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Contents
Abstracts
Australian press, radio and television historiography: An update
Bridget Griffen-Foley
The thirtieth anniversary issue of MIA in May 2006 (no. 119) featured ‘Australian Press, Radio and Television Historiography: An Update’. In it, Bridget Griffen-Foley produced a bibliography of books, theses and special journal issues concerning the history of the Australian media completed or commenced since the publication of two well-known bibliographical essays by Henry Mayer and John Henningham in 1987–88. Bridget has now expanded and updated her bibliography. The websites of MIA and the new Centre for Media History at Macquarie University, to be headed by Bridget, aim to publish periodic updates of the ‘Update’. Readers of MIA might also be interested to learn that an email discussion list for those interested in Australian media history has recently been established. For information on the listserv, or to subscribe, go to: http://listserv.mq.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/amhlist.
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Super size me: Accounting for television advertising in the public discourse on obesity
John Sinclair and Rowan Wilken
For some time, advertising has been the object of much public debate about eating disorders, such as concerns about its role in fostering body image. More recently, attention has turned towards the degree to which advertising is implicated in what has become a bona fide public health issue in the developed countries, namely obesity — especially amongst children. This is both a local issue, in that it has mobilised concerned parents’ groups in the community, and a global one, in that it raises questions about fast food practices and the commercialisation of food in general within global culture. While corporations have pursued ever more intricate ways to penetrate their target markets, they also have had to respond concretely to public concerns. This paper outlines the dimensions of the debate about the social and cultural impacts attributed to advertising in the public discourse about obesity, identifying the various positions, and seeks to assess the mode and degree to which advertising plausibly can be held responsible.
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Discourses of choice in Australian pay TV
Teresa Rizzo
This essay examines discourses of viewer choice in Australian pay TV and how central to them is the illusion of an all-powerful viewer in control of programming, who can watch what they want when they want. Drawing on the work of Karen Lury, it theorises programming and scheduling practices in the industry, focusing on the importance of this idea of viewing. It then considers how the introduction of a personal digital recorder (PDR) type device — specifically Foxtel’s iQ — encourages practices linked to choice such as timeshifting, co-participation and customisation, and looks at how the use of such a device has more in common with a download culture where users search for media rather than tune in at a particular time. The essay explores how the iQ extends the discourse of viewer choice.
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Competition is getting real in Chinese TV: A moment of confrontation between CCTV and HSTV
Yong Zhong
China Central Television (CCTV) and Hunan Satellite Television (HST) have engaged in a moment of confrontation. The two networks have great stakes in that confrontation, and each has a lot to gain or to lose, including access to television utilities, reach to national audiences and share of the advertising market, not to mention the right to represent the viewers. I attempt to document that moment of confrontation in this paper. I begin with a brief review of existing knowledge about Chinese television, moving away from a propaganda monolith. I continue with a discussion of regional satellite television (STV) broadcasters aspiring to be a national force to be reckoned with. However, as I argue in the paper, capacity constraints and economic reality mean that there is a limit to what the STVs can do. I then proceed to a discussion of an exceptional case involving HSTV, a regional broadcaster based in an underdeveloped inland province of China. I will describe the smart commercial cycle accomplished by the STV, best exemplified by the success of a talent quest show known as Super Girls. The model provided a passage to the survival of HSTV, but by doing so it also unnerved CCTV, the ailing empire of television in China. Towards the end of the paper, I discuss the reactions of CCTV, which apparently bordered on desperation and despair. I use the confrontation to reiterate that Chinese television is changing drastically and that it is high time for the political television establishment to learn to put up with the new commercially operated broadcasters.
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Mapping media
Susan Ward and Albert Moran
This issue addresses a ‘spatial turn’ in communication or media studies. By becoming attuned to the specificities of place, research inevitably becomes embedded within real-life situations that acknowledge the similarities but also differences between localities brought about by, for example, processes of uneven development, local variations in social organisation and the articulation of creative networks that are critical to the cultural production industries. The field of media studies is still opening up to the productive possibilities that come with a primacy on the specificities of place. Her we begin a survey of this spatial turn in media studies by collating articles that are concerned with a variety of mediascapes and their relation to places and spaces.
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The role of talkback radio in Hong Kong and Singapore: An initial exploration
Richard Fitzgerald
Politicians increasingly treat radio talkback as a valuable resource through which to communicate directly with the public. Whilst research has examined the role of talkback in the public sphere in the United States, United Kingdom and recently Australia, little is known about the use of talkback in Asia. This paper begins an initial examination of the role of talkback in Singapore and Hong Kong as a vehicle for public opinion and political engagement by those who produce and host the programs.
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Contours of Community: The independent community press in Southeast Queensland, 2006
Kitty van Vuuren
Often dismissed as irrelevant and not worth the paper they are written on, community newspapers have received little scholarly attention. Yet results from a survey of independent community newspapers in Southeast Queensland challenge the assumption that this sector is in decline, and reveal a popular and vibrant industry that has an important function in the formation and maintenance of communities.
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Multiplex cinemas and urban redevelopment in India
Adrian Mabbott Athique and Douglas Hill
The aim of this article is to introduce the phenomenon of the multiplex theatre as it is being played out within the complex urban geographies of metropolitan India. Since its inception a decade ago, the multiplex cinema in the subcontinent has become an intrinsic component of a new leisure infrastructure configured around the notion of a ‘consuming class’ keen to take its place amongst a ‘global middle class’. The dramatic growth in multiplex cinemas, projected to grow in numbers by 300 per cent over the next three years, has been greatly encouraged by urban planning and taxation policies designed to encourage new commercial and residential developments arising out of urban regeneration programs and the growth of satellite conurbations. This article makes the case that, while the multiplex is an example of flagship architecture employed in the ‘globalisation’ of the urban environment, the demand for such facilities is also a logical extension of the long-running contest over public spaces between different segments of the urban population in Indian cities.
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Danish and Australian television: The impact of format adaptation
Pia Majbrit Jensen
Format adaptation plays an increasingly important part in international television. Formats such as Dancing with the Stars and Idol are screened in many territories. The article presents an in-depth case study of how this relatively new and highly internationalised production and business model influences local television markets and leads to changes according to local competitive, financial, cultural and political conditions. It explores the impact of format adaptation on Danish and Australian prime-time schedules between 1995 and 2004/05, and its effect on local content and genres among the main broadcasters. Various media systemic explanations for these trends, differences and similarities are investigated.
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The new media geography of global and local production networks
Doris Baltruschat
This article highlights the networked collaborations, across non-traditional lines, between producers, broadcasters, digital content developers and telecommunications providers for the development of content across multiple platforms. Through using global production technologies such as co-production and formatting, they are able to localise program narratives with the participation of audiences, online communities, and media events — all of which increase the value of the overall program package for the international market.
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Localising global television
Albert Moran
With format programming now a business and cultural mainstay of global television, this article focuses on processes whereby adaptation takes place. A key figure in such an interchange is the visiting producer who has production expertise in the adaptation of a particular format. These occasions of remaking or translation involve cross-cultural exchange between the global and the local. Usually, there is mutual recognition of the need to vary a format to suit specific conditions and situations. Adaptation of television formats is a complex dialogue involving at least three levels of negotiation or translation. The analysis highlights the turbulent, messy nature of both local and global culture as they are involved in this interchange.
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Hong Kong: Changing geographies of a media capital
Anthony May and XiaoLu Ma
Thanks to its stunning entry into the ranks of world cinema in the 1970s, the history of the Hong Kong film industry up to 1997 is relatively well known. However, the coincidence of the Asian economic recession and the city’s reintegration into the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has worked to obscure recent developments. This article analyses contemporary Hong Kong cinema and its relations with the government of the mainland. We argue that the economic, cultural and geopolitical location of the city is contributing to developments that will allow the art cinema of the People’s Republic of China to engage in international, Hollywood-dominated markets. Matters to do with production investment, censorship and film exhibition business are analysed in terms of the development of and revisions to the Closer Economic Partnership arrangement that now governs trade between the PRC and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR).
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Encountering space, places and memories in Australian landscapes
Francesca Veronesi and Petra Gemeinboeck
Mapping Footprints: Lost Geographies in Australian Landscapes is a research project in development that explores the relational qualities of places and contemporary perceptions of geography. It reflects on new mapping technologies that have the capacity to reinstate relations between subjects and places via a spatial exploration that engages with inventive and specific uses of location sensing technologies informed by physical and cultural contexts. The Elvina rock engravings in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park are the site of a location sensitive sound installation in which we integrate the specificities of landscape with a navigational medium. A sonic map is overlaid over the physical terrain, opening up the site as a place embedded with memories, creating the potential for spontaneous exploration and new understandings of place. The ‘map’ in Mapping Footprints is composed from the geographical narration of the cartographers’ exploration across Indigenous mediascapes.
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REVIEWS
Edited by Kitty van Vuuren
Bertrand, Ina and Hughes, Peter, Media Research Methods: Audiences, Institutions, Texts
Deger, Jennifer, Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community
Downing, John and Husband, Charles, Representing ‘Race’: Racisms, Ethnicities and the Media
Duffield, Lee and Cokley, John (eds), I, Journalist: Coping with and Crafting Media Information in the 21 st Century
Hanger, Catherine (ed.), Switched On: Conversations with Influential Women in the Australian Media
Harrie, Eva (ed.), Media Trends 2006, in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden: Radio, TV and Internet
Jansson André and Falkheimer, Jesper (eds), Geographies of Communication
Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture
Kaid, Lynda L. and Hotz-Bacha, Christina, The Sage Handbook of Political Advertising
Lewis, Jeff, Language Wars: The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence
Marshall, Lee, Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry
Miller, Toby, Cultural Citizenship, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age
Morris, Meaghan, Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture
Newitz, Annalee, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture
Nicholls, Mark, Scorsese’s Men: Melancholia and the Mob
Schroeder, Jonathan, E. and Salzer-Mörling, Miriam (eds), Brand Culture
Tatsumi, Takayuki, Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America
Valdivia, Angharad N. (ed.), A Companion to Media Studies
Verhoeven, Deb, Sheep and the Australian Cinema
White, Michele, The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship
Winston, Brian, Messages: Free Expression, Media and the West from Gutenberg to Google
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