Capital music : personal expression with a public display of song choice

Using information and communication technology devices in public urban places can help to create a personalised space. Looking at a mobile phone screen or listening to music on an MP3 player is a common practice avoiding direct contact with others e.g. whilst using public transport. However, such devices can also be utilised to explore how to build new meaningful connections with the urban space and the collocated people within. We present findings of work-in-progress on Capital Music, a mobile application enabling urban dwellers to listen to music songs as usual, but also allowing them to announce song titles and discover songs currently being listened to by other people in the vicinity. We study the ways that this tool can change or even enhance people’s experience of public urban spaces. Our first user study also found changes in choosing different songs. Anonymous social interactions based on users’ music selection are implemented in the first iteration of the prototype that we studied.

AIDS and pro-social television : industry, policy and Australian television drama

This thesis examines the intersection of popular cultural representations of HIV and AIDS and the discourses of public health campaigns. Part Two provides a comprehensive record of all HIV related storylines in Australian television drama from the first AIDS episode of The Flying Doctors in 1986 to the ongoing narrative of Pacific Drive, with its core HIV character, in 1996. Textual representations are examined alongside the agency of "cultural technicians" working within the television industry. The framework for this analysis is established in Part One of the thesis, which examines the discursive contexts for speaking about HIV and AIDS established through national health policy and the regulatory and industry framework for broadcasting in Australia. The thesis examines the dominant liberal democratic framework for representation of HIV I AIDS and adopts a Foucauldian understanding of the processes of governmentality to argue that during the period of the 1980s and 1990s a strand of social democratic discourse combined with practices of self management and the management of the Australian population. The actions of committed agents within both domains of popular culture and health education ensured that more challenging expressions of HIV found their way into public culture.