications satellites funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from the 1950s, and the early internet, funded by the US government from the 1960s to the 1990s. But times have changed and new policy models have emerged. Australia’s telecommunications public policy decisions during the past decade have locked us into having few choices for broadband. The sad irony to date is that the introduction of the open competition model in July 1997, its associated regulatory framework and the full privatisation of Telstra have actually made us less efficient in investment and impeded the development of the broadband networks we need. We might just benefit from revisiting some lessons from history.
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Peter Putnis
The early years of international telegraphy in Australia: A critical assessment
This article examines the political and economic circumstances surrounding the introduction of international telegraphy to Australia in 1872, and analyses the local and international factors that helped shape institutional arrangements for the provision of this service. Its particular, it focuses on the tension between private and public interests in the provision of communication infrastructure, and related issues of public policy, competition (or lack thereof) and pricing.
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Reviews
Edited by Kitty van Vuuren
Alten, Stanley R., Audio in the Media, 8th ed.
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship
Blaetz, Robin (ed.), Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks
Bull, Michael, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience
Carlsson, Ulla, Tayie, Samy, Jacquinot-Delaunay, Genevieve and Tornero, Jose Perez (eds), Empowerment Through Media Education: An Intercultural Dialogue
Drotner, Kirsten and Livingstone, Sonia (eds), The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture
Levine, Elana and Parks, Lisa (eds), Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Lewis, Jon and Smoodin, Eric (eds), Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method
Lowe, Gregory, F. and Bardoel, Jo (eds), From Public Service Broadcasting to Public Service Media
Maltby, Richard, Stokes, Melvyn and Allen, Robert C., Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema
Ruddock, Andy, Investigating Audiences
Sampedro, Victor (Coord.), Medios y Elecciones 2004. La campaña electoral y las ‘otras campañas’
Seneviratne, Kalinga (ed), Media’s Challenge: Asian Tsunami and Beyond
Gunawardene, Nalaka and Noronha, Frederick (eds), Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book
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