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Contents
Abstracts
The ABC and the 2006 federal media reforms
Elizabeth Jacka
This article dissects the implications for the ABC of the current Australian government media reforms. If the quality of policy development and discussion of such changes to key media laws and policy is poor in general, the level of consideration of the role of public broadcasting is worse. The author also considers other perennial dilemmas such as advertising on the ABC, governance and political interference, concluding that the new communications landscapes makes the ABC and public service broadcasting more necessary than ever — yet it is still awaiting a thorough exploration and adequate public discussion.
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Digital challenges for community broadcasting
Barry Melville
This article considers the current developments in convergence from the perspective of community broadcasting in Australia. It examines government media reforms and plans relating to digital technology and content, and notes the potential of community broadcasting to contribute to goals of diversity, innovation and new services. The paper concludes with various policy proposals which aim to ensure that the ‘third tier’ of free-to-air broadcasting is included in the transition to digital services.
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Net neutrality: No easy answers
Danny Butt
This article considers the debate on ‘network neutrality’, and the idea that the internet should carry all internet traffic equally without prioritising different kinds of traffic or discriminating among types of content. It considers contemporary developments in the internet and its business models, and urges caution about adopting simplistic solutions in the name of saving the public internet. Instead, the author suggests that there is a need to clarify the public benefits of network access, and to develop mechanisms to support these.
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Digging for disability
Christopher Newell
This article reads media coverage of the May 2006 Beaconsfield Gold Mine rescue through the lens of disability. It argues that disability is essential to the way discourses of heroism, masculinity and nationalism were constructed in the rescue of the miners. However, the importance of disability to this, and other aspects of media, politics and society in Australia, was not well recognised — yet raises important questions.
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Travelling with James W. Carey
Steven Maras
James W. Carey’s recent death provides an occasion to trace the reception and reworking of some of his ideas in Australia. A significant scholar, Carey made contributions to communication, cultural, media and journalism studies. Carey’s work can be tackled in a number of ways, and this essay reflects upon his contribution to these fields, with a special focus on the Australian context. The essay approaches Carey’s work thematically, through notions of ‘culture and communication’ and ‘journalism’, and purposefully tries to draw links between the two.
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Censorship of sexually explicit materials: What do consumers of pornography have to say?
Alan McKee
This article attempts to bring a new set of voices into public debates about censorship in Australia—those of consumers of pornography. Forty-six consumers—chosen to provide the most diverse range of voices across gender, age, sexuality, income, place of residence and state/territory—were interviewed in detail. Interviewees consistently distinguished between beneficial and harmful pornography. The main issue was consent, with child pornography, bestiality and violent pornography being singled out for condemnation. The interviewees noted that public debates about pornography in Australia tend to favour conservative religious positions. All interviewees agreed that censorship was necessary; they particularly focused on the need to keep sexually explicit materials away from children. They evinced a strong distrust of politicians and bureaucrats, and mostly presented a classical liberal line. Several of the consumers had children of their own: all of these interviewees argued that their children should not see sexually explicit material and had strategies in place to ensure that their own did not.
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(Re)constructing Port Arthur and Thredbo: tourist site tragedies and Myths of national character
Annona Pearse
This paper examines the role of the media in disseminating and perpetuating the mythology of shared national characteristics with particular reference to the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 and the Thredbo landslide in 1997. Attention is given in my research to the ways in which public grief and mourning are conducted through the media following such events, and how the shock of significant loss of life is ameliorated by the reinforcement of national characteristics. The positive actions of victims, survivors and rescuers are projected through the media as being representative of ‘Australianness’, thereby further entrenching the mythology of national characteristics within wider discourse.
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Gentrification, cultural policy and live music in Melbourne
Ramon Lobato
This paper examines the regulation of nightlife in Melbourne, with a special focus on live music venues. Widespread gentrification of the city centre and inner suburbs has recently created considerable tension between residents and venues. Under pressure from both sides, the state government established the Live Music Taskforce in 2003, and its findings resulted in a semi-formal—albeit largely symbolic—policy reorientation towards the protection of existing music venues. Through a case study of the Live Music Taskforce policy development process, the author argues that the Bracks government’s creative cities development strategy and its overriding economic motivations have, in this instance, intersected with the broader cultural needs of Melbourne. However, such productive intersections can in no way be assured by creative industries planning models, whose interest in cultural activity is conditional upon its economic value.
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Media education: authority, identity and value—an editorial dialogue
Sara Bragg, David Buckingham and Sue Turnbull
In this ‘dialogue’ article, the three editors of the special issue debate three key themes arising from the articles that follow. We discuss the dilemmas posed by the institutionalisation or ‘authorisation’ of media education within the formal education system; persistent questions about the role of media education as an intervention in the processes of students’ identity formation; and the vexed debate about judgments of cultural value and their relevance to the field. The discussion suggests some shared themes and some clear differences between Australasian and British perspectives, which emerge from their overlapping but distinctive histories.
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Media studies: Finding an identity
Robyn Quin
This paper argues that, from the beginning, Media Studies—at least in Australian schools and universities—did not display the usual organising principles of an academic subject. Media Studies in both Australian secondary schools and universities has traditionally been organised to include the written alongside the oral and practical, to integrate theory with practice, to focus on the application—often at the expense of the abstraction of knowledge. At the school level, this theory/production integration has been justified and promoted under the rubric that students ‘learn by doing’. At university level, much of the same rhetoric is used but at the tertiary level media production classes also cater for the students who see—or hope to see—that a degree in Media Studies is an entrée into the media industries. This approach, the integration of training in media production with education in media theory and criticism, produces tensions, apparent contradictions and misalignments that are obvious to teachers and students alike. Drawing from post-modernist critiques and sociologies of subject knowledge, the study uses interviews with school teachers, students, academics and observations of lessons at school and university level to describe the issues and concerns from multiple perspectives.
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Media education and the limits of assessment
Julian McDougall
This paper is concerned with subject identity and assessment in the case of contemporary English (UK) Media Studies. It explores the relationship between the ‘spirit’ of Media Studies, notions of its relative value and its institutionalised version, ‘Subject Media’ (its authority, as administered by examiners). The case study given attention is the first examination of a new specification for AS (Advanced Subsidiary) Media Studies, held by the English awarding body, OCR, in 2000. The AS level is taken after GCSE and before the full A Level (A2), usually by students aged 16–17 in school sixth form or further education colleges. The paper suggests, through analysis of examiner discourse, that the assessment of media learning is not yet organised into a ‘vertical discourse’ (Bernstein, 1996), although examiners will it to be so. These findings set up the possibility that the distinguishing features of Media Studies in England might be over-stated.
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Globalisation, nationalism and post-socialist media education
Anikó Imre
The article examines contemporary attempts in education to come to terms with the effects of globalised media and the waning authority of the nation-state. It compares current debates regarding the role of electronic media in US education with the state of media education in post-socialist Eastern Europe, where the desired accession to the European Union, accelerated technological changes and the entry into a globalised economy have induced thorough reforms in the structure and content of national education and set in motion intense negotiations about how electronic media are shaping the values and identities of the next generations. The essay focuses on the achievements and ambivalences of the newly introduced Hungarian national media education curriculum and parallel, state-supported print reading initiatives.
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‘Like Shakespeare it’s a good thing’: Cultural value in the classroom
Sara Bragg
Questions of cultural value, aesthetics and evaluative judgments have vexed media education since its inception. Whilst they continue to count heavily both in teachers’ conceptions of the work they do, and in students’ responses to it, they have become increasingly problematic in contemporary society. The diverse environments of contemporary schools and the capacity of new media technologies to foster different taste communities have contributed to the dispersal of cultural authority and undermined traditional judgments. This article addresses how we might approach cultural value through a case study approach, exploring multiple value judgments deployed by teachers and students in post-16 classroom practice. It shows how current pedagogical thinking about cultural value does not take into account the complexity of classroom life, particularly its social relations and young people’s awareness of the valorised identities and ‘supervisory discourses’ that circulate there. It explores specific educational practices that might make it possible for students to enter into debates about value, taste and preference.
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Thought beats: New technology, music video and media education
Steve Archer
This paper has as its focus two key strands that are significant to contemporary media education. The first is the increasing move towards creative production work as the central and dominant feature of media studies courses. In UK schools, this has largely been facilitated by the rapid expansion of digital technologies. Whilst this offers unprecedented opportunities for students to construct advanced and highly polished artefacts, it has also created new challenges for the media teacher in relation to pedagogy and classroom management. The second strand is the emergence of globalised, commercial media cultures and their relation to new media forms facilitated by digital technology. Here, this paper is interested in the relatively new media form of the music video which, in its dominant mode of distribution and exhibition, exists globally as part of satellite and digital packages. Music video as a form is ideal for use in Media Studies as an object of study and as a framework for facilitating creative work. Based on practitioner research methods, this paper teases out the tensions that exist between popular culture, media education and digital technology, incorporating the way a sense of community located beyond the school can create opportunities for student creative work.
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Prince Charming has perfect white teeth: Performativity and Media education
Michael Dezuanni
This paper argues that Judith Butler’s post-structuralist theory of performativity provides a valuable tool for understanding how students might contest prevailing hegemonic gender discourses in media education classrooms. It suggests an alternative to structuralist ‘empowerment’ and ‘critical pedagogy’ approaches, which continue to motivate many media educators, despite serious questions being asked about their effectiveness. The paper draws on data collected from a unit of work about video games, completed by Year 10 students at an all-boys secondary school in Brisbane. It argues that many media-related activities fail to elicit genuinely ‘critical’ responses because they are complicit in the regulation of hegemonic discourses. It suggests that teachers are more likely to create the potential for variation in their students’ gender performances if activities are dialogic and open-ended, and avoid placing emphasis on discourses of excellence and competition.
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Class in the Classroom: Media students, pedagogy and Legally Blonde
Angela Devas
This paper argues that widening participation, which is now part of the agenda of higher education, has been insufficiently acknowledged by the media and cultural studies community, particularly in regard to pedagogic practices. The author examines the teaching of Legally Blonde, a film about an unconventional entrant to Harvard University, to first-year students on a Media Arts course, nearly all of whom came from non-traditional backgrounds. Interviews with a small cohort of students reveal that some experienced a degree of alienation at university. The students were asked to write essays on Legally Blonde that drew on theoretical understandings of widening participation, class, gender and race. The students’ readings of the film are examined to highlight issues of identity and belonging in the academy, and to demonstrate the students’ own understandings of structural inequalities.
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Teaching for the revolution: The Long March of Media Studies
Sue Turnbull
This paper constitutes a form of auto-ethnography, reflecting on my career as a teacher of media in the United Kingdom during the 1970s and in Australia in 2006. The biographical method was chosen in order to affirm the value of media education in relation to the personal experience of both the student and the teacher, and to question the authority and value of the various Media Studies curricula as they have evolved over the last 30 years within the institutions of the school and the university. This account constitutes part of a larger project on the part of the author entitled ‘Moments of Intensity’, which is concerned with issues of affect and aesthetics in the experience of teaching media and popular culture.
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REVIEWS
Edited by: Kitty van Vuuren and Angi Buettner
Anderson, Brian C., South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias
Ang, Ien, Brand, Jeff, Noble, Greg and Sternberg, Jason, Connecting Diversity: Paradoxes of a Multicultural Australia
Alia, Vaeria and Bull, Simone, Media and Ethnic Minorities
Craig, Geoffrey, The Media, Politics and Public Life
Cunningham, Stuart and Turner, Graeme (eds), The Media and Communications in Australia, 2nd edn
Cyrino, Monica Silveira, Big Screen Rome
Dickenson, Ben, Hollywood’s New Radicalism: War, Globalisation and the Movies from Regan to George W. Bush
Downie, Christian and Macintosh, Andrew, New Media or More of the Same? The Cross-media Ownership Debates
Willett, Ed, Convergence, Media and the ACCC, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission
English, James F., The Economy of Prestige
Goode, Luke, Jurgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere
Hawkins, Gay, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish
Haynes, Richard, Media Rights and Intellectual Property
King, Madonna, Catalyst: The Power of the Media and the Public to Make Change
Lockyer, Sharon and Pickering, Michael (eds), Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour
McCauley, Michael P., NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio
Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image
O’Farrell, Clare, Michel Foucault
Servaes, Jan and Carpentier, Nico, Towards a Sustainable Information Society
Tanner, Stephen, Phillips, Gail, Smyth, Chris and Tapsall, Suellen, Journalism Ethics at Work
Hirst, Martin and Patching, Roger, Journalism Ethics: Arguments and Cases
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