Media International Australia 2010

Television Comedy and Light Entertainment   No 134, February 2010 Theme Editors: Felicity Collins, Sue Turnbull and Susan Bye Buy this issue Subscription and order form Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

Australia’s proposed internet filtering system: its implications for animation, comics and gaming (ACG) and slash fan communities

Mark McLelland

This paper investigates the implications of the federal government’s proposed internet filtering system in the light of Australia’s blanket prohibition on ‘child pornography’ (including cartoons, animation, drawings, digitally manipulated photographs and text) for Australian fan communities of ACG and slash. ACG/slash fan groups in Australia and elsewhere routinely consume, produce and disseminate material containing ‘prohibited content’ (i.e. featuring fictitious ‘under-age’ characters in violent and sexual scenarios). Moreover, a large proportion of the fans producing and trading in these images are themselves ‘under age’. Focusing specifically on the overwhelmingly female fandom surrounding the Japanese Boys’ Love (BL) manga , the paper argues that legislators have misrecognised the nature and scope of these online communities. It is also argued that the sheer scale of this kind of material, and the fact that it is legal to download and purchase in jurisdictions such as the United States and Japan, make attempts to prohibit access to these purely fictional depictions in Australia unworkable.

News in ‘new media’: An historical comparison between the arrival of television and online news in Australia

Margaret Van Heekeren

The quest to identify the ‘new’ in new media has led to recognition of an historical continuity in the technological and cultural circumstances surrounding the introduction of new media forms. A newer area of research is the identification of a similar patterning in the adaptation of content delivery. This article examines news content through a snapshot of two periods in Australian news media history: the arrival of television news in 1956, and the advent of online news in 1995. It finds a repetitive familiarity in the response of newspaper publishers on both occasions in terms of the organisation of news divisions and news delivery, which raises questions about the ability of new media to offer greater diversity of mainstream news content.

Shifting positions to the media discourse on terrorism: Critical points in audience members’ meaning-making experiences

Anne Aly

In his essay on encoding/decoding, Hall (1980) acknowledges that events in the broader socio-political context influence the way audiences position themselves in relation to the dominant hegemonic discourse. This article reports on an investigation into how Australian audience members continuously reviewed and shifted their positions to media texts that contributed to an over-arching evolving and changing discourse of terrorism in the Australian popular media. The findings of the study illuminate critical points in meaning-making in relation to the evolving discourse on terrorism. These critical points are not single moments, but rather a series of determinate moments where messages are decoded, subsumed into the range of cultural codes and discourses available to the audience, which are then implicated in the decoding of other messages, and then also subsumed into the cultural codes of the audience.

Communication services in remote Indigenous communities

Franco Papandrea

Access to and use of modern communication services in remote Indigenous communities in Australia lags considerably behind that in the rest of Australia because of inadequate supply arrangements and prevalent economic and social conditions. This article presents some findings of research on the availability and use of telephone and internet services in remote Indigenous communities in central Australia. The research involved the collection of community-wide data on the availability of telephone and internet services as well as details of individual user experience in the use of those services. In evaluating the findings, the article suggests potential improvements to programs for the delivery of better communication services in remote communities.

Television comedy and light entertainment

Felicity Collins, Sue Turnbull and Susan Bye

This issue of MIA provides an opportunity to consider the various ways in which light entertainment and comedy intersect with the national, social and broadcast contexts in which they are produced.

On television comedy as an invented tradition

Brett Mills

Existing analysis of the relationships between comedy and nation commonly work from an assumption that nations have a sense of humour that in some way defines them, while comedy texts — such as those broadcast on television and radio — merely draw on these pre-existing phenomena (Richards, 1997). This article instead demonstrates a more complex relationship between the two, suggesting that broadcast comedy is an ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), which has been one of the most powerful ways for nations to define themselves — often at the expense of the complexities and contradictions within any one nation state. Drawing on the idea that nations are ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983), this article takes the BBC as a case study, exploring the ways in which an understanding of the ‘British sense of humour’ has evolved in response to the needs of the nation. In doing so, it explores historically significant moments such as World War II, as well as a range of regional comedy that doesn’t make it into national broadcasting circuits. In addition, the notion of ‘Britishness’ that is sold abroad via such programming is examined. In doing so, this article outlines the ways in which ideas of comedy and the nation intertwine, as well as exploring the problems this relationship might cause for alternative or oppositional ideas of the nation.

The funny thing about Scottish independents …

Lynne Hibberd

The Comedy Unit is one of the most successful independent production companies in Scotland. Established in 1995 by former employees of BBC Scotland and based in Glasgow, The Comedy Unit uses a specifically Scottish voice in its productions — a factor that increases its success outside Scotland. This article examines the national specificity of The Comedy Unit’s television productions and explores the reliance of the independent sector in Scotland on the BBC. This includes an exploration of the role and importance of Scottish national identity in four programs made by The Comedy Unit. The paper contributes to the body of work examining the national specificity of comedy, the nature and structure of the television industries in the United Kingdom, and the largely neglected area of television production and television entertainment in Scotland.

Character and comic innovation in Australia You’re Standing In It

Susan Bye

This article focuses on the sketch show Australia You’re Standing In It in order to trace the contribution of the ABC to the revitalisation of the comedy landscape of Australian television during the 1980s and beyond. I argue that when Australia You’re Standing In It was screened on the ABC in 1983, it revived the identification of ABC television with comic invention and heralded a subsequent explosion of TV sketch and stand-up comedy. For the national broadcaster, the long-term benefits of the show’s modest success were an increasing confidence in the place of comedy at the ABC — a confidence underpinned by the vitality of the new Melbourne-based Light Entertainment Unit.

The long tail of Mother and Son: The transnational career of an Australian situation comedy

Sue Turnbull

This article challenges the proposition that Australian television comedy does not succeed in overseas markets through a discussion of the transnational career of the ABC sitcom , Mother and Son (1984–94). A brief account of the development of the Australian sitcom up to 1984 is provided, with attention to British and American influences on the Australian genre. Following a close discussion of the comedy operational within the show, an examination of the international sales and adaptations of Mother and Son reveals how the specific tonal qualities of the humour may have been lost in translation or adapted to suit different cultural contexts. The implications of these findings for the transnational career of contemporary Australian comedy are then raised.

‘Mum likes Bandstand too’: Creating the teenage audience on Australian television

Michelle Arrow

Television and rock’n’roll both arrived in Australia in 1956, twin symbols of modernity and Americanised consumerism. Television was crucial to the dissemination of rock’n’roll, amplifying its shocks but also rendering it palatable for a broader audience. While it was important in the articulation of the new youth culture, television — unlike film or even radio — had to be more mindful of the familial, domestic context of broadcasting. This article explores the ways in which television networks shaped, and catered to, a teenage audience in the first years of Australian television through an examination of the early teenage music programs, Six O’Clock Rock and Bandstand , with a particular focus on audience responses.

Chasing reporters: Intertextuality, entertainment and public knowledge

Stephen Harrington

This article examines ‘What Have We Learned From Current Affairs This Week?’ — a very successful weekly segment from the ABC program The Chaser’s War on Everything . It argues that, through its intertextual satire, this regular segment acts not as a traditional news program would in presenting news updates on current events, but as a text that reflects on the way news is reported, and how this in turn may shape public discourse. While the program has been highly controversial (enduring many a loud call for it to be pulled from air), this form of light entertainment can play an important public service by encouraging citizens to ‘read through’ commercial current affairs’ façade of ‘quality’ journalism.

Learning to labour on the reality talent show

Guy Redden

From Idol and So You Think You Can Dance to the Got Talent franchise, light entertainment has returned to screens in a form that is globally popular. This article examines this new genre (which is, of course, a revival of an old one) in the light of recent hybridisations of television programs, and proposes that the particular configurations in which the new shows present singing, dancing and specialty acts are indicative of broader interrelated changes in TV and society. With reference mainly to Australian shows, it is argued that the new variants both depict and enact the commodification of precarious labour in line with exigencies of the contemporary cultural industries and imperatives of the new economy. The genre’s pleasures are directed into commodifiable value in strictly controlled, competitive formats of celebrity-creation, resulting in a mode of accumulation that capitalises on the largely gifted labour of the enthusiastic participants who co-create the entertainment spectacle with little guaranteed return.

Cross-dressed and crossing over from stage to television

Jonathan Bollen

Female impersonation was a popular aspect of light entertainment in mid-twentieth century Australia. On stage, the Kiwis Revue Company, an army entertainment unit from New Zealand, toured extensively for eight years from 1946, with three female impersonators as the highlight of an all-male bill. Female impersonation was also standard fare on variety shows during television’s first decade. In such sketch comedies and spoofs lie television’s strongest claims to inheriting the traditions of variety performance from the stage. Comedic drag roles, in particular, came directly from the stage, for the visual incongruities of costume, wigs and make-up would have had less currency on radio. This article explores the cross-gendered dimensions of light entertainment on television and stage, drawing on film and television recordings at the National Film and Sound Archive and research at Australia’s performing arts collections.

Reviews in this issue

Edited by Susan Bye

Arrow, Michelle, Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia Since 1945

Atton, Chris and Hamilton, James F., Alternative Journalism

Belfiore, Eleonora and Bennett, Oliver, The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History

Bruns, Axel, and Bahnisch, Mark, Social Media: Tools for User-Generated Content Social Drivers, Volume 1 — State of the Art

Churchill, Suzanne W. and McKibble, Adam (eds), Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches

Edgerton, Gary R., The Columbia History of American Television

Hilderbrand, Lucas, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright

Hillis, Ken, Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign

Holland, Samantha (ed.), Remote Relationships in a Small World

Kraus, Jerelle, All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside the New York Times Op-Ed Page

Ling, Rich and Campbell, Scott (eds), The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices

Sarikakis, Katharine (ed.), Media and Cultural Policy in the European Union

Sarwal, Amit and Sarwal, Reema (eds), Creative Nation: Australian Cinema and Cultural Studies Reader

Starkey, Guy and Crisell, Andrew, Radio Journalism Turkle, Sherry (ed.), The Inner History of Devices

Verhoeven, Deb, Jane Campion

Children, Young People, Sexuality and the Media No 135, May 2010 Theme Editors: Kath Albury and Catharine Lumby Buy this issue Subscription and order form Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

Sending a message? Refugees and Australia’s deterrence campaign
Roslyn Richardson
While Australia’s immigration deterrence policies, such as the temporary protection visa (TPV), mandatory detention system and ‘Pacific Solution’ have been criticised on ethical and legal grounds, the core justification for these policies has remained largely untouched. This article challenges the key justification behind many of Australia’s immigration policies — that they ‘send a strong message’ to potential irregular migrants and people smugglers. Drawing on a communication studies perspective and cultural studies audience research, the study outlined in this article demonstrates that these policies are based on a flawed and outdated view of the communication process and a simplistic understanding of refugee audiences. The article reveals that, like all audiences, refugee audiences are diverse, unpredictable and capable of producing a variety of interpretations of the messages they receive. This article calls for a recognition that the transmission and reception of Australia’s deterrence ‘messages’ are far from straightforward.

Newspaper blogs: The genuine article or poor counterfeits?
Mary Garden
Blogging began as a grassroots alternative phenomenon, and it was some years before the mainstream media took notice, let alone responded by introducing their own blogs. However, the blogs of Australian journalists (especially those of News Ltd) have been criticised as being ineffective, although such criticism is based on anecdotal evidence rather than substantive data. This article presents the findings of a pilot study that examined the popularity, interactivity and hyperlinks of twelve political blogs across mainstream and alternative media sites. The greatest challenge of blogging has been to one of traditional journalism’s weakest points: its lack of personal contact with readers. The results of this study indicate that there are Australian journalists who have taken up the challenge, with their blogs outshining their alternative counterparts, especially in terms of reader engagement. This represents an exciting new trend, where blogging, rather than being a threat, may reinvigorate mainstream media and help democratise news processes.

Arts and business: The impact of business models on the activities of major performing arts organisations in Australia
Jo Caust
Managerial business models were first introduced to Australian subsidised performing arts organisations by the then Howard Coalition government in 2000. Until the early 1990s, Australian arts organisations were contextualised as ‘not for profit’ entities, with an overall objective of producing good art. Over the past decade, however, major Australian performing arts organisations have been viewed more frequently as part of an ‘industry’ and, within this industry construct, framed as ‘business entities’, with a need to prove positive financial outcomes as a first priority. This article explores what is meant by business models in the context of Australian major performing arts organisations and looks at the impact of this approach.

Framing Australian telecommunication policy: A case study of the 1996 Review of Standard Telephone Service
Michael Bourk
This article discusses the influence of sociolinguistic structures such as metaphors and narratives as organising cognitive frames on telecommunication policy, its representation in the media and other public documents. In particular, it identifies the tension between competing narratives of national development and competition in the public debates and official records of the 1996 Review of Standard Telephone Service . The article argues that metaphors and narratives perform similar but distinctive persuasive and formative functions that extend beyond mere description. Collectively, they influence not only what we think of telecommunication technology and associated policy but how we imagine alternative policy scenarios and future technological innovation.

Introduction: Children, young people, sexuality and the media
Kath Albury and Catharine Lumby
Since the 2008 Australian Senate Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Environment, both the British and Scottish governments have conducted their own inquiries into the role that mediated representations of sex and/or sexuality play in the lives of children and young people. At the same time, scholars, commentators, activists and educators have continued to debate the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘pornography’ in representations of children and young people; and the boundaries between ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ content in popular and educational material for children and young people. This article introduces the multidisciplinary approach taken in this special issue of Media International Australia , which the editors hope will promote positive strategic approaches to promoting safety, agency and well-being for children and young people.

Raunch culture goes to school? Young women, normative femininities and elite education
Claire Charles
Public concern about popular culture’s sexualisation of women and girls is regularly voiced in the Australian media. Young women grow up against a backdrop of ‘raunch culture’ (Levy, 2005), which for some scholars represents a ‘new’ femininity (Gill, 2007), in which ‘hyper-sexual’ forms of (hetero)sexual expression are now expected of young women and girls, despite ostensibly being about choice and personal empowerment. In this article, I explore the constructions of girlhood and femininity amongst young women attending an elite, single-sex, private school in Melbourne, Australia. Elite schooling for girls is often associated with highly classed notions of (hetero)sexual modesty and propriety, epitomised in the reality television program Ladette to Lady . Here I consider how hyper-sexualities are configured within students’ constructions of themselves and others, and I explore their relationship to classed expectations of identity for privileged girls. I examine the role that classed norms of identity play in mediating these girls’ negotiations of hyper-sexualities.

Hot for teacher: The cultural erotics and anxieties of adolescent sexuality
Steven Angelides
This article takes popular media scandals surrounding cases of female secondary school teachers charged with sexual offences against male students as its point of inquiry. Using the infamous story of former American schoolteacher Debra Lafave as a case study, it examines the over-determined dynamics of fascination, eroticisation and anxiety structuring the representation and reception of this case and others like it. The article argues that the ‘sex panic’ over female teacher sex offenders is often less about the women than it is about male adolescent sexuality.

When subject becomes object: Nakedness, art and the public sphere
Kate MacNeill
In May 2008, a photograph of a naked twelve-year-old girl by the Australian artist Bill Henson came to the attention of the Australian public when it was featured on an invitation to the opening of an exhibition at a commercial art gallery in Sydney. Within hours, a debate had commenced about the appropriateness of the image and the intentions of the artist. It rapidly descended into the familiar argument of art versus pornography, with protagonists lining up on one side or the other. There seemed no shared space in which to discuss this particular image and instance. Drawing on contributions to this very public debate, I demonstrate the way in which the closed nature of the art system leaves many of its practitioners unable to engage in the wider conversations that occur when artworks travel beyond the credentialling context of the art gallery and enter the public space.

Feminism, sexualisation and social status
Robbie Duschinsky
New formulations and responses to classic questions have emerged in recent feminist thinking on the relationship between gender and consumption. One instance of this is the work of Abigail Bray on the damage caused by the media sexualisation of girls. She offers important insights into some problems with the discourse of media and sexual empowerment, and also critically considers the social distinction that such an discourse tends to confer. This article offers a sympathetic account of her argument, but also moves beyond Bray to express concerns regarding the class and race codings of the discourse of childhood innocence.

The innocence fetish: The commodification and sexualisation of children in the media and popular culture
Joanne Faulkner
Over the past century, a great deal of cultural energy has been invested in the ideal of childhood innocence, to the extent that innocence is frequently cited as our society’s most valuable asset. More recently, however, the dominant sentiment — frequently represented in news and current affairs media — has been that childhood innocence is imperilled, and that the ‘less responsible’ aspects of our popular media are putting it at risk. This article argues that the reasoning that engenders innocence with cultural value invites, and even demands, its violation. Specifically, the very same influences through which the child has come to be valorised also lead to the desire for and consumption of innocence. Innocence has become a ‘fetish’, positioned as a lost freedom and plenitude inciting desire. This article draws upon psychoanalytic theory to place into its correct context the anxiety about childhood innocence. It argues that these ‘responsible’ lamentations about the sexualisation of children and the loss of childhood innocence contribute to (rather than avert) a fetishisation of innocence that both prepares the ground for childhood to become the ultimate commodity, and ignores the concrete circumstances, desires and capacities of children.

Revisiting moral panics in sexuality education
Mary Lou Rasmussen
There is a common impulse within academic research on sexuality education to draw on the notion of moral panic in order to better understand ‘unreasonable’ and emotional opposition to the implementation of sexuality education programs. The aim of this article is to interrogate this tendency to classify religious opposition to the sexuality education curriculum as suggestive of a ‘moral panic’. I begin with a brief discussion of how the notion of ‘moral panic’ is commonly used in academic and popular discourse, and proceed to a discussion of ‘moral panic’ in the field of sexuality education, specifically focusing on the work of US researcher Janice Irvine. I also consider some research on recent South Australian controversies related to sexuality education in schools. Finally, I consider the attribution of ‘moral panic’ in accounting for religious opposition to sexuality education as a secular formation.

Everything is child abuse
Alan McKee
In 2008, the Australian federal Senate held an Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Environment. I made a submission to this Inquiry, noting that in public debate about this topic a number of quite distinct issues, with distinct aetiologies, were collapsed together. These included: child pornography; children being targeted by any form of marketing; young people becoming sexually active; sexual abuse of children; raunch culture; protecting children from any sexualised material in the media; and body image disorders. I suggested that commentators had collapsed these issues together because the image of the helpless child is a powerful one for critics to challenge undesirable aspects of contemporary culture. The result of many different ideological viewpoints all using the same argument — that the forms of culture they didn’t like were damaging children — gives the impression that there is no element of culture today that isn’t (somebody claims) causing harm to children: everything is child abuse. The danger of such discourses is that they draw attention away from the real harm that is being caused to children by sexual and other forms of maltreatment — which overwhelmingly occur within families, and for reasons ignored in these debates.

Too much? Too young? The sexualisation of children debate in Australia
Catharine Lumby and Kath Albury
This article considers the origins and focus of current Australian debates around the alleged ‘sexualisation’ of children and young people. It explores the popular discourses around youth and sexuality and unpacks the assumptions and contradictions that underwrite them, by addressing the terms of reference of the Australian Senate’s 2008 Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Inquiry . The article concludes by outlining some proposed public policy solutions to addressing current community concerns that children and teenagers are being inappropriately sexualised.

Reviews in this issue

Edited by Susan Bye

Aly, Anne, Green, Lelia and Balnaves, Mark, Social Implications of Fearing Terrorism

Bainbridge, Jason, Goc, Nicole and Tynan, Liz, Media and Journalism: New Approaches to Theory and Practice

Bird, S. Elizabeth, The Anthropology of News & Journalism: Global Perspectives

Cohen, Hart, Salazar, Juan Francisco and Barkat, Iqbal, Screen Media Arts

Cunningham, Stuart and Turner, Graeme (eds), The Media and Communications in Australia (3rd ed.)

Donald, Stephanie, Kofman, Eleonore and Kevin, Catherine (eds), Branding Cities: Cosmopolitanism, Parochialism and Social Change

Engelman, Ralph, Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism

Foth, Marcus (ed.), Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real Time City

Foster, Kevin (ed.), What are We Doing in Afghanistan? The Military and the Media at War

Griffen-Foley, Bridget, Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio

Harindranath, Ramaswami, Audience-Citizens: The Media, Public Knowledge and Interpretive Practice

Hartley, John, The Uses of Digital Literacy

Hills, Jill, Telecommunications and Empire

Martin, Ray, Ray: Stories of My Life

Moran, Albert, New Flows in Global TV

Rickels, Laurence A., The Devil Notebooks

Shaw Christopher A., Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games

Stoneman, Rod, Chávez: The Revolution will Not be Televised: A Case Study of Politics and the Media

Von Krogh, Torbjörn, Media Accountability Today … and Tomorrow: Updating the Concept in Theory and Practice

Wurtzler, Steve J., Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media

ABSTRACTS

The Victorian Bushfires and Other Extreme Weather Events: Case Studies in Crisis, Culture and Communications   MIA 137, November 2010 Theme Editors: Louise North and Jason Bainbridge   Buy this issue Subscription and order form Abstracts

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