|
|
|
Contents
Abstracts
Julia de Roeper and Susan Luckman
Future audiences for Australian stories: Industry responses in a post-Web 2.0 world
The development of global social networking sites using Web 2.0 technologies
(MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc.) is signalling a shift in
media usage towards an environment in which the distinction between producer
and consumer is less clearly defined. While audiences still demand and enjoy a
quality professional product, their active personal experience of media production
means that they are no longer content to remain outside the production process.
This paper outlines the first part of a multi-stage research project that is monitoring
responses on both sides of the divide. Through analysis of media coverage, policy
reports, submissions to government and interviews with a number of senior
executives in leading Australian screen agencies and industry organisations, we
have identified four distinct categories of Australian film industry response to
technological change and shifts in media consumption, provisionally referred to
as ‘Denial’, ‘Panic’, ‘Embrace’ and ‘Co-create’. In this paper, we offer a critical
examination of these responses.
back to top 
Julie Freeman and Brett Hutchins
Balancing the digital democratic deficit? e-Government
This article responds to Thomas’s (2004) call for investigation into how the internet
and World Wide Web are changing government in Australia. It first discusses
e-government principles and policies at the federal level, and then investigates
initiatives and events in one of Australia’s most populous municipalities, the City
of Casey in Melbourne’s southeast. The objective of this approach is to understand
the broader context of e-government policy formulation in Australia, and connect
this to the level of local government in order to understand the features and
dynamics of existing e-government mechanisms. The evidence generated from this
approach reveals an imbalance between service delivery and civic engagement in
e-government strategies, with the emphasis on consumer-oriented service delivery
far outweighing civic participation and political dialogue. The analysis that follows
outlines actual and potential political problems flowing from this imbalance — or
‘digital democratic deficit’ — and offers suggestions on how equilibrium might
be restored.
back to top
Folker Hanusch
The Australian we all aspire to be’: Commemorative journalism and the death of the Crocodile Hunter
This article examines the news coverage generated in Australia by the death of
Steve Irwin, widely known as the Crocodile Hunter. In line with past research on
commemorative journalism, the study demonstrates the dominant discourses employed
in the reporting of Irwin’s death. It is argued that Australia’s newspapers invoked a
number of national myths, such as mateship, larrikinism and anti-elitism, in order
to reassert notions of Australian identity and social values and to deal with the
widespread grief over his loss. Most importantly, the study sheds new light on how
news media deal with challenges to the dominant memorialising discourse. Past
studies had not been able to investigate alternative discourses in much detail, but
in examining Irwin’s death we are able to see how the media deal with such an
unwanted interruption. It is argued that newspapers appropriated the alternative
perspective within the mythical terms of their memorialising discourse, thereby not
allowing it to disrupt the memorialisation itself and in fact further strengthening
the process of mythologising the Crocodile Hunter.
back to top
Glen Donnar
A support withdrawn: ‘Spain’s 9/11’ and Australian newspaper framing
This study represents an attempt to redress the neglect of academic research
into coverage of the Madrid train bombings through a content analysis of major
Australian newspapers in the immediate aftermath (12–21 March 2004). It quantifies
a sudden and significant shift in representation from a ‘support for Spain’ news
frame following the bombings to a ‘criticism of Spain’ frame following the Spanish
national election result only three days later. Australian newspapers made support
for a terrorised Spain conditional on a politics of representation marked by the
‘war on terror’ as a master frame, and served to reflect the political interests and
sponsored interpretation of government sources. The moral implications of this
withdrawal of support for the Spanish cannot be under-estimated, for it suggests that
Australian newspapers were prepared to contribute to an ‘erosion’ of compassion
for recent victims of terrorism.
back to top
Sal Humphreys
Computer games: Co-creation and regulation
This introduction to the special issue on games, co-creation and regulation introduces
some key concepts arising from the phenomenon of user-generated content in
interactive media environments such as online computer games. It canvasses the
work of the seven authors who have contributed to the special issue, covering a
range of areas such as advertising and surveillance, participatory design, end user
licence agreements, user-generated classification and participant rights.
back to top
Sal Humphreys
Discursive constructions of MMOGs and some implications for policy and regulation
This paper examines how the production of interactive, co-creative software such
as multiplayer online games differs from conventional media production, and
how stakeholders employ different discursive constructions to understand those
environments. The convergence of forms and functions, and the emergence of new
structures that cross pre-existent regulatory and policy boundaries, mean that
the discourses adopted to describe these environments and enact regulation and
control need to be examined for the particular interests they represent. The paper
canvasses six different discourses about online social software such as games, and
briefly discusses the implications of each for areas such as intellectual property,
classification, governance, data privacy, creative industries and global crossjurisdictional
infrastructures.
back to top
Mark Andrejevic
Productive play 2.0: The logic of in-game advertising
Online video games are helping to pioneer the use of interactive advertising that
targets consumers based on information about their behaviour, consumption patterns,
and other demographic and psychographic information. This article draws on the
example of in-game ads to explore some of the ways in which advertisers harness
virtual worlds to marketing imperatives, and equate realism and authenticity with
the proliferation of commercial messages. Since video games have the potential to
serve as a model for other forms of marketing both online and off, the way in which
they are being used to exploit interactivity as a form of commercial monitoring
has broader implications for the digital economy.
back to top
John Banks
Co-creative expertise: Auran Games and Fury — a case study
This article discusses the ways in which the relations among professional and nonprofessional
participants in co-creative relations are being reconfigured as part of
the shift from a closed industrial paradigm of expertise towards open and distributed
expertise networks. This article draws on ethnographic consultancy research
undertaken throughout 2007 with Auran Games, a Brisbane, Australia-based games
developer, to explore the co-creative relationships between professional developers
and gamers. This research followed and informed Auran’s online community
management and social networking strategies for Fury (http://unleashthefury.com),
a massively multiplayer online game released in October 2007. This paper argues
that these co-creative forms of expertise involve coordinating expertise through
social-network markets.
back to top
Nicolas Suzor
On the (partially) inalienable rights of participants in virtual communities
As virtual communities become more central to the everyday activities of connected
individuals, we face increasingly pressing questions about the proper allocation
of power, rights and responsibilities. This paper argues that our current legal
discourse is ill-equipped to provide answers that will safeguard the legitimate
interests of participants and simultaneously refrain from limiting the future innovative
development of these spaces. From social networking sites like Facebook to virtual
worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life, participants who are banned from
these communities stand to lose their virtual property, their connections to their
friends and family, and their personal expression. Because our legal system views
the proprietor’s interests as absolute private property rights, however, participants
who are arbitrarily, capriciously or maliciously ejected have little recourse under
law. This paper argues that, rather than assuming that a private property and
freedom of contract model will provide the most desirable outcomes, a more
critical approach is warranted. By rejecting the false dichotomy between ‘public’
and ‘private’ spaces, and recognising some of the absolutist and necessitarian
trends in the current property debate, we may be able to craft legal rules that
respect the social bonds between participants while simultaneously protecting the
interests of developers.
back to top
Dale Clapperton
Electronic contracts: A law unto themselves?
Electronic contracts, however described, are everywhere in the digital environment.
In computer games, they govern the relationship not only between the gamer and
the game publisher, but the gamer and the game. Yet, despite their ubiquity, their
substantive content receives relatively little attention. Consumers assent without
reading them, and publishers and their lawyers adopt oppressive contracts, seemingly
without thought for the rights of their customers. Whether a market failure or a
rational response, electronic contracting seems to be stuck in a vicious cycle of
apathy and indifference. This paper explores these issues, as well as examples
of games-related electronic contracts, common terms in such contracts, and how
those contracts might be affected areas of law including contract, copyright,
competition and consumer protection. Might these areas of law provide a stimulus
for ‘clickwrap reform’?
back to top
Jeffrey Brand and Mark Finn
Informing our own choices: A proposal for user-generated classification
New media are distrusted media, and computer games are the contemporary
currency in new media. Computer game content, like other popular media content, is
regulated in different jurisdictions by one of three general models: the open market
in which consumption decides the availability of product, industry self-regulation in
which industry bodies decide, and government regulation in which government or
quasi-governmental bodies decide. Arguably, these models represent the twentieth
century state of the art and fail to keep pace with changes in the aesthetics and
technologies associated with interactive entertainment. In a networked economy,
alternative models exist to serve content gatekeeping functions, and they serve
to close the lags and limitations that plague existing models. These alternatives
include innovations such as user-generated classification and dynamic meta-tagging.
This paper examines current classification approaches and their limitations, and
presents alternative approaches with a hypothetical game title.
back to top
Reviews
Edited by Susan Bye
In this issue
Barfield, Ray, A Word from Our Viewers: Reflections from Early Television Audiences
Baron, Naomi S., Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World
Breit, Rhonda, Law and Ethics for Professional Communicators
Bruns, Axel, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage
Caldwell, John Thornton, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television
Chu, Yingchi, Chinese Documentaries: From Dogma to Polyphony
Cooper, Sally, A Burqa and a Hard Place: Three Years in the New Afghanistan
Ekström, K. M. and Tufte, B. (eds), Children, Media and Consumption: On the Front Edge
Giblett, Rod, Sublime Communication Technologies
Hilmes, Michele (ed.), NBC: America’s Network
Lam, Adam and Oryshchuk, Nataliya (eds), How We Became Middle Earth: A Collection of Essays on The Lord of The Rings
Marolf, Gerald, Advergaming and In-Game Advertising: An Approach to the Next Generation of Advertising
Ott, Brian L., The Small Screen: How Television Equips Us to Live in the Information Age
Sconce, Jeffrey (ed.), Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics
Sparks, Colin, Globalization, Development and the Mass Media
Tremayne, Mark (ed.), Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media
Winseck, Dwayne R. and Pike, Robert M., Communication and Empire: Media, Markets and Globalization
8
back to top
|
