title: ABC Online: Becoming the ABC
Creators: name: Burns, Maureen
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2004
Subjects: subject: ABC
subject: Australian Broadcasting Corporation
subject: public service broadcasting
subject: public service broadcasters
subject: Australia
subject: website
subject: websites
subject: Michel Foucault
subject: Gilles Deleuze
subject: Felix Guattari
subject: World Wide Web
subject: Internet

description: This thesis combines histories of the implementation of ABC Online (the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia's largest national Public Service Broadcaster) with the political philosophies of Foucault, and of Deleuze and Guattari. Following the Deleuzian argument that institutions of enclosure are in crisis because they exist in between diagrams of the disciplinary and control societies, the thesis tests each of the Foucauldian diagrams of discipline, governmentality and control against the ABC as Public Service Broadcaster. It explores issues such as which ABC strategies belong to which diagram, and the ways in which changes in communications technologies altered governing rationales of these diagrams at the ABC. The thesis uses the implementation of ABC Online to explore the idea of the ABC in the late 1990s as operating in between social diagrams. One way of examining this 'in between-ness' is to use the Public Service Broadcasting idea as an instance of arboreal thinking and the internet idea as rhizomic. The thesis employs that model to argue that Public Service Broadcasting as it is practised is not merely an arboreal assemblage, and that actual implementations of the internet are more than merely rhizomic assemblages. The thesis details some of the earliest relations between broadcasting and the internet at the ABC, and describes the relations between rhizomic and arboreal images of the ABC at particular sites and in various discourses. This examination concludes that both ways of imagining the ABC - the arboreal and the rhizomic - have been essential to the success of ABC Online. While the position of the ABC in between social diagrams caused a sense of crisis, ABC Online was in fact successful largely because of its position in between social diagrams. Not only was ABC Online remarkably successful in its first five years, but it was successful in ways which could not be accommodated in such documents as the ABC Charter. The public silences of ABC Online both allowed it to thrive, and conversely supported arboreal stratified ways of defending the ABC. Defences of the ABC that used arboreal thinking as a rhetorical strategy continued to dominate public discussion of the ABC, despite the successes of contrary examples in practice. One such example was the successful implementation of Radio Australia Online at a time when the Mansfield Review sought to limit the scope of the ABC to domestic free-to-air broadcasting. When some ABC Online practices were publicised in relation to the proposed Telstra deal, the resultant controversy concentrated on the non-commercial/commercial boundary at the ABC. The controversy also highlighted fears that the Online environment may alter the ethical relations between the ABC and its publics. In particular, the ethical goals of independence and integrity were perceived as being under threat in the World Wide Web environment. These goals were further problematised within the organisation by the demands of interactive subsites. These subsites demonstrated an altered ethical relation between the ABC and its user in the online environment of the control society.