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Contents
Abstracts
Managing Expectations: The Howard Government's WorkChoices Information Campaign
Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington
This article analyses the Howard government’s $55 million information campaign to sell its new industrial relations (IR) reforms. The expensive advertising campaign was spread across newspapers, television channels, radio stations and even on internet sites. It was widely criticised by media professionals, politicians and interest groups. The IR information campaign was an example of ‘permanent campaigning’ because it was an overtly partisan information campaign that appeared in the middle of an electoral cycle. It was also emblematic of the blurred lines between government and political advertising. However, the IR information campaign also revealed the limitations of incumbency advantage and the limitations to some aspects of the modern trend towards permanent campaigning. Public anger over the plethora of taxpayer-funded advertisements limited the effectiveness of the messages being delivered. The government persisted with the information campaign — perhaps a signal it was designed not to turn public opinion in favour of the reforms, but to prevent an increase in public dissatisfaction following the negative campaign being waged by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).
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Moving Through Discourses: An Assessment of the New Zealand 2005 Election Televised Leaders' Debates
Geoffrey Craig
This article examines the nature of the ‘debate’ that occurred in the televised leaders’ debates during the 2005 New Zealand election campaign. It argues that the theories of language and dialogue of the Bakhtin Circle of scholars can effectively inform evaluations of such debates. Such theories acknowledge the inherent contestability of language, the necessarily embodied nature of communication and the constitutive functions of the particular contexts of communication acts. The article also argues that the dialogical basis of political debate needs to be located in the contexts of contemporary mediated culture and information dissemination. Successful political performance in televised leaders’ debates is said to reside in the negotiation of a range of discourses, expressions of conflict and consensus, style and substance.
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Mediatised Recognition and the 'Other'
Simon Cottle
Media representations of minorities and outsider groups have long been observed to involve demeaning stereotypes, discourses of denigration and symbolic annihilation. Where this is so, group claims for public recognition and social belonging are undermined and a climate is created in which fears and hatreds can flourish. But this story, like the politics of recognition more widely, is not destined to remain fixed for all time. Mainstream media are in fact capable of producing representations that give voice to the voiceless and identity to image. These representations perform an important role in the symbolic rehabilitation of former ‘others’ — whether they are, for example, asylum seekers, terrorism suspects, Aboriginal people or victims of war and famine — and they do so through journalism’s performative deployment of powerful communicative modes of display and deliberation. These more progressive enactments are too often overlooked and under-theorised by critical researchers today, who remain theoretically fixated on the media’s construction of the ’other’. In an increasingly reflexive, culturally pluralistic and globalising world, it is time to acknowledge and bolster the more politically productive representations of mainstream journalism.
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'A Wild Idea': Rupurt Murdoch, Maxwell Newton and the Foundation of The Australian Newspaper
Denis Cryle
This article outlines the particular difficulties faced by The Australian in its critical startup period, and documents the competitive forces and dominant personalities that shaped its dramatic birth. Although he ultimately lacked Murdoch’s business acumen, Maxwell Newton, as The Australian’s first editor, also made a powerful intellectual contribution to national journalism and to the Canberra venture. This article revisits the Newton–Murdoch relationship in the context of The Australian, focusing on the Canberra years and their deep-seated differences prior to their eventual reconciliation in the 1980s.
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Popular Music: Networks, Industries, and Spaces
Shane Homan and Chris Gibson
There has been much recent media coverage and public speculation about change in the music industries. This issue of MIA examines the shifting technological, production and consumption contexts of local popular music. Australian music practices have reflected global changes in corporate structures, methods of distribution and what it means to construct and maintain a music ‘career’. How traditional music-making and consumption practices work with or against emerging media technologies, and what this means for older understandings of music creativity, is a key focus.
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Music Festivals: Transformations in Non-metropolitan places, and in Creative Work
Chris Gibson
This paper addresses the theme of this special issue of MIA in the context of music festivals. It discusses the continuing growth of music festivals as avenues for musical performance, and for regional economic development, and considers what festivals mean for musicians in terms of changing audience demographics and the conditions of work. Festivals are increasingly important for musicians in building audiences and incomes. They have proliferated particularly in rural, coastal and ex-urban parts of Australia, linked to day-tripper and shortstay tourism and the wider socioeconomic transition of those places. Festivals both reflect and contribute to social and cultural changes, such as the diffusion of musical genres with specialist audiences, inward migration of particular demographic groups and shifting place identities. They also offer new opportunities for places seeking to develop tourism, and local music and performance-based industries. This paper explains these trends, and draws on results from a recent large research exercise that sought to document the extent and impact of festivals. Although they are not new, festivals continue to reconfigure musical touring networks, audiences and performance opportunities. Such reconfigurations have occurred with less public fanfare than developments surrounding digital technology and downloading cultures, but their influence on the working lives of musicians is no less profound.
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Copyright and Creativity: Changing Paradigms and the Implications for Intellectual Property and the Music Industry
Phillip McIntyre
Copyright law is entangled with the Romantic conception of the creative process. So is the music industry. This Romantic conception has been challenged more recently to the point where there has been a paradigmatic shift of the conception of creative activity within the research community. This change has not as yet occurred for popular conceptions of creativity, nor has the law changed its basis. Once these older views are substituted with the recent work on cultural production and confluence models of creativity, the implication for rights-holders in the music industry may be significant, yet remain dependent upon the industry and others’ general acceptance of these recent creativity research findings. Examples of the changing structures of intellectual property and what this shift might mean for songwriters in particular can be drawn from the struggles of Lindy Morrison, former Go-Betweens drummer, and the attitude to songwriting developed by writers such as Paul Mac and Daniel Johns.
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Classic Hits in a Digital Era: Music Radio and the Australian Music Industry
Shane Homan
Often the ‘forgotten’ form in media and cultural studies, contemporary music radio remains a significant presence in the daily pleasures of Australians. This paper briefly explores the current regulatory, technological and cultural challenges confronting the local music radio industry. The music format is taken as the key source of engagement between station, advertiser and audience, at the intersection of relationships with the music industry. As the music radio industry is forced to question its traditional modes of delivery and reception, it is argued that a re-examination of the role of contemporary music formats within wider local music infrastructure is needed, particularly in the development and presentation of new artists and music genres, and radio’s role in the maintenance of ‘heritage’/canonical artists and genres.
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The DIY Habitus of Australian Hip Hop
Tony Mitchell
Since its origins in the late 1980s, Australian hip hop continues to be fundamentally a do-it-yourself (DIY) subcultural field which has little or no music industry input or support. This paper profiles some of the small labels and producers in Australian hip hop (Obese, Elefant Traks, Nuff Said, Crookneck, Invada, etc.) and examines how they have formed from the ground up, using community radio stations such as 2SER, PBS and 3ZZZ, and websites such as Ozhiphop.com, to promote their music, as well as organising their own gigs and tours. It also examines Aboriginal practitioners of hip hop, who have even less infrastructure than the DIY network of independent producers and labels. Drawing on Holly Kruse’s writing about ‘situated practices’ in independent rock music, which refers to Bourdieu’s ‘fields of practice’ and ‘habitus’, I examine the subcultural networks and associations that have emerged in Australian hip hop, mediated through a nexus of genre, gender, space, location, race and ethnicity. The concept of habitus is arguably a useful way of referring to hip hop practices like MCing, DJing, breakdancing and graffiti, as well as the social behaviour associated with the hip hop subculture.
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Work and Play: Vagaries Surrounding Contemporary Cultural Production in Sydney's Dance Music Culture
Chris Brennan-Horley
Much recent research has documented how, under ‘creative’ capitalism, approaches towards work and types of work are changing. This paper extends this research direction, uncovering the discourses that influence conditions of work in one sector of the cultural industries: what can loosely be defined as the ‘dance music industry’. It examines the role that networking and social relations play in maintaining a music scene through which work opportunities are created. The paper also explores how attitudes toward work in this particular cultural pursuit are emblematic of wider shifts in working practices within the cultural and creative industries. The findings are based on interviews with various DJs and promoters within dance and electronic music scenes in Sydney. It is argued that the boundaries between work and non-work, and between ‘industry’ and ‘scene’, are porous for those engaged in this form of cultural production, with a need to further discuss the implications of these observations for the future of cultural work under advanced capitalism.
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Hepfidelity: Digital Technology and Music in Contempoary Austrlian Swing Dance Culture
Sam Carroll
Since its revival in the 1980s, Lindy hop along with other swing dances has become increasingly popular with middle class youth throughout the developed world. Social dancing plays a central part in local swing dance communities, and DJing recorded music has become an essential part of social dancing. Marked by class and gender, DJing in swing dance communities is also shaped by digital technology, from the CDs, computers and portable media devices which DJs use to play digital musical files to the discussion boards and websites where they research and discuss DJing and the online music stores where they buy CDs and download music. This brief discussion of the preponderance of digital technology in swing dance DJing is part of a larger project considering the mediation of embodied practice in swing dance culture, and it pays particular attention to the ways in which mediated discourse in swing culture reflects wider social forces, yet is also subordinated by the embodied discourse of the dance floor.
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Learning to Listen when there is too Much to Hear: Music Producing and Audio Engineering as 'Engaged hearing'
Karl Heuenfeldt
This article examines how music producers and audio engineers learn to listen in the context of a very particular form of musical work. Ethnographic interviews provide data on their acquisition of skills, strategies they devise to remain engaged with the physicality and aesthetics of sound, and the socio-cultural and psychological dimensions of their work. It comments in particular on the multi-skilling brought about by the technological changes and economic imperatives informing the cultural production of popular music.
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REVIEWS
Edited by Kitty van Vuuren and Angi Buettner
Alysen, Barbara, The Electronic Reporter, 2nd edn
Beattie, Keith, Documentary Screens: Nonfiction Film and Television
Bilton, Chris, Management and Creativity: From Creative Industries to Creative Management
Brett, Judith and Moran, Anthony, Ordinary People’s Politics: Australians Talk about Life, Politics, and the Future of Their Country
Byerly, Carolyn M. and Ross, Karen, Women and Media: A Critical Introduction
Chin, S.Y. (ed.), Digital Review of Asia Pacific 2005/2006
Cohen, Stanley, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3rd edn
Creed, Barbara, Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny
Cunningham, Stuart, What Price a Creative Economy?
Goggin, Gerard, Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life
Inness, Sherrie A., Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender and Class at the Dinner Table
Lilleker, Darren G., Key Concepts in Political Communication
Louw, Eric, The Media and Political Process
McQuail, Denis, Golding, Peter and de Bens, Els, Communication Theory and Research: An EJC Anthology
Murphy, Kerrie, TV Land: Australia’s Obsession with Reality Television
Nohrstedt, Stig A. and Ottosen, Rune (eds), Global War — Local Views
O’Connor, Alan, Raymond Williams
Perkowitz, Sidney, Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids
Skinner, David, Compton, James and Gasher, Michael, (eds), Converging Media, Diverging Politics
Surette, Ray, Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Images, Realities and Policies, 3rd edn
Willson, Michele A., Technically Together: Rethinking Community Within Techno-Society
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