Terry Flew

State of the Industry conference - Genevieve Bell presentation

2009-11-27T08:46:00.010+10:00

Second presentation from from the State of the Industry conference at the University of NSW, hosted by the Cultural Research Network is from Genevieve Bell, who heads the first social science oriented reserach team at Intel, the User Experience group in the Intel Home Group. She was also identified as one of the 50 Most Creative People by Fast Company in 2009, as well as an Adelaide Thinker in Residence for the South Australian government.

Genevieve Bell

PhD in anthropology at Stanford University after a very diverse and eclectic childhood and upbringing - has struggled to "fit" with either the university or the industry environment;
Was going to take up an academic post, but was in Palo Alto in 1998 and was offered a job (again, in interesting circumstances) at Intel;

(Hope this is podcast, as its a great talk, in ways that can't quite be captured in a blog).

Challenge between the very predictable path of academic tenure track employment and jobs that are not defined at Intel;
She was hired out of the "irrational exuberance" at Intel in 1998, and being "the only woman who didn't cry" at the day-long interview;
Job was to be in charge of "women" and "Rest of the World";
Working with people from maths, sciences and IT backgrounds from an arts/humanities background requires disrupting dominant logics within Intel (e.g. everyone wants to be American), but they often relapse (graphic of three generations of white people watching TV together);
How to mobilise stories about the "messiness of everyday life" to talk back to dominant understandings within Intel - this generates sharp debates, and forces a willingness to stand up for what you know in the face or arguments and scepticism;

Research Questions

There is no single trajectory through which technologies are adopted or no single pathway for the Internet - the "feral Internet", which is a very Australian interpretative concept (Internet as undomesticated, like feral animals in the Australian desert);
How technologists imagine technologies as being perceived? How to unpack underlying notions of the body, space etc., but privacy is becoming less of a core concern than what can be called reputation - telling other people about every aspect of your identity. Contrast between "messiness' of identities and desire for seamless personas among technology developers - image, authenticity, reputation more than trust, risk;
Concerns for policing behaviour: what it is devices want and what people need? Devices that work better when "always connected" versus desire of people for discrete moments of engagement/non-engagement;
How people talk about their lives as technologically engaged citizens? What are the "overheads" of everyday life in a technological age, and how do people struggle to deal with them? Don't map easily onto existing sociological categories (age, gender etc.) or life stages.;
Contributing theory in unexpected places. All kinds of people can do good fieldwork, but the caapcity to make sense of it requires exposure to a rich array of theoretical resources. Sometimes theory is taught to Intel engineers e.g Adrienne Rich on "compulsory heterosexuality" and why engineers should know about this. What seems to be "internal tools in the academy" can be used outside of the academy e.g. Foucault on bodies and power.

There are a lot of people doing work of this nature in various areas of high-tech industry, who are using the intellectual tools learned in the humanities academy for other purposes.

Implications

Increasingly complex trajectories for cultural researchers, and thinking about how people with PhDs may move in and out of industry, academy etc. Also how to see work done outside of the academy as rigorous, engaged etc. There are a lot of lacunae in the higher education sector about this, especially in the US academy. Australia can avoid this. They recruit people who do not come out of the Intel industry template model, but you need to know how to talk with them without thinking you have to sacrifice your theoretical training - not "dumbing down" training, but expanding horizons and career possibilities;
Finding the questions and asking them, and new jobs to be created. Development of a National Broadband Network in Australia will require cultural knowledge that Australia is not good at developing, as well as engineering knowledge which it is good at - how to you concretise the "digital economy" into everyday life? How to get beyond "putting the 'e' in front of everything" to the more complex questions of socio-technical questiosn of citizenship, identity, inclusion etc. The critique from within the academy is important, but so too is the scope to insert ourselves and our own positions into the government agencies, consultancies, companies etc. that are actively engaged in these decisions?
How can Australian cultural reserachers be global drivers of theory and analysis of the changing socio-cultural environment? Australia can be an incubator of new ideas, that can then be "talked back" to the rest of the world.

State of the Industry Conference - Graeme Turner presentation

2009-11-27T08:21:00.008+10:00

Live blogging from the State of the Industry conference at the University of NSW, hosted by the Cultural Research Network.

Professor Graeme Turner, Convenor, Australian Research Council Cultural Research Network, and University of Queensland

Problem of how to replenish the academic labour market as up to 50% of "baby boomer" academics retire over the next decade;
The market will be increasingly internationally competitive - arts & humanities generate a lot of PhDs, but there are slower completion rates, higher attrition rates and more discontent with casualisation of work than in other Faculties/disciplines/sectors;
This will be approached as "the university's problem" but it is increasingly one for government;
The myth of "lots of jobs in the near future" has been around "since Graeme was 25" - beware of that mantra, although it may be more true this time.

Issues that need addressing and their attendant causes:

Perpetuation of casual/sessional appointments - originally designed to eliminate "exploitative" contract employment, but is itslef more exploitative;
Collapse of discipline-based departments;
Exploitative behaviour by unviersities and departments and resultant loss of trust;
Low level of PhD stipends and effects on personal living conditions esp. for those with families;
The end of the Masters degree as a PhD training ground - requires too much to be done with inexperienced PhD candidates;
Anti-intellectualism in Australia and disapraging of people in universities;
Increasing vocationalisation of universities, and use of "interdiscplinarity" to develop economies of scale by forcing disciplines together;
Marketisation of univerisites and short-term responses to shifts that see wholesale disappearance of disciplines and departmentsesp. outside of metro universities and G8 universities (seen in ERA exercise, soon to be public);
Poor advice from research offices and other entites trying to "second guess" where the funding will be e.g. whole Faculties being told to submit ARC grants.

Such factors influenced the decision to set up the CRN. Aims were to:

link up senior reserachers with PhDs and ECRs;
enable grassroots development of research ideas;
build collaborations across disciplines and build multidisciplinary teams;
address problems associated with professional development and lack of institutional mentoring for ECRs;
liberate researchers from constraints of their particular institutions and departments by linking up to a wider communtiy of scholars.

Issue of how not simply to draw attention to constraints but build capacity for collective agency c.f. presentations by Simon Marginson and Staurt Cunningham on Day One of State of the Industry conference.

Whta are the consequences of loss of capacity in the humanities generally over the last 15 years and the unevenness of critical strength across the sector? Capacity was largely built in the sciences, particularly during the Howard years.

Ongoing arguments about how to get government to take our claims seriously. Poor results in first round of Future Fellowships an illustration of the problems arising. Can become a "vicious cycle" since governments respond to evidence of results rather than special pleading for more cash.

Maintain a focus on the quality of your work, and not on short-term exigencies of research offices e.g. first-tier journals after ERA.

The Cultural Economy Moment now in Cultural Science

2009-11-19T11:18:00.004+10:00

My paper "The Cultural Economy Moment?", first presented as a keynote at Murdoch University in Perth, is now accessible from the online journal Cultural Science. Thanks to John Hartley, Eli Koger and anonymous referees for feedback on this.

The full paper can be accessed here. The abstract is below:

This paper explores the rise of cultural economy as a key organising concept over the 2000s. While it has intellectual precursors in political economy, sociology and postmodernism, it has been work undertaken in the fields of cultural economic geography, creative industries, the culture of service industries and cultural policy where it has come to the forefront, particularly around whether we are now in a ‘creative economy’. While work undertaken in cultural studies has contributed to these developments, the development of neo-liberalism as a meta-concept in critical theory constitutes a substantive barrier to more sustained engagement between cultural studies and economics, as it rests upon a caricature of economic discourse. The paper draws upon Michel Foucault’s lectures on neo-liberalism to indicate that there are significant problems with the neo-Marxist account hat became hegemonic over the 2000s. The paper concludes by identifying areas such as the value of information, the value of networks, motivations for participation in online social networks, and the impact of business cycles on cultural sectors as areas of potentially fruitful inter-disciplinary engagement around the nature of cultural economy.

Creative Suburban Geographies

2009-11-17T14:27:00.008+10:00

The Creative Suburban Geographies event was hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation last Thursday (12 November, 2009), and I am pleased to say that the Powerpoint presentations from Alan Davies, Christy Collis and Emma Felton, and Simon Freebody are now available on Slideshare. We will have podcasts available shortly. Thanks to Rebekah Denning, Eli Koger, Courtney O'Connor and Colleen Cook for egetting this together.

I've provided my introductory talk to the session below. Again, a podcast will be available shortly.

Creative Suburban Geographies

Professor Terry Flew, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Introductory presentation to Creative Suburban Geographies: Rethinking the Cultural Geography of Creativity and Creative Cities, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation workshop, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, 12 November 2009.

Today’s event brings together papers and presentations that draw upon the themes of creative cities and creative suburbs, and whether the creative industries develop primarily in one type of urban zone over another. In particular, we are seeking to open up a discussion on whether thinking about creative industries in Australia needs to give more attention to Australia’s outer suburban regions, and what might be the implications of doing so.

Creative industries emerged on the horizon in the late 1990s and early 2000s with an implicitly urban cultural and economic geography. Creative industries were seen as something that were most strongly developed in cities, and particularly in the densely populated inner city areas. In the language of the time, creative industries developed in the parts of creative cities that were attractive to the creative class, who in turn would form creative clusters that would incubate new forms of creative enterprise.

As creative industries were presented as a people-driven, bottom-up alternative to top-down cultural policies driven by nation-states and government arts agencies, this raised the question of how did people form communities, and act collectively to achieve certain types of outcomes? There was a rapid growth of interest in how networks were formed, as a category between that of bureaucratic hierarchies and impersonal markets, and with this was a surge of interest in notions of community, situated knowledge and what Ash Amin and Joanne Roberts have referred to as “organizing for creativity”. 1

The most visible representative of all of this has been the writer Richard Florida, who has given us the term “creative class” and linked growth in the 21st century global economy fundamentally to the attributes of this group and the forms of cultural amenity that they seek from cities. Florida’s work is widely critiqued around the statistics used to measure a creative class and its rise and rise, which can easily sound like most people with a tertiary qualification, but there is no doubt that he has given us a highly influential image of what the 21st century creative worker looks like. Possibly tattooed and lycra-clad, she/he cycles off to new projects, incubating and generating ideas by day and trying out new cultural scenes, small bars or designer drugs by night, keeping a dense network of loose ties, but never becoming too fixed to any one job, place, scene, relationship or set of ideas.

Caricatures aside, Florida’s work draws upon a recognisable and longstanding history of thinking about the modern city. Sometimes termed the “new urbanism”, it draws upon the highly influential visions of cities and their social and cultural role developed by authors such as Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. Recalling how central debates about whether the move from the countryside to cities was so central to modern sociology (e.g. Ferdinant Tonnies on gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, Georg Simmel), authors such as Jacobs and Mumford stressed the social and cultural value of cities in the outcomes that arise from proximity, diversity and sociality. The more that people are forced to mix with others who are in some way different to themselves, and the more that the city provides “third spaces” for social interaction outside of work and home, the more dynamic cities will be, and the more conducive they will be to creativity.

Jacobs and Mumford wrote about cities when the issues were not only migration from the countryside, or migration from other parts of the world, but the movement to suburbs. Suburbanisation was a trend of the early 20th century, and accelerated in the period after the Second World War. In his book Suburban Century, which traces 20th century suburbanization and debates about its impact in the United States and England, Clapson identifies Mumford as an exemplary anti-suburbanite:

In the mass movement into suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, [a] multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.2

So anti-suburbanism has a long lineage, and when columnists such as The Age’s Catherine Deveny attack the Chadstone Shopping Centre as ‘soul-destroying cathedral to emptiness’, and those who go there as ‘dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul’, it follows a longer and more intellectually respectable tradition.

But we are reminded in Australia that so much that is seen as our contributions to global culture has suburban roots. Australia’s most famous bands, such as AC/DC, INXS and Midnight Oil, came out of a pub-rock culture that was deeply suburban. Our major television exports, Neighbours and Home and Away present images of suburban life that have had international appeal. Kylie Minogue’s trajectory from a mechanic on Neighbours to a global pop princess is a suburban one. From Barry Humphries and the character of Dame Edna Everage, the housewife superstar from Moonee Ponds, to Kath and Kim, the foxy morns of Fountain Gate, Australian humour has drawn from what Humphries termed “the vast suburban tundra”.3 Even Australian cultural studies has a suburban inflection. To take three early landmark works, Meaghan Morris’s “Things to Do With Shopping Cetnres”, Myths of Oz by John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner, and John Hartley’s Tele-ology: Studies in Television, are all dealing at some level with Australian suburban culture.

So suburbanism and anti-suburbanism have sat cheek by jowl in Australia. The historical Graeme Davison suggests that it may have ever been thus. He notes that when Governor Arthur Philip was preparing the first town plan for Sydney in 1789, he instructed that streets be laid out:

… in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and when the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment, which will be sixty feet in front and one hundred and fifty feet in depth. 4

While Governor Philip never used the words “quarter acre suburban block”, he was nonetheless planning for an urban environment where, as Dame Edna would taunt Michael Parkinson on British television 210 years later, ‘In Australia, our houses aren't all joined together like yours to stop them from falling over’. Davison argues that suburbanization has always found a rich response in early Australian history as ‘Australia may be thought of as the farthest suburb of Britain and ambitions for land, space and independence, frustrated in the crowded cities of the homeland, were often realized on the suburban frontiers of Australia’.5 In contemporary multicultural Australia, the aspiration to a detached suburban dwelling across ethnic groups and class divides remains. To take one example, Terence Lee from Murdoch University has discussed the appeal of Perth to Singaporeans, to the point where the term ‘Singaperth” is used in the Straits Times, in terms of the desire to have the sorts of housing that is simply not available on a small and densely populated island, and where ‘Perth might be seen as a “new frontier” for these Singaporeans to strut their creative stuff’.

The Australian Research Council project that inspires today’s symposium has the title Creative Suburbia: A Critical Evaluation of the Opportunities and Scope for Creative Cultural Development in Australia’s Emergent Suburban Communities. The aims of the project have been to:

Map and analyse the experience of the creative industries workforce in outer suburban areas, through grounded case studies in the Australian cities of Brisbane and Melbourne;
Better understand creative enterprise work practices in Australia’s emergent suburban communities, and the role played by networks and dynamic clusters, through a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies;
Identify qualitative cultural factors affecting the employment and productivity of these workers, and the effectiveness of existing mechanisms of government and other forms of support;
Address a potential gap in creative industries research and policy literature arising from a primary focus upon inner-urban areas as sites of creativity, drawing upon the techniques and methodologies of cultural studies and cultural geography.

In developing the project, we were very cognizant of the extensive creative industries mapping project that has been conducted through the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, in the project involving Stuart Cunningham, Peter Higgs and Simon Freebody. There has also been a significant amount of research being undertaken in the field of urban infomatics, looking at how the increasing ubiquity of digital technology, internet services and location-aware applications in our everyday lives are changing both the visible and invisible infrastructure of cities, led by Marcus Foth, Greg Hearn and a large range of researchers across disciplines and Faculties. We are also pleased to have Alan Davies and Richard Brecknock with us today, who bring extensive understanding and experience of how such trends are developing in Australian cities and internationally, and who have been engaged with policy-makers at local and state government levels in shaping responses to these trends.

Before introducing the first speaker, I’ll conclude with two potential pitfalls that can arise in this area. The first is what I would call suburban realism. Suburban realism had something of a high water mark in Australia between the arrival of the MV Tampa in Australian waters in 2001 and the arrival of Work Choices legislation in Australian workplaces in 2006. It became very popular among conservative politicians in Australia, and was responded to by Labor in electing a leader in Mark Latham who was a self-described “suburban warrior”, and who will be the only Australian political leader to ever identify Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell as his all time favourite musical work.

It championed the folk wisdom of suburban Australia, a world of tradies, ute-men and hairdressers, over the “out of touch elites” of the inner city, the “latte set” who thought that republicanism, refugees and Australia’s cultural standing in the world were more important than Bunnings, Officeworks and plasma TVs from Harvey Norman. The Liberal former member for Lindsay, Jackie Kelly, captured suburban realism in her infamous statement that the people of her electorate in Western Sydney were not much interested in what happened at the university located in the region, as her electorate was “pram city”, where people were too busy having babies to worry much about higher education. If the stereotype of suburban Australia as brain dead bogans is not accurate, as the work in this project and elsewhere is finding, there is little point in inverting the stereotype and presenting a hitherto perceived lack as some form of vernacular cultural advantage.

The other potential pitfall is what can be termed suburban romanticism. The trope of ‘romancing the suburbs’ arguably goes back to colonial times in Australia and elsewhere, but it can acquire a new tenacity in the age of creative industries. Chris Gibson, Chris Brennan-Horley, Susan Luckman and Julie Willoughby-Smith found elements of this in their study of creative workforce in Darwin, where the ‘serenity’ of parts of the city could equate with having ‘spaces to think’ that were not possible in more concentrated urban zones.7 It is useful to challenge what is often the relentless urbanism of creative industries and creative cities discourse, not least because it frequently conflates attributes of place with consequences of positioning in global circuits of capital and culture, so that the “global city” status of places such as New York, Los Angeles and London is presented as a result of their people and communities rather than their place in the global economy.

But simply romanticizing the suburbs, no less than demonizing them, has the effect of constructing as homogeneous entities places that are highly diverse. This is one reason why the Creative Suburbia project has chosen a qualitative research methodology, as it allows for responses from those actively engaged in developing networks as creative workers in different Australian suburbs to present experiences, and to codify these in ways that don’t force the outcomes back into pre-existing categories. How to better balance positive and negative perceptions of Australian suburbia, and to challenge one-dimensional stereotypes without presenting a patchwork of ineffable and irreducible difference – these are challenges facing those engaged with researching the cultural economic geography of creative workers in Australian suburbs today.

1 Ash Amin and Joanne Roberts, ‘The Resurgence of Community in Economic Thought and Practice’, in A. Amin and J. Roberts (eds.), Community, Economic Creativity and Organization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2 Lewis Mumford, The City in History, quoted in Mark Clapson, Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the United States, Oxford: Berg, 2003, p. 5.
3 Sue Turnbull, “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: From Dame Edna to Kath and Kim”, International Journal of Cultural Studies 11(1), 2008, pp. 15-32.
4 Governor Arthur Philip, Letter to Lord Sydney 1788, quoted in Graeme Davison, ‘The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb’, in L. C. Johnson (ed.), Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities, Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1985, p. 100.
5 Davison, ‘The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb’, p. 102.
7 Chris Brennan-Horley, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson and Julie Willoughby-Smith, ‘GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back Into Ethnographic Mapping', The Information Society 26(2), 2010 (forthcoming).

HASS on the Hill 2009 - Day 2

2009-10-29T20:20:00.008+10:00

Day 2 of HASS on the Hill, being written a day after due to late flights and lots of October 30 deadlines around the place.

Going to New Parliament House (using that term because we had dinner the previous night in the Old Parliament House) is a lot of fun. This is the political class in its natural habitat, and the designers of the building created a cavernous space with lots of nooks and hiding places which seem to facilitate plotting. The famous cafe Ossie's also facilitates arriving early and staying late, with its collection of breakfast cereals, wines, toilet paper, noodle packets, condoms and so on alongside the standard cafe fare. A chance meeting there with Rhys Muldoon revealed many fascinting stories about the political world and the arts world in particular (no spoiler alert here).

The main event for me was meeting Senator Mitch Fifield. Mitch is a Liberal Senator from Victoria, and was a Senior Political Advisor to former Treasurer Peter Costello prior to entering the Senate in 2004.

From Mitch's well designed web site, I gauged that an area of potentially fruitful discussion could arise from his being a patron of The Song Room, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing music education opportunities for children in disadvantaged schools. We were also both at the University of Sydney in the 1980s, so there were some common touch points, ranging from smuggling items into the Fisher Library stack, to students form the era now in the Federal Parliament, including Anthony Albanese, Joe Hockey, Greg Combet, Belinda Neal and (after the Bradfiled by-election, barring a big surprise) Paul Fletcher.

[The road not taken here involves Mitch also being a vocal campaigner for Voluntary Student Unionism. While I have been around universities enough to have seen some truly daft things happen in student unions, withdrawal of the funding that came from student union fees has left a funding hole on campuses that has proved difficult to fill. At any rate, it can be noted that perhaps the daftest thing ever done by a student union was by Liberal Students at the University of New England, in their creation of a position of Heterosexuality Officer.]

Anyway, the meeting was off to a good start. I noted that I wasn't asking for support for any paticular project, which met the affiring respomse from Senator Fifield that being in the Opposition, he couldn't give me anything anyway, so just go ahead and ask. I was also struck by the fact that, just as I had Googled him prior to the metting, he had similarly Googled me, and fould this very blog.

My points from the meeting were:

The National Library of Australia's digitising newspapers initiative is something well worth supporting, not least because it may mean that Sydney Uni. students spend less time in the Fisher Library stack;
50% of Australian universities' funding coming from non-government sources (discussed yesterday) of which the largest is student fee income, has had a distorting effect on what happens in the sector that is a problem for developing strength in the arts, humanities and social sciences;
A case can be made, and I sought to make it, for a national audit of Media and Communications courses around Australia (including areas such as journalism and public relations as well as areas of multimedia design) to see if they are still growing, and how they are responding to a plethora of industry and technological changes, as well as their general balancing of vocational skills orientation and contextual material.

In realtion to the last point, the last major study in this area was the report prepared by Peter Putnis and his team at the University of Canberra, which was recognised internationally as a landmark study. The time may well have arrived for an equivalent new study, and CHASS may be the entity through which this can be pursued in conjunction with ANZCA.

HASS on the Hill 2009 - Day 1

2009-10-27T17:22:00.004+10:00

Being late October, it is time for HASS on the Hill, which I am attending as ANZCA President.

My trip to Canberra turned out to be more eventful than expected for three reasons. First, I discovered the night before that in the course of changing the timing of my return flight to allow for my meeting with Senator Mitch Fifield at 4pm on Wednesday, someone (ether QANTAS or my travel agent) managed to eliminate my flight to Canberra altogther, so I had to make a hurried ticket purchase on my own credit card on Sunday night.

Second, on my revised flight – later than was originally planned – I found myself sitting next to the Independent MP for Kennedy in Far Far North Qld, Bob Katter. Bob wore the most impressive hat onto the plane, an R. M .Williams cowboy number. Finally, leaving Brisbane where the current temperature range is 21-32 degrees Celcius, and the tracksuits are well and truly packed away, I forgot that it is still cold in Canberra, making for a challenging night of rugging up. Still, it could have been worse, as I met people who took the later flight out of Brisbane, only to find themselves stuck at the airport for 3 ½ hours due to the storm.

HASS stands for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and HASS on the Hill is an annual event held by the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS). A lot of acronyms here, but the aim of CHASS – founded in 2004 – is to “promote and provide advocacy for the humanities, arts and social sciences and to serve as a coordinating forum for academics, students, business, practitioners and the broader community”.

CHASS aims to build recognition, profile and influence for the humanities, arts and social sciences akin to the influence acquired by the science and technology sectors, with the specific aims of:

Promoting the work of the sectors to government, industry and the public
Advocating for policy reform and resources to allow Australia to further develop and use the knowledge and skills it has developed in the humanities, the arts and the social sciences.
Providing a coordinating forum for discussion in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences sectors in Australia
Creating networks linking experts and researchers in the sector with industry, policy makers and media
Building the innovative capacity of Australia through better linkages between these sectors, and science, technology, engineering and medicine
Supporting members by building an effective and well-resourced organisation able to provide policy briefing, advocacy and communications advice, and leadership in promoting the sector.

From the first session, which provided an overview of making the case for the value of the HASS sector, two points caught my attention. The first was from Professor Stuart MacIntyre, President of the Academy of the Social Sciences, that higher education in Australia accounts for 1.6% of GDP, of which 0.8% is contributed by private sources, primarily domestic and international fee-paying students. The private contribution ratio is second highest in the world after the United States, but the public contribution in the U.S. is considerably larger. This is another way of saying that Australia has one of the most market-driven higher education sectors in the world, and one of the lowest proportionate contributions of government to higher education funding.

The other point was from Jan Fullerton, Director-General of the National Library of Australia, and her description of the NLA’s process of digitizing Australia’s newspapers. As of June 2009, 4.3 million articles are now available and full-text searchable, with 1.95 million pages scanned from microfiche, and now available through the Google news Archive service. Following the Web 2.0 principle, participants are encouraged to scan, correct and tag text, and users have corrected over 3.4 million lines of electronic text in over 150,000 articles, while adding 70,000 tags to articles and including comment and further information about articles. The plan is to have 40 million searchable articles by 2010, and you can put a link to Australian Newspapers beta from your own website: http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/.

Then it was off to lunch at the National Press Club to hear Peter Garrett on a national cultural policy. Underwhelming is the term that stays with me. The National Press Club is an underwhelming venue, with its mix of leathery steaks, bad red wine, and rules that only the journalists can ask questions even if they – by their own admission – know nothing about the topic. And when did the guy from sciencemedia.com.au (he kept adding the domain name in his questions) become such an authority on the arts that he gets to ask two questions about Australia’s future population! Future historians and archaeologists may well draw a link between the general dodginess of the National Press Club and the poor quality of Australian newspaper commentary.

The last time I saw Peter Garrett on a stage, it was 1982 at the Royal Antler Hotel in Narrabeen, at a Midnight Oils show. After hearing a decidedly underwhelming presentation on an Australian national cultural policy here, I was certainly a bit nostalgic for the old days. There are certainly a series of old debates about a cultural policy that invariably generate what Peter would call “deep thinking” and a “fair dinkum exchange of views”. What I found most odd was how readily Peter Garrett accepted the formula the arts = culture = flagship companies and big festivals. Its not odd because it’s a view – not everyone subscribes to a cultural studies zeitgeist – but because its coming from someone who has had such an impact on Australian national culture from completely outside of that institutional terrain. It feels like a determined disavowal of his old tribe of the live musicians.

Afternoon involved a debrief on how to deal with an MP or a Senator, with six presenters doing their pitch to a panel in an event described by one panelist as “Australian Idol for smart people”. It was pretty engaging and quite a lot of fun, even as we all wondered who is meeting with Wilson Tuckey MP tomorrow.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Twelve

2009-10-24T00:54:00.000+10:00

• ‘Homo economicus strips the sovereign of power inasmuch as he reveals an essential, fundamental and major incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the totality of the economic field. The sovereign cannot fail to be blind vis-à-vis the economic domain or field as a whole. The whole set of economic processes cannot fail to elude a would-be central, totalizing, bird’s-eye-view’ (p. 292).

• Possible solutions were : (1) to demarcate market and non-market spaces, and enable political power to be exercised in non-market domains; and (2) to cede control over economic processes but develop superior maps of the economic process (Physiocrats) – ‘in the Physiocrats’ perspective the sovereign will have to pass from political activity to theoretical passivity in relation to the economic process’ (p. 293)

• As neither of these options are satisfactory, “governmentable” subjects are developed through a new domain or field of reference for the art of governing, which is civil society

• The question of civil society is one of ‘how to govern, according to the rules of right, a space of sovereignty which for good or ill is inhabited by economic subjects?’ – ‘The problem of civil society is the juridical structure (economie juridique) of a governmentality pegged to the economic structure (economie economique)’ (p. 296)

• Civil society as a governmental technology: ‘An omnipresent government, a government which nothing escapes, a government which conforms to the rules of right, and a government which nonetheless respects the specificity of the economy, will be a government that manages civil society, the nation, society, the social’ (p. 296).

• Civil society is not a ‘primary reality’, but rather a ‘transactional reality’, like madness or sexuality – ‘an element of transactional reality in the history of governmental technologies’ that correlates to liberalism as ‘a technology of government whose objective is its own self-limitation insofar as it is pegged to the specificity of economic processes’ (p. 297)

• From the mid C18th, and particularly with Adam Ferguson’s History of Civil Society (published at roughly the same time as The Wealth of Nations), civil society appears as:
1. A historical-natural constant beyond which nothing can be found;
2. The spontaneous synthesis of individuals – the social bond which requires no contract non-egoist interests represented in civil society, which is nonetheless territorially bounded in ways that the market is not;
3. A permanent matrix of political power, that is spontaneously formed rather than being the expression of a social contract between governors and governed – ‘in civil society the groups; decision appears to be the decision of the whole group, but when we look more closely at how this takes place we see that the decisions were taken, as [Ferguson] says, “in more select parties”;
4. A motor of history, in so far as it presents the possibility of a stable equilibrium between market society/homo economicus and that which is outside of it (benevolence, community, consent) – developments in economic society and civil society must bear a relationship to one another, as expressed through government and law – civil society can therefore never be static

• The German tradition of counterposing the state and civil society is contrasted to the English tradition of conceiving of civil society within problematics of government – ‘Does civil society really need a government?’ (Thomas Paine) (p. 310)

• The recentring of government associated with liberalism is the shift from government based upon the wisdom of the sovereign (raison d’Etat), to government based upon rationality and calculation. Rationality as a governmental technology is limited, however, by both the invisibility of economic processes and the autonomy of economic subjects. The concept of homo economicus exists less as an attempt to describe human behaviour than as a means of pegging a rationality to subjects that makes them amenable to governmental actions that act as changes to the external environment.

• The different governmental rationalities that have overlapped and competed since the 19th century have been government according to truth (Marxism as government according to the truth of history), art of government according to reason/rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic agents.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Eleven

2009-10-23T00:50:00.000+10:00

• The problem of homo economicus and its applicability to domains that are not immediately and directly economic (crime, marriage, child rearing etc.) is interesting as it posits a notion of the “rational subject” that bears no relationship to the work done in the social sciences on how individuals respond to behavioural stimuli, but it also presents homo economicus not as someone who should be left alone (as in the theory of laissez faire), but rather as ‘the person who accepts reality or who responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment … as someone manageable … someone who is eminently governable. Far from being the intangible partner of laissez faire, homo economicus now becomes the correlate of a governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables’ (pp. 2070-271).

• There is in fact no theory of homo economicus, but it draws upon a notion of the subject that begins to appear in C17th English empiricist philosophy as ‘a subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable’ (p. 272). The legal subject of contract is understood as a ‘subject of interest’ in this sense, who ‘has become calculating, rationalized’ (p. 273). The ‘subject of interest’ overflows the ‘subject of right’ – juridical will cannot take over from interest – and the subject of interest is not governed by the principle of rights, but is assumed to be an egoistic subject – ‘The market and the contract function in exactly opposite ways and we in fact have two heterogeneous structures’ (p. 276)

• ‘The situation of homo economicus could therefore be described as doubly involuntary, with regard to the accidents which happen to him and with regard to the benefit he unintentionally produces for others’ (p. 277) – Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ – uncertainty about outcomes is an absolute condition for the effective functioning of such a system – ‘The collective good must not be an objective. It must not be an objective because it cannot be calculated, at least, not within an economic strategy. Here we are at the heart of a principle of invisibility.’ (p. 279) – the invisibility is as important as the ‘hand’ – ‘Invisibility is absolutely indispensable. It is an invisibility which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the collective good’ (p. 280).

• The economy must also be obscure to political power, not only in the importance of leaving people alone to pursue self-interest, but also ‘it is impossible for the sovereign to have a point of view on the economic mechanism which totalizes every element and enables them to be combined artificially or voluntarily. The invisible hand which spontaneously combines interests also prohibits any form of intervention and, even better, any form of overarching gaze which would enable the economic process to be totalized’ (p. 280).

• ‘Liberalism acquired its modern shape precisely with the formulation of this essential incompatibility between the non-totalizable multiplicity of economic subjects of interest and the totalizing unity of the juridical sovereign’ (p. 282).

• The C18th saw liberalism form itself in opposition to raison d’Etat and the idea of the sovereign that was both a sovereign of right and an administrative sovereign, capable of delivering good government on the basis of superior knowledge. Economic liberalism emerges in opposition to the Physiocrats and the Economic Table, as part of a more general project of ‘disqualification of a political reason indexed to the state and its sovereignty’ (p. 284)

• After Adam Smith ‘Political economy is indeed a science, a type of knowledge (savoir), a mode of knowledge (connaissance) which those who govern must take into account. But economic science cannot be the science of government and economics cannot be the internal principle, law, rule of conduct, or rationality of government. Economics is a science lateral to the art of governing. One must govern with economics, one must govern alongside economics, one must govern by listening to the economists, but economics must not be and there is no question that it can be the governmental rationality itself’ (p. 286).

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Ten

2009-10-22T10:22:00.001+10:00

• Paradoxes of German neoliberalism (Ordoliberalism):
o How to maintain “light” regulation that dies not act directly upon the market but only in favour of promoting the economic process?
o How to address the tension inherent in generalizing the enterprise form to balance the promotion of “warm” moral and cultural values with the “cold” mechanisms of competition?

• ‘The return to the enterprise is therefore at once an economic policy or a policy of the economisation of the entire social field, of an extension of the economy to the entire social field, but at the same time a policy which presents itself or seeks to e a kind of Vitalpolitik with the function of compensating for what is cold, impassive, calculating, rational, and mechanical in the strictly economic game of competition. The enterprise society imagined by the ordoliberals is therefore a society for the market and a society against the market, a society oriented towards the market and a society that compensates for the effects of the market in the realms of values and existence.’ (p. 242)

• American neo-liberalism is more radical than German ordoliberalism in that it involves ‘the generalization of the economic form of the market … throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges’ (p. 243)

• The generalization of the economic form of the market beyond the realm of monetary exchanges functions as a ‘principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relationships and individual behaviour’ for American neo-liberalism (p. 243) – examples include thinking about child-rearing in terms of human capital, and marriage in terms of a contract to manage transaction costs

• The second major use of the economic form in American neo-liberalism is to subject government action to endless scrutiny of costs and benefits ‘a permanent criticism of governmental policy’ based upon “economic positivism”, and pursued by institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute, whose history actually precedes the Chicago School (p. 247)

• This analysis of non-economic behaviour through a grid of economic intelligibility and the critique of public authorities in market terms can be seen in the account developed of crime and criminal justice by Gary Becker, George Stigler and others. They develop a transaction cost account of crime and punishment where it is the ratio of costs and benefits from the point of view of both the individual and the society that serve as the anchor-points for appraising the penal justice system, as distinct from the ‘anthropology of crime’ that has been developing since the 19th century, with its focus upon the criminal subject and his/her social environment – homo economicus as compared to homo criminalis. While this appears trite and banal (‘a crime is that for which a punishment exists if one is caught’), it reverts back to earlier conceptions of the management of penal justice by classical liberals such as Bentham and Beccaria.

What is Content Co-creation?

2009-10-13T11:09:00.003+10:00

Fascinating paper by Michel Bauwens from the Foundation fro Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and Institute for Distributed Creativity, published in the Fibreculture journal, on the layers of content co-creation:

Albert Boswijk, of the Amsterdam-based Center for the Experience Economy, asked me a set of interesting questions:

What is the reality behind so called best practice co-creation concepts? Are these lipservice to co-creative approaches? Are you really in the driver's seat or are you just being made to believe that you have influence on the outcome? What are the building blocks of co-creation? Which conditions are required? Are organisations really prepared to allow customers to influence and control their organisation and therefore become a co-creative organisation?

To understand the reality or illusion behind projects claiming to practice co-creation or co-design, one must look at the polarities of power and control that determine the context in which the co-creative processes take place, with on the one hand the communities of external collaborators, and on the other hand the corporate entities. But before tackling this issue in particular, it may be useful to see the emerging new paradigm of production that is arising out of the new participative processes.

The new institutional reality could be described as follows.

The First Layer: Collaborative Platforms

At the core are the enabling collaborative socio-technological platforms that allow knowledge workers, software developers and open design communities to collaborate on joint projects, outside of the direct control of corporate entities.

Interesting questions already arise here. These concern who or what is the driving force behind the creation and development of such platforms? They can be initiated by developing communities, managed and maintained by a new type of non-profit institution (like the FLOSS Foundations), or they can be corporate platforms that have been opened up to external participants.

The Second Layer: Open Design Commons/Communities and Physical Infrastructure

Around the corporate platform is the open design community and the knowledge/software/design commons ruled by a set of licenses which determine the particular nature of the property.

Interesting questions arise here. Is it a true commons license like the GPL? Or a sharing license like the Creative Commons, where the stress is on the individual sovereignity in determining the level of sharing that is allowed? Or is it a corporate license, giving very limited rights, or even with outright digital sharecropping, i.e. with the expropriation of the totality of the creative output reserved for usage by the organizing corporation?

It is important to see the open design commons not just as a collaborative community or a new type of 'intellectual property' depository, but also as a fundamentally new type of manufacturing infrastructure. Open design communities have different priorities and constraints than proprietary IP, and naturally design for modularity, lower threshold capital requirements, sustainability, etc. Thus, we are talking about the seeding of a new physical productive infrastructure as well.

The Third Layer: Entrepreneurial Coalitions

Around the commons are the entrepreneurial coalitions that benefit and sustain the design commons, create added value on top of it, and sell this as products or services to the market.

Important questions raised here are as follows. How is the coalition itself organized? Do all parties have equal say, as in the Linux Foundation, or does one big party dominate, as in the Eclipse Foundation and IBM. How does the business ecology relate to the community? Is is nothing but a corporate commons?

The Fourth Layer: Funding Ecologies

In addition, there is a funding infrastructure.

What is the process governing the stream of returns from the monetized market sphere; to the commons, its community, and the infrastructure of cooperation? Do businesses support the community directly, through the foundations? Is the government or a set of public authorities involved? Are there crowdfunding mechanisms?

The Fifth Layer: The Partner State as Orchestrator?

Finally, there is the role of public authorities and governments in orchestrating the public-private-common triad in order to benefit from the local effects of the new networked coopetition between entrepreneurial coalitions and their linked communities.

In the not so far future, wealth building or sustaining capacity will be determined to a large degree by the capacity of cities, regions and states to insert themselves within the global coopetition between different enterpreneurial coalitions (think Drupal vs Joomla, but on a much larger scale).

Overview of the Main Models Emerging So Far

When we via these layers through an interlocking triad (community—foundation—business) or quaternary structure (if public authorities are involved), we can now distinguish at least three main models:

— In commons-centred peer production, like Linux, the community is at the core, and a real commons operates, with the community strong enough to sustain its own infrastructure, and cooperating with market players.

— In a sharing environment, where individuals share their creative endeavour, it is the corporate third party platform which monetizes the attention space, and may control the platform to a significant degree; the community does not control its own platform, but is not without power of influence, since quick and massive mobilizations are always possible.

— In a crowdsourced environment, participant producers are even more isolated from each other, and the corporation integrates them into the value chain which they control. Since individuals are here competing for market value themselves, solidarity is more difficult to obtain, giving corporate platform owners more influence.

A good illustration of the various possibilities is Lego. Lego still operates as a classical producer of toys, selling to consumers. In Lego Factory, it provides a crowdsourced environment, where co-designers can take a cut of the kits they succeed in selling; the new Lego World virtual environment is a sharing environment; finally, Lugnet is true commons-oriented peer production, happening outside the control of the company altogether.

The Ladder of Participation: The Gradation of Control on Community/Corporate Polarity

Here are ten different co-creation modalities, depending on the polarity of control between peer producers and the corporate entities:

1. Consumers: you make, they consume. The classic model.

2. Self-service: you make, they go get it themselves. This is where consumers start becoming prosumers, but the parameters of the cooperation are totally set by the producing corporation. It's really not much more than a strategy of externalization of costs. Think of ATM's and gas stations. We could call it simple externalization.

3. Do-it-yourself: you design, they make it themselves. One step further, pioneered by the likes of Ikea, where the consumers re-assemble the product themselves. There is a complex externalization of business processes.

4. Company-based Crowdsourcing: the company organizes a value chain which lets the wider public produce the value, but under the control of the company.

5. Co-design: you set the parameters, but you design it together. For examples, see here: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Co-Design.

6. Co-creativity: you both create cooperatively. In this stage, the corporation does not even set the parameters, the prosumer is an equal partner in the development of new products. Perhaps the industrial model of the adventure sports material makers would fit here. For examples, see here: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Co-Creation.

7. Sharing communities create the value: Web 2.0 proprietary platforms attempt to monetize participation.

8. Peer production proper: communities create the value, using a Commons, with assistance from corporations who attempt to create derivative streams of value. Linux is the paradigmatic example.

9. Peer production with cooperative production: peer producers create their own vehicles for monetization. The OS Alliance is an example of this.

10. Peer production communities or sharing communities place themselves explicitly outside of the monetary economy.

A diagram that mindmaps the possibilities of the open is found here.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Nine

2009-10-08T09:00:00.000+10:00

• American neo-liberalism had become a hot topic in France by the late 1970s. Foucault sees key contextual differences between The United States and Germany (and France) as being:
1. It emerges as a reaction to the Keynesian policies of Roosevelt and the New Deal, from about 1934;
2. The policies of economic and social intervention are motivated in the U.S., as in Britain, not just by Keynesian economics, but by the need to provide security to those who had engaged in the war effort;
3. Growth in social programs was a theme of U.S. governments from the 1930s to the 1960s – Kennedy/Johnson “Great Society” programs.

• Bigger contextual differences in the U.S. case:
1. American liberalism was not a reaction to raison d’Etat, as in France, but was a founding doctrine of American independence and is therefore central to the legitimacy of the state – ‘The demand for liberalism founds the state rather than the state limiting itself through liberalism’ (p. 217)
2. Liberalism is therefore a recurring theme of American political debate;
3. Interventionist government policies therefore appear as non-liberal and somehow illegitimate and socialistic – they are therefore critiqued by the left as well as the right, with the left seeing the interventionist state as being tied to militarism and imperialism.

• ‘Liberalism in America … is a type of relation between the governors and the governed much more than a technique of governors with regard to the governed … whereas in a country like France disputes between individuals and the state turn on the problem of service, of public service, in the United States disputes between individuals and government look like the problem of freedoms’ (p. 218)

• It is therefore in the U.S. that writers such as von Hayek look to liberalism as not simply an alternative to state socialism or a technical alternative for government, but as generating utopian possibilities.

• The theory of human capital emerges from American neo-liberal economic thought (Theodore Schultz, Gary Becker, Jacob Mincer). It seeks to analyse labour itself, whereas classical political economy had little to say about the supply of labour, as compared to its employment by capital.

• ‘The neo-liberals practically never argue with Marx for reasons that we may think are to do with economic snobbery’ (p. 220) – their difference form Marx would revolve around the perception that the “abstraction” of labour is less the result of how it is subsumed within capital at the point of production, but rather because classical economics set its limit-point of analysis at the study of labour itself.

• The question being asked is not about the price of labour (wages), its uses (employment), or the value that it adds and who receives it (profit), but rather how the person who works makes choices between competing ends about how they develop their “human capital” in order to receive wages for undertaking work.

• Labour from the point of view of the worker can be decomposed between its capital (skills, ability, training etc.) and its income (earnings streams over time). ‘If capital is defined as that which makes a future income possible, this income being a wage, then you can see that it is a capital which in practical terms is inseparable from the person who possesses it. To that extent it is not like other capital. Ability to work, skill, the ability to do something cannot be separated from the person who is skilled and who can do this particular thing.’ (p. 224)

• Homo economicus becomes not simply the partner of exchange as in classical liberal economics, but is ‘an entrepreneur of himself’ (p. 226). Consumption becomes production of satisfaction – this is not an individual who is alienated from either production or consumer society.

• Human capital is formed through:
1. Genetics – economic theory of marriage, the family, and children;
2. Parenting and socialization;
3. Educational investment;
4. Mobility and migration – psychological as well as material costs of moving necessitate some form of economic return.

• Key move in development economics from the 1960s onwards was to link economic growth to education through investments in human capital.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Eight

2009-10-07T20:20:00.001+10:00

• Why this topic? The methodological reason is to give ‘concrete content to relations of power’ by understanding how the ‘grid of governmentality’ operates at the level of economic policy or social management. He also wants to get beyond the moralizing of critiques of the state because:
1. It defines the state as the opposite of civil society;
2. It wrongly conflates different kinds of states, particularly liberal-administrative states and fascist-totalitarian states;
3. It promotes a paranoiac mode of thinking that eludes concrete empirical analysis (i.e. the state is becoming more fascist);
4. There is a need to understand critiques of the state as ways of promoting different thinking about state policy e.g. German neo-liberal critique extends a critique of Nazism into a critique of the interventionist state more generally.

• Foucault argues that we have not seen the growth of the state and raison d’Etat but rather its reduction – liberal governmentality involves setting limits to state control, rather than expanding the state’s domains of influence

• Some tendencies towards diffusion of German neo-liberal model to France, but in practice this has been limited by: (1) the much stronger traditions of state-centred governmentality in post-WWII France; (2) the absence of a clear sense of crisis; and (3) the fact that it is state bureaucrats who are being asked to reform themselves, rather than change being driven by exogenous forces. In France, the question of economic liberalism has also been liked historically to being an open or protected economy, and social policy has been seen as a corrective rather than as a correlate of the market economy.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Seven

2009-10-06T21:49:00.003+10:00

• Social policy of neo-liberalism (Gesellschaftpolitik) is ‘active, intense, and interventionist’, but is not a compensatory policy for impacts of the market economy on the social fabric. It is rather ’a historical and social condition of possibility for a market economy, as the condition enabling the formal mechanism of competition to function’ (p. 160)

• The two key elements are:
1. Formalisation of society on the model of the enterprise;
2. Redefinition of the juridicial institution and the rule of law.

• Walter Lippmann symposium 1939 – emphasizes that the market economy is not a “natural order” but rather ‘the result of a legal order that presupposes juridicial intervention by the state’ (Louis Rougier) – Foucault identifies this as a turning point between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism

• This is not a juridicial order that is superstructural to economic relations – ‘The juridicial gives form to the economic, and the economic would not be what it is without the juridicial’ – ‘like Max Weber, they situate themselves from the outset at the level of the relations of production rather than at the level of the forces of production’ (p. 163)

• ‘The economic must be considered as a set of regulated activities from the very beginning … The economic can only ever be considered as a set of activities, which necessarily means regulated activities … these economic processes only really exist, in history, insofar as an institutional framework and positive rules have provided them with their conditions of possibility’ (p. 163)

• ‘The history of capitalism can only be an economic-institutional history’ (p. 164) – Foucault rejects the Marxist idea that Capitalism can be understood as a singularity – ‘the historical capitalism we know is not deducible as the only possible and necessary figure of the logic of capital’ (p. 165)

• German economic theory was concerned to show that capitalism could have a non-contradictory logic. It therefore focused on the one hand on the theory of competition, and whether or not it led inexorably to monopoly, and on the other on the economic-institutional ensembles which promoted the development of capitalism (e.g. Weber on the Protestant ethic)

• If we are not dealing with an essential Capitalism derived from a pure logic of capital, then the forms of legal intervention that change the economic-institutional ensemble become critical to ‘act … in such a way as to invent a different capitalism’ (p. 167)

• This raises the question of the “economic constitution” (Wirtschaftsordnung), and the development of debates about the Rule of law (l’Etat de droit or Rechtstadt) – rule of law emerged in opposition to both despotism and the police state – it requires that ‘public authorities act within the framework of the law’ (p. 169). It also generates a distinction between the Rule of law as it applies universally, and laws as generated in specific contexts and applied for particular actors (e.g. market regulations), which are generated by specialist administrative courts and institutions.

• The Rule of law as developed by von Hayek in The Constitution of Society presents the Rule of law in the economic order as the opposite of a plan. Economic planning has: (1) definite aims (e.g. a prescribed rate of growth); (2) modifications of the plan in light of circumstances to achieve the goal; and (3) public authorities supplanting individuals as the core decision-makers, and (4) public authorities as holders of all relevant information.

By contrast, the Rule of law as understood by Hayek requires: (1) restriction of state authority to setting formal laws and not dictating economic ends; (2) it must operate through fixed rules only and not by means of discretion; (3) economic agents can operate on the basis of certainty about the legal framework; and (4) formal laws are binding on the state as they are binding on others. Its correlate is that ‘the state must be blind to the economic processes. It must not be expected to know everything concerning the economy’ (p. 173) – ‘The economy is a game and the legal institution which frames the economy should be thought of as the rules of the game’ (p. 173)

• There is also the ‘growth of juidical demand’. The major challenge of classical liberalism was how to establish a general system of laws imposed on everyone in the same way. But the rise of an enterprise society has as its correlate ‘the number and size of the sources of friction between these competing units will increase and occasions of conflict and litigation multiply’ (p. 175) – this juridicial interventionism increasingly has to take the form of ‘arbitration within the framework of the rules of the game’ (p. 175) – ‘the de-functionarization of the economic action of plans, together with the increased dynamic of enterprises, produces the need for an ever-increasing number of judicial instances, or anyway of instances of arbitration’ (p. 175)

• Joseph Schumpeter shared with the ordoliberals a view that capitalism was not inherently contradictory at the economic level, but he did believe that monopolistic tendencies were inherent to capitalism as organized at a social level – this concentration of power would reduce the dynamism of capitalism and see it tending towards socialism. Schumpeter’s pessimism about the social pressures to absorb economic processes within the state is contrasted to the ordoliberals, who believe that the rule of law and social intervention can modify this tendency by promoting an enterprise society.

Google Wave and Journalism

2009-10-02T05:47:00.002+10:00

As Google Wave starts to surface as a quite different way of conceiving of e-mail, and article in The LA Times discussed how it could change journalism towards a more collaborative practice.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Six

2009-09-26T13:59:00.000+10:00

I have provided a summary of notes on the sixth lecture given by Michel Foucault at the College de France 1978-79, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. The lecture was originally given on 14 February, 1979.

• Foucault wants to emphasise the singularity of neo-liberalism, and not to say that it is a return to old economic theories (Adam Smith), it is another term for market society (Marxism) or that it is the generalization of a form of state power. For Foucault, it differs from liberalism in that liberalism was concerned with how to ‘contrive a free space of the market within an already given political society’, whereas neo-liberalism is concerned with ‘how the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of a market economy’ (p. 131).

• Competition is both rigorous in its internal structure but historically fragile, and therefore needs the active support of government – it is not a state of nature (laissez-faire)

• 1939 Walter Lippmann Colloquium in Paris – emphasises the need for an active policy to maintain a market economy – classical liberalism is seen as naïve in this respect, as ‘the problem is not whether there are things that you cannot touch and things that you are entitled to touch … [but] the problem is the way of doing things, the problem, if you like, of governmental style’ (p. 133).

• The problem of monopolies provides a recurring question for neo-liberalism, as it suggests that competition may contain its own negation – the question becomes one of showing how other factors – most notably law – can maintain monopoly, raising the question of the need to understand specific political-institutional frameworks in the development of capitalism. They shift the question away from intervention to prevent monopoly, or even to support it, to one where ‘non-intervention is necessary on condition, of course, that an institutional framework is established to prevent either individuals or public authorities intervening to create a monopoly’ (p. 137)

• Eucken (1952) – liberal government must intervene through regulatory actions and through organising actions. Regulatory actions are those policies which set the rules of the game. Neo-liberalism recommends a focus on price stability, and not policies such as full employment. Organising actions are those which set up the framework for commercial activities e.g. European agricultural policy.

• Social policy marks a major point of difference between Keynesian economics and what in France was known as the economics of the Popular Front, and neo-liberalism. Keynesianism recommends a redistributive social policy that modifies the effects of the market and economic competition, through social provision of essential goods and services (welfare state), redistributive taxation, and greater social spending as a reward for economic growth. The ordoliberals argue that social policy and economic policy cannot be founded on contradictory principles, as a social policy premised upon equalizing outcomes will undercut the economic mechanisms of the market. They favour private provision over social provision, social policy based upon individuals rather than collective groups, and a policy which maintains and encourages risk-taking rather than one which compensates for economic risk.

• German social policy under the social market economy could not be based upon such principles due to popular resistance, and it marks an important point of differentiation between German ordoliberalism and the American neo-liberalism of the Chicago School. Its core principle, however, is that social policy should not be a counterpoint to economic policy, and the German ordoliberals want a ‘policy of society’ rather than a ‘government of society’

• The new art of government is one that seeks to generalize the enterprise form throughout society. A range of social conditions are identified as correlates for this including: promoting access to private property; encouraging medium-sized towns and private home ownership; decentralizing economic activity; developing policies favourable to small business; and planning urban environments in order to minimize environmental degradation. This is what Rüstow referred to as a Vitalpolitik, or a ‘politics of life’, that ‘is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society’ (p. 148).

• One consequence of the enterprise society is that it has the potential to multiply sources of dispute, and hence it typically requires considerable legal arbitration and judicial activism.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Five

2009-09-25T20:53:00.000+10:00

I have provided a summary of notes on the fifth lecture given by Michel Foucault at the College de France 1978-79, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This lecture was given on 7 February, 1979.

• While classical liberalism and political economy raised the question of how to reconcile the expansion of the market and the objectives of raison d’Etat by proposing the paradox of ‘more state by less government’, the challenge facing German neo-liberals was how to legitimize a state in advance that both guarantees economic freedom and is guaranteed by it?

• The Freiberg School of German political economists (Watter Eucken, Franz Böhm, Müller-Armack, Wilhelm Röpke, Röstow) developed an influential reading of German history that saw a consistent rejection of liberalism over the C19th and early C20th as the path that led to the Nazi state

• By the early C20th, according to Foucault, the Marxist problematic of the contradictory logic of capital had been largely displaced in intellectual circles by the problematic of Max Weber around the ‘irrational rationality of capitalist society’. The Weberian problematic saw no internal limits to the logic of capital accumulation, but pointed to its paradoxical social consequences. While the Frankfurt School sought a new social rationality that could displace economic irrationality, the Freiberg School sought to redefine the economic rationality of capitalism in ways that could nullify its social irrationalities.

• The Freiberg School’s historical reading argued that obstacles to liberalism had appeared successively in German history:
List’s principle in 1840 that national economy needed to take priority over liberal economy, and that Germany needs protectionism – liberalism seen as the policy of a maritime nation (Britain)
Bismarckian state socialism in late C19th that preserved national unity against the socialist challenge through a welfare policy that reintegrated the working classes
Preservation of the machinery of a planned economy after WWI, and support for economic planning by both socialist and non-socialist governments
Early adoption of Keynesian-style interventions from 1930 onwards
Nazism coalesced all of these already existing elements of German economic policy around the ‘total system’ of the war economy. Rather than being an aberration, Nazism – like Soviet planning – could be seen as the coalescence of a diverse range of non-liberal forms of governmental economic action.
• Nazism was seen by the Freiberg School as also drawing upon critiques of mass society under capitalism associated with Werner Sombart and others (society of the spectacle, loss of communitarian ties, individuals as isolated atoms), but only through intensifying mass society and spectacles – they reject the argument (associated with the Frankfurt School) that the liberal model of capitalism produces these ideas, but rather see them as a consequence of ‘a policy of protectionism and planning in which the market does not perform its function and in which the state or para-state administration takes responsibility for the everyday life of individuals. These mass phenomena of standardization and the spectacle are linked to statism, to anti-liberalism, and not to a market economy’ (p. 114). – contrast to Herbert Marcuse (p. 117)

• The Freiberg School attributes those irrationalities that others link to the market and to capitalism to the state and the absence of a fully-functioning market: ‘Nothing proves that the market economy is intrinsically defective since everything attributed to it as a defect and as the effect of its defectiveness should really be attributed to the state. So, let’s do the opposite and demand even more from the market economy than was demanded from it in the eighteenth century’ (p. 116).

• ‘The ordoliberals say we should completely turn the formula around and adopt the free market as organizing and regulating principle of the state, from the start of its existence up to the last form of its interventions. In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state’ (p. 116).

• Ordoliberalism is not a continuation or a reversion to classical liberalism, liassez-faire or Adam Smith. It fundamentally revises liberal political economy in three ways:
The focus is shifted from the market as a system of exchange generating prices but as a mechanism which ensures competition. If it is only competition that can guarantee economic rationality, then the state must play a role in ensuring that competition occurs, which raises the issue of monopoly as well as how the ‘rules of the game’ are structured by government – the competitive market is not a ‘natural order’, but must be continually guaranteed through the actions of government;
There can never be ‘pure competition’, but only a striving towards producing more competition - ‘Competition is therefore an historical objective of governmental art and not a natural given that must be respected’ (p. 120)
The relationship between the market/competition and the state/government cannot be a ‘reciprocal delimitation of different domains’ – ‘the essence of the market can only appear if it is produced, and it is produced by an active governmentality’ (p. 121).

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Four

2009-09-25T04:50:00.000+10:00

I have provided a summary of notes on the fourth lecture given by Michel Foucault at the College de France 1978-79, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This lecture was given on 31 January, 1979.

• State-phobia is a recurring theme across the political and ideological spectrum. Foucault rejects a theory of the state as being like an ‘indigestible meal’ (p. 77), instead focusing upon how activites are brought under governmental rationality or etatisation. ‘The state is not a universal nor in itself an autonomous source of power … The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities’ (p. 77).

• German neo-liberalism rises to prominence in aftermath of WWII. Focus of post-WWII European economic policies was reconstruction, planning, and social objectives, all of which pointed towards greater governmental intervention in the key economic processes along Keynesian lines. Focus of German economic administration in 1948 was upon the removal of price controls and restoring market mechanisms at the earliest opportunity.

• Ludwig Erhard (1948): ‘Only a state that establishes both the freedom and responsibility of the citizens can legitimately speak in the name of the people’ (quoted on p. 81).

• Erhard’s statement not only refers to the obvious need to renounce the recent Nazi past, but also reflects the question on the conditions on which a new German state can be founded if there is not historical or juridical legitimacy. The proposal is that economic freedom can in itself constitute the basis for political sovereignty. Germany as a performative state where ‘the economy, economic development and economic growth, produces sovereignty; it produces political sovereignty through the institution and institutional game that, precisely, makes this economy work’ (p. 84). ‘All these economic partners produce a consensus, which is a political consensus, inasmuch as they accept this economic game of freedom’ (p. 84).

• The German neo-liberal policy was at odds with British neo-Keynesianism of the time, and had its critics on the left and among the unions in Germany at this time. It also appeared to be at odds with Christian doctrine of a social economy. It was therefore proposed that the German liberal order could be a ‘middle way’ between capitalism and socialism, with each of the other categories ambigiuously defined.

• German social democracy (SPD) turns from its Marxist inspired socialism towards an acceptance of the market economy and private property at the Bad Godesberg Congress of 1959, as long as it is compatible with ‘an equitable social order’ and does not produce monopolies. Foucault does not approach this as an SPD sell-out of its Marxist/socialist principles, but rather as an indicator of the extent to which the neo-liberal program had constituted the revised basis of the German state itself.

• ‘What socialism lacks is not so much a theory of the state as a governmental reason, the definition of what a governmental rationality would be in socialism. That is to say, a reasonable and calculable measure of the extent, modes, and objectives of governmental action’ (pp. 91-92).

• ‘In actual fact, and history has shown this, socialism can only be implemented connected up to diverse types of governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism. It has been connected up to liberal governmentality, and then socialism and its forms of rationality function as counter-weights, as a corrective, and a palliative to internal dangers’ (p. 92) – it can also function as the internal logic of the administrative apparatus of a police state, where there is a fusion of government and administration (Soviet/Eastern European model)

• There is a consistent questioning of what is “true” socialism – was it the Germany of Helmut Schmidt, Erich Honecker, or something else – but we never ask what is “true” liberalism, as liberalism is not concerned with conformity to texts, but rather with more pragmatic logics of governmentality.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Three

2009-09-24T20:37:00.001+10:00

I have provided a summary of notes on the third lecture given by Michel Foucault at the College de France 1978-79, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, which was given on 24 January, 1979.

• Raison d’Etat was premised upon a balance between the unlimited objectives of the state within its territory on the one hand, and limited external objectives on the other – Treaty of Westphalia (system of states) generally accepted – mercantilism as an economic policy was premised upon the impoverishment of other states, and could only co-exist with relatively limited trade within Europe otherwise it would create a zero-sum game

• The market generates the possibility of mutual enrichment through trade, exchange and commerce – this pointed to the possibility of ‘reciprocal enrichment through the game of competition’ (p. 54)

• The idea of a European progress is a fundamental theme in liberalism, which has as a condition the commitment to an extended market so that all can benefit – ‘we are invited to a globalization of the market when it is laid down as a principle, and an objective, that the enrichment of Europe must be brought about as a collective and unlimited enrichment’ (p. 55)

• ‘This opening of the economic game onto the world clearly implies a difference of both kind and status between Europe and the rest of the world. That is to say, there will be Europe on one side, with the Europeans as the players, and then the world on the other, which will be the stake. The game is in Europe, but the stake is the world’ (pp. 55-56) – this is ‘the start of a new type of global calculation in European governmental practice’ (p. 56) – maritime law, Kant’s idea of “perpetual peace”, international law – ‘The guarantee of perpetual peace is therefore actually commercial globalization’ (p. 58)

• This does not lead to an era of European peace at all, and the ‘historical paradox of Napoleon’ emerges, who is hostile to the idea of a police state internally, but committed to an imperial project in Europe

• ‘Freedom is never anything other … than an actual relation between governors and governed, a relation in which the measure of the “too little” existing freedom is given by the “even more” freedom demanded’ (p. 63)

• ‘If I employ the word “liberal”, it is first of all because this governmental practice in the process of establishing itself is not satisfied with respecting this or that freedom, with guaranteeing this or that freedom. More profoundly, it is a consumer of freedom. It is a consumer of freedom inasmuch as it can only function insofar as a number of freedoms actually exist: freedom of the market, freedom to buy and sell, the free exercise of property rights, freedom of discussion, possible freedom of expression, and so on. The new governmental reason needs freedom therefore, the new art of government consumes freedom. It consumes freedom, which means that it must produce it. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of government appears as the management of freedom.’ (p. 63)

• At the heart of this liberal practice is an always different and mobile problematic relationship between the production of freedom and that which in the production of freedom risks limiting and destroying it … The liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed in the eighteenth century, entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship with freedom … Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etc.’ (p. 64)

• ‘Freedom in the regime of liberalism is not a given … Freedom is something which is constantly produced. Liberalism is not acceptance of freedom; it proposes to manufacture it constantly, to arouse it and produce it, with, of course, the system of constraints and the problems of cost raised by this production’ (p. 65) – the cost of freedom is security, and ‘the problem of security is the protection of the collective interest against individual interests. Conversely, individual interests have to be protected against everything that could be seen as an encroachment of the collective interest’ (p. 65)

• ‘The problems of what I shall call the economy of power peculiar to liberalism are internally sustained … by this interplay of freedom and security’ (p. 65)

• Consequences of this continuing need to arbitrate over the interplay of freedom and security:
‘The motto of liberalism is” “Live dangerously”’ (p. 66) – individuals continuously have to deal with danger and asses their exposure to it, and how to protect against it – ‘There is no liberalism without a culture of danger’ (p. 67)
Development of disciplinary and supervisory techniques as a necessary correlate of liberal government derived from economic freedom
Controls become a way of protecting freedoms – rise of ‘crisis of governmentality’ where ‘democratic freedoms are only guaranteed by an economic interventionism that is denounced as a threat to freedom’ (p. 68)
Possibility of an ‘inflation of the compensatory mechanisms of freedom’ – too many protections in order to guarantee the freedom of the liberal state?

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Two

2009-09-24T06:32:00.000+10:00

Following from yesterday's post, I have provided a summary of notes on the second lecture given by Michel Foucault at the College de France 1978-79, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This lecture was given on 17 January, 1979.

• Liberal art of government is ‘not something other than raison d’Etat, an element external to and in contradiction with [it], but rather its point of inflection in the curve of its development’ (p. 28) – idea of frugal government - the permanent question of ‘too much and too little’ government – the ‘question of liberalism’ is the frugality of government rather than constitutionalism

• The market becomes ‘the site of truth’ of liberal government (p. 30) – move from the market as a site of justice (setting of just prices), to market mechanism as generator of a natural, normal price through supply and demand

• ‘Inasmuch as prices are determined in accordance with the natural mechanisms of the market they constitute a standard of truth which enables us to discern which governmental practices are correct and which are erroneous’ (p. 32) – the market as a ‘site of verification-falsification for governmental practice’

• There is no singular cause of the rise of the market as the ‘site of truth’ of liberal government, but arises from a complex set of developments in C18th Europe

• History of truth is always coupled with the history of law – rejects the critique of European rationality associated with Frankfurt School and romanticism

• Foucault notes that in France faculties of law were long coupled with faculties of political economy – C18th economists also tended to be theorists of public law (Beccaria, Adam Smith, Bentham)

• ‘There is a shift in the centre of gravity of public law … the problem becomes how to set juridical limits to the exercise of power by a public authority’ (p. 39)

• Difference between the axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach to law (Rousseau and French Revolution – Rights of Man), and the approach that starts from governmental practice itself, and asks what would be the ‘desirable limits’ of government in terms of limits to its spheres of competence – ‘the problem of English radicalism is the problem of utility’ (p. 40)

• ‘We have therefore two absolutely heterogeneous conceptions of freedom, one based in the rights of man, and the other starting from the independence of the governed … they have different historical origins and I think they are essentially heterogeneous or disparate’ (p. 42) – the ambiguity between these is a feature of both C19th and C20th liberalism

• Centrality of concept of interests to the new art of government. ‘Government is only interested in interests … It deals with the phenomena of politics, that is to say, interests, which precisely constitute politics and its stakes; it deals with interests, or that respect in which a given individual, thing, wealth, and so on interests other individuals or the collective body of individuals’ (p. 45)

• ‘Liberalism posed the fundamental question of government, which is whether all the political, economic, and other forms which have been contrasted with liberalism can really avoid … formulating this question of the utility of a government in a regime where exchange determines the value of things’ (p. 47)

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter One

2009-09-23T17:21:00.005+10:00

I am convening a reading group on Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France 1978-79, now published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, at QUT tomorrow. Information about the meeting can be found here, and the rationale for the event is as follows:

In light of considerable interest in the term “neo-liberalism”, its historical origins, and its uses and misuses – including its use by Australian Prime Minster Kevin Rudd – we have decided to get together an informal working group to discuss how the term was developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Foucault’s lectures at the College de France in 1978-79 have only now been translated and published. In these lectures he traces a history of liberalism as an “art of government”, and its relationship to political economy and to government policy.

In the lectures, Foucault focuses upon the origins of the term “neo-liberalism” among the Freiberg School of German social thinkers, and its later uses by the Chicago School of American political economists. This is traced to changing ideas about the relationship between the individual, the state, society and economy.
The first meeting will focus upon how the idea of neo-liberalism was developed in Germany and applied through the “social market economy” in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Later meetings will consider American neo-liberalism as developed by Milton Freidman, Gary Becker and others, and contrasts between the neo-liberal “art of government” and alternative approaches.

As part of the preparation for these gatherings, I am summarising the lectures on this blog. Below are my notes on the first lecture, which was presented by Foucault on 10 Janaury, 1979.

• “Art of government” – interest in this instance is in “government … insofar as it appears as the exercise of political sovereignty” (p. 2)

• Why an “art”? Not a description of how governors really governed, but rather “the level of reflection in the practice of government and on the practice of government” - “the study of the rationalization of governmental practice in the exercise of political sovereignty” (p. 2)

• Starting point is not with pre-given objects or universal categories, but rather “starting from this practice as it is given, but at re same time as it reflects on itself and it rationalized, show how certain things – state and society, sovereignty and subjects etc. – were actually able to be formed” – aim is “to start with these concrete practices and … pass these universals through the grid of these practices” (p. 3)

• Raison d’Etat (reason of state) – established the state as both the object and the instrument of governmental practice – ‘a practice … which places itself between a tstae presented as given and a state presented as having to be constructed and built’ (p. 4) – strengthening the state as the guiding principle of government – principles included mercantilist economics, ‘police’ as an unlimited system of internal management, and permanent military-diplomatic apparatus

• Juridical challenge to raison d’Etat proposes that the law must set limits to the sovereign power – contract theory, natural law, parliament/Crown balance in England – ‘the opposition always takes a legal challenge to raison d’Etat and consequently uses juridical reflection, legal rules and legal authority against it’ (p. 9)

• Political economy emerges not as an external challenge to raison d’Etat, but rather as ‘establishing a principle of limitation that will no longer be extrinsic to the art of government, as law was in the C17th, but intrinsic to it; an internal regulation of governmental rationality’ (p. 10). Six principles of this internal limitation:

It is a de facto limitation rather than a legal one, meaning there is no illegimitacy to exceeding this limit, but it will lead to less effective government
It is nonetheless a general one and ‘the problem is precisely one of defining this general and de facto limit that government will have to impose on itself
The principle of limitation is itself calculated through governmental reason and its objectives rather than something external to it (God, law, social contract etc.)
This establishes a division between what must be done by government and what it is advisable not to do, but not in terms of a domain of freedom and constraint grounded in individuals, but rather in the ‘agenda’ and the ‘non-agenda’ (Jeremy Bentham)
This arises in the context of transactions between subjects rather than a historically or theoretically defined ‘principle of right’
Critical governmental reason thus becomes internal to government – a continual practice of criticism about ‘how not to govern too much’ (p. 13)
• Political economy as it emerges between 1750 and 1810-1820 is central to this, but it does not develop in opposition to raison d’Etat, but rather within the principle of governmental reason to maximize wealth in the context of competition between states e.g. the issue is not whether or not a tax is legitimate, but rather what the optimal rate of tax may be in light of its possible effects – it is an empirical practice concerned with making mechanisms intelligible ‘success or failure, rather than legitimacy or illegitimacy, now become the criteria of governmental action’ (p. 16)

• Political economy is central to liberalism as a new regime of truth alternative to that of raison d’Etat, where ‘a government is never sufficiently aware that it always risks governing too much, or a government never knows too well how to govern just enough’ (p. 17) – ‘With this question of self-limitation by the principle of truth, I think political economy introduced a formidable wedge into the unlimited presumption of the police state’ (p. 17)

Charles Leadbeater presentation in Brisbane for EIDOS 21 Sept

2009-09-21T16:20:00.006+10:00

I had a 5am start this Monday morning to get in the car and head 50km to Brookwater Golf Club for breakfast at 7am on a Monday morning, as you do. The reason why myself at 99 other luminaries hit the Ipswich Motorway this morning was to hear the British writer, thinker and former Blair government advisor Charles Leadbeater present on The User-Generated State: Public Services 2.0.

The presentation was brought to us by the EIDOS Institute, headed by Bruce Muirhead, and with participation from a number of universities (including QUT) and industry participants.

I had the opportunity to meet Charles Leadbeater when he was in Brisbane as part of the launch of the QUT Creative Industries Faculty in 2002, so it was great to hear him again, even at what appeared to be an unlikely venue at an unlikely time (a few golfers could be spotted at the club among the more formally dressed attendees).

The gist of Charles's presentation could be summarised as saying we are entering into a third age of thinking about public services. The first, which characterised the post-WWII welfare state, was driven by need. Services needed to be delivered to people, and questions of quality were subordinated to the importance of delivery. The second was driven by want, or people exercising power as consumers (encouraged by government policies and philosophies of the 1980s and 1990s) to demand more responsive and personalised services. In the third stage, the key word is can - can the service provider give me a voice in this, and can I take some personal responsibility over how this is provided?

What follows is that thinking in terms of service delivery is not enough. There needs to be more emphasis on three C's:

Collaboration between service providers and citizen-consumers;
Conversation - particularly in times of greatest need, people don't want a purely transactional model, but want someone to talk with;
Capability - how can a service be provided in such a way that the need to provide it dminishes after a certain point, as people have got more control over their own affairs.

Leadbeater cautioned that people who claim they want to do something for you often want to do something to you. He gave the example of his Personal Funds manager, whose friendliness belies the fact that he wants some of his cash in service fees. Rather than thinking in terms of for and to, it is recommended that thinking be in terms of with. Participation is where leading edge thinking about the future of public services is, according to Leadbeater.

This also necessitates a shift of thinking away from the institution as the starting point. His example from cultural policy was that the building of cultural institutions (fixed infrastructure with high up-front costs) is often the starting point of this sector, but that there is obviously a plethora of "culture" that happens well away from these institutions (You Tube, Facebook etc.), that is lower-cost and more distributed, participatory and agile.

NB: Charles Leadbeater took up some of these themes in a recent article in The Guardian.

Update: Charles Leadbeater's talk can now be accessed from You Tub e.

Findings on online news

2009-09-20T11:15:00.005+10:00

My colleague Anna Daniel has recently presented our findings on Young People and Online News, developed through the Smart Services CRC with Fairfax Digital as the principal business of interest. This was presented at the Transforming Audiences 2 conference, held at the University of Westminster in London from 3-4 September.

The paper can be accessed from my QUT ePrints site, by clicking on Conference Papers and downloading the top listed paper. It was based upon an online survey of 540 people - primarily in South-East Queensland - and follow-up focus groups with 50 respondents. We divided these up into 18-24 and 25+ demographics.

In developing the work, we have identified three competitive strategies of news media organisations (following Michael Porter, among others):

Brand leadership - investing in quality and unique resources to build a nationally or internationally leading news brand. Examples in Australia include The Age, SMH, The Australian and the ABC;
Cost leadership - generating content at the lowest possible cost that is tailored to the expectations of a targeted readership. Examples include the free MX newspapers and the ninemsn web site;
Differentiation - this is about extending content into new news brands, made very possible in the online environment. An interesting recent example is The Economist developing a new magazine and online resource called More Intelligent Life, repurposing its non-economic content.

In the course of our research, we identified three typologies of news user. They were:

Loyal users: they gravitate to established news brands, and have strong views about the authority of professional journalists. They are not especially innovative users of online sources, and they don't typically comment on hews sites (although they read the comemnts of others). This would account for about 30% of our sample.
Conveneience users: this group take news where they find it, and like news "snacks". Many get ninemsn from their Hotmail accounts. They are not necessarily disengaged from news, but are not "classic" news consumers e.g. they like their celebrity gossip as much or more than finding out about ETS policy. They accounted for about 60% of our sample;
Customizers: this group accounted for about 10% of our sample, and fit the profile of what my colleague Axel Bruns refers to as produsers. They source niche content globally, rely upon blogs and multiple RSS feeds (or increasingly Twitter), and are as likely to be producers and consumers of news. They are often highly critical of the mainstream media (or what they term the MSM).

Key take home messages. Two to focus on at this stage:

The challenge for established news brands is how to reach beyond the loyal users. Google seeks to occupy the Convenience space, and the "frenemy" issue for these news providers in their dealings with Google is becoming more acute. Growing through the customizers can attract a valuable readership, but is expensive and time-consuming to pursue;
It was not clear from our study that there is a user reaction to perceived "dumbing down" of online news sites. This may be shaped by our focus on younger users and S-E Qld, but we had very little commentary that these online sites were once better than they now are.

Dancing Barefoot and Paying for Online News

2009-09-18T09:36:00.006+10:00

One issue that comes up with the question of whether people would pay for online news is the nature of micropayments. So what is a micropayment?

I have a recent example of one. While buying pot plants at Bunnings, with 4 year old in tow playing in the children's play area, I heard Patti Smith's "Dancing Barefoot" on the in-store music system. An unusually engaging song to hear at Bunnings, and I was thinking what a great song it is. Upon getting back from Bunnings, I went onto Apple iTunes, paid my $A1.69, and got the song downloaded.

So micropayments may be for impulse buying. I'm exposed to it, I like it, and I buy it. Can this work for online news? I think there are several problems with the anlaogy.

I could compare it to the last really compelling news article I accessed. It was Paul Krugman's diagnosis, in The New York Times on September 8, of why economists failed to anticipate the global fianncial crisis of 2008, and how their ideas helped contribute to it. This is a comprehensive and compellign piece by the most recent Nobel Prize winning economist on what he believes was wrong with dominant thinking in his field over the 1990s and 2000s, written in a way that both makes its non-specialist reader able to understand the issues, whithout overly simplifying or misrepresenting the views of those whose analyses differ from his own neo-Keynesian position. In my view, the model of how an academic specialist can write an op-ed piece, and an excellent case study in why they should do so.

Buy would I pay for it?

At present, I don't because I can get it for free. Unless I feel a moral obligation to pay for journalism in order to keep journalists in work, I take advantage of free access. Even if I felt morally obliged to "return the gift" of news with money, it is not clear that I would give money to the New York Times which, even if a high-quality paper, is also a capitalist enterprise that I would expect to survive through means other than my charity. Even if a case was made that people should pay for good journalism, I would prefer that it was done through general tax revenues that I contirbute to rather than one-off donations. And with taxpayer-funded public broadcasting, that already happens.

But I could afford to make a micropayment if that was the only way that I could get the article. And this is what the "paywall" question for the future of online news, most forcefully raised by Rupert Murdoch in recent months, revolves around.

It is at this point that other dilemmas emerge. One is how I found the Krugman piece in the first place. I found it because someone put a link to it up on Facebook. After I read it, and profiled it, others did the same. This is, of course, the phenomenon of network effects, and the risk for proprietors of the paywall environment is that they lose them altogether. While some may those to subscribe to NYT to continue to get Paul Krugman op-eds, they will be a fraction of those who get such information serendipidously via the 300 million Facebook users or via network aggregators.

I don't know who Patti Smith's record label is. The point is that I don't have to, as its not a condition for getting access to the song, and Apple iTunes has simplified the task for middle-income earners prepared to pay for the convenience of going to a single site [If I was on a student income, I would devote time to shopping around the Web for a free copy of this, copyright be damned.] This is not the way the news business has worked, with its brands, mastheads, trusted sources and so on. In the past, this didn't matter, as the source and content were bundled in a single package. Now they are increasingly disaggregated.

Which raises the last point. If I were to pay for articles by Paul Krugman, what do I need the New York Times for? Why don't I just pay Krugman directly? In the recent past, the answer would have been that big media have distributional clout and the capacity to reach large audiences that a sole trader can never acquire, and that a Princeton University economics professor with plenty of other calls on his time would be foolish to also seek to be an Internet entrepreneur. There may still be something in that, but the self-evidence of the proposition is diminishing quickly.

Finally, as Joshua Gans notes, one source of resistance to the idea of paying for online content is that people are already paying for online access. Be it a broadband plan, a mobile phone plan or whatever, people are paying for access top the medium, and payment for the content on top of that may be seen as a payment too many. With the scope for myriad news providers to emerge in the online space if the incumbent media players vacate it and move behind content paywalls, the risks of losing audience share, and what interests advertisers, are substantial. They are not the same risks Patti Smith has to face.

The Cultural Economy Moment?

2009-09-15T09:12:00.004+10:00

The draft of my keynote presentation to "Media Technologies, Community and Everyday Life", histed by the Centre for Everyday Life at Murdoch University in Perth, WA on 2 Septmebrt, 2009, can now be accessed from Scribd here.

Please note that this is a draft completed in the hotel room, and without a Bibliography at this stage. A version will appear on the QUT ePrints site shortly.

Social Media presentation at Murdoch University

2009-09-10T15:44:00.001+10:00

Slides from my presentation to students at Murdoch University on 1 Sept, 2009.

Social Media Murdoch

View more presentations from Terry Flew.

Smart Services CRC scholarships in New Media Services

2009-09-08T18:07:00.003+10:00

The Smart Services CRC is a $120 million, commercially focused collaborative research initiative, developing innovation, foresight and productivity improvements for the services sector. Services are the largest sector of the economy representing approximately 80% of Australia’s GDP and 85% of employment. Within the services industries Smart Services’ initial programs are customer-focused with outcomes translatable across the whole services sector. Initial research outcomes and demonstrators have been associated with the digital media, finance and government sectors.

In order to achieve these goals, Smart Services CRC is supporting research higher degree students at PhD and Masters level through scholarships, top-ups and in-kind support for research, travel, conferences etc. As a partner in Smart Services CRC, the Queensland University of Technology is offering scholarship packages for 2010. Research higher degree students with CRC scholarships will have access to the full range of resources offered by QUT (access to equipment and facilities, Grants-in-Aid, teaching opportunities etc.), as well as the opportunity to work with leading industry partners in the media, finance and government sectors on projects of direct real-world relevance through Smart Services CRC.

The New Media Services program at QUT is focused on research questions such as:

• What are innovative business models for new media? Can international case studies identify new opportunities for media service industries in an era of Web 2.0 that goes beyond the mass communications model?
• What new opportunities for news are enabled by digital media, including computational journalism, news visualization and citizen journalism?
• What opportunities exist to “harness the hive” of social media in advertising, marketing and integrated marketing communication?
• Can the development of digital communities and the nurturing of digital ecosystems be applied across the service industries?

Led by the Creative Industries Faculty and the Faculty of Business, the New Media Services program provides the opportunity to work collaboratively with industry partners across the media and government sectors on aligning research activity with industry goals and strategies in the emergent digital media environment.

The following topics are of interest to supervisors in the New Media Services research project team:

Professor Terry Flew (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT)

1. Innovative business models for new media;
2. Digital futures for news media;
3. Mobile and digital media content production.

Associate Professor Axel Bruns (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT)

1. Drivers and motivations for users to participate in social media Websites;
2. Future developments in online social media and social networking;
3. Business models for social media sites.

Dr. Christy Collis (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT)

1. Emerging uses and users of locative mobile media;
2. Audiences and markets for online, mobile, and cross-platform media.

Dr. Christina Spurgeon (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT)

1. Researching and developing brand communities and content;
2. Commercializing co-creative media.

Dr. Edwina Luck (School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, Faculty of Business, QUT)

1. Future drivers of participation within virtual social media
2. The role of ‘electronic word-of-mouth’ in product and service marketing
3. Hyper-targeting and advertising within virtual social networks

Dr. Larry Neale (School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, Faculty of Business, QUT)

1. Social media and information search
2. Delivering digital customer service

Smart Services CRC is a research and development partnership between 12 major industry players and six Australian universities, funded by the private sector and governments under the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centre program. Its aim is the creation of research-enabled commercial outcomes for its partners.

For more information on scholarships at QUT, go here.

Application forms for Smart Services CRC scholarships can be found here.

Information for prospective research students in the Faculty of Business can be found here.

Information for prospective research students in the Creative Industries Faculty can be found here.

Past, Present and Future of Cultural Studies - Frances Bonner and John Hartley

2009-09-03T15:45:00.023+10:00

In the second part, Frances Bonner (University of Queensland) promises not to do a "state of the cultural studies nation" talk, but to focus on the specifics of material culture studies. Frances recommends Daniel Miller's The Comfort of Things, and wants to register problems with the concept of consumer culture as an explanatory framework. Miller's book is targeted at the more genral reader, and comes out of a failed research grant (!). Frances argues that the relationship between anthropology and cultural studies is a rich one, and material culture studies of the sort undertaken by Miller of human-object relations as "technologies of attachment". It helped Frances understand lifestyle media in ways that consumer culture studies do not sufficiently explain as part of a "concern with things".

Talking about "things" as a meaningful term is a challenge, which Frances first heard from Lesley Stern in her work on "cinematic things" and forms of personal affect and memory. Frances has being doing recent work on Top Gear and its female audience in particular, with its three middle-aged male presenters (four if you include The Stig!). Female viewers have found the show to be a facilitator of family interaction, and gifts and merchandise being given in ways related to it. Why do we want to own the material artefacts of a program, in this case the world's most watched program! The Stig features mist commonly in the merchandise, and more of the merchandise bears the figure of The Stig than that of Top Gear more generally. There is no personality to get in the way of our fantasy figure of The Stig e.g. Stig stress toy/keychain fob.

Frances Bonner proposes study of the material objects that are spin-offs from TV programs as providing insights into the role of memory in our relationships to television, ranging from cookbooks to Stig toys. This is auto-ethnography as an affordable form of cultural reserach that does not require ethical clearance, part of the great tradition of cultural studies reserach that does not have research council funding. Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe have done a study of second-hand culture that considers what the gifting of old TV-related products may involve.

The requirement to monetise digital material is a recurirng theme of corporate literature, and Frances thinks that the relationship between the tangible and the digital may be too heavily dichotomised in thinking about both material culture and new/digital media. They can remain technologies of attachment, even if they do not sit in one's lounge room. Frances ended by showing her binoculars inside a beer can that was a gift from being in the studio audience for Roy & HG's The Monday Dump.

John Hartley from QUT and the CCI begins by describing cultural studies as a "treasured object", and feels that while it is in institutional good health in Australia, it is not in intellectual good health. Hartley notes that Thorstein Veblen worried that economics had gone towards "measured work" and avoids the "meretricious", and that this is something that he has been accused of by Jim McGuigan.

He notes that "the death of cultural studies" has been proclaimed by Tony Bennett in the Journal of Cultural Economy, among other places. Rayomnd Williams worried in the 1970s that English departments had become stale, and renewal needed to come from outside, possibly from communications studies or cultural science (Williams' term). This article appeared in the Journal of Communication in 1974 (Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 17-25) - woudl cost to get it from Wiley-Blackwell, so check it out yourself.

The Australian Government minister responsible for research, Kim Carr, now intends that science to be understood in its broadest sense, which includes culture and the humanities.
Hartley proposes that evolutionary science can be applied to culture, and proposes Thorstein Veblen as a champion of such an idea in 1898. He argues that too often new ideas are warded off from cultural studies by presenting those who present new ideas as being under the evil spell of neo-liberalism (a theme of my talk at Murdoch University in Perth on Sept. 2, which I will post shortly).

Cultural studies has, for Hartley, imported ideology into the centre of the field, where it once sought to critically analyse ideology. He thinks it is time for what Joseph Schumpeter termed "creative destruction" to be applied to cultural studies. He thinks that the need to resist "premature scientism" has passed, in light of significant evolutionary change in the biological sciences and mathematics in particular, where complexity theories open up new ways to use sicne to explain culture. The Santa Fe Institute has asked can we used physics to explain culture, for example. John Hartley thinks that cultural studies went wrong histoircally in its assumption that the world "ought to be" like the analysts wished.

The second part of the paper focused on creative industries and its moment from origins in the UK in 1998. Noting that people are often encouraged in advance to know what their critique of creative industries should be, he proposes that this conjuncture needs to be explained as something other than political opportunism by Chris Smith as the DCMS Minister to get more money for the arts. In particular, it pointed to the need to think about the relationship between economics and culture as complex systems, particular around the hypothesis about culture being central to modern economies.

To understand this, there was a need to get away form both neo-classical economists (who weren't challenging enough) and political economy (which rejected the propositions form the start), but from evolutionary economics, that could converge with cultural studies through cultural science at the CCI. Reference is made here to the idea of social network markets as a bridging point between evolutionary economics and cultural studies as a way to rethink creativity as a product of complex systems rather than arising out of the unique genius of talented individuals. Hartley sees this as future-oriented and a form of creative destruction in an age of power-law distributions (It all makes sense with a diagram John showed at the symposium, honestly!). John recommends the work of Carsten Herrmann-Pillath from the Frankfurt School (of Finance and Management!) in Germany.

The cultural has been collapsed into the economy, around questions of identity, distribution and difference. Have we therefore all become neo-liberals? No. The magazine AdBusters is entirely devoted in its most recent issue to evolutionary economics and Joseph Schumpeter - also George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz - to point out that the "revolution in economics" is precisely based around a turn away from neo-liberalism and orthodox equilibrium economics.

Melissa Gregg (Uinversity of Sydney) was invited to respond to the papers today, which she saw as a big job. Does she need a "silver space suit" to be the "future of cultural studies"? Melissa begins by noting how much work being done in Internet Studies is cultural studies, but there is a reluctance to name it as such.

[Interesting side point: at this time I was told off by someone complaining about my typing during the session. This surprises me, but may something about different types of audiences. I have been at plenty of confernces where blogging during the event is very much the norm.]

Melissa also makes reference to the Association for Cultural Studies Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference being held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong in 2010. Some US schoalrs boycotted the 2008 conference in Jamaica because the country was seen as homophobic, and the 2010 event has been accused by some board members of implicitly endorsing the govenrment of China and ignoring human rights abuses and the conditions of labour in the country.

The third event Melissa references is the State of the Industry conference being held at UNSW in Novmeber 2009 through the Cultural Research Network as a signing-off event. She notes surveys that have found that 100% of academics at University of Western Sydney worked on weekends according to an NTEU survey, and that many academics are saying that having chldren is inimical to pursuing an academic career. Are these symtoms of those at the top of what Hartley referred to as the "winner-takes-all" economy?

Q & A

Mark Gibson wondered whether cultural studeis was in institutional good health, noting that it is in decline in undergraduate enrolments and is not holding a 2009 conference in Australia. Do cultural studies people go somewhere else at a certain point, such as what John Hartley outlined as cultual science and evolutionary economics?
John Hartley sees cultural studies more as a meeting point for different approaches and methodologies rather than as a discipline or methodology in its own right. He also pointed to Graeme Turner's influential positions with the Australian Federal government, such as being on PMSEIC.
Liz Ferrier wondered whether the focus on agency has been lost, as people focus more on networks. Hartley sees agency as operating through networks, and there can be bottom-up as well as top-down networks.
Greg Hainge wondered if the university today is basically a different beast to that of the 1970s, that points towards the inevitable dispersal of cultural studies into a bunch of other things, especially as fee income and a client-driven economy particularly impact on arts and humnaities faculties.
Chris Rojek thinks that one the one hand cultural studies, as with sociology in an earlier period, has been successful in popular education (we talk about alientaion, charisma etc.), while simultaneously being dispersed into fields as diverse as criminology/justice studies, business studies, game studies, Internet studies etc.
Stuart Cunningham noted that there is also a crisis in the core of the sciences in terms of student demand toward applied domains. He is not sure that there is a similar gripping narrative about whether fundamental humanities are under threat.
Graeme Turner wondered whether interdisciplinarity has exposed the humanities to extinction. Are they too easy to merge to the point of extinction around the principle of "interdisciplinarity"?

Past, Present and Future of Cultural Studies - Graeme Turner and Chris Rojek

2009-09-03T14:10:00.014+10:00

I'm writing from the Cultural Studies Symposium: Past, Present and Future conference at the University of Queensland, being hosted by the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies on Thursday, September 3, 2009.

Keynote presentation by Professor Graeme Turner. Graeme notes that the origins of the symposium come from a book he is developing with Chris Rojek, who heads to relevant publishing outlet at Sage, and he and Graeme are working on a book with this theme. Graeme has bemoaned the growing predictability and lack of critical edge of contemporary cultural studies, as seen in its conferences and ARC grant applications. Graeme notes a reluctance to put doubts about "cultural studies orthodoxies" into the public sphere, for fear of giving ammunition to its enemies, but feels that something needs to be said, as many of its senior founders are declaring their doubts about what now happens in the name of cultural studies.

Chris Rojek, Professor of Cultural Studies at Brunel University, UK (en route to New Zealand to taek up a chair). Notes that the culture of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies remains pessimistic and beleagured, even if all involved are tenured professors. He argues that this has infused the discipline, particularly about how they conceive of the "organic intellectual". Birmingham School was always small, highly politicised, and attuned to popular culture, but in order to "transmit knowledge" to the population as a road-map to political action.

Rojek feels that most cultural studies researchers do not clearly indicate such a political motivation to their work in this way, as opposed to genuflecting to being empowering and inclusive. Birmingham Centre's influence subsided after Stuart Hall, with Jorge Larrain and Richard Johnson failing to manage its finances and intellectual tensions effectively. Chris Rojek's book on Stuart Hall was subject to a 30 page review by Bill Schwarz - indicative of a defensiveness about outsiders, and some people wanting to "get him". The CCCS were, he argues, reluctantly to be "optimistic" or put forward concrete proposals for change. They were very reluctant to look at corporate culture - focus was on class, race and the state - ignored the rise of what Rojek calls "neat capitalism", or solutions porposed by global corporations that presetn themselves as more effective than the state - doing good while stamping the brand - "the brand is everything" (Richard Branson about Virgin).

What "the project" of CCCS was about was:

class consciousness
struggles over ideology
Western Marxism (esp. Gramsci and Althusser)
how to move the state towards meeting popular demands.

What CCCS did not deal with:

feminism
Michel Foucault
what corporations actually do
cultural citizenship (what can be done?)
what a future society might look like?

Achievements of Birmingham School:

Rigorous insistence upon the importance of popular culture (fashion, youth culture , pop music, television etc.);
Linking culture to politics in a sophisticated way (now largely absent from the field);
Made idea of resistance legitimate;
Developing an alternatvie publishing stream in face of publishers' indifference - appeared "cutting edge" and alternative;
Creating jobs in cultural studies - a new establishment.

Defects of Birmingham School:

Backed the wrong horse in embracing tradition of Western Marxism, which led it to overly focus upon the white working class and the state, and slow to understand identity politics or corporate capitalism. It made it less receptive to globalization, and exaggerated the importance of the nation-state;
Insistence on relevance promoted a need to be an expert on what is happening now, which gets in the way of better grounding its own approach and developing a string disciplinary base - leads to a recurring tendency to "reinvent the wheel" intellectually;
Tendency to produce cultural relativism - failed to develop an adequate position on cultural value - "everything is important";
Never linked its intellectual work to a viable form of politics - resistance, protest and challenging privileged over organisation and leadership - proposes an "unlikely rainbow coalition to deliver the goods" that avoids the nitty-gritty of political work.

Q & A

Rojek notes that cultural studies people do not come across as intellectuals, but only as "moaning critics" - he proposes "learning from the new capitalists" in how to appear able to concretely address real issues - stop just bemoaning "bad capitalism";
Both Liz Ferrier and Jason Jacobs argue that geographers have a better feel for the issues Chris Rojek raises than cultural studies people do;
Stuart Cunningham asks about cultural value - is the point that "the emergent" is of more implicit interest to the resistive scholar than "the traditional"?
Publishing experience for Sage and Routledge is that textbooks are selling much better than ideas books (response to John Hartley);
Mark Gibson notes a "pre-Marxist" moment in British cultural studies in the 1960s, with early Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart;
I asked a question about undergraduate cultural studies. Chris thought that, at least in Britain, they may be a "lost cause" for cultural studies;
Chris Rojek notes that Jim McGuigan's forthcoming book Cool Capitalism will deal with how corproate branding has incoprorated elements of counter-cultural critique;
Tom O'Regan asked about a "stepping in the face" ethos in cultural studies, where the impulse may now be to "kill the father" that is now Stuart Hall (used to be Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams).

Who will pay for online news?

2009-08-27T18:06:00.005+10:00

With the revenue downturn for Fairfax Media being announced on Monday, I got the call from Ashley Hall at the ABC’s PM program to give my opinion. At 2.45pm I may not have been sure that I had an opinion, but the nature of the relationship between news journalists and academics is that it would be good for all concerned if you could get an opinion, and give that to us to put on air. With Crikey publisher Eric Beecher and former ACCC head Allan Fels also offering their opinions, I was in good company on the PM program.

My comments were picked up by Shaun Carney, the associate editor of The Age, for his opinion piece on Wednesday. In Carney’s view I am one of those who argues that the future of digital media is free content, as we are moving from an environment of information scarcity to one of information abundance, and that is driving down the price of online content of all sorts. The editor of WIRED magazine, Chris Anderson, is another seen to be holding to this view, in his most recent book Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

Carney disagrees with this, arguing that the era of free online content will be seen as a short-lived phase, since commercial businesses ultimately need to set a price for their content or they will go out of business. Carney is also of the view that consumers will ultimately accept the need for this. Just as what were once free sample bags given out at the various Royal Shows around Australia (Easter Show, The Ekka etc.) became show bags with a price attached, so too will once free online news become a commodity for which consumers will pay.

Since Rupert Murdoch said the hares running on this issue earlier in August by declaring that News Corporation sites around the world will move to a pay model, there has been a lot of commentary on this. Among those offering views have been Brian McNair, Roy Greenslade and James Harkin. The jury is clearly out on what will happen next, with there being some high profile examples where a subscription model for premium content has worked, such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, and some high-profile failures, most notably The New York Times.

I wanted to pick up on a specific criticism that Carney makes of my claim that we have been moving from information scarcity to information abundance in ways that affect the ability to charge for access to online news:

It's true that there are a lot more places where people can get information ''about'' news, such as boutique political websites and one or two email newsletters, but when it comes to finding actual news he's wrong. So far, the Internet has not ushered in any substantial new news organisations; the vast bulk of Australian online media consumers still rely on Fairfax, News, ninemsn and the ABC for their news. Scarcity still applies.

Carney is right to argue that the big news organisations continue to dominate the online news space in Australia, and no substantial new players have emerged that are Internet only. News, The Age, SMH, ninemsn and the ABC are all sites that are in the Alexa top 25 most accessed Internet sites in Australia, and probably account for about 80% of traffic to Australian news sites, even allowing for a relatively flexible definition of news. While it is difficult to compare the number of users of a site such as Crikey to that of theaustralian.com.au as more people get the former in a “push” format via emails, it would be somewhere in the range of 10-20% of page views for Crikey as compared to that of The Australian, which in turn is well below the site statistics for The Age, ninemsn or the ABC.

Carney has pointed to what is known as power-law distribution, where the majority of an activity tends to cluster around a minority of possibilities, Also known as Pareto’s Law (after the Spanish economist Vilfredo Pareto) or the 80/20 rule, it has been a feature of media industries that the majority cluster towards a minority of options, be they TV programs, Britney Spears CDs, Dan Brown novels or whatever. Put differently, of course the ABC would love to put more arts programs to air, but with a 1 to 2 per cent audience share, it has to be on Sunday afternoons, not Monday nights.

What the Internet has changed, and what Chris Anderson points to with the long tail concept, is that as digital media distribution costs tend towards zero, the less popular options also can become commercially viable. Social media can intensify this by promoting new ways of gathering a reputation, through ranking systems, word of mouth, shared links via Facebook, Twitter feeds etc.

Moreover, Anderson also suggests that assumptions about popularity may have been an artefact of distributional limits. When the number of books for sale was determined by the size of the store, that set physical limits to the number of titles that could be held; there is no such capacity constraint on the Internet, and so more specialist tastes and interests can be catered for through online book catalogues.

What Shaun Carney points to – as does Rupert Murdoch – is that the business of getting news is not free. As economist Tyler Cowen puts it, all of the major news providers have found that their revenues are falling below their average costs curves, and they are not prepared to make losses indefinitely. The problems are that no-one knows what the price should be, what is the best approach to charging (subscriptions, pay-per-view, freemiums, or what?), or whether enough consumers will pay to offset the losses arising from those who will inevitably opt out once some form of charging for news is introduced.

At this point, two further complications emerge. One is the possibility that new opportunities may emerge for commercially viable free news services that capture the convenience users who opt out of pay models. This may be a new provider who also captures the imaginations of those who are now vocally critical of what they term the "mainstream media", and who access sites such as The Huffington Post in the U.S.

The second is that it is unlikely that the public service media providers – ABC, BBC, SBS, NPR etc. – will charge for news, as it is contrary to their Charter obligations of providing universal access. At any rate, I doubt that Shaun Carney is right that consumers will simply accept paying for what they are currently getting for free simply because they recognise the costs that exist for the established news providers.

Economists on pay-per-view online print news

2009-08-10T09:36:00.003+10:00

Tyler Cowen has provided an interesting economist's perspective on the plans of Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation to start charging subscription fees for online news. He doesn't think that it will work, but can recognise that on this occasion the capacity of news proprietors to collude around common business interests will have an impact. He does think that public service media will come into their own as providers of free, quality news content.

This time around plausibly all the major newspapers will follow suit and charge for their content as well. It's like one of those Lester Telser/George Bittlingmayer models except now we are at the point where the major players realize they are all below their average cost curves permanently and they are not willing to incur losses indefinitely. Since we've not yet been in an all-charging equilibrium, we don't know what the price will be. What does the NYT business model look like at $50 a year for access, with price breaks for India?
In that equilibrium does any newspaper gain from defecting and moving back to p = 0? Is there a stable core to the game? Isn't Murdoch simply signaling that all the newspapers ought to collude?
Won't NPR, and NPR.org, be the big winner?
I'm not saying the Murdoch move is going to "work." I am saying that if the game has no core the idea of charging for content will not go away.

Joshua Gans is also thinking about the issue at Core Economics. Key point here is that that "producing news involves high fixed costs and low marginal costs.".

Debating Journalism

2009-08-09T20:24:00.003+10:00

I am pleased to say that a podcast is available of an interview that I did with Peter Clarke from Inside Story at the recent ICA Journalism in the 21st Century conference at the University of Melbourne. The link can be found here.

Below is the description on the site (Note: completely free - no need to pay News Limited or Fairfax for access).

CONFERENCES on “the future of journalism” have become a growth industry. In many ways, the news media’s own digital evolution has become one of its biggest stories. The collapse of the twentieth century funding model for (quality) journalism is pre-occupying western news operations. Rupert Murdoch is leading another attempt to try to make online news content pay its old media creators as well as its new media recyclers. But the myriad micro-realities of changing journalism practice in a digital age mean journalism academics and practitioners have plenty to describe and argue about. The School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne’s recent conference, Journalism in the 21st Century: Between Globalisation and National Identity, brought together career academics, journalists-turned-academics and a range of news practitioners and executives from Australia and overseas. Peter Clarke was there to gauge the latest thinking on possible futures for journalism.

More on Murdoch and pay-per-view news

2009-08-08T14:11:00.003+10:00

Roy Greenslade offers this commentary on Rupert Murdoch's announcement that News Corporation news titles will go towards pay-only access to online content:

I have never received so many calls from so many places across the world to talk about the momentous decision by Rupert Murdoch to charge people for access to his newspaper websites.
As so often with statements by the world's most famous media mogul, the announcement is being treated as the word of god. Where Rupert goes, said several TV and radio presenters, others are sure to follow.
Excuse me if I disagree with those slavish reactions, and with Murdoch and, incidentally, with Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, who also believes that paid-for content is inevitable.
I tend to agree with Jeff Jarvis (Murdoch's move to charge for content opens doors for competitors), Guido Fawkes (Murdoch bucks the market) and John Temple, publisher of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News (charging for a basic news service is flawed).
But I concede that there are many supporters of Murdoch's move too. The split is both philosophical and practical. There are those (with whom I agree) who believe that the digital media revolution is in the process of transforming journalism and those (such as Murdoch and most traditional newspaper publishers) who believe the net is merely another platform rather than an instrument of transformation.
It follows that if you wish to continue to fund traditional journalism that you require similar revenues, hence the Murdoch charging strategy.
Oddly, there are advocates of Murdoch's approach who believe him to be a journalistic hero and even a revolutionary, as I discovered when taking part yesterday evening in a BBC World Service discussion.
I was taken by surprise by the passionate support for Murdoch offered by by Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at Kent University (and a former editor of The Scotsman).

This also from James Harkin, also available (free) from The Guardian:

The cheerleaders of a free, digital utopia want to resurrect the mass market for news by having us chat to each other and our newspapers all day long. But between the fusty old newspapermen who refuse to tweet and the gadgeteers who do little else, there is little evidence that the rest of us have the time to be cogs in an all-purpose electronic machine. Long before the net tore apart its business model, the truth is that many newspapers were looking bloated and fat, as if lifestyle supplements and the advertising which went along with them was all readers wanted.
What they wanted, it turns out, was focused content, written by journalists who know what they're talking about. The freshest news outlets springing up in the US, for instance, are Politico, the magazine aimed at political junkies which broke the scandal of the Washington Post charging companies for access to its reporters, or TMZ, the well-connected celebrity mag which broke the news of Michael Jackson's death.
News organisations will, as a consequence, divide into populist monoliths which try to be all things to all people – witness the growth of news aggregators, for example – or, more promisingly, slim down and concentrate on what they know about.
For those that can hold their ground and know their niche, the good news is that the advertising industry will eventually have to catch up to the fact that the production of news is moving away from national mainstream outlets into a more global patchwork of niches. What matters then is whether newspapers have anything distinctive enough to pay for, or audiences who are interested enough in reading them to see their demographic data sold on to advertisers in tune with their specific interests. In one way or another, Rupert is right and the free-lords are wrong – we'll end up having to pay for the news that we really want.

Its on - Rupert Murdoch to introduce pay online news

2009-08-06T09:57:00.005+10:00

Today saw Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation announce one of its largest corporate losses in history. Details from ABC News are below:

The global economic downturn has had a huge impact on News Corporation's results, with Rupert Murdoch announcing a 30 per cent decline on last year's performance.
News Corp reported a fourth quarter loss of $US203 million ($241 million), in line with its forecasts.

Across the fiscal year the company recorded a $US3.4 billion ($4 billion) loss.

Mr Murdoch says newspapers have been hit particularly hard, with classified advertising never expected to return to previous levels.

"The last year has been one of the toughest in our history and the results today outlined for fiscal 2009 clearly reflect the sour economic environment that affected our businesses throughout the year," he said.

But Mr Murdoch says he is confident the worst is behind the company.

Mr Murdoch has also indicated that access to News Corp material on the internet may soon come at a price.

"The extended downturn has only increased the drum beat for change, but the secular challenge is clear," he said.

"Classified advertising revenues will never again reach the levels that print once offered.

"Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting."

The big news is that Rupert Murdoch has indicated that all News Corporation online news sites will become fee-based in the near future:

"The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites."
...
At present, only the Wall Street Journal charges a fee for online access and until recently, received wisdom in the publishing industry was that readers would not pay to read newspapers on the internet.
Murdoch said he had completed a review of the possibility of charging and that he was willing to take the risk of leading the industry towards a pay-per-view model: "I believe that if we're successful, we'll be followed fast by other media."
He said he was thinking in terms of "this fiscal year" to introduce charges. He said News Corp would avoid a migration of readers to free sites by "making our content better and differentiated from other people".
The charging model will be extended to red-top tabloids such as the Sun and the News of the World. Murdoch said he was keen to capitalise on the popularity of celebrity stories: "When we have a celebrity scoop, the number of hits we get now are astronomical."

As Bobbie Johnson observes in The Guardian:

A divisive split has emerged between those who believe that readers must be forced to pay for access to stories or see traditional reporting disappear altogether, and those who believe that a great deal of the information we consume each day is merely a commodity, and journalism must adapt itself to the changing environment.

News Corporation is at the forefront of the former camp, and plans are well advanced to make news on News Corp sites available onto on a fee-paying basis. Jeff Jarvis thinks that this won't work, as it misunderstands the nature of value creation through the Internet:

Newspapers have had 15 years since the launch of the internet browser to reimagine and rebuild themselves for the reality of the post-Guttenberg age. But they didn't. Now they are trying to reclaim old business models for a new media economy — a link economy, I call it, in which links give content value. Cut yourself off from links, behind pay walls, and you cut yourself off from the internet and its real value.

With any radical change to business models of this nature, some of the issues to be considered are:

Consumer reaction: will consumers simply shift en masse from News sites to other sites that provide free news content?
Competitor reaction: how will sites such as the Fairfax sites in Australia, or The Guardian in the UK, respond? The role of public service media is another factor here - the ABC and BBC are almost certain not to go down this path;
Advertiser reaction: will advertisers identify potential "premium clients" here, or simply migrate to where the consumers are going, if they leave News sites for free content?
Implications for different News properties: fee-based access to the Wall Street Journal can be profitable. But does this apply to The Sun, The Australian, The Courier-Mail, the Hobart Mercury etc.?
Implications for News journalists: if news is understood as a low-value-adding commodity, then status differentiations among journalists are not so great. But if there is a need to produce content that people will pay for, will this leave a small cadre of "star" journalists, and mass layoffs for those who provide everyday news content?

News Limited has being laying off journalists and other news staff in Australia, and this would be likely to continue under a pay-per model. There is also the interesting point, which was considered in Tech Crunch last week, of whether "star" journalists - those whose content attracts a personal following that readers would be willing to pay for - are better off leaving large flagship newspapers and starting their own sites, hoping to take readership and advertisers with them. Harvard Business Review blogger Umair Haque has been thinking along similar lines with his Nichepaper Manifesto.

(Hat tip to Tim Mansfield for the latter).

Internships as the new elitism

2009-08-01T07:34:00.005+10:00

A story coming through from The Guardian in Britain is the growing use of unpaid internships in business and government to employ university graduates at minimal cost. With up to one million young people estimated to be unemployed this year, this is a source of cheap labour, but its growing use for that purpose has raised allegations of exploitation and avoiding minimum wage obligations.

Another consequence of the high use of unpaid internships in some industries is that it reinforces patterns of elite employment that were raised in the Milburn Review into inequality in Britain. For those from lower-class backgrounds, the option of months or years of unpaiod work is less open, as they cannot rely upon parental support. This is particularly likely in the media and creative industries, where the notion of short-term contract work is widespread and people are more willing to forego short-term income.

Alex Donovan, 22, has been trying to break into the film world since graduating from Nottingham University last year with a degree in American studies.
After numerous unpaid stints as a runner, assistant director, editor, camera assistant, scriptwriter, website tester and general office skivvy, he is signing on and working unpaid in an east London theatre.
"It's immensely frustrating and I've got to the point now where I can't do internships," he said. "I've been on the dole for six months and I can't get bar work and a lot of high street recruitment agencies won't take me on as I don't have recognisable skills. They won't even take my CV. I knew film was notoriously difficult to get into, but I'd hoped to be in a paid job after six months."
Despite the setbacks, Donovan is determined to persevere. "It would be very easy to get depressed and there are nights when I think, 'Oh my God, why am I doing this?' but I will definitely keep pushing away to get into film; I would hate to end up doing something I didn't want to do."
Research by the National Council for Work Experience suggests that Donovan is not alone, and that his predicament will be shared by thousands more graduates this year.
A poll of 1,400 recent graduates and students who were seeking work found that 66% had felt obliged to work for free and 67% said they felt "exploited" or "undervalued" while doing work experience. The research, seen by the Guardian, reveals that half had worked unpaid for four weeks or more.
The government's own guidelines suggest that in the vast majority of cases unpaid placements should be for no more than two weeks.

More here.

Is small media the future of big media?

2009-07-31T21:46:00.002+10:00

Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch develops an interesting proposition. What if the best 50 writers at the New York Times left the NYT, and developed their own lost cost, low overheads online start-up? Would their readership follow them? Would investors be interested?

Like everyone else I’ve watched the print media world fall apart over the last few years. The poster child for that industry is the New York Times, of course, and their many missteps in recent memory have been well chronicled. In early 2008 Marc Andreessen started a New York Times Deathwatch, and the company’s financial performance has degraded since then.
I keep wondering what would happen if the top 10% of the writers at the NYTimes just…walked out. I know it’s crazy, but let’s just explore this a bit for the heck of it.

Today the company is worth just a little over $1 billion. As recently as five years ago it was worth nearly 5x that much. You have to go back to the early 1980s to see a lower stock price.

I certainly don’t think the NYTimes is going to be shutting down any time soon. The company still pulls in nearly $3 billion a year in revenue, down just 10% or so from 2005. But massive overhead, and more than 9,300 employees, make profitability an increasingly difficult goal for The Gray Lady. Her age is showing.

Full article here.

The app economy

2009-07-30T18:50:00.004+10:00

Interesting discussion in The Guardian about the rise of the app economy, or the revenue shares between Apple, developers and advertisers from the large - and, for Apple, somewhat unexpected - surge in demand for iPhone applications.

Tube Exits is just one of an estimated 100,000 apps that will exist by the end of this year. Apps are mobile applications designed to be used on smartphones such as iPhones or BlackBerrys or devices such as the iPod Touch. Ilja Laurs, chief executive of GetJar, a leading independent application store, told the MobileBeats conference in San Francisco earlier this month that apps could be bigger than the internet by 2020. Some 65,000 apps are currently available for Apple's iPhones from the corporation's App Store, which marked its first anniversary earlier this summer. But in that year, the apps industry has grown exponentially – the total number of Apple's App Store downloads recently passed the 1.5bn mark.
The App Store's success is reportedly a surprise to Apple, but presumably an even bigger and nastier one to competitors such as Research in Motion (who make BlackBerrys) and Nokia (the world's biggest mobile phone maker). The App Store's staggering success has led nearly every maker of a smartphone operating system to mimic Apple's business model: make it very easy for smartphone users to buy or freely download software created by from third-party developers.
At the moment Apple has something of a stranglehold on apps: Tube Exits is typical in that it can only be used on Apple mobile hardware (ie iPhones and iPod Touches). Apple has even won, if unwittingly, the battle of nomenclature: apps could have just as easily been called programmes or software but instead they are called apps, echoing the corporation's first syllable and thus stressing their seemingly umbilical link to one particular supplier of smartphone hardware.
What are apps? Some are games (such as Who Has The Biggest Brain?, which was played by 25 million people on the internet before being launched as an iPhone app, and its rival The Moron Test), some are silly (one allows you to download the image of a fan on to the screen of your iPhone, the aim being to make you feel cooler), some are edifying (one app consists of an audiobook of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History, whose text scrolls on the phone's screen as you hear it read aloud). Among the most popular is a now venerable one called iBeer, which transforms your iPhone into the simulation of a beer glass. Tilt it to your mouth and you seem to be drinking beer. There is even a way of seeming to pour virtual beer from one iPhone to another. And they say technology is all about progress.

Full article here.

Review of New Media in New Media and Society

2009-07-29T05:57:00.006+10:00

Following on from a blogging idea form my friend Mark Deuze, I have decided to start including reviews of my books on my blog.

The first is a review of New Media: An Introduction by Helen Kennedy from the University of Leeds. This review appeared in New Media and Society, Vol. 11 No. 3, May 2009.

The full text can be accessed from here, but a sample is provided below.

Flew’s text is an interesting, introductory overview – not the definitive
overview, for such a text does not exist. It is broad in reach. After the
introduction, the first three chapters attempt to define the key concepts to,
key approaches in, and key writers about, new media. In the remaining
chapters, Flew addresses what he sees as central issues in new media today.
These include social networking, participatory culture, gaming, citizen
journalism, creative industries, the global knowledge economy and the law–
policy–governance triangle.

How do you choose 20 key concepts in new media? Like Flew, I would
include convergence, cyberspace, networks, participation and virtuality, but
I am not convinced that all inclusions belong here. Also, how do you do
justice to these important concepts in less than a page? While many authors
have dedicated whole books to the topic of participation, Flew settles for a
couple of paragraphs (although admittedly he does dedicate a whole chapter
later in the book to participatory media cultures). The result is that these
brief summaries are very dense and some of them, such as the section on
surveillance, need a lot of unpacking.

Similarly, the chapter addressing approaches to new media mentions only
five. Flew defines these as: beyond hype and counter-hype; approaches to
technological change; social psychology; technology and culture; and political
economy and cultural studies (this last approach is arguably not one but two
different approaches). Many more exist; or at least, different categorizations
and classifications could be brought to bear. The same could be said for his
list of 10 key theorists. His choice is interesting and I am glad to see that
Tiziana Terranova has made it to the list for her work on the politics of
network cultures, but my choices (and probably everyone else’s working in
the field) would be at least a little bit different.

...

The discussion of the technologies and modes of production of new
media, found in the introduction to this book, is a welcome change. Other
new media overviews fail to attend to the means by which new media
products are made and, as a result, the production process in the ‘circuit of
culture’ (defined by du Gay et al. (1997) as constituted by representation,
identity, production, consumption and regulation), is left out and
understandings of new media are subsequently limited. In this sense, Flew’s
interest in creative industries approaches makes a valuable contribution in the
field of new media.

If this review contains some gripes, they are not really major ones. The
book is an interesting read and it engages with a broad range of contemporary
debates. It is a thorough and comprehensive volume, shaped inevitably by
the author’s own interests in relation to the canon-free field of new media. I
might have written it differently, but then, I did not write it.

Journalism in the 21st Century - keynote podcasts available

2009-07-28T06:55:00.001+10:00

The Keynote sessions at the Journalism in the 21st Century: Between Globalisation and National Identity conference is now available as podcasts from the SBS Radio site. I participated in the session titled "Journalism in the New Digital Age: New Directions for national and international media outlets", with Valerio Veo (Executive Producer Online Current Affairs SBS, Sydney), Christoph Lanz (Director Television, Deutsche Welle, Berlin), and Bruce Dover (Chief Executive ABC International TV, Sydney).

The theme of the session was:

The currently proclaimed ‘crisis’ of journalism is caused by new increasingly complex technology developments. Traditional media are deeply challenged by a number of different developments which question not only their business models but also ways of journalistic practice. New transnational interactive journalistic formats but also forms of a ‘global presence’ of local, national or international outlets have an impact on business models as well as journalism practice. Questions asked are: is there a role for national journalism in such a globalized sphere? What are quality standards of new forms of ‘interactive’ journalism? What are the new models of covering worldwide events? What is the role of journalism as a 4th estate in an international context?

Overcooking Neoliberalism: Des Freedman's The Politics of Media Policy

2009-07-27T16:59:00.005+10:00

I have observed that the term neoliberalism is in my view over-used, and has lost much descriptive clarity as it has become something of an omnibus term of abuse for anything or anyone who you happen to disagree with. Increasingly, the term functions in much the same way as the word "bourgeois" did for radicals in the 1970s.

In order to clarify with an example, I have provided a link to a review I have undertaken of Des Freedman's The Politics of Media Policy (Polity Press, 2008). An edited version of this review of Des Freedman's The Politics of Media Policy appeared in Australian Journalism Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, December 2008, pp. 127-129. This journal, however, which can be hard to find online, as the Web site is four years out of date (NB: this link may not be accessible to you - I got it from the Informit database which QUT subscribes to).

My conclusion on Freedman's book was:

The Politics of Media Policy opens with a highly insightful analysis of how to do media policy studies in original and significant ways. Unfortunately, by anchoring its empirical analysis closely to a desire to expose the hidden machinations of neo-liberal ideology, it loses focus the more that it moves out of the dominant terrain of political economy in the study of media ownership. Des Freedman has pointed to important new directions in media policy studies, but has unfortunately only got half way to developing a new synthesis for understanding the relationship between policy institutions and broader ideas.

For more read here.

Rudd government walking both sides of the street

2009-07-26T17:09:00.004+10:00

The Rudd Government is starting to position political discourse in such a way that it becomes the "sensible centre" of Australian politics, by sending out different messages to different audiences.

As noted yesterday, Kevin Rudd took the opportunity in The Age/SMH to again attack "neoliberalism" as the source of the nation's woes, and his own government as the compassionate alternative. Railing against neoliberalism does not win a lot of votes in marginal seats, but keeps the left-leaning middle classes happy and has the added virtue of sending The Australian's opinion writers into paroxyms of anger and furious rage. The fact that their only readers these days may be the left-leaning middle classes, who continue to feel the comfort of having The Australian to hate as a reminder of the good old, bad old days of evil John Howard, needn't matter.

Meanwhile, his Employment Participation minister Mark Arbib can rail against young people being "job snobs", speaking the language that Today Tonight viewers in marginal seats readily respond to, and stealing the clothes of their political opponents such as Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott.

I think the planning for a Federal election in early 2010 may have already begun.

Kevin Rudd on the economy

2009-07-25T07:30:00.004+10:00

Kevin Rudd has written a long essay on the Australian economy again. This time it is in the Sydney Morning Herald. Shaun Carney at The Age predicts that:

The article will, predictably, be dismissed and ridiculed by his opponents and other media outlets, not only for what it is but what it argues. Rudd has, as a small part of his argument, quite intentionally climbed right up the noses of free marketeers and neo-liberals over what he sees as their culpability for the global financial crisis. This is a reprise of another one of his long-form essays, which appeared in The Monthly magazine a few months ago.

Anyway, here is part of the article. The rest can be found here.

When Australia last experienced a global recession worse than this one, Jim Scullin and Joe Lyons were prime ministers of Australia, Don Bradman had just begun his Test cricketing career and Charles Kingsford Smith had just made his first flight across the Pacific. Of Australia's current population of nearly 22 million, only 1 million of our number were alive to experience the traumatic impact of the Great Depression.

In its response to the global recession, Australia has sought to learn some lessons of recessions past. To cushion the impact, the Government took strong, early and decisive action through the Nation Building for Recovery plan to support jobs, small business and apprenticeships today by investing in infrastructure for tomorrow.

The alternatives were to do nothing or, worse, effectively replicate the Premiers' Plan of 1931 when governments cut expenditure, thereby compounding the problems created by a private sector already in retreat. The result, of course, was an economic rout, appalling unemployment and a decade of negligible growth through the 1930s.

By contrast, the economic data today suggests the Government's plan is working so far. Australia is performing better than most other economies, with the fastest growth, the second-lowest unemployment and the lowest debt and deficit of all the major advanced economies. And we remain the only advanced economy not to have gone into recession.

Economics in crisis

2009-07-24T06:57:00.007+10:00

The Economist contains an article on the crisis of economics in the wake of the global financial crisis. Its particular reference points are macroeconomics and financial economics, and in particular the "rational expectations" school and the "efficient markets hypothesis". The critiques of Paul Krugman and Brad de Long, amoing others, have been developed in the Australian context by economist and blogger John Quiggan.

OF ALL the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself. A few years ago, the dismal science was being acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behaviour, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling. Wall Street ransacked the best universities for game theorists and options modellers ...

In the wake of the biggest economic calamity in 80 years that reputation has taken a beating. In the public mind an arrogant profession has been humbled. Though economists are still at the centre of the policy debate—think of Ben Bernanke or Larry Summers in America or Mervyn King in Britain—their pronouncements are viewed with more scepticism than before. The profession itself is suffering from guilt and rancour. In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.” ...

two central parts of the discipline—macroeconomics and financial economics—are now, rightly, being severely re-examined (see article, article). There are three main critiques: that macro and financial economists helped cause the crisis, that they failed to spot it, and that they have no idea how to fix it.

Whatever happened to work-life balance?

2009-07-23T06:53:00.002+10:00

This from The Daily Dish reporting on Jack Welch's view that women face a choice between having children and corporate success. Given Welch's influence on corporate thinking around the world, you would have to imagine that he is not alone in the higher echelons of the corporate world in these views. Comments on Welch are from Conor Friedersdorf.

Corporate Chutes and Ladders

by Conor Friedersdorf

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Former General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jack Welch has some blunt words for women climbing the corporate ladder: you may have to choose between taking time off to raise children and reaching the corner office.
"There's no such thing as work-life balance," Mr. Welch told the Society for Human Resource Management's annual conference in New Orleans on June 28. "There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."
Mr. Welch said those who take time off for family could be passed over for promotions if "you're not there in the clutch."

I am unsure whether Mr. Welch is speaking descriptively or prescriptively. Either way, I've got two responses:

1) Imagine that three people, all about 50 years old, are competing to be named CEO of a large company like General Electric -- one that pays a premium to compensate its top executive on the theory that singular talent at the top, drawn by necessity from a small pool of applicants, vastly increases corporate worth. Does it make sense that this decision would rest heavily on whether or not one of the applicants took a year off in her late twenties to care for her child? It makes perfect sense that the woman in question would be passed over for promotions that became available during her absence. Were Mr. Welch justifying a statistic showing that the average female CEO reaches the top at a slightly older age than the average male CEO, I'd buy into his theory.

But if what he's actually saying is that once you step off the corporate ladder it is impossible to get back on at the same rung, or to climb as fast once you do, I'd say that's a flaw in the corporate ladder, not a rational structure for penalizing employees who aren't "there in the clutch." Doesn't Mr. Welch's approach artificially limit the number of qualified applicants considered for top jobs where the applicant pool is already smaller than optimal? Doesn't it prevent some people with singular, extreme talent from ever being considered?

A similar sort of irrational behavior exists in corporate law and business consulting, where the time to join a prestigious firm is during recruiting season for your law school or MBA class. A job candidate who would have garnered offers from several top firms in that process might well find he can't get hired at any of those places if he applies after spending a year doing almost anything else. In my experience, folks who take conventional, highly codified steps toward success irrationally come to ascribe greater worth to those who follow the same path.

2) It is no coincidence that in our current corporate structure, a lot of CEOs and law partners lead miserable lives rife with lost friendships, dysfunctional relationships, divorces, alienated children, ludicrous attempts to use consumption as a stand in for actual happiness, etc. Perhaps if we stopped viewing these jobs as what we're aspiring to reach, and begin seeing them as fool's gold largely sought by folks with too narrow a conception of ambition, men and women who never reach the C suite would better count their blessings.

Kraftwerk

2009-07-22T10:37:00.004+10:00

Apropos of nothing at all, I found myself thinking again about the impact of Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk emerged for me at about the same time as punk rock, and I saw both as doing something that was profoundly subversive of the rock aesthetic of its time (mid-late 70s).

In some respects, Kraftwerk were more subversive because (1) there was always something weirdly compelling about the apparent dullness of the music; and (2) it looked like the attack of the office accountants.

Kraftwerk were also one of two things that shaped my perception of Germany and Germans for some time. The other was German goalkeeper Harald (Toni) Schumacher who famously flattened French forward Patrick Battiston in the 1982 soccer World Cup, in an action for which he was lucky not to face criminal charges, let alone stay on the pitch that day.
If you didn't grow up with Kraftwerk, enjoy both the music and the visual styling of The Robots and Trans Europe Express:

Also enjoy Bill Bailey performing one of Kraftwerk's lesser known hits:

The Arts versus Creative Industries?

2009-07-21T19:21:00.003+10:00

Marcus Westbury has a discussion in The Age about whether the perceived conflict between "arts for art's sake" and "creative industries" is overstated (link to Marcus's blog, as this doesn't appear to be on The Age online site). I include his discussion below.

One point I would make is that the idea that "the industries will take care of themselves" seems odd to me from a policy point of view. It avoids the question of what policy settings enable cultural production to take place in Australia, particularly in the higher risk and more capital-intensive sectors such as film and television.

We wouldn't assume that the existence of a lot of car enthusiasts give you a car industry, so are we being too nonchalant in assuming that the energy of artists gives you an arts industry. I'd agree with his points about the cultural - and economic - signifgicance of "design, architecture, contemporary music, mass media, digital media and video games".

SHOULD governments fund the arts “for art’s sake”, or should they be developing “creative industries”? It may seem like an abstract philosophical argument but at stake in this heated debate are the reasons why, how and even whether governments fund and support art and culture.

The two camps at times have much in common. They can and do form workable alliances but discussions can degenerate into the kind of hostility that student communists reserve for splinter groups that are less ideologically pure.

Historically, governments funded and promoted the arts for reasons that had little to do with money. Governments supported the arts because it was good for us, or a sign of civilisation, or it asserted our Australianness. The arts made it a better world to live in. Today the role that government plays in the arts is constantly being questioned.

The “creatives” who argue that governments should let go of dated ideas of “The Arts” range from frustrated designers or web workers or architects through to economists, bureaucrats and postmodern academics. They’re supported by some in the high art world who figure that any case for subsidies needs a little economic jargon, the odd research report, and some friendly sound bites about how many direct and indirect jobs the sector supports.

Those who advocate supporting art for art’s sake range from staunch defenders of artistic independence to stridently anti-commercial artists, to the opera lovers, the landed gentry and reflexive defenders of the status quo. They’re supported by every artist and community worker who is sick of justifying self-evidently beneficial projects and programs with elaborate pseudo-economic nonsense for Treasury and political press releases.

To the creative industries crew, the capital “A” Art types look like unreconstructed elitists, with an antique view of what is and isn’t proper art. All the subjective talk of “intrinsic value” seems a lot like code for elevating whatever they are personally into, and getting the Government to underwrite it, no questions asked.

To the capital “A” Art types, the creative industries crew look like the bastard children of shallow pop culture and decades of economic rationalism. They dangerously reduce everything to the dollar and miss the central point that culture is about something bigger than making a buck. They seem destined to stuff culture with the same free market that has so spectacularly stuffed up everything else.

I’ve regularly found myself popping up behind enemy lines on both sides. I alternate between finding both sides compelling and hopelessly and frustratingly wrong.

I believe passionately in the principle of art for art’s sake – and yet I also believe that arts policy is desperately behind the times. The traditional art forms of theatre, dance, classical music, opera and the visual arts still dominate government spending and focus while the so-called “commercial” arts touch our lives far more than the traditional ones.

If we want to make this world a better place, then design, architecture, contemporary music, mass media, digital media and video games have a cultural significance that far outstrips the impact of the high arts. They are art forms, not cash cows. They demand to be taken seriously because of their intrinsic worth and impact. It is an insult and not an elevation to talk of them only in terms of industry development and export earnings.

Just as importantly, any cultural policy motivated by picking economic winners is doomed to fail. You can’t pick the next cultural movement. Last year’s trends are next year’s cliches and any attempt to pick them as policy is likely to go horribly wrong.

The paradox of creative industries is that artists rarely behave like industries. Artists can be good business people but for the great ones, money is rarely what drives them. Thinking of them as economically rational players motivated by the desire to maximise their profits is a recipe for failed industries and terrible art.

Policy needs to celebrate the creative imperative in all its forms. It needs to provide fertile ground for creative people and encourage and support them to take risks, experiment and innovate. It shouldn’t matter whether you are a painter, a sculptor, in a rock band, a theatre maker, an architect or a computer-games designer. The industries will take care of themselves.

The End of Fortress Journalism

2009-07-20T16:55:00.002+10:00

Peter Horrocks, Director of the BBC World Service, has contributed to a collection of papers published by the BBC on The Future of Journalism. The full report can be accessed from the link provided, but a sample of what he refers to as the "end of fortress journalism" can be found below.

Most journalists have grown up with a fortress mindset. They have lived and worked in proud institutions with thick walls. Their daily knightly task has been simple: to battle journalists from other fortresses. But the fortresses are crumbling and courtly jousts with fellow journalists are no longer impressing the crowds. The end of fortress journalism is deeply unsettling for us and requires a profound change in the mindset and culture of journalism.

Fortress journalism has been wonderful. Powerful, long-established institutions provided the perfect base for strong journalism. The major news organisations could nurture skills, underwrite risk and afford expensive journalism. The competition with other news organisations inspired great journalism and if the journalist got into trouble - legally, physically or with the authorities - the news organisation would protect and support. It has been familiar and comfortable for the journalist.

But that world is rapidly being eroded. The themes are familiar. Economic pressures - whether in the public or private sectors - are making the costs of the fortresses unsustainable. Each week brings news of redundancies and closures. The legacy costs of buildings, printing presses, studios and all the other structural supports of the fortress are proving too costly for the revenues that can now be generated.

Democracy, Participation and Convergent Media

2009-07-16T13:00:00.004+10:00

Democracy, Participation and Convergent Media: Case Studies in Contemporary News Journalism in Australia

View more presentations from Terry Flew.

Digital Economy report

2009-07-15T21:27:00.005+10:00

The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has released its report Australia's Digital Economy: Future Directions. The report develops the following argument as found in its Executive Summary:

Advancing Australia’s digital economy requires action by government, industry and the community.

The key areas of focus for government, industry and the community in order to maximise the benefits of the digital economy for all Australians are:

•• for Government, to:

−− lay the foundations Australia’s digital infrastructure

−− facilitate innovation

−− set conducive regulatory frameworks

•• for industry, to:

−− demonstrate digital confidence and build digital skills

−− adopt smart technology

−− develop sustainable online content models

•• for the community, to:

−− enjoy digital confidence and digital media literacy skills

−− experience inclusive digital participation

−− benefit through online engagement.

The report makes reference to the 2007 You Decide project undertaken by a QUT-based team as "Australia's first experiment with collaborative, citizen journalism online". Details of the case study can be found here.

I'd like to turn your Powerpoint into a book

2009-07-13T19:21:00.003+10:00

As this is the second time VDM Verlag have requested that I turn a Powerpoint presentation they found on my ePrints site into a book, I feel happy to share the email with you.

I pointed out after the first request that, had they opened the file, they would have found a Powerpoint presentation. For those PhD students who are approached by VDM Verlag about turning their thesis into a book, you may want to consdier this in terms of the amount of attention they pay to the contents of their products. Others have discussed this online.

Dear Flew, Terry,

I am writing on behalf of the international academic publisher, VDM Publishing House Ltd.

In the course of a research at the Library of QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, we came across a reference to your thesis on "Communication for the 21st Century, or, How to have your blog and read it too!".

As we would like to make your work available to a larger audience, I am wondering if you may be interested in publishing your thesis in the form of a printed book.

Your reply including an e-mail address to which I can send an e-mail with further information in an attachment will be greatly appreciated.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,
Kumar Dhora

Acquisition Editor

VDM Publishing House Ltd.

17, Meldrum Str. | Beau-Bassin | Mauritius

Tel / Fax: +230 467-5601

k.dhora@vdm-publishing.com | www.vdm-publishing.com

Business Registration No.: C07072290

Board of Directors: Benoit Novel , Saleem Chotoye

Beyond Globalisation

2009-07-10T18:54:00.005+10:00

My paper Beyond Globalisation: Rethinking the Scalar and the Relational in Global Media Studies has just been published in Global Media Journal: Australian Edition.

Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the World Communications Association conference in July 2007, the Seoul Symposium on Mobile Communication in October 2007, and the International and Intercultural Communication in the Age of Global Media conference at Monash University in August 2008.

Thanks to Hart Cohen for his support with this publication, and to Caroline Hatcher, Song Gi-Baek and Ron Gallagher for their invitations to present at these events.

The abstract for this paper is below, and the full paper can be accessed here.

This paper traces how the concept of globalisation has been understood in media and communications, and the ongoing tension as to whether we can claim to be in an era of ‘global media’. A problem with this discussion is that it continues to revolve around a scalar understanding of globalisation, where the global has superseded the national and the local, leading to a series of empirically unsustainable, and often misleading, claims. Drawing upon recent work in economic and cultural geography, I will argue that a relational understanding of globalisation enables us to approach familiar questions in new ways, including the question of how global large media corporations are, global production networks and the question of ‘runaway production’, and the emergence of new ‘media capitals’ that can challenge the hegemony of ‘Global Hollywood.’

The Economist viral marketing campaign

2009-07-06T09:14:00.006+10:00

Interesting developments in market testing. A personal email that I received from Chris McCrudden from Speed Communication to gauge my response to a new campaign being launched for The Economist. The email read:

I’m getting in touch with you on behalf of The Economist in the UK as I notice that you’ve written about the magazine before on your blog.

The Economist has just launched a new cinema ad campaign which it hopes will help attract a new generation of readers. We’re very interested in hearing your thoughts about it as it’s very different to the ‘white out of red’ posters it’s used for over 20 years. It’s intended to grab the attention of the “intellectually curious”, the estimated 3m+ people in the UK who, thanks to the expansion in university education, care about the range of big global issues that The Economist covers every week.

You can see the video here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Esx57x7CtZo

It uses the image of a wire-jumper (Florent Blondeau) walking through a city on a series of red wires and the strapline “Let your mind wander” as a metaphor for the pleasure we get from connecting different ideas, suggesting that you can get a similar experience from reading a copy of the magazine.

I hope you enjoy the ad. If you’d like any more info on the thinking that went into the campaign please let me know.

Best regards, Chris

Note both the personal turn and the feedback loop between my use of The Economist in my blog and an email back about their new marketing campaign.

The video is here.

If I'm going to pay for The Australian, I want better sub-editing than this

2009-07-03T19:09:00.009+10:00

If John Hartigan believes that "the willingness of readers to pay for [news] will depend on the quality of the content", he may want to note how his own pieces are sub-edited in his own News Limited papers. Kudos to Tim Burrowes from Mumbrella for spotting this.

The bad sub-editing seems contagious Rod McGuinness spotted this with Christian Kerr's House Rules column online, which has remained untouched for three days.

Jeff Goldblum: Back from the dead?

2009-07-01T11:58:00.003+10:00

If Richard Wilkins, New Zealand police and Twitter say you are dead, then you must be. Or maybe not. Stephen Colbert investigates.

Are the suburbs neglected in Australian higher education?

2009-07-01T05:33:00.004+10:00

A report commissioned for the Bradley Review of Higher Education by Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research (both boring web sites, BTW) argues that school-leavers in the outer suburbs of Australia's capital cities face a "triple disadvantage" of distance form a university campus, modest family incomes, and medicore schooling affecting their final scores adn therfore entry to university.

Guy Healy deals with this in The Australian today.

SCHOOL-LEAVERS in the middle to outer suburbs of Australia's capitals are often "triple handicapped" in their access to university, according to expert advice to the government's Bradley review obtained under Freedom of Information.

The report, Higher Education: Demand and Supply Issues, was written by Bob Birrell, Ernest Healy, Daniel Edwards and Ian Dobson from Monash's Centre for Population and Urban Research.

As the Senate estimates committee recently heard, the government plans to recruit an extra 100,000 university students by 2025.

The advice from demographer Dr Birrell is that the push will have to come from under-prepared suburban frontiers of the nation's metropolises.

"Young people located in outer suburbs often suffer a double or triple handicap as regards access to higher education," says Dr Birrell's report, which appears to have influenced the government's recent equity-based push in tertiary education.

These young people live long distances from a university, their family income is modest and they have often gone to poor-performing, vocationally oriented government schools where the median equivalent national tertiary entrance rank score is generally below that for career-specific courses.

Dr Birrell told the HES: "You can characterise all the capital cities in the same way. (But) it's really serious in southeast Queensland, where you have a rapid spread of suburbs north and south of Brisbane, but there are very limited facilities. And it's pretty extreme in Perth."

The chances of young people from these social backgrounds successfully competing for career-specific university places are limited, the report says, especially since "competition for HECS places in (these) courses has become increasingly fierce in Australia over the past decade".

Such is the demand for HECS places - especially at highly ranked universities - that increasing numbers of parents are willing to invest in private school education for their children while public school parents invest heavily in the residential zones of select high schools.

Dr Birrell said access to the high-demand universities and courses was increasingly dominated by students from private schools and high performing or select government schools. He quoted a report from the Australian Council of Educational Research that found 60 per cent of students from an independent school received an offer and enrolled in 2002, compared with 50 per cent from Catholic schools and 32 per cent from government schools generally.

However, in the case of those from government schools, the share of those from high-performing schools - such as Melbourne High, MacRoberston Girls High, Glen Waverley High and Balwyn High - who received an offer was "way above" that of government schools located in outer suburbia.

The report highlights outer southwestern Sydney, outer western Sydney, Fairfield and Gosford-Wyong in NSW, and southeastern outer Melbourne, Frankston and Mornington in Victoria as areas with low participation and most potential to recruit young people to university.

The report notes that there has been very little increase in the number of completions at the undergraduate level at Australian universities since 2000.

It calls for university places to be targeted to outer suburban areas with low participation rates and backed by increased student support.

In the budget the federal government announced $437 million would be invested in boosting participation over four years, including $108 million for universities to build long-term partnerships with schools and communities in disadvantaged areas.

Michael Jackson in the Middle East

2009-06-30T05:04:00.001+10:00

Not much to say on Michael Jackson's life and death that others haven't said, but his circualtion as a global symbol of ... something always fascinates me. Enthusiasm for Michael Jackson in the Middle East continues to surprise and interest me, along the lines shown below.

My favourite Michael Jackson moment does not in fact feature Michael Jackson. It is the interrogation scene from Three Kings, where the Iraqi soldier questions a puzzled Mark Wahlberg about what has been happening to Michael Jackson.

NB: transformation of MJ's face at end of clip added by person who put it on You Tube - not part of the original film.

"Best Job in the World" as successful social media

2009-06-29T07:39:00.004+10:00

Interesting discussion today in The Australian about Tourism Queensland's "Best Job in the World" campaign for Hamilton Island, and how to get value for money for promotional campaigns using social media.

TOURISM Queensland has massively outstripped the performance of Tourism Australia's $40million sponsorship of Baz Lurhman's movie Australia, despite being run on a budget of just $1.7m, according to the chairman of Tourism Queensland.

The Best Job in the World advertising campaign set a new record at the Cannes International Advertising Festival last week when it took an unprecedented three Grand Prixs for public relations, direct advertising and cyber websites.

Tourism Queensland chairman Don Morris said the campaign had evolved into a case study on how to use emerging social media and keep taxpayer funding of such campaigns to a minimum.

"No one has done this as a simple business story," Mr Morris told Media. "This is a seriously interesting case study of how to use social media.

"Tourism Australia put $40m into the Australia movie and it is ranked something like 469. The Queensland government put $1m and partners another $700,000 into the Best Job campaign."

By the end of the campaign last month, when 34-year-old charity events organiser Ben Southall was named the winner, the campaign had outstripped Tourism Queensland's wildest expectations.

More than 34,000 entries from almost 200 countries were submitted and media coverage about the campaign has been valued at more than $200m. At the same time, an estimated three billion people have been exposed to the campaign.

The campaign, which began with simple press ads in newspaper classifieds looking for applicants for The Best Job in the World -- being a caretaker on Hamilton Island for six months -- used websites, YouTube and was an extension of the government's existing Islands of the Barrier Reef campaign.

Mr Morris said that the campaign had attracted attention by offering an experience money can't buy. "It was a hook to gain media and consumer interest," he said.

Mr Morris said while the campaign had been launched in one of Tourism Queensland's core target markets, the UK, it has transcended international boundaries by bringing a massive return on investment in Europe, North America and south east Asia where travel partners such as airlines offered special deals linked to the campaign.

Hamilton Island has already benefited with increased tourist numbers and Amway Australia choosing it as the destination for its 2010 conference.

Last month, Amway Australia general manager Michial Coldwell said publicity surrounding Best Job had tipped the balance in Hamilton Island's favour.

Mr Morris said interest in the outcome of the promotion was so high 22 international and domestic media crews attended the announcement of the winner on Hamilton Island.

He said one of the reasons the campaign attracted so much attention was the simplicity of the core message.

"The whole world gets obsessed about segmentation with tourism," he said. "But you just have to find the right button to press. It hit that button with the universal appeal of The Best Job in the World.

"It trebled the press coverage of the G20 conference in Sydney and the only comparable reference point online was day one of the soccer World Cup. This is really about how to be smart with taxpayers' money."

For information about how Tourism Queensland did it, see here.

Celebrating with a Powerpoint

2009-06-24T10:39:00.006+10:00

In the aftermath of 'Ute-gate', sections of the media and the blogosphere have enthusiastically taken to psychoanalysing Malcolm Turnbull (see here and here), focusing in particular on the relationship between an absent mother-figure in his childhood, poor political judgement, and a failure to check the source of emails before using them as evidence.

Its good to see the tradition of undertaking amateur psychoanalysis of key Liberal party figures has not disappeared with the departure of Peter Costello, perhaps the most psychoanalysed figure in Australian political history.

Nontheless, why does the Labor Party escape scrutiny in all this, or why is it confined to the likes of Mark Latham? Annabel Crabb offers a corrective to this, with her observation that Kevin Rudd celebrates political victory over his foe Turnbull with ... a Powerpoint presentation.

DIFFERENT people celebrate victory in different ways.

Formula one drivers tip champagne all over their heads. Football players smother each other in hugs. And Kevin Rudd, when he's riding high on a week of political triumph, indulges himself by putting on a PowerPoint presentation.

That's what he did yesterday when he faced his colleagues at the regular caucus meeting, after the bizarre and turbulent fizzing cocktail of events that was Monday.

Such was his excitement about the previous day's vanquishing of Malcolm Turnbull that Rudd allowed himself 20 minutes and many, many transparencies, dealing with bank bond issuances, household consumption, employment patterns calculated with and without the effects of the stimulus package and so on.

A comparison of major country credit spreads showed Australia's position to be very competitive, he explained to his comrades, as their congratulatory cries died upon their lips.

Call this "nerd hubris", I guess.

Social Media and Journalism in Iran

2009-06-23T06:45:00.001+10:00

Interesting piece by Brian McNair on social media and journalism in post-election Iran:

Current events in Iran exemplify what I called in a 2006 book, ‘cultural chaos’. A ruling authoritarian elite struggles to maintain control of information and political dominance in a world where online media and satellite news threaten to make everything it does visible to a global audience.

Internally, Iran’s protesters Google, Twitter and Facebook around the censorship, countering the propaganda which fills state media coverage and organising their opposition. The oppressive order of Islamic fundamentalism becomes the dynamic chaos of emerging democracy, and culture - communication - is the catalyst for that phase change.

As I write, the outcome of the protests is uncertain. But there is no doubt that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hold on power has never been more fragile. The Iranian state tries to disrupt email and social networking sites. Mobile phone networks are blocked and satellite dishes confiscated, but those attempts merely add more fuel to the story as reported by a globalised, always-on media, stirring up further revulsion and anger at home and abroad.

In this sense, the globalisation of news media, and the explosion of online means of communication which are, by design, very difficult for authoritarian regimes to control or destroy, is a democratising force. It erodes the barriers which those regimes erect around their countries, breaks their quarantine, raises the global political cost of their behaviour. It brings chaos, but in a good way, the way that leads to the birth of something better.

The presence of new kinds of media is not enough in itself to guarantee progressive change, or to create the public mood which demands it. In the case of Iran, the arrival of Barack Obama and his conciliatory overtures appears to have strengthened the opposition. The parlous state of the Iranian economy has been a domestic issue for a long time, and the sheer extremism of Ahmadinejad’s version of Islam can only provoke resistance in a country with Iran’s cosmopolitan history.

But the impact of these underlying factors is amplified by the globalised media, which give them heightened visibility and force. Everything plays out before a global audience, in BBC and CNN bulletins, or on Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera. Iranians themselves, many of them, are part of that audience, and take strength from the knowledge that the eyes of the world are upon them as they fight for personal freedom and human rights.

This is what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, when Kate Adie and her media colleagues covered first the pro-democacy protests, then the massacre which followed. The Chinese communists won that battle, but they lost the war, and to this day are still shamed by their actions.

The global media were in Eastern Europe in the velvet revolutions, and in Moscow during the failed coup of 1991, lending their publicity to popular uprisings.

But in Iran, two decades on, there is another factor at work. Alongside the professional journalists and foreign correspondents are armies of ordinary people, armed only with mobile phones and digital cameras, Twitter and Skype accounts, Facebook and MySpace profiles.

While John Simpson and the rest are locked in their hotels, effectively prisoners of the regime, young Iranians keep a flow of uncensored news pouring out of the country – citizen journalists if you like. They are connected to the world beyond, in a way that previous generations of protesters have not been.

Brian McNair is Professor of Journalism & Communication at the University of Strathclyde.

Milne Watch 4 - Worst of the Worst

2009-06-22T16:18:00.008+10:00

All that is wrong with national political reporting in Australia could be summed up in two words: Glenn Milne. While there are people who periodically write worse columns, Glenn Milne is the exemplar of the three worst traits that pervade the scene:

Uncritically passing off whatever they have been told by a MP/minister/political staffer as their own thoughts;
An inability to think about any issue in terms other than its immediate tactical advantage to whomever it was they last spoke to;
Absurdly self-righteous commentary about others that are completely unwarranted in light of their own conduct.

The 2007 column about a pissed Kevin Rudd going to the Scores strip club in NYC being in the public interest as it "went to the heart of questions of character" had been the high/low point of this genre of political reportage thus far. But as "Ute-gate" unravels and the questions surrounding the forged e-mail are investigated, we should record these two Milne contributions from 22 June as - we would hope - an epitaph for a style of reporting national affairs, and the time to clean out the stables at News Limited in particular (Insiders needs a look at as well).

Exhibit A

MALCOLM Turnbull has told close colleagues the prime ministerial adviser at the centre of the ute affair admitted to him he was troubled and had not been able to sleep.

According to colleagues briefed on the Opposition Leader's version of his conversation with Andrew Charlton at last week's press gallery Midwinter Ball, it was Charlton -- not Turnbull -- who raised his own role.

The two men were seated next to each other at the ball. After talking about a mutual friend, Turnbull says he gave the generic career advice as "one old man to one young man; always tell the truth".

According to Turnbull's version of events it was Charlton who admitted to worrying about the advice he had given Kevin Rudd.

Charlton was "clearly anxious and stressed" but concluded he had given the Prime Minister the correct advice on OzCar.

Exhibit B

This would be a good time for Kevin Rudd to uphold the standards he expects of others, writes Glenn Milne
LET'S strip this down to its bare basics, shall we?

In a supposedly mature democracy in the 21st century, the leader of an opposition political party uses a newspaper report referring to a leaked email to raise questions about the behaviour of the government and on that basis calls for the resignation of the prime minister of the day.

The same prime minister responds by immediately ordering a police investigation into the opposition leader and the journalist who wrote the story using the full force and authority of the office of the attorney-general and the commissioner of the national police.

And where did this take place -- Tehran, Cairo, Singapore, perhaps? No, in Canberra last week, the capital of Australia, the country whose same Prime Minister is in the middle of a global campaign to secure a seat on the UN Security Council, the ultimate guardian of international human rights. And who at home campaigned during the most recent election campaign for more protection for public service whistleblowers and journalists.

At the same time, the Treasurer in the same government repeatedly refuses a public invitation to explicitly submit either himself or his department to a parallel investigation by the national Auditor-General into the same issue.

Let's take stock here; these are at root seriously worrying developments in the conduct of both our politics and the process of our democracy.

Especially in light of Kevin Rudd's own behaviour. Who can ever forget the basis on which Rudd eventually convinced his own colleagues that he had what it took to lead them? I speak here, of course, of his assiduous demolition of the Howard-led Coalition over its behaviour during the AWB "wheat for weapons" scandal.

During that time Rudd relied repeatedly on information leaked to newspapers to attack Alexander Downer, then foreign minister. And to call for his resignation.

The government of the day did eventually order an inquiry into the issue -- the Cole commission -- but it was into its own behaviour and that of AWB, not Rudd's.

Downer at the time was under enormous pressure and often -- and unconvincingly -- used the defence that he hadn't read relevant emails involving the role of his department. Much as Wayne Swan is now saying he didn't necessarily read the emails sent to his home fax by Treasury officials, Godwin Grech and Andrew Thomas, regarding John Grant Motors.

And while we're at it, what happened to the accepted legal convention that once a police investigation is on foot, politicians should cease making public comments about the case? Rudd whistled up his Attorney-General Robert McClelland to authorise a made-to-order police inquiry (and knowing McClelland to be a thoroughly decent man, I'm sure he's uncomfortable with all this) on Saturday.

Yet there was the Prime Minister, fresh from reconciling himself with God at St John's Church in Canberra yesterday, and here is what he had to say before again calling on the Opposition Leader to resign: "I believe (Malcolm) Turnbull has a fundamental case to answer here. This email is something he and the Liberal Party have boasted of now, for some time."

Well, under Australian law -- assuming that still applies -- the conclusion of whether or not Turnbull has a case to answer is now surely one for the commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to reach based on the evidence provided to him by the Australian Federal Police.

And it's not only in the area of police inquires that decent process and standards are going by the board, sacrificed to the government's attempts to defend Swan. It also goes to public service standards and threats to public servants themselves.

Its hard to top the observation of blogger Possum in Crike y today (written before the whole story unravelled in Parliament):

The political analysis at The Australian has been sliding down a notch or two in the quality stakes recently – but honestly, you’d have to be a lead poisoned crackhead to believe that horseshit.

Binge drinking on the rise among U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

2009-06-22T09:50:00.004+10:00

The level of binge drinking, and alcoholism generally, among US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has spiked considerably. It is particularly marked among those on second and third tours of duty. The social consequences of this engagement within the US when all troops return will be truly alarming.

The number of U.S. Army soldiers enrolled in treatment programs for alcohol dependency and damaging behaviors such as binge drinking has nearly doubled since 2003. Experts believe that the stress of frequent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan is the leading cause.
On Friday, USA Today reported US Army statistics revealing that the number of soldiers diagnosed with alcoholism or problems relating to alcohol abuse such as binge drinking rose from 6.1 out of 1,000 in 2003 to 11 out of 1,000 in the first six months of this year.
Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, said that he believed the rising number of US soldiers that have developed alcohol disorders could be attributed at least in part to the eight consecutive years of combat that the soldiers have been engaged in.
"We're seeing a lot of alcohol consumption," Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff, told top officers during a briefing on the Army's growing number of suicides.
Even in Muslim countries where alcohol is prohibited, excessive drinking among military personnel in these war zones was still an enormous issue, according to experts attending a conference in New York last month.
Panelists at the conference sponsored by the National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse pointed to multiple tours of duty in highly combative zones with limited contact with family or visits to home as being to blame.

For more read here.

Times shuts down blog

2009-06-21T21:09:00.004+10:00

Jean Seaton at the University of Westminster has written in The Guardian about a court action undertaken by The Times in the UK to expose who the anonymous blogger was behind the well-regarded Night Jack police rounds blog. This case was also discussed at Larvatus Prodeo.

As soon as the High Court ruled yesterday that police blogger NightJack could be named , the Times triumphantly did so. An earlier injunction, which perhaps was to let an ordinary bobby not equipped with the press defence equipment of a celebrity have time to prepare for the onslaught, was overturned. The Press Complaints Commission to which he had appealed had provided no assistance at all.
We hope that Detective Constable Richard Horton won't lose his job, although he has been through what may be one of the fastest disciplinary processes in police history and been given a written reprimand. He has already been doorstepped by photographers and his award-winning blog has disappeared – and a window that had opened on to the way in which policeman go about their work, bristling with insights into contemporary Britain, has been slammed shut.
In a rather Orwellian way, history is being rewritten – it is as if it had never existed. Horton won the Orwell Prize for blogging because in an increasingly competitive field he offered such a distinct voice. And because it took you to the heart of policing in a gripping way: it was old-fashioned reporting but in the new time frame of an unfolding story. In particular it reeked of somewhere local, regional, a particular part of Britain as well as the particular place of being a policeman.
The Orwell Prize judges – Jenny Abramsky, Ian Jack, Ferdinand Mount and Geoffrey Wheatcroft – pounced on this blog: it was, indeed, in the public interest and fulfilled Orwell's ambition "to turn political writing into an art".
Before Horton's entry to the prize went forward we did, in fact, check rather carefully that he was what he said he was. He did not come to the prize giving, and the money went to the Police Benevolent Fund (I saw the cheque being made out).
Blogging anonymity has to be tested in various ways. But, surely what matters is the accuracy and insight of the information. No one has disputed what this blog said: it was not illegal, it was not malicious. Indeed, in a world where local reporting is withering away as the economic model for supporting it disappears, we know less and less about our non-metropolitan selves and this lack of attention will surely lead to corruption. So this blog was a very good example of reporting bubbling up from a new place.
What is puzzling is the Times attack. The paper has made an intelligent use of blogs, and has been good at fighting the use of the courts to close down expression. NightJack was a source and a reporter. They would not (I hope) reveal their sources in court. Even odder is their main accusation against him: that the blog revealed material about identifiable court cases. The blog did not do this – cases were disguised. However, once the Times had published Horton's name then, of course, it is easy to find the cases he was involved with. The Times has shut down a voice.
Blogs as a form are no more reliable or "true" than any other kind of journalism. That is why we started a blog prize – to try to help people to find the interesting ones. This decision damages our capacity to understand ourselves just when we need new forms to develop. After Tuesday's ruling, would you blog about your workplace?
• Jean Seaton is director of the Orwell Prize and professor of media history at the University of Westminster

Iran: Views in the Western Media

2009-06-18T20:29:00.004+10:00

As it appears that the stand off around the disputed Iranian election result could take some time to play itself out, there is the chance to look at how this is being picked up in the Western media.

As Jason Wilson has noted, a dominant motif is that this is the social media or Twitter-driven revolution. Although some of the claims being made appear premature, this is not stopping some overblown claims being made, such as that of Jeff Jarvis that Twitter is "the keystone in the architecture of the new infrastructure of unstoppable freedom of speech and democracy".

And, hey, I thought it was so you could find out about Lindsay Lohan's breasts or where Ashton Kutcher is right now.

But we've been here before. From Rupert Murdoch's claims in the early 1990s that satellite TV could bring down the Chinese government to more recent absurd claims about Twitter triggering the "Moldovan revolution", the idea that media technologies force political regime change has had a run on many occasions and been found wanting. According to his blog, Jarvis is pronouncing the end of dictatorships on Al-Jazeera:

I recorded a Skype video interview for Al Jazeera English that will air at 20000 GMT today and looked at the camera and said, “Despots, beware.” Your days are numbered. This is more than a revolution. It is an evolution in the architecture of speech and freedom.

I am reminded here of this famous warning to sceptics, from the legendary Criswell in 1953:

But Jeff Jarvis is certainly open to the possibilities of people taking matters into their own hands, even if he overstates the global significance of You Tube and Twitter. Not so Seamus Milne in The Guardian, who seems to see the whole thing as an orchestrated campaign by the US and its Western allies against Mahmoud Ahmedinijad.

That is also reflected in the western media, whose cameras focus so lovingly on Tehran's gilded youth and for whom Ahmadinejad is nothing but a Holocaust-denying fanatic. The other Ahmadinejad, who is seen to stand up for the country's independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority, is largely invisible abroad ... If Ahamdinejad was in fact the winner, then there is an attempted coup going on in Tehran right now, and it is being led by Mousavi and his western-backed supporters.

One consequence of the Bush administration's foreign policy was that it reignited a Cold War world-view on the left, where reflex anti-Americanism and the sense that the US was behind everything would lead to routine support for whoever was opposed to the US and to Western foreign policy. Ahmedinijad is a very unlikely figure for the Western left to align with - his quite vocal anti-Semitism would seem to present at least one obstacle - but "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" mindset can be a hard one to break with.

As I noted in an earlier post, we will never know the actual result of the Iranian election (Ahmedinijad could have actually won), but enough analysis can be done of the official dats to reveal that it is fraudulent, and that is what has been the trigger for the protests. Yes, Teheran is where the mobile phone owning, Internet accessing, Twittering urban middle classes are, but the line that such people are the stooges of U.S. foreign policy is predictable and vacuous. Iranians are quite capable of demanding democratic accountability from their leaders without help from the U.S. State Department.

How reliable is the information from Iran?

2009-06-17T18:48:00.003+10:00

Good article from The Guardian about the issues arising about how to determine the reliability of information coming through from Iran via social media sites.

The internet is a brilliant machine for spreading information. Data shoots across the network at the speed of light, passing from one node to another. It's unmotivated by fear or repression or greed, and can shine a torch into the darkest corners to help bring what was hidden to the world.
The uprising in Iran has been a perfect case in point - despite state censorship, the suppression of journalists and the shutdown of communications - the story has been covered from almost every angle: and the internet - as I've written before this week - has played a vital part in getting the information out.
(Some of the public nature of the information has been sparked in part, it seems, by the surprisingly robust design of Twitter and the fact that instant messaging services from Google, Microsoft and AOL have been turned off in Iran as part of US sanctions. Would an uprising have commanded so much of the internet's attention if conversations were happening privately, between Iranians, in Farsi?)

For more read here.

Innovative blogging on the Iranian election

2009-06-16T20:54:00.007+10:00

I am pleased to see that Aussie expat Craig Bellamy has put together an as it happens blog on the events in Iran in the aftermath of the disputed elections. I noted yesterday the minute by minute reportage coming from Andrew Sullivan's blog, and The Guardian has put together an excellent news blog on this.

In Australia, the bloggers themselves can be their own worst enemies. In a generally self-congratulatory discussion on Larvatus Prodeo about what a fool Christian Kerr from The Australian was, I put up this post:

Just to take the conversation out of the realms of the Canberra cognoscenti for a moment, I can agree with all of this about the likes of Christian Kerr and David Penberthy BUT…

At the moment I think what is happening in Iran is very interesting. It confirms that social media is not just apolitical fluff and chasing around Ashton Kutcher, but may have a political significance at certain moments. At the same time, I am quite glad that there are “journos as hard men of the streets” like John Simpson, who are employed by places like the BBC, and who have a very clear understanding of how to cover events like those currently happening in places like Teheran.

I’ve been following Andrew Sullivan’s blog, among other things, on this, and his observation on the MSM and the blogosphere and MSM-bashing is interesting in relation to these events:

Some of it is overblown. The NYT’s Lede blog has been outstanding, as I’ve said for the past several days. PBS and NPR are doing important work. Many MSM reporters are risking their lives to report this story from within Iran and we bloggers should honor their courage and work. Most of the photos I’ve published come from Getty and the remarkable Olivier Laban-Mattei. Cable news is useless, but we knew that already. But the future is a fusion of MSM tradition and new media open-source news gathering, aggregating, editing, filtering.

While some responses were well thought through, others were of the stock standard "You can't trust the mainstream media" stuff:

Terry yes, there are plenty of journalists still out there gathering primary data and reporting it, which is what I think we would all like journalists to do. However an increasing number of these ‘news’ stories consist of little more than summaries of what various anonymous people allegedly said, all written to support the journo’s evaluative opinion piece … one usually presented in the context of an argument full of assumptions about causation and implications for a particular interpretation of likely future developments.

Ken Lovell - well said. I also note that these unsourced reports are usually chockablock full of loaded epithets, of which my particular fave is ‘moderate’, closely followed by ‘reformist’. Both are usual in discussions of ‘hot spots’ in foreign correspondentdom and denote, if not actually paid agents of the CIA, at least willing Quislings.

As there is little point in being poster #60 responding to poster #40 responding to poster #25, I thought I'd reiterate a few points about what seems to be happening in Teheran:

The West is not behind these protests. Iranians are making their own judgements, and taking matters into their own hands. Barack Obama's foreign policy strategy in the region was premised upon the idea that he would still be dealing with Ahmadinejad after the election, who was the devil they knew. The U.S and others like Britain are basically playing catch up, and decidedly unsure on whether to support the uprising;
Blogging, You Tube, Twitter and other social media have been central to getting the messgae out to the wider world. The idea that this is all apolitical fluff that is about following Ashton Kulcher around and "are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism [but] are directives from the Central Software Committee" (to quote a recent pooh-poohing manifesto from the land of Digital Media High Theory) is actually being exposed in a sharp light on the streets of Teheran right now;
The mainstream media are not a monolith in relation to these matters. Several people have commented on the appalling lack of coverage on the U.S. cable networks, the BBC has been great, as has The Guardian and the New York Times news blog The Lede. Moral: don't write off media outlets that invest in serious coverage of international affairs. Bloggers are not filling this gap at this stage.

Understanding what is happening in Iran

2009-06-15T19:21:00.006+10:00

In trying to understand what has happened in Iran since the election results came through, there is a need to avoid two temptations of the Western observer following this through the Western media:

The temptation to assume that people in countries where there is anti-Western feeling only vote for leaders who express that feeling because they are manipulated by the media and the government. Not only does this ignore the extent to which manipulation occurs in Western democracies; it also obliterates the significance of the history of colonialism and the manifest inequalities in the global system;
The temptation to align with the candidate who people support who seem to be "most like us". This can become particularly easy if they also make use of the Internet, Facebook, My Space, You Tube, Twitter etc. Not surprisingly, this will be the younger middle class.

While both of these are possibilities with the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran this weekend, the extensiveness and spontaneity of the uprisings that have followed suggest that a real fault line has emerged in post-1979 Iranian society, and that the suppression of popular feeling has reached a critical mass.

Soem of the online coverage of this has been excellent. Via Andrew Sullivan's site, there is an analysis of the official figures from Nate Silver that suggests that these figures verge on the completely impossible. Juan Cole points to problems with the assumption that the poor voted for Ahmadinejad, and the vote for Mir-Hossein Mousavi is an urban middle class phenomenon (which has become the quasi-official line). Interesting discussion on this site as well.

Excellent coverage from the BBC and John Simpson in Teheran. Not so CNN which has been attacked for failing to pay attention to the story as it was breaking very publicly and very visibly.

Aside from SBS, the Australian coverage has generally been poor, despite the significant number of Iranians living, working and studying in Australia.

Aged News?

2009-06-13T17:54:00.003+10:00

Jon Stewart's The Daily Show is already writing the obituary for newspapers. Check the question here about whether the New York Times only has "aged news", and the Woodward and Bernstein questions.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

End Times

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

2009-06-08T19:02:00.004+10:00

Bruce Sterling in WIRED online projects on the difficulties faced for literature and book publishing today. Below are what he sees as eighteen challenges for contemporary literature:

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

The Chaser - Offensiveness or Satire?

2009-06-06T08:48:00.011+10:00

Now that the ABC Chaser team have been sent to the sin bin by ABC management for two weeks after the "Make a Realistic Wish Foundation" sketch, and the offending material has been removed form the ABC web site, thank goodness for You Tube so that we can preserve the material and make our own calls on it. With everyone from Kevin Rudd to Miranda Devine saying this is inappropriate humour, you can make your own calls on it.

The most dubious claims of being offended come from the Seven and Nine networks. The Nine news in Brisbane on Thursday night made this the lead story, ahead of the State of Origin game, the resignation of Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon and Barack Obama's speech in Eqypt. Given that both Seven and Nine are rumoured to have offered contracts to the Chaser team, and that poking fun of Today Tonight and A Current Affair was a staple of their show last year, do I sense a whiff of vengeance going on here?

More here on comedy and offensiveness. Interesting point made by comedian Dan Ilic about whether people would be as offended if the joke was made by a character, as with shows such as Little Britain. Or, even better, when offensive jokes are made by animated characters, as with South Park.

Umbrellas in Tiananmen - June 4, 2009

2009-06-04T18:17:00.004+10:00

When I was young, I thought it odd that my mother would put up an umbrella on a sunny day. Well, it appears that Chinese security personnel also think its a good idea. Particularly on June 4, 2009 - the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square incident.

Update: somewhere between 63,000 (police estimate) and 150,000 (organiser estimate) hold a commemorative rally on June 4 at Victoria Park in Hong Kong. Surprisingly little international media coverage of this rally.

Twitter blocked in China before June 4

2009-06-03T19:55:00.002+10:00

There are a range of news stories about (here and here and here) about how the Chinese authorities have blocked access to social media sites including Twitter, You Tube, Flickr and MSN Hotmail prior to the 20th anniversary of the Tiannemen Square crackdown on June 4, 2009. This story won't be blocked, as my understanding is that Blogger is always blocked in China.

News goes for The Punch

2009-06-02T18:05:00.003+10:00

News Limited went public on Monday June 1 with its new online site The Punch.

According to editor David Penberthy (former editor of the Sydney Daily Telegraph):

The Punch is a new opinion website aimed at every Australian with a love of ideas, discussion and debate.

It’s not a fancy, la-di-dah site aimed at people with three university degrees, nor is it a site for yobbos who want to engage in mindless abuse.

It’s a place for spirited, sleeves-up, energetic, engaging commentary, written by people who enjoy writing, for people who enjoy reading.

It has a full-time team of four writers (Penberthy, Tory Maguire, Leo Shanahan and Paul Colgan), and an eclectic group of signed on occasional contributors:

Our political contributors include Mike Rann, Maxine McKew, Anthony Albanese, Joe Hockey, Mark Arbib, Nick Xenophon, Barnaby Joyce, Jason Clare, Scott Morrison, John Cobb, Jamie Briggs, George Brandis, Chris Pyne, Michael Costa, Bronwyn Bishop and Peter Dutton, as well as Mark Textor, Peter Lewis, David Gazard and Tim Gartrell.

Our sportswriters include Kate Ellis, Ben Buckley, Anthony Sharwood and Luke Foley, on business and economics we have Clive Mathieson, Steve Keen, Frank Zumbo and Cameron England, and a broad suite of writers including Catharine Lumby, Tracey Spicer, Fergus Linehan, Ed Charles, Clive Small, Matt Kirkegaard and Nedahl Stelio covering entertainment, technology, food, fashion, crime, movies, music and trends.

The Punch will also include exclusive original content from established and emerging News Limited journalists including Joe Hildebrand, Dennis Atkins, Di Butler, Alan Howe, Alex Dickerson, Tory Shepherd, as well as journos from other outlets including Leigh Sales from the ABC and Fiona Connolly from ACP.

Much of our content will be News Limited content. But it will also come from people at independent news sites, from people who aren’t in journalism but are great writers, from people at rival news organisations whose work on The Punch opens them, and us, up to new audiences. And every morning we will link through to content on sites which we own, but also on sites which we don’t own, to give you the most enjoyable reading experience.

Suggesting that Penberthy may be reading this blog, he notes:

Against this backdrop, our hope for the site is this: at a time when every tenured communications academic on the planet is sending tiny urls via twitter, linking you through to wrist-slashing stories about the apparent death of journalism, we want to demonstrate that journalism is alive and well.

Commentary on The Punch can be found online at Larvatus Prodeo, Club Troppo and Public Opinion. Not surprisingly, the blogosphere is not enthised by News's entry into their patch.

Two lines of cricicism have been most common. The first is whether you can make a site of this nature work without some commitment to quality writing, even if that means writing for "people with three university degrees". Hell, I will have five by year's end (six if you see Honours as a separate year!), and my own suspicion is that it is a lot more common than David Penberthy may be allowing for to find people who regualrly read and post to blogs having above-average levels of educational qualification (and don;t interpret that as saying they are smarter, just sayin' ...).

The second is that it is opinion, not journalism, and that most of the contributions come at no cost. All true, and it may be causing some ructions wihtin News, particularly for those who get paid to write opinion, and now face also having to write for The Punch, or perhaps having their work replaced by material sourced from The Punch. This may indeed come to pass - I first became aware of the site by reading Penberthy's piece on Australians abroad on The Australian online - but it does seem odd for bloggers to be criticising other media outlets for drawing on crowdsourced free labour as an alternative to paid professional journalism. Isn't that what many have been arguing is the future?

At any rate, the fact that News has gone for The Punch indicates above all else that the Crikey model (and that of other sites such as On Line Opinion) is getting audiences and commerical traction, and that going head-to-head with them is a sure sign that this is being acknowledged. That siad, we'll know whether this site is getting readers in a way that matters when we see regular postings from the likes of Mike Rann, Anthony Albanese, Barnaby Joyce and Chris Pyne.

ABC Regional Hubs and Hyper-Local Citizen Journalism

2009-06-01T08:12:00.006+10:00

Its not often that I find myself in agreement with columnists in The Australian, but Mark Day's analysis of the Federal Government's decision to support the ABC in developing online regional hubs is to me pretty valid. The decision has been criticized by regional media interests such as APN, Prime Television and Rural Press (owned by Fairfax Media) but, as Day notes in relation to hyper-local online media hubs, "Where have the APN and Rural Press people been these past 15 years?".

The decision is consistent with recommendations made by Stuart Cunningham, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson and myself to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy's Review of National Broadcasting in the latter part of last year. It points to the affordances of new digital media technologies in re-scaling the mandate of public broadcasters to the local and regional and not simply the national, while also opening up new opportunities for including citizens as media participants in ways that Web 2.0 technologies allow.

The Music of 1989

2009-05-31T06:29:00.002+10:00

The Guardian has a retrospective on the music of 1989. While noting that the year had its fair share of dross, it was also the year of The Stone Roses, The Pixies, Happy Mondays, De La Soul and Soul II Soul, as well as Madonna's "Like a Prayer" and New Order's "True Faith". All up, a pretty interesting year for music - and also for fashion and drugs, as the middle picture reminds us. While you may not want to be reminded of it, an American version of such a list would also give a high profile to Motley Crue and G'n'F'n'R - 1989 was also a big year for hair metal.

Are academics better bloggers than journalists?

2009-05-29T07:23:00.002+10:00

From Andrew Sullivan's blog:

Felix Salmon, using a Brad DeLong post as a springboard, explains why academics have taken to blogging more easily than many journalists:

“Situating your work and your contribution in the ongoing discussion” is exactly what bloggers do — and it’s something that journalists find very difficult. Being original (the fetishization of the “scoop”, even if it’s only by five minutes) is vastly overpraised in journalism, and journalists as a group tend to imbue everything they do with an incredible amount of secrecy. Try asking a magazine writer what she’s working on: she probably won’t tell you. After all, you might scoop her!

I think Brad’s insight helps explain to a very large extent the reason why academics took to the blogosphere with so much more alacrity than journalists, and why journalists-turned-bloggers can be pretty stingy with links and hat-tips, at least when they’re starting out. And of course it helps explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Bloomberg to bar its reporters from even discussing “media competitors”, let alone linking to them.

Internet downloading increasing in Australia

2009-05-28T04:54:00.002+10:00

The Age reports that the use of Interent downloading of movies, TV, music etc. in Australia is on the increase, and the economic downturn seems to be a factor. Note the quote from Sony Entertainment, which points to the prevalence of "two cultures" in the entertainment media industry about the Internet and the future of providing content to audiences.

Hundreds of thousands more Australians have turned to illegal download sites in the past year to save money on movies, music, software and TV shows during the economic downturn, new figures show.

Total visits by Australians to BitTorrent websites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz grew from 785,000 in April last year to 1,049,000 in April this year, Nielsen says. This is a year-on-year increase of 33.6 per cent.

The figures, which do not include peer-to-peer software such as Limewire, are in line with a Newspoll survey of 700 Australians in April, which found almost two-thirds of respondents said they were more tempted to buy or obtain pirated products in tough financial times.

The movie and music industries are battling revenue declines because legal downloads are not yet making up for the drop in physical disc sales. They have ramped up the pressure on governments and internet providers around the world to do more to prevent online piracy.

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the internet. Period," Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton said this month.

Lynton complained the internet had "created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time ... and if you don't give it to them for free, they'll steal it".

For more read here.

New York Times Creates Social Media Editor

2009-05-27T20:15:00.004+10:00

Jennifer Preston, the former editor of the New York Times regional sections, has been appointed as the paper’s first social media editor. Preston will not be handling a new section. The job, which entails coordinating the newsroom’s use of social media, sounds similar to the one Shirley Brady was hired to do when BusinessWeek Online tapped her as its first engagement editor last year. Among other things, Brady has helped the edit staff become more conversant with using Twitter and blogging, as well as working with readers on blog posts for the site. (On Twitter, Brady also pointed to other social media editors, such as LATimes.com’s Andrew Nystrom and Mathew Ingram, who is the communities editor at The Globe and Mail, as other examples of how pubs have been carving out new newsroom duties.)
The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) flagship is full of very active Twitter users. Interestingly enough, the news of Preston’s appointment was first publicly conveyed by NYT deputy managing editor Jon Landman on Twitter. Incidentally, Valleywag pointed out that Preston’s own Twitter updates are private.

I spoke to Landman briefly, and he denied Valleywag’s speculation that Preston’s role will be to clamp down on the newsroom’s after several reporters revealed the details of an editorial meeting a few weeks ago using the microblogging site.

“This isn’t about policing, although that is a small function [of the social editor’s role], but as only as a matter of making things consistent. It’s not the main purpose at all,” Landman told paidContent. “It’s really just the opposite of policing. it’s about helping everybody figure out how to use social media as a tool for journalists. A number of people have discovered social media a form for marketing and promotion, but it’s also got explicitly journalistic uses. Some people in our newsroom know and use it to their advantage. Some don’t and could use that know-how.” (Landman’s staff memo on Preston’s promotion is here, via Nieman Labs)

Preston, a reporter and editor for New York newspapers for close to 25 years, is charged with developing new initiatives for the reporters to use, in terms of sharing information and reporting it. This comes as the NYT has been ramping up its social media offerings for its readers, such as the Times Wire, which provides links to the paper’s online articles and blog posts in a headline-based reverse chronological feed that updates every minute, and the second version of its Times Reader e-paper.

Link here. Thanks to Anna Daniel for pointing this out to me.

The US Housing Bubble

2009-05-25T21:55:00.004+10:00

The map above provided by Richard Florida in The Atlantic gives a sense of how the housing bubble developed in the United States in the 2000s. This was in 2006, at the height of the boom. Note some of the incredible ratios of house prices to average wage on the West Coast - six regions in California reached as high as 15:1+ (Salinas, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Oxnard-Thousand Oaks, Napa, and San Luis Obispo). Los Angeles and San Francisco were both 10:1+.

The Citizen's Voice: Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty and its Contribution to Media Citizenship Debates

2009-05-25T04:17:00.000+10:00

Paper presented to the Philosophy of Communication Division of ICA on 22 May, 2009. Full paper available here, and it will appear in the Sage journal Media, Culture and Society shortly.

The Citizen's Voice: Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty and its Contribution to Media Citizenship Debates

View more OpenOffice presentations from Terry Flew.

Cultural Economic Geography: A New Paradigm for Global Communication Studies?

2009-05-24T10:00:00.002+10:00

My presentation at the ICA pre-conference. Paper will be available here shortly.

Cultural Economic Geography: A New Paradigm for Global Communication Studies?

View more OpenOffice presentations from Terry Flew.

The Chinese Communist Party: why does its membership keep growing?

2009-05-22T06:45:00.001+10:00

The Guardian has a feature on the interesting question of why the membership of the Chinese Communist Party continues to grow. The appeal of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought would not appear obvious in 21st century China, and the party would appear to be a long way from its roots in peasant uprisings and the "Long March". But its continued growth continues to pose a challenge for those assuming that democratisation must at some point follow China's transition to a market economy.

Outwardly, the party remains rigidly ideological; members are drilled in Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents and current president Hu Jintao's Scientific Development Outlook. Hu has, in fact, stepped up political education – perhaps because of an evident disconnect: to many, what the party really stands for is personal advancement, social stability and national unity.

For more read here. Information on the Communist Party of China can be found here.

Todd Gitlin on Journalism in Crisis

2009-05-21T10:59:00.003+10:00

Todd Gitlin's Keynote presentation at the Journalism in Crisis conference being held by the University of Westminster can be found here.

It is called "A Surfeit of Crises: Circulation, Revenue, Attention, Authority, and Deference" and it is a rollicking read.

A section can be found below:

The word “crisis” is overused, as is its anodyne opposite, “problem,” or its cousin, “issue.” (As in the highly flexible, “I have issues.”) Ordinary troubles become inflated into “crises” because crises sound somehow more dignified or electrifying. A problem sounds possibly serious, if hypothetically soluble, but a crisis sounds, well, critical. Yet the overuse might lead us to bend over backwards and fall into euphemism—calling a grave matter “a little difficult,” for example, as is common, for some reason, in American discourse today. There are crises. History proceeds by convulsions, not only increments—or rather, increments build up into crises, and before one knows it, the landscape has changed, one is living in a different world, and the world before it changed is barely conceivable and certainly unrecoverable. It was a foreign country; they did things differently there.

In the case of the murky future of journalism, it is fair to speak of crisis—crises, actually. The landscape has changed, is changing, will change—radically. You must know the parable of the boy who cried “wolf.” Just because the overanxious boy kept thinking the wolf was at the door, and sounding a warning to which others became accustomed, and therefore ignored, did not mean that the wolf was not nearby. When the real wolf showed up, no one was ready.

I shall speak primarily of American journalism because it is what I know best, and leave it to you to judge how much this case is typical. Four wolves have arrived at the door simultaneously while a fifth has already been lurking for some time. One is the precipitous decline in the circulation of newspapers. The second is the decline in advertising revenue, which, combined with the first, has badly damaged the profitability of newspapers. The third, contributing to the first, is the diffusion of attention. The fourth is the more elusive crisis of authority. The fifth, a perennial—so much so as to be perhaps a condition more than a crisis—is journalism’s inability or unwillingness to penetrate the veil of obfuscation behind which power conducts its risky business.

For more read here.

Frontera Grill: TV Chef runs Mexican restaurant in Chicago

2009-05-20T10:45:00.004+10:00

With some free pre-ICA conference time and pre-conference paper finished (but not Powerpoints), I went off for dinner at Frontera Grill. Chicago wouldn't seem the most obvious American city for Mexican food, but this restaurant was set up by Rick Bayliss. Rick Bayliss is a TV Chef whose program, Mexico: One Plate at a Time, has run for six seasons on PBS.

The food was fabulous. No over-cheesy nachos here. Importantly, what I was impressed by was that Rick tends his own restaurant. A bit greyer than he appears on the books for sale at the front, he was nonetheless watching over the booking desk, and came over to the bar table next to me and fast-tracked a couple over to a table at the main dining area.

This guy isn't having affairs or advising the President on school lunches. When not on the TV, he actually runs his own restaurant. Doubt if I'd see Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay having time to do that.

Be warned tough: it was a 90 minute wait for a table by 6.30pm on a Tuesday, and they don't take advance bookings. You may well be having a pre-dinner margharita.