bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Reconciliation, Restoration and Guilt: The Politics of Apologies
Authors: Power Mary R.
Published: March 2018

Current media emphasis recognises that politicians' apologies are powerful tools in the process of reconciliation with those who see themselves the victims of government policies. Through apologies, blame is managed, minorities are reconciled, lingering guilt is assuaged and the image of a government is restored. In this paper, Prime Minister Howard's refusal to apologise on behalf of the Australian government for the harm done to Aboriginal people, as described in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Bringing Them Home report, is analysed in the light of theoretical writing about apologies and the effects of apologies by President Young-Sam Kim of Korea and President Clinton of the United States.
Hacking the Democratic Mainframe: The Melissa Virus and Transgressive Computing
Authors: Best Kirsty , Lewis Jeff
Published: March 2018

As with many of the other 45 000 computer viruses operating across the globe, the Melissa virus constitutes a significant threat to organisational processes. There are two major readings of the Melissa virus's social and political implications — one rejecting its subversive intent, the other celebrating it. In either case, these readings reflect the inadequacy of current theorisations of the relationship between computer networked communication, organisational theory and democracy. A fuller understanding of this relationship, and in particular the culture of hacking, is needed to mediate significant tensions within contemporary culture and politics.
Introducing Competition into Australian Telecommunications
Authors: Alston Senator Richard
Published: March 2018

Australia's telecommunications regime has been developed over several years with the clear intention of facilitating robust competition, while also providing a raft of consumer safeguards. After introducing elements of competition in the 1980s, the government was able to gradually increase the level of competition, until the introduction of full competition in the Telecommunications Act 1997. Since then, the government has encouraged a stronger competitive environment by strengthening the powers of the ACCC. It has also improved consumer protection safeguards through the enactment of the Telecommunications (Consumer Protection and Services Standards) Act 1999. Further refining of the regime will not end here. The government will continue to review competition and consumer policy and continue to promote liberalised trade in telecommunications markets.
Competition and Consumers in Telecommunications: Industry-Specific Competition
Authors: Fels Allan
Published: March 2018

With the introduction of telecommunications-specific competition regulation in July 1997, the Australian telecommunications industry began a transition which is transforming its structure and operations. Under amendments to the Trade Practices Act, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was given responsibility for applying the regulation, which established an access regime and special powers in relation to anti-competitive conduct. In this article, the Commission's chairman, Professor Allan Fels, summarises the operation of the regime over the last three years and outlines the Commission's major decisions and approaches. In a year when the regulation is subject to review, he also expresses some views on the issues which will influence future regulatory directions in telecommunications.
Choosing Telecommunications? Consumers in a Liberalised, Privatised Telecommunications Sector
Authors: Campbell Helen
Published: March 2018

Consumers were promised that the introduction of open competition in the Australian market would bring greater choices and cheaper prices. This article considers how residential consumers have fared in a liberalised, privatised Australian telecommunications sector in the 1990s. It finds that, while consumers in general have enjoyed considerable benefits from liberalised, competitive telecommunications markets, especially in terms of wider choices and price reductions, not all consumers have shared in the benefits. Indeed, equitable, affordable access to a service supported by common standards of quality and reliability is under threat from the demands of market-based competition. Producing service quality indicators and consultation structures appropriate to the expression of consumer concerns will be essential to ensure that consumers benefit from competition in telecommunications.
Scott V. Telstra: A Watershed in Australian Telecommunication Policy
Authors: Bourk Michael
Published: March 2018

In Australia, the Universal Service Obligation (USO) operates as a legislative mechanism that guarantees the right of all Australians to access a standard telephone service wherever they reside. In 1997, special provisions for people with severe hearing impairment were added to telecommunication legislation. The Telecommunications Act 1997 included a specific reference to teletypewriters (TTYs), including them as an addition to the definition of the Universal Service Obligation (USO) as the result of the outcome from a public inquiry held in 1995. The inquiry, subsequently referred to as Scott v. Telstra, is a case study illustrating the collision of two separate pieces of federal legislation and the paradigms that formed them. Furthermore, both the inquiry and subsequent revision of definitions of a standard telephone service illustrate the complexity of planning telecommunication policy for equitable social outcomes. Specifically, further questions are raised surrounding the role of universal service in changing technological and competitive environments.
The Telecommunications Policy Process
Authors: Barr Trevor
Published: March 2018

A fundamental power shift is underway in contemporary Australia — the deconstruction of the role of the state in ownership, policy and strategic thinking for the future. In telecommunications policy, we have replaced strategic thinking for the nation with ad hoc strategic planning by an array of intensely competitive companies. This article argues that we need to widen the framework of a plethora of public-interest groups pushing narrow sectional interest to much wider inputs in the overall policy process. We need to foster imaginative attempts at constructing national plans — of many different kinds — for Australia's communications future.
Revisiting the Future: Assessing the 1994 BTCE Communications Futures Project
Authors: Luck David
Published: March 2018

In 1994. the former Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics undertook a major study for the Australian government on likely developments in online services over the decade to 2005. At the time, there was a wide level of industry ‘hype’ about the imminent arrival of broadband services to the home. It was also a crrcial time for the Australian government in formulating a range of policies—to encourage competition in the newly opening telecommunications market, to help bring to birth the new pay TV industry and to set the scene for mobile telephony. The CFP provided an economic analysis of these new technologies and the directions in which they might be heading. This paper assesses the extent to which the government research body ‘got it right’ and analyses why it was successful and where it missed the mark. Some of the reasons for the successes and failures illustrate the potential for analytical research to guide governments in their policy formulation.
Communications Deregulation and Democratisation in Thailand
Authors: Lewis Glen , Thompson Peter
Published: March 2018

This article considers recent Thai communication policy debates as a case study of some of the tensions in Asian communications regulation. Thailand is now reregulating its communications after a period of boom and bust. With the new 1997 Constitution, there is an expectation that regulation should ensure more public oversight of telecoms and broadcasting, formerly the province of state agencies, the army and big business. One problem for reformers, however, is the prospect of telecom and broadcasting regulation being combined. Another issue is that, as the power of the army and the state agencies is being challenged, new private monopolies are replacing them. After locating Thai experience in its regional context, the article examines the main telecom and broadcasting policy issues in the 1990s. It argues, pace the view that communications deregulation promotes efficiency and national development, that it may reinforce social inequality in developing countries.
He Lies like a Rug: Digitising Memory
Authors: Brabazon Tara
Published: March 2018

With most critical and historical interpretations of the Internet trapped between the ideologies of technophilia and the progress, little attention is being placed on the digital future of the analogue past. This paper evaluates contemporary notions of cataloguing, preservation and memory. However, most stress is placed on how the passions and enthusiasm of popular culture are tempered through digitisation.
The X-Files, X-Philes and X-Philia: Internet Fandom as a Site of Convergence
Authors: Howell Amanda
Published: March 2018

This paper surveys the representation of The X-Files Internet fandom in order to show how the structural positioning of television fans is altered by Internet technology and culture. Additionally, the representation of fans in promotional materials and the series itself, when considered in light of the conflicts between fans and Fox, highlights the difficulties Fox has had in translating its promotional strategies to the Internet.
Technoculture: Another Term That Means Nothing and Gets Us Nowhere?
Authors: Green Lelia
Published: March 2018

This article argues that the term ‘technoculture’ is frequently used in a woolly manner to refer in a general way to technologies implicated in Western cultures, and to constructions of culture that incorporate technological aspects. The opportunity for the term to convey a specific meaning is lost in the generality of this everyday usage.

Arguing from first principles about the nature of technology and culture, the paper suggests that technoculture as a term should be applied to communications technologies that are used in the mediated construction of culture. To be technocultural, the technology concerned must facilitate cultural communication across space and/or time and should, in some way, raise issues of place.

Since culture is a construction involving communication and more than one person, technoculture involves the communication of cultural material in technological contexts — which is to say, other than the face-to-face. If this definition were to be adopted, future discussions of technoculture would indicate reference to a technology that allows the construction of culture across space and time.
The Coming of Post-Reflexive Society: Commodification and Language in Digital Capitalism
Authors: Graham Philip , Hearn Greg
Published: March 2018

Language is a unique aspect of human communication because it can be used to discuss itself in its own terms. For this reason, human societies potentially have superior capacities of coordination, reflexive self-correction and innovation than other animal, physical or cybernetic systems. However, this analysis also reveals that language is interconnected with the economically and technologically mediated social sphere. Hence it is vulnerable to abstraction, objectification, reification and therefore ideology — all of which are antithetical to its reflexive function (whilst paradoxically being a fundamental part of it). In particular, in capitalism, language is increasingly commodified within the social domains created and affected by ubiquitous communication technologies. The advent of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ implicates exchangeable forms of thought (language) as the fundamental commodities of this emerging system. The historical point at which a ‘knowledge economy’ emerges, then, is the critical point at which thought itself becomes a commodified ‘thing’, and language becomes its ‘objective’ means of exchange. However, the processes by which such commodification and objectification occur obscure the unique social relations within which these language commodities are produced. We argue that the latest economic phase of capitalism — the knowledge economy — and the obfuscating trajectory which accompanies it, are destroying the reflexive capacity of language, particularly through the process of commodification. This can be seen in the fact that the language practices which have emerged in conjunction with digital technologies are increasingly non-reflexive and therefore less capable of self-critical, conscious change.
Free-to-Air Futures in the United Kingdom and Australia: A Personal View
Authors: Thomas Abigail
Published: March 2018

This industry paper looks at the broadcasting industry, how its revenue streams are changing and how this will affect the future of free-to-air services. Its premise is that, increasingly, consumers will purchase services rather than goods, and that their attention will become more and more valuable. If existing broadcasters want to remain relevant, they need to make sure that their content is accessible to consumers in the new world
Playing with the Big Kids: The Implications of Imported Advertising on Australian Television
Authors: Waddell Terrie
Published: March 2018

This article critically examines the Australian Broadcasting Authority's Television Program Standard 23 (TPS 23) — a set of regulations governing the importation of offshore television advertisements. Point five of the Australian Content in Advertising section of TPS 23 (effective from 23 January 1992) stipulates that: ‘A licensee must ensure that at least 80 per cent of the total advertising time (other than the time occupied by exempt advertisements) broadcast in a year by the licensee between the hours of 6.00 a.m. and midnight, is occupied by Australian produced advertisements.’ Although the 20 per cent guideline has not yet been breached, the number of imported commercials has increased since the introduction of the standard. This research paper concentrates on the implications of TPS 23 for those working in the media industry.
Good Guys, Bad Guys: Images of the Australian Soldier in East Timor
Authors: Woods Denise
Published: March 2018

It is said that pictures tell a thousand words, but to Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir, the images of Australian soldiers pointing guns at suspected militiamen in East Timor made one word stand out: ‘belligerent’. Images that meant one thing in Australia represented quite different and often opposite meanings in Southeast Asia. In the Australian press, the Australian soldiers were constructed as ‘the good guys’ helping out a neighbouring country in trouble. The press in some Southeast Asian countries told quite a different story — that of the Australian soldiers as intimidating and therefore the ‘bad guys’ of the region. Through a textual analysis of these images, this paper examines the ways in which the Australian soldiers have been represented in the press in Southeast Asia. This paper also discusses the role the reading of these images played in negotiating Australia's role in East Timor and the region.
Child(Hood) Abuse: Constructing the Australian Public in Public Service Advertisements
Authors: Brennan Marc
Published: March 2018

This paper intervenes in debates about the construction of ‘publics' by the media. It traces the way in which one governmental genre of television programming — the public service announcement — attempts the difficult task of constructing a unified sense of ‘the public’ in Western Australia by means of appeals to a supposedly ‘universal’ discourse — that of the protection of children. The paper examines the ways in which these advertisements employ such strategies and discusses the limitations and implications of such appeals by looking at the citizens who are excluded from such a ‘public’.
It's the Bush: Foreign Perceptions of Australia — A Comparative Study
Authors: Louw P.E. , Rivenburgh N.K. , Loo E. , Mersham G.
Published: March 2018

Cities compete to host the Olympics because it is a unique global public relations opportunity to attract tourism, foreign investment, and international respect. However, hosting an Olympics also entails risks because host cities and countries must survive intensive international media scrutiny. Whether the Sydney Olympics will redefine overseas perceptions of Australia either positively or negatively is still to be established. Our study will address this question through an empirical, cross-cultural profiling of foreign perceptions of Australia from 1999 to 2001 in various countries to see whether responses differ, and/or whether similar patterns of change are observable across cultures at different points in time (pre- and post-Olympics). In parallel, media coverage of the 2000 Olympics (and Australia) is being monitored in the countries being studied. If any attitude shift is detected from 1999 to 2001, explanations can be sought from the recorded media coverage. This article represents the results of the first stage of the study — an examination of overseas attitudes towards Australia and stereotypes of Australians in 1999.
Internet Content Regulation in Southeast Asia: Directions
Authors: Mitchell David
Published: March 2018

The movement of Internet content regulation from telecommunications regulatory regimes into the existing streams of media regulation can be seen all over Southeast Asia — from Australia and Singapore to Vietnam and Laos. This paper examines this movement, comparing regulatory regimes for internet content control in Vietnam, Singapore and Australia. It will show that these countries have moved to integrate internet content regulation within existing media regulatory regimes and that regulation of internet content in countries of widely differing social and political cultures is not as different as may be believed. The regulatory path in a future of converged distribution systems for previously disparate forms of content may, however, force a re-evaluation of existing rationales for media and broadcasting regulation.
Intellectual Property Issues on Ip Networks
Authors: Michaelson George
Published: March 2018

Some fundamental behaviours of the current (and foreseeable) global internet do not fit well with the requirements for successful digital rights management (DRM) and for control of access to IP rights-protected content. This has implications for longer term development of regulation in the digital domain. This paper considers some of these behaviours from a broad and unashamedly biased perspective. For the purposes of this paper, it is assumed that effective digital rights management depends on being able to constrain people not to use the network for direct, rights management-avoiding purposes. If we can assume total law-abiding communities, much of this discussion is pointless. The polemic probably lies in the area of suggesting that the value proposition for DRM is weak, and that such claims as are made in respect of ability to limit use are overstated.
The Operation of Australia's Internet Content Legislation
Authors: Coroneos Peter
Published: March 2018

This paper considers the workability of Australia's recently introduced internel content legislation from the viewpoint of the national industry body, the Internet Industry Association (IIA), which campaigned for amendments to the legislation, then developed industry codes for it.
The ‘Problem of Culture’: A Case Study of Some Arts Industries in Southwest Western Australia
Authors: Kaino Lorna
Published: March 2018

This paper presents a case study of three glass art studios situated in the southwest of Western Australia. The study is designed to provide a model for a larger study of the arts industries that will contribute to a strategic analysis of cultural policies for arts industry development. Its purpose is to offer insights into why arts policy frameworks and arts development strategies in the southwest of Western Australia appear to have had limited outcomes consistent with their arts industry objectives. It proposes that one of the reasons — difficult to formalise in policy documents but a persistent theme in informal discussions I have had with arts practitioners all over the southwest region — is a conceptual problem related to instrumentalities charged with the responsibility of implementing arts policy and development. I propose that this is a ‘problem of culture ‘. I explore this proposition in relation to cultural policy planning and development at the regional level within a wider framework at the state and federal levels in Australia and internationally.
Live for Art — Just Don't Expect to Make a Living from it: The Worklife of Australian Visual Artists
Authors: Callus Ron , Cole Mark
Published: March 2018

Visual artists make up one of the few occupational groups in Australia where the majority of those working in the field are not regulated by awards or agreements that set minimum rates of pay and conditions. This is because most artists are self-employed and therefore lie outside the industrial relations regulatory framework. This article builds on the results of a survey of members of the National Association of Visual Artists (NA VA). The survey was designed to provide a picture of the income sources and activities of persons who work in the arts industry. For the majority of artists, the paid work undertaken as an artist was not their main source of income. These artists supplemented their art-producing income with other art and non-related income-producing work. A significant proportion of NAVA members work for a living in the visual arts industry as teachers, arts administrators, curators or in other art-related work; many of these also produce art in their spare time. The data collected were then used to develop a typology based on the combination of artists' time-use and income-generating activities. The typology was generated through the use of a cluster analysis that revealed three major groups of artists and a number of subgroups within these three major groupings. Given the complexities of the artist's labour market experiences, a number of options are canvassed as to how the precarious nature of artists' work could better be managed. One approach to regulation is to accept the realities of the artists' labour market and build around this through a system of accruing entitlements that come from working in the industry rather than for any one individual or organisation. It is suggested that governments could also take a different approach by recognising the special nature of artists' work, specifically the fact that artists move in and out of the labour market over their lifetimes. A whole-of-life approach to the problem is therefore necessary.
Cultural Industry or Social Problem? The Case of Australian Live Music
Authors: Homan Shane
Published: March 2018

The live music pub and club scene has historically been regarded as the source of a distinctively Australian rock/jazz culture, and the basis for global recording success. This paper examines the history of live venue practices as a case study of a local cultural industry that often existed outside of traditional policy structures and meanings of the arts industries. Confronted with a loss of performance opportunities for local musicians, it is argued that traditional cultural policy mechanisms and platforms used for cultural nationalist outcomes are no longer relevant. Rather, policy intervention must engage with administrative obstacles to live creativity, specifically the series of local regulations that have diminished the viability of live venues. The decline of the rock/jazz pub continues in the face of current federal government support for touring musicians. A closer inspection of the local administration of cultural practice remains the best means of understanding the devaluation of the social and industrial value of live performance.
Reviewing the Readership: Profiles of Central Queensland Newspaper Readers
Authors: Ewart Jacqui , Tickle Kevin
Published: March 2018

This paper sets out to explore the concept of readership through a quantitative examination of Central Queensland newspaper readers. Because most Australian media audience research is undertaken by market research companies on behalf of news media corporations, an independent study of readership is needed in order to reveal data which can be used in future studies of regional newspapers and readership. Such data may also be useful in enabling regional newspapers to begin a process of forming stronger connections with their readers and communities. This paper focuses on data collected about newspaper readers in Central Queensland. While discussing Central Queensland newspaper readers, their demographics and newspaper reading habits more generally, this paper establishes a series of mini-profiles of these newspaper readers and investigates the issues which readers would like to see covered more often or less frequently by the newspapers they use. It suggests that these profiles are important for researchers wanting to investigate media in Central Queensland, and that the profiles may provide interesting comparisons of points from which to undertake readership research in other regions of Australia. As well, this paper suggests that such information is essential if regional newspapers are to fulfil the important role they have in their communities and reflect the concerns of their publics. Finally, this paper argues that such data are essential in the process of improving relations between regional newspapers and their communities, and ensuring they adequately reflect their publics.
Creating a Community Public Sphere: Community Radio as a Cultural Resource
Authors: Forde Susan , Foxwell Kerrie , Meadows Michael
Published: March 2018

This article draws upon recent findings of a study of the community radio sector in Australia.
Confession and the Unbearable Lightness of Factual
Authors: Dovey Jon
Published: March 2018

This paper examines the changes in contemporary documentary practices, in particular the shift to a ‘first-person media’. By looking at certain types of first-person and confessional speech forms in factual television, I hope to offer a case study in how we might continue to distinguish between different kinds of program and to determine their relationship to the public sphere. The rise of first-person media can be seen as a response to the need for a public space in which ‘life world politics' and ‘emotional deomcracy’ are fundamental. The dispersal of intimate speech and confessional discourse is an expression of the changes that have occurred in our social and economic lives. This paper explores documentary and factul television's role in this process.
Acting a Part: Performing Docudrama
Authors: Paget Derek
Published: March 2018

This essay considers approaches to acted performance in film and television docudrama, using as examples of recent practice a number of ‘high concept’ international coproductions such as Nuremberg and Conspiracy (both 2001). The focus of the essay is specifically upon the actor as a ‘visible marker of [documentary] inauthenticity’. It discusses the means by which an actor attempts to compensate for the manifest gap between the performed and the historical ‘real’ in preparation for docudrama performance. It also considers the nature of the transaction that takes place between actor and audience in docudrama, noting that the founding concept of this transaction is likely to be intertextual (grounded in an appreciation of the knowledge(s) brought to performance by actor and audience alike). Both parties bring to docudrama performance an awareness of the information, misinformation and disinformation that tend to cluster around significant historical events and personalities. This, it is argued, will in all probability affect both actors ‘preparation and audience reception in strikingly similar ways. The actor's trained ‘as if’ reflex is matched by a sophisticated audience's ‘what if’ reflex, in a mutual seeking of understanding beyond the rational and factual. Brian Cox's performance as Hermann Goering in Nuremberg is discussed in detail in relation to these claims. The intensification of documentary's basic absent/present paradox that takes place in docudrama is finally considered in relation to reality TV and its participants (who should be thought of, it is argued, as ‘authentic performers of self’).
Introducing Ratings in Transition
Authors: Balnaves Mark , Ferrier Liz , Phillips Gail , O'Regan Tom
Published: March 2018

There is considerable ferment surrounding audience measurement systems in Australia and internationally (Balnaves, O'Regan and Sternberg, 2002). This article identifies the range and sources of this ferment. It pinpoints several pressure points such as the constitution of ratings panels and the problems of survey fatigue in a fragmenting media environment. Consideration is also given to ‘next generation’ ratings measurement technologies such as the personal people meter (PPM) and their likely impact upon the industry and its norms, and new media formats such as the personal video recorder (PVR) and the problems and opportunities they create for audience measurement systems.
Bring Out the ‘Backroom Boys’: The Role of Media Planners and Buyers in the New Knowledge Economy
Authors: Ferrier Liz
Published: March 2018

This paper outlines the relatively recent emergence of a specialised field of media services that come under the title of media planning and buying. It details the kinds of work this field involves, and the position it occupies in relation to other branches of the advertising industry, noting its increasing centrality in advertising and growing profile in the press. The history of its emergence and development as a separate field in Australia is closely linked to changes in the structure and regulation of the advertising industry. The paper examines challenges currently facing this area of advertising, including the global downturn in advertising, fragmentation of media audiences, and changes in technologies of audience measurement. It suggests that there has been increased value placed on the media planners' and buyers' specialised expertise, especially as audiences have become more segmented and fragmented, as traditional media loses its reach, and as clients have come to expect more accountability in relation to their advertising investment. The emergence of specialist media planners and buyers is situated alongside other changes occurring in the advertising industry, in the national context of particular institutional practices (commissioning system, accreditation and deregulation of the industry), and in the broader context of global economic restructuring and the emergence of the informational mode of development. The challenges faced by the advertising industry, articulated in the 2001 ratings debate, demonstrate Castells' point that ‘the diffusion of new technologies under the new mode of development calls into question the very processes and organizational forms that were at the basis of demand for information technologies’.
The City, the Suburb, the Community and the Local Press: A Gold Coast Case Study
Authors: Griffin Grahame
Published: March 2018

Local and suburban newspapers have not generally received a ‘good press’, at least in the relevant academic literature. This article argues that it is time to reconsider the roles and responsibilities of these newspapers in the light of discussions surrounding the nature of community and of community cohesion and conservatism, as well as the relationship of the local to the global. A case study of two Gold Coast newspapers — a suburban and a daily — concludes that, while the suburban paper relies on traditional hard news journalism with little overt recognition of community, the daily pursues a ‘sometimes obsessive’ search for local meaning, image and identity.
Telenovelas and Soap Operas: Negotiating Reality from the Periphery
Authors: Slade Christina
Published: March 2018

Latin American telenovelas, like the Australasian soap operas, have been globally successful. It is a remarkable feature of this success that it has reversed the flow from the centres of production in Europe and the United States. I argue that we should assess these products from the ‘periphery’ in their own terms, and not through the lens of the industries of the heartland. I lake the Mexican case as a specific example, and turn then to comparisons between the Australasian soap industry and that in Latin America.
Realism and Politics in Brazilian Telenovelas
Authors: Porto Mauro Pereira
Published: March 2018

Telenovelas have been central to the constitution and development of Latin American cultures, becoming the most popular genre of television broadcasting. In the Brazilian case, the melodramatic serials soon became the basis for the commercial success of TV Globo, the dominant network. The prime-time telenovelas of TV Globo are currently watched in almost 50 per cent of the dwellings with TV sets every night. This paper argues that this popularity is specific to the Brazilian industry. The realism and treatment of political issues in the genre is traced to the role of scriptwriters.
The Telenovela Industry: Markets and Representations of Transnational Identities
Authors: Mato Daniel
Published: March 2018

This article discusses the process of transnationalisation of the telenovela industry from a perspective that seeks to articulate economic and cultural analysis (social symbolic). Two objectives guide this analysis. The first is to contribute to the theoretical field on globalisation through a criticism of the attributes of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘homogenisation’ which are often associated with the idea of globalisation without being put to the test in at least some realms of experience. Through a close analysis of the telenovela industry. I examine those presuppositions in order to demonstrate both how new territorial references emerge (particularly the city of Miami) and how certain differences are erased while new ones appear. The second objective is to explore some tensions related to the production of markets and of representations of identities, especially relative to the construction of a transnational ‘Hispanic’ identity. A significant outcome of the analysis of the case of the telenovela industry is that it makes particularly evident the tight interwoven of cultural and economic factors.
Killing the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs: A Mexican Perspective on the Industry
Authors: Aragón Angélica
Published: March 2018

The business of making telenovelas is immensely profitable, yet very few of the profits are fed back into the industry. The industry in Mexico is, according to Angélica Aragón, unprofessional and slapdash. She argues that actors and directors should insist on their artistic imperatives, and seek a professional structure within which to work.
Creating Social Reality: Template or Mirror? An Industry Perspective
Authors: Arias Cuauhtémoc Blanco , Haddrick Greg , Arnold Gillian
Published: March 2018

While much has been written by academics about television strip serials and telenovelas, a perspective less frequently discussed is that of these programs' writers and creators. What aspects of social realities do the writers, story editors and script producers of soap operas and telenovelas invest in their writing? This article draws together the views of practitioners from three very different backgrounds. Cuauhtémoc Blanco, a leading Mexican writer of telenovelas, Felicity Packard and Greg Haddrick of Home and Away, and Gillian Arnold of Going Home discuss their understanding of the ways they create social reality on television.
The Communications Environment
Authors: Maras Steven
Published: March 2018

This article discusses and evaluates different understandings of the term ‘communications environment’. The article suggests that the term has a complex place in critical discourse, and is caught up within a process of media and communication theory rethinking its own ground. In the discussion that follows, I attempt to locate various uses of the term in relation to each other, and different traditions of communications research.
Articulating An Activist Imaginary: Internet as Counter Public Sphere in the Mapuche Movement, 1997/2002
Authors: Salazar Juan Francisco
Published: March 2018

The article analyses the role of the internet in informing and shaping indigenous knowledge and offers a critical examination of the uses of internet by Mapuche indigenous activists in Chile. It describes the ways in which the internet has been appropriated as an efficient political tool to rearticulate a renewed Mapuche cultural imaginary, constructed in the realm of the virtual but grounded in the materiality of the everyday struggle for cultural survival and ethnic recognition. Through a critical reading of several Mapuche websites hosted in Chile and Europe, the paper analyses how and why new media have been embraced as a fertile field of symbolic and political struggle. It is argued that the internet has been constructed, promoted and used as an incipient counter public sphere to the state, the national imaginary and corporate interests becoming an important mediator for the articulation of a Mapuche ‘activist imaginary’. It is demonstrated how the World Wide Web has been a key tactic in the Mapuche responses to the mainstream media's distorted construction of a Mapuche conflict to refer to the current Mapuche uprising started on December 1997.
The Spectrum Auctions: Mismanagement, Lost Opportunities and the Undermining of a Critical Communications Conduit
Authors: Smith Scott
Published: March 2018

The welfare of wireless communications systems in Australia depends on the recognition of the electromagnetic spectrum as a unique and crucial cultural ‘resource’ of an information society. This article suggests that the elusive nature of ‘spectrum’ has resulted in mismanagement and lost opportunities, and that now the rights of local communities to our ‘airwaves’ are under threat, an assertion explored through an analysis of spectrum management in the 2000/01 financial year. I will further demonstrate that the new orthodoxy of ‘spectrum auctions’ reflects our political and economic milieu: the prominence of short-term decision-making and ‘budget politics’, the lack of concern with concentration of media/telecommunications ownership and, moreover, the undermining of cultural and ecological aspects of the Australian communications system. This article argues for the provision of unlicensed ‘spectrum’ for local communities (or bioregions) — a ‘commons’ — to nurture the world of non-commercial communications and the distribution of localised ecological information, both scientific and cultural.
Drugs and Media
Authors: Tebbut John
Published: March 2018

The articles in this Drugs and Media theme section place the current media debates on the various drugs prevalent in our society — legal and illegal — in some perspective, drawing as they do on historical and contemporary events to address the relationship between media representations and social policies relating to drug use and abuse.
Alcohol Marketing and the Media: What are Alcohol Advertisements Telling US?
Authors: Duff Cameron
Published: March 2018

The marketing and promotion of alcohol have attracted considerable controversy in Australia in recent years. Many researchers argue that the active promotion of alcohol has led to increases in alcohol consumption in Australia, particularly among the young, as well as a range of alcohol-related harms and problems. Others contest this view, whilst the alcohol industry itself contends that alcohol advertising is more concerned with winning and maintaining ‘market share’ than with attracting new drinkers. As such debates intensify, it is timely to consider changes in the content and format of alcohol advertising in this country. This paper examines a number of recent Australian alcohol advertisements, comparing those for beer with those for spirits and ‘ready to drink’ products in highlighting some significant changes in the ways leisure and consumption are represented in youth cultures. I argue that many of these advertisements present alcohol as a potent means of enhancing young people's leisure experience in ways that risk endorsing excessive alcohol consumption as an appropriate or ‘normal’ leisure activity for young people.
‘Headlining Heroin’: Policy Change and Reporting the Heroin Problem
Authors: Watts Rob
Published: March 2018

This article explores the role of daily print media in the formation of policies on illicit drug use. It asks how we might think about the rote of the media in making drug policy and how the print media represent the use of heroin. In answering these questions through an examination of the complex process of problem making, the article suggests it may help us to better understand how issues which policy-makers identify as ‘problems’ come to achieve such a status, and how solutions that come to be regarded as ‘realistic’ — or not — reach this point.
Hard Sell, Soft Sell: Men Read Viagra Ads
Authors: Vares Tiina , Potts Annie , Gavey Nicola , Grace Victoria M.
Published: March 2018

Viagra (known generically as sildenafil citrate) was released in New Zealand in 1998. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements represented Viagra as a panacea for men's sexual difficulties. The Research Medicines Industry Association of New Zealand (2000) claims that the Viagra DTC campaign removed the stigma associated with erectile dysfunction. However, in this paper we analyse participants' views that the advertisements also transform cultural anxieties in ways that proliferate ‘performance’ (and other) anxieties in new forms and for increasingly broad groups of people. This paper draws on material from a reception study of male viewers' readings/interpretations of popular cultural representations of Viagra in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2002. The participants frame both the advertisements and the television program My Family as ‘peddling fear’ about sexual performance, and thus potentially ‘establishing a need ‘for a new drug. As one participant said: ‘Pfizer wants young men to start worrying about these things, stress creates erectile dysfunction, off you go.’ This indicates a need to consider how the critical responses of viewers/readers to advertising, particularly DTC drug advertising, may reflect the ‘exploitation’ of advertising by its audience in a way that simultaneously critiques a commodity (Viagra) and its associated cultural practices (creating erections through a pharmacological ‘solution’), as suggested by recent arguments in the media/cultural studies literature.
The Game Thing: Ludology and other Theory Games
Authors: Crogan Patrick
Published: March 2018

The current state of computer games studies is critically examined in this paper by means of an analysis of the recently released computer game, The Thing. Game studies is an emerging area of humanities scholarship, an emergence that exhibits characteristically ambivalent processes of defining its own object and staking out its own field of expertise from other areas of academic competence. A principal dynamic of these processes concerns the opposition between ‘ludological’ and narratological theorisations of the computer game. This opposition is examined for both its limitations and its productive potential by means of consideration of The Thing game and its relation to John Carpenter's cinematic iteration of the original short story from which it is adapted. This consideration leads away from the question of the specificity of the computer game object to some concluding speculations about the relation of contemporary computer games to the broader computer culture within which games are taking on an increasingly significant profile.
Theoretical Frameworks for Analysing Turn-Based Computer Strategy Games
Authors: Caldwell Nicholas
Published: March 2018

This paper argues for a more specific formal methodology for the textual analysis of individual game genres. In doing so, it advances a set of formal analytical tools and a theoretical framework for the analysis of turn-based computer strategy games. The analytical tools extend the useful work of Steven Poole, who suggests a Peircian semiotic approach to the study of games as formal systems. The theoretical framework draws upon postmodern cultural theory to analyse and explain the representation of space and the organisation of knowledge in these games. The methodology and theoretical framework is supported by a textual analysis of Civilization II, a significant and influential turn-based computer strategy game. Finally, this paper suggests possibilities for future extensions of this work.
Developing the Alternative Communications Policy Framework
Authors: Ryan Mark David , Tanner Lindsay
Published: March 2018

The findings of the ACCC report, Emerging Market Structures in the Communications Sector, in June 2003 painted a bleak future for the Australian communications and media industries unless some major policy and regulatory changes are implemented. This report, along with the very important recommendations it made, is paralleled by a number of equally important contemporary issues regarding the future of these industries, such as telecommunications regulation and the issue of Telstra, the media ownership debate, the government's digital television policy framework and the future of the ABC. With the next federal election expected in mid-2004, the objective of this interview was to gain a broad outline of the alternative communications policy framework. In so doing, it captures the thoughts, the ALP perspective and the policy positions and priorities of the Shadow Minister for Communications, Lindsay Tanner MP, on the above issues.
COSTCO in Mexico: What Struggles for a Dignified Life are Set to Be in a Globalised World
Authors: Segovia Rafael
Published: March 2018

This article tells the story of a battle in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca between a coalition of civil society groups on one side, and a multinational corporation, its local partner, and entrenched political and economic interests on the other. This battle over the transformation of a former casino and hotel into a supermarket is a story about resistance to the neoliberal paradigm underpinning a trade agreement (in this case, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA) which privileges the interests of capital and foreign investment over local particularity and cultural and ecological heritage. It is also a story about the politicisation of a cultural NGO, the Civic Council for Culture and the Arts of Morelos (CCCAM), which was founded by an independent group of citizens who were looking for a way to increase and optimise cultural activities in the state. The CCCAM, which was a non-political movement, without any allegiance to any political party, became involved in this struggle against the destruction and loss of an important artistic, archaeological and natural heritage in the downtown area of Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos state. The organisation didn't go looking for conflict, but organisations such as this — operating in a society lacking democratic mechanisms for conciliation — often naturally become focal points for dissent, and therefore attract conflict. The conflict ended up in repression and abuse by governmental authorities. Eventually, the story raised national and international concern, and has been considered by analysts, politicians and newsmen as one of the most significant civic struggles of modern times in Mexico.
Australian Film and the Cultural Cold War
Authors: McKnight David
Published: March 2018

This article examines whether, and in what way, anti-communism was a factor in the slow development of an Australian film industry in the 1950s and early 1960s and in the kind of film culture developed in Australia, particularly through film festivals. In particular it examines the activities of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) towards left and liberal filmmakers and film lovers. It briefly examines the effect of anti-communism on the struggle for Australian content by Actors' Equity in the early years of television.