After the Olympics: Evaluating the Global Media Coverage

I woke up this morning to Radio National, and heard the BBC report on the 2008 Beijing Olympics closing ceremony. In commenting on it being a spectacle of noise, fireworks and lot of dancers, the BBC reporter commented:

China can do what democracies can't, because its government is not accountable to the voters.

Um, hello? Government in democracies do not spend lots of money on public spectacles? Taxpayers will not accept this, and want the money to be spent on roads, hospitals, schools etc.

Next Saturday, in the city of Brisbane, the democratically elected government will conduct Riverfire, a public spectacle on the Brisbane River involving, yes, noise, fireworks and dancers.

The transparently bogus claim made by the BBC reporter - that only undemocratic governments can put lots of resources into public spectacles - has typified a lot of coverage of the Beijing Olympics, particularly from Britain.

The hold of the concept of totalitarianism on the Western journalistic imaginary has been quit striking. In a way of thinking that was presented by the 'Four Theories of the Press' model back in the Cold War era of the 1960s, the line has been run that in countries with state-run media and one-party governments, all activities are an extension of the monolithic one-party state. This in turn is contrasted to an entirely normative account of how the media actually function in liberal democracies, making everything appear to be a construct of state ideology.

To take another example, Marina Hyde in The Guardian could attribute the large number of volunteers on hand in Beijing to, wait for it, the authoritarian one-party state that China has. The fact that Sydney 2000 could get 50,000 volunteer without resorting to a suspenion fo democratic rule seems to have missed this columnist.

China does need good independent journalism, and does need good independent research on its journalism. The closeness of the government, the CCP and the media is a major issue that needs to be addressed to develop a civil society that can accompany its impressive economic performanc and growing world power status.

But as long as Western media coverage of China remains freeze-locked in the model of totalitarianism that was an artefact of Cold War politics, and as long as it pursues criticism of China that completely ignores its own culture and context, we will have an awkward intellectual stand-off.

Quality work on how the world's media covered Beijing 2008 remains to be done.

New UNCTAD database on global cultural trade

UNCTAD has just announced the launch of a global Database on Global Trade in Creative Products. This should provide vital empirical data on longstanding debates about globalization, culture and trade. UNCTAD describes it in these terms.

The databank is intended for use by governments, businesses, academia, the media, international institutions, and members of the creative community, including independent artists and creators. It comprises factual data by country or region on some 235 products in the categories of arts and crafts, the visual arts, audiovisuals and media, and design and creative services.

The statistics are a starting point for improving market transparency and supporting governments in policy-making. They will also facilitate better understanding of the interface between culture, trade and technology as drivers of the creative economy.

Users may view, analyse and browse the data by choosing from tabular reports, country profiles, selected products, key players in major markets, and a variety of tables and charts.

You've never been trucked like Brendan before

While excitement build around the nation about Federal Opposition leader Brendan Nelson's long distance trucking tour from Melbourne to Dubbo, there is much speculation about what music he will take with him. While much of the focus has been on Brendan Nelson's Slim Dusty cassettes, this could well be a suitable addition to the long journey.



We all hope that Brendan does not get into any trouble on the trip, particularly of this nature.

Vinton Cerf on the Intergalactic Internet

One of the highlights of the Third Edition of New Media: An Introduction was getting an interview with Vinton Cerf, the 'Father (Grandfather?) of the Internet'. I thank Barry Saunders for his ability to arrange the interview with Vint when he was in Brisbane in 2007. He had a recent piece in The Guardian musing on the future of the Internet, and particularly on his latest theme of an 'Intergalactic Internet'. Perhaps not surprisingly, it did not win over many of the Guardianistas in the Comments section, but here is an excerpt for your interest.

Yet such a transformative technology is bound to ruffle a few feathers. I have no doubts that its social repercussions will take decades to be fully understood, but it has already done much to benefit the world. It has provided access to information on a scale never before imaginable, lowered the barriers to creative expression, challenged old business models and enabled new ones. It has succeeded because we designed it to be both flexible and open. These features have allowed it to accommodate innovation without massive changes to its infrastructure.

And innovation on the internet happens at a rapid pace. Ten years ago, Google was simply an idea being explored by two graduates in California. The years to come will offer more that is new and exciting. It's easy to forget, sitting in the UK or the US, just how far the internet still has to go. Today, there are only about 1.4 billion users, representing a bit more than one-fifth of the world's population, and a substantial amount of the content on the web is still written in English. But the internet is becoming more global. Asia has more than 500 million users and Europe nearly 400 million and internet-enabled mobile phones will help extend the net to Africa, Latin America and the Indian subcontinent. We're about to see further waves of innovation.

There are more than three billion mobiles in use today and more than 80 per cent of the world's population live within range of a network. In areas where wireline or WiFi access barely exists, many new users will first experience the internet through a mobile phone. In developing economies, people are already finding innovative ways to use mobile technology. Grameen's micro-finance and village phone programmes in Bangladesh and elsewhere are known and respected around the world, but there are many less famous examples. During the Kenyan elections, Mobile Planet provided its subscribers with up-to-the-minute results by text message. As the cost of mobile technologies fall, the opportunities for such innovation will continue to grow.

We're nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information. Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles' windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas.

Creative Suburbia?

We are about to commence an Australian Research Council - Discovery grant on Creative Suburbia. The question we are asking is whether more of Australia's creative workforce is located in the outer suburbs of Australia's cities than is commonly assumed in the creative industries literature, which has tended to emphasise the unique powers of inner-city 'buzz'. And if they are, how do they network and organise their professional relationships?

The team involved includes myself, Professor Phil Graham (QUT), Dr. Christy Collis (QUT) and Dr. Mark Gibson (Monash). Dr. Emma Felton will also be working with us on the project. Intended research sites at this stage include the Redcliffe and Springfield areas of South-East Queensland, and the City of Casey in South-East Melbourne.

I'll keep you posted on developments via this blog among other places, but a piece by Shaun Carney in today's The Age gives a sense of some of the issues, althoguh his focus is on petrol prices and politics.

Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor

Shaun Carney
August 13, 2008 - 12:00AM

Last week in this space I argued that cleaner, greener cars should be a more important part of Australia's effort to reduce carbon emissions than an increase in public transport. In making the point, I suggested that people in the inner suburbs who found this shocking could benefit by taking the nearest train to the end of the line to see how hard it is for people in the outer suburbs to do without their cars.

This was a mistake because it implied that Melbourne's outer suburban belt was accessible by rail. In fact, it extends way beyond the metropolitan train system.

Recently, for family reasons, I've been spending time in Carrum Downs. For those who don't know, Carrum Downs is a suburb of about 18,000 people north-east of Frankston. When I knew it back in the 1970s, it was made up of paddocks and a mushroom farm. Now it's so substantial that it has its own secondary school and its retail hub calls itself the Carrum Downs Regional Shopping Centre.

You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.

There are those who will say that places such as Carrum Downs should never have been developed, that urban sprawl is overloading our resources and making not just Melbourne but Sydney, and probably several other capitals, unworkable. There might be something to that argument but the question is: what happens to the hundreds of thousands of people who already live in Carrum Downs and Caroline Springs and Berwick and Roxburgh Park?

If you live within 15 kilometres of the city and have a tramline running right past your door, or a station nearby, as did many of those readers who were offended by last week's column, you could say it's not your problem. To be a car user is, one letter-writer observed, a planet-destroying "lifestyle choice".

Indeed, you could adopt a position that finds its way into letters to the editor and even the occasional opinion piece: the sneer. This assumes that outer suburbanites are less intelligent, less engaged and generally less enlightened than those of us who are closer to, you know, where it's all happening. From what I can see, it comes more often from the broader leftist end of the political spectrum than from the right.

Aside from being a betrayal of a genuine progressive perspective and just plain wrong, it represents a misreading of where electoral power lies in our society. Governments are made and broken in the outer suburbs. For decades now, the major political parties have relied on their traditional bases of support in the inner and middle suburbs — the older residential belts established up to the Second World War — to act as their electoral bedrock.

...

In Melbourne particularly, some parts of the inner suburbs are becoming very slippery territory for the ALP as the Greens become ever more popular. How does Rudd satisfy inner urban Labor sympathisers who want radical action on climate change while also holding on to shaky Labor voters in the outer suburbs who want something done but aren't so keen on the radical option and don't enjoy being lectured by people who have many more facilities than they have? Increasingly, Rudd presides over two tribes. Come the next election, they might just go to war.

International and Intercultural Communications

I have completed two days at the International and Intercultural Communications in the Digital Age conference organised by the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University. Thanks very much to Andy Ruddock and Ron Gallagher for providing the opportunity, as well as lovely accommodation at the historic Hotel Windsor (tip for Melbourne conference organisers: consider this as a place to house international guests rather than a more anonymous international hotel chain).

I have provided notes below on the presentations by Professor Xinxin Deng from the Communications University of China, and the keynote presented by Associate Professor Ramaswami Harindranath from the University of Melbourne. The full program can be accessed here, but other notable presentations for me were:

• Professor Sung Gwan Park from Department of Communications, Seoul National University, on how a 'herd opinion' can emerge through mass communication as an alternative to public opinion, with reference to recent Korean politics;
• Peter Murphy's (Monash) interesting, provocative and surprisingly positive reappraisal of Ronald Reagan and his role in US politics, focusing on the role of humour, personal ease and 'rat cunning' in holding together a contradictory political coalition, which he believes that all Democrat candidates other than Bill Clinton have lacked, and he finds lacking in Barack Obama, who he finds too narcissistic;
• Craig Norris's (U. Tasmania) intriguing account of the cultural appropriation of the Ross Village Bakery in rural Tasmania by young Japanese anime fans.

Among the bouquets, one brickbat, however. This goes to IT administration at Monash, and how ill-equipped they seem to be to handle access to wireless networking facilities for guests to the university. The problem, which took much of Day 1 to not resolve, was that the event was in a building 'owned' by the Faculty of Business and Economics, who see the wireless infrastructure as 'theirs', and not as something to be shared with the Faculty of Arts, as they are based on another campus.

If ever there was a reminder of how assumptions of territoriality and sovereignty become problematic in a networked environment, this was it. Sometimes the administration of IT needs to be taken out of the hands of 'IT culture', with its obsessions with security and denying rather than facilitating access, and this was a case in point. As a multi-campus university, Monash should think seriously about how to deterritorialise its wireless IT, rather than reduce people to begging for assistance from the IT divisions.

International and Intercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media, School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, 11-13 August, 2008

Professor Xinxin Deng, Department of Communication, Communications University of China (CUC)

30th Anniversary of Development of Communication Studies in China

• Communications studies is primarily at Doctoral/research level, whereas journalism education is primarily undergraduate level
• Communication education in China started at postgraduate level in 1997 – by 2006, 88 programs nationwide, of which 10 are at Doctoral level
• 24 undergraduate programs by 2005 – no widely accepted paradigm – mix of electronic journalism, visual communication, advertising and public relations
• Chinese Association of Communication (CAC) established in 2002 to promote exchange inside/outside of China
• Chinese communication researchers expected to answer ‘bigger’ questions than their American counterparts at a comparable stage of disciplinary development – consequence of ‘transitional’ economy
• Most communications textbook are introductory and general in context, and often followed structure an framework set by Wilbur Schramm in 1982 visit to China – range of courses offered is limited (typically 6-10, as compared to 200+ at Annenberg USC)


Professor Ramaswami Harindranath, University of Melbourne, ‘Decolonizing Media Research: Postcolonial Interventions’

• Ambition to globalize media studies both laudable and limited – caught within existing positions that have become ossified – not engaging with local stories outside of the Western context
• Problems with global media studies/globalization theories as an orthodoxy:

1. Prominent conceptualizations ignore material realities of communities outside of the West – ‘we’ is the perspective of the cosmopolitan Western intellectual and excludes large sections of the world population;
2. Exclusive focus on the ‘new’ ignores continuation of longstanding patterns of inequality and power that impact on large sections of the world;
3. Problem is not simply epistemological but political, as it neglects the undersides of globalization.

• Walter Mignolo (ed.), special issue of Cultural Studies, 2007 – ‘zero point’ of observation in modern epistemology is disembodied and draws upon a limited historical range – coloniality of knowledge
• De-colonial projects different to postcolonial studies – roots in contemporary Latin American thought – epistemological reconstruction – pluriversality of the universal subject.
• Aihwa Ong – Neoliberalism as Exception – malleable technology of governing taken up by different regimes in different ways – re-engineering of political spaces in a variety of regimes types: pro-capitalist Islam, market zones in China – reconfiguring relations between governing and governed – interactive mode of citizenship – rights of citizenship attributed on basis of marketable skills – need to conceptualise citizenship and media/citizenship differently (c.f. Dahlgren and Hermes, European Journal of Communication, 2006)
• Dipesh Chakrovarty – differences between diaspora studies and what are referred to in the US as ‘area’ studies e.g. what is a generation? ‘national agony’ of becoming a multicultural society (Stuart Hall)
• Media and terror – Philosophy in the Age of Terror – interviews with Habermas and Derrida – media as a ‘prodigious techno-socio-political regime’ (Derrida)
• Audience as citizens (forthcoming book by Harindranath) – audiences typically missing from media/citizenship debates – access to symbolic resources and cultural capital becomes important.

Creative Industries after a decade

This is a presentation I will be giving to QUT students in the Creative Industries: Theory and Policy unit on Thursday 14 August. It draws upon a presentation that I gave to staff and students at Indiana University in the US in May. It aims to outline the complex labour market dynamics of the creative industries, both in term of how they differ from other economic sectors, and how they differ from one another. It draws upon both Australian and UK data, and upon the work undertaken by Stuart Cunningham and Peter Higgs at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

Ci Theory And Policy Guest Lecture 14 Aug 08

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