Teenage technological experts : Bourdieu and the performance of expertise

This thesis explores the construction of technological expertise amongst a heterogenous group of New Zealand teenagers, specifically in regard to their home computer use, which for many of them is their primary site of leisure. This thesis explores the field in which these teenagers are positioned, and explains the practice constituting that field. In this field, the trajectories towards expertise are explained including the time, experimentation, and pleasure evident in their praxis. The qualitative study involved observations and interviews with eight teenagers aged 13 – 17. Five boys and three girls participated and each attended one of various secondary schools located within a provincial city in New Zealand. All of the participants considered themselves to be technological experts, and their peers and/or their family supported this comprehension. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s socio-cultural theories, the capital (cultural, economic, social) and habitus of the teenagers are described (habitus being what makes them who they are, and continues to define who they are in the future). Chapter five centres on explaining the field the teenagers have positioned themselves in, namely the field of out-of-school leisure and home computer use. It also explores the construction and performance of technological expertise within the field. Chapter six examines traditional views of schooling and expertise, and contrasts these views with what the teenagers think about their learning and expertise. This gap is specifically explained with regard to differences between the concepts and value of learning, expertise, and technology, and how they are recognised and valued differently between generations. Chapter seven explores the praxis that the participants exhibit, which is arguably misrecognized by those whose interests are in the established order (e.g. institutional, societal structures). The field they are placed in is arguably part of the broader field of education, yet the findings suggest their capital is misrecognized by digital newcomers, and therefore not legitimated. This thesis concludes that the gap between teenager and adult understandings of expertise is exacerbated in the digital world in which the teenagers position themselves. Their schooling is mainly positioned in the print culture of previous generations and consequently, in the lives of these teenagers, schooling has had little influence on the development of their technological expertise. Additionally, gender has had little impact in their development of expertise; therefore stereotypical notions of female underachievement as computer experts are contested.

Girls' school stories, 1749-1929

As part of the ongoing project of retrieving women writers from the margins of literary and cultural history, scholars of literature, history, and gender studies are increasingly exploring and interrogating girls’ print culture. School stories, in particular, are generating substantial scholarly interest because of their centrality to the history of girls’ reading, their engagement with cultural ideas about the education and socialization of girls, and their enduring popularity with book collectors. However, while serious scholars have begun to document the vast corpus of English-language girls’ school stories, few scholarly editions or facsimile editions of these novels and short stories are readily available.

Writing, English and digital culture

In their out-of-school lives, young people are immersed in rich and complex digital worlds, characterised by image and multimodality. Computer games in particular present young people with specific narrative genres and textual forms: contexts in which meaning is constructed interactively and drawing explicitly on a wide range of design elements including sound, image, gesture, symbol, colour and so on. As English curriculum seeks to address the changing nature of literacy, challenges are raised, particularly with respect to the ways in which multimodal texts might be incorporated alongside print based forms of literacy. Questions focus both on the ways in which such texts might be created, studied and assessed, and on the implications of the introduction of such texts for print based literacies.

This paper explores intersections between writing and computer games within the English classroom, from a number of junior secondary examples. In particular it considers tensions that arise when young people use writing to recreate or respond to multimodal forms. It explores ways in which writing is stretched and challenged by enterprises such as these, ways in which students utilise and adapt print based modes to represent multimodal forms of narrative, and how teachers and curriculum might respond. Consideration is given to the challenges posed to teaching and assessment by bringing writing to bear as the medium of analysis of, and response to, multimodal texts.

Writing, digital culture and English curriculum

In their out-of-school lives, young people are immersed in rich and complex digital worlds, characterised by image and multimodality. Computer games in particular present young people with specific narrative genres and textual forms: contexts in which meaning is constructed interactively and drawing explicitly on a wide range of design elements including sound, image, gesture, symbol, colour and so on. As English curriculum seeks to address the changing nature of literacy, challenges are raised, particularly with respect to the ways in which multimodal texts might be incorporated alongside print based forms of literacy. Questions focus both on the ways in which such texts might be created, studied and assessed, and on the implications of the introduction of such texts for print based literacies. This paper explores intersections between writing and computer games within the English classroom, from a number of junior secondary examples. In particular it considers tensions that arise when young people use writing to recreate or respond to multimodal forms. It explores ways in which writing is stretched and challenged by enterprises such as these, ways in which students utilise and adapt print based modes to represent multimodal forms of narrative, and how teachers and curriculum might respond. Consideration is given to the challenges posed to teaching and assessment by bringing writing to bear as the medium of analysis of, and response to, multimodal texts.

Vibrant, oppositional culture : the media and Australian political culture, 1880-1910

The notion that Australia has an entrenched “utilitarian political culture” has predominated in representations of political life and political culture in this country. Ostensibly, political life has been characterised above all by materialism and pragmatism, largely devoid of meaningful debate over ideas. There has, however, been a growing recognition that Australian political culture has been richer, more complex and less settled than commonly believed.

This paper examines the experience in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia, focussing on the role of the media in tandem with a burgeoning reading public as integral elements of a vibrant oppositional culture. Here, a passion for knowledge and self-improvement combined with a strong sense that cultivation of the mind was intrinsic to goals of moral, political and social development existed. The print media was centrally important in catering to and stimulating the interests, outlooks and aspirations of a diverse community of readers. Radical papers and journals jostled for attention alongside the mainstream press, supported by a spreading carpet of Mechanics Institutes and Schools of Arts, bookshops stocking a vast array of titles, and a comparatively large and increasingly professionalised literary-artistic intelligentsia.

Many different publics were being engaged and indeed constituted, from the very pragmatic to the strongly idealistic; from anarchists through to conservatives; from the strongly nationalistic through to those deeply loyal to God and Empire. Moreover, potentially quite complex patterns of understanding and attachment were being stimulated during this time. Taking clearer account of the media’s contribution to intellectual and literary pursuits during this period increases our understanding of the diverse and often contradictory traditions that have been part of Australian political culture.

Reporting Iraq's cosmopolitan society in the Australian print media : The case of the Assyrian church bombings

A series of bomb blasts that targeted a number of Assyrian churches in Baghdad and Mosul last year were reported in the Australian media and seemed to hint at the complexity of Iraq’s cosmopolitan society. This paper seeks to compare and contrast the representation of these events in four of Australia’s leading newspapers (The Australian, The Courier-Mail, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald) by using a multi-methodological approach. The analysis reveals that Australian print coverage falls short of detailing the complexities of Iraq’s cosmopolitan society and therefore engenders an Orientalist (Said, 1978) discourse that constructs the Assyrians as powerless and anonymous victims.

Dematerialised data and human desire : the Internet and copy culture

Since Licklider in the 1960s [27] influential proponents of networked computing have envisioned electronic information in terms of a relatively small (even singular) number of 'sources', distributed through technologies such as the Internet. Most recently, Levy writes, in Becoming Virtual, that "in cyberspace, since any point is directly accessible from any other point, there is an increasing tendency to replace copies of documents with hypertext links. Ultimately, there will only need to be a single physical exemplar of the text" [13 p.61]. Hypertext implies, in theory, the end of 'the copy', and the multiplication of access points to the original. But, in practice, the Internet abounds with copying, both large and small scale, both as conscious human practice, and also as autonomous computer function. Effective and cheap data storage that encourages computer users to keep anything of use they have downloaded, lest the links they have found, 'break'; while browsers don't 'browse' the Internet - they download copies of everything to client machines. Not surprisingly, there is significant regulation against 'copying' - regulation that constrains our understanding of 'copying' to maintain a legal fiction of the 'original' for the purposes of intellectual property protection. In this paper, I will firstly demonstrate, by a series of examples, how 'copying' is more than just copyright infringement of music and software, but is a defining, multi-faceted feature of Internet behaviour. I will then argue that the Internet produces an interaction between dematerialised, digital data and human subjectivity and desire that fundamentally challenges notions of originality and copy. Walter Benjamin noted about photography: "one can make any number of prints [from a negative]; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense" [4 p.224]. In cyberspace, I conclude, it makes no sense to ask which one is the copy.

Forgotten histories: ephemeral culture for children and the digital archive

The history of children’s popular culture in Australia is still to be written. This article examines Australian print publication for children from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, together with radio and children’s television programming from the 1950s to the 1970s. It presents new scholarship on the history of children’s magazines and newspapers, sourced from digital archives such as Trove, and documents new sources for early works by Australian children’s writers. The discussion covers early television production for children, mobilising digital resources that have hitherto not informed scholarship in the field.

Blokey' newsroom culture

This paper seeks to address the gap in Australian media studies and feminist media scholarship relating to the way newsroom culture is embodied. How does the numerical dominance of men in journalism, particularly in decision-making roles, affect newsroom culture? How do male and female journalists understand this inequality? The paper first briefly attends to research into occupational culture and feminist theories of the body to address the central question ‘How is newsroom culture embodied?’ It then engages with this question more thoroughly via an analysis of my own interviews with 17 Australian male and female print news media journalists. It finds that, even though women have entered the industry in unprecedented numbers, a ‘blokey’ or hegemonic masculinity continues to shape news newsroom culture.

The gendered world of sports reporting in the Australian print media

The mainstream news media have long been charged by feminist and critical media scholars of largely excluding women from its sports coverage, and concomitantly highlighting the ongoing relative absence of female sports reporters. With the 2012 London Olympic Games just past, it is timely to reflect on two areas of sports journalism that recieve sparse scholarly interest from the majority of Australian journalism academics, as technology issues and the future of journalism debates take precedence. The Olympics typically generate more media exposure for female athletes than usual, nevertheless, it remains that there are particular types of 'gender appropriate' events that attract mainstream news media attention during the Games, and other sporting events in general. This paper analyses a month of pre-Olympic sports coverage and general sports coverage in two major Australian newspapers, finding that while pre-Olympic coverage includes more women's sport than in general sport, sportsmen and men's sport remains highly privileged in both areas. The fact that horseracing recieves three times more media coverage than women's sports in this study clearly identifies sportswomen's marginalised status. The paper also maps the number of female sports reporters at these two newspapers, and concludes with some insights into a newsroom culture that typically rejects women as athletes and as sports reporters