The passionate critic

It's hard to be dispassionate about Reyner Banham. For me, and for the plethora of other people with strong opinions about Banham, his writing is compelling, and one’s connection to him as a figure quite personal. For me, frankly, he rocks. As a landscape architect, I gleaned most of my knowledge about Modern architecture from Banham. His Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, along with Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City and Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture were the most influential books in my library, by far. Later, as a budding “real scholar”, I was disappointed to find that, while these authors had serious credibility, the writings themselves were regarded as “polemical” – when in fact what I admired about them most was their ability and willingness to make rough groupings and gross generalizations, and to offer fickle opinions. It spoke to me of a real personal engagement and an active, participatory reading of the architectural culture they discussed. They were at their best in their witty, cutting, but generally pithy, creative prose, such as in Rowe’s extrapolation of the modern citizen as the latest “noble savage”, or Banham railing against conservative social advocates and their response to high density housing: “those who had just re-discovered ‘community’ in the slums would fear megastructure as much as any other kind of large-scale renewal program, and would see to it that the people were never ready.” Any reader of Banham will be able to find a gem that will relate, somehow, personally, to what they are doing right now. For Banham, it was all personal, and the gaps in his scholarship, rather, were the dispassionate places: “Such bias is essential – an unbiased historian is a pointless historian – because history is an essentially critical activity, a constant re-scrutiny and rearrangement of the profession.” Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future, Nigel Whiteley’s recent “intellectual biography” (the MIT Press, 2002), allowed me to revisit Banham’s passionate mode of criticism and to consider what his legacy might be. The book examines Banham’s body of work, grouped according to his various primary fascinations, as well as his relationship to contemporaneous theoretical movements, such as postmodernism. His mode of practice, as a kind of creative critic, is also considered in some depth. While there are points where the book delves into Banham’s personal life, on the whole Whiteley is very rigorous in considering and theorizing the work itself: more than 750 articles and twelve books. In academic terms, this is good practice. However, considering the entirely personal nature of Banham’s writing itself, this separation seems artificial. Banham, as he himself noted, “didn’t mind a gossip”, and often when reading the book I was curious about what was happening to him at the time. Banham’s was an amazing type of intellectual practice, and one that academics (a term he hated) could do well to learn from. While Whiteley spends a lot of time arguing for his practice to be regarded as such, and makes strong points about both the role of the critic, and the importance of journalism, rather than scholarly publishing, I found myself wondering what his study looked like. What books he had in his library. Did he smoke when he wrote? What sort of teaching load did he have? He is an inspiration to design writers and thinkers, and I, personally, wanted to know how he did it.

Democracy, participation and convergent media : case studies in contemporary online news journalism in Australia

The shift from 20th century mass communications media towards convergent media and Web 2.0 has raised the possibility of a renaissance of the public sphere, based around citizen journalism and participatory media culture. This paper will evaluate such claims both conceptually and empirically. At a conceptual level, it is noted that the question of whether media democratization is occurring depends in part upon how democracy is understood, with some critical differences in understandings of democracy, the public sphere and media citizenship. The empirical work in this paper draws upon various case studies of new developments in Australian media, including online- only newspapers, developments in public service media, and the rise of commercially based online alternative media. It is argued that participatory media culture is being expanded if understood in terms of media pluralism, but that implications for the public sphere depend in part upon how media democratization is defined.

Editorial

This special issue of the Journal of Community, Citizen’s and Third Sector Media and Communication (3CMedia) is based on selected presentations given at the 5th annual Making Links conference, held at The University of Melbourne from 11th to 13th November, 2008. Making Links (see also www.makinglinks.org.au) is a conference that seeks to engage interested people, organisations and groups working at the intersection of social action and information technology, including community workers, educators, trainers, not-for-profit organisations, people who work with marginalised groups, activists and researchers. One of the program streams at this conference was dedicated to the practice of digital storytelling (Lambert, 2002; Hartley & McWilliam, 2009).

Tax morale affects tax compliance : evidence from surveys and an artefactual field experiment

Our working hypotheses is that cross-cultural differences in tax compliance behaviour have foundations in the institutions of tax administration and citizen assessment of the quality of governance. Tax compliance being a complex behavioural issue. Its investigation requires use of a variety of methods and data sources. Results from artefactual field experiments conducted in countries with substantially different political histories and records of governance quality demondtrate that observed differences in tax compliance levels persist over alternative levels of enforcement. The experimental results are shown to be robust by replicating them for the same countries using survey response measures of tax compliance.

Bronwyn Fredericks

Bronwyn Fredericks shares her thoughts on citizen advocacy as part of the 1999-2009 celebration of Capricorn Citizen Advocacy Inc.

Urban informatics and sustainable cities (Workshop)

One way to build more sustainable cities through network technologies is to start with monitoring the level and usage of resources as well as encourage citizens to participate in sustainable everyday practices. This workshop focuses on three fundamental areas of sustainable cities through urban informatics and ubiquitous computing: Environment: climate change adaptation Health: Food practices and cultures Civic engagement: citizen participation and interaction In particular, the workshop seeks to come up with locally (Oulu) specific ‘mash-up’ solutions that enhance the interactions of citizens with the physical city using data from various sources such as sensor networks. Students will work in groups to research, analyze, design, and develop local mash-ups. The workshop is designed to help students gain understanding of sustainability in a techno-social context, such as how the existing data can be effectively utilized, how to gather new data, and how to design efficient and engaging computer-human interactions. Further issues of consideration include access to and privacy of information and spaces, cultural specificities, and transdisciplinary research.

Genres of editorial photographs and patterns of photographic practice

Taking an 'action genre' approach (Lemke, 199**) this paper analyses representational strategies of three genres of photography: press photography, photojournalism and documentary photography. While there has been much written on editorial photography, there is no organised body of scholarship that distinguishes between these three very different modes of of editorial photography.

Photographic representations of Asylum seekers in Australian media

This paper introduces three approaches to unlocking the degrees of “truth” within photographs published in newspapers by exploring the genres of Press photography, Photojournalism and Documentary photography. This is brought into context through a study of photographs appearing in The Australian newspaper during 2001 when the Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, rescued boat people whose vessel had sunk off the West Australian coast in 2001, and two months later the Children Overboard incident occurred.

Rural Poultry in the Developing world

In 2007 I travelled to Mozambique and Tanzania to photographically document the work undertaken by a group of Australians who are working to bring a self sufficient lifestyle back to the HIV Aids stricken communities of Africa. University of Queensland veterinary researchers have developed a vaccination that can eradicate disease from local rural poultry. The Kyeema Foundation is working in country to supply this vaccine to families battling HIV AIDS and to teach local residents how to successfully implement it. QUT, AusAID and the Kyeema Foundation funded the trip.

Dramatic character development personas to tailor apartment designs for different residential lifestyles

This chapter reports on research work that aims to overcome some limitations of conventional community engagement for urban planning. Adaptive and human-centred design approaches that are well established in human-computer interaction (such as personas and design scenarios) as well as creative writing and dramatic character development methods (such as the Stanislavsky System and the Meisner Technique) are yet largely unexplored in the rather conservative and long-term design context of urban planning. Based on these approaches, we have been trialling a set of performance based workshop activities to gain insights into participants’ desires and requirements that may inform the future design of apartments and apartment buildings in inner city Brisbane. The focus of these workshops is to analyse the behaviour and lifestyle of apartment dwellers and generate residential personas that become boundary objects in the cross-disciplinary discussions of urban design and planning teams. Dramatisation and embodied interaction of use cases form part of the strategies we employed to engage participants and elicit community feedback.

Advancing design for sustainable food cultures

Our paper, “HCI & Sustainable Food Culture: A Design Framework for Engagement,” presented at the 2010 NordiCHI conference, introduced a design framework for understanding engagement between people and sustainable food cultures (Choi and Blevis, 2010). Our goal for this chapter “Advancing Design for Sustainable Food Cultures” is to expand our notion of this design framework and the programme of research it implies. This chapter presents the three elements of design framework for sustainability: (i) engagement across disciplines; (ii) engagement with and amongst users/non-users and; (iii) engagement for sustained usability. The uses a corresponding sample of photographic records of experiences that reflect three key issues in the current sustainable food domain: respectively, (i) context of food cultures, (ii) farmers’ markets, and (iii) producing food.

The Guardian Reportage of the UK MP Expenses Scandal: a Case Study of Computational Journalism

The Guardian reportage of the United Kingdom Member of Parliament (MP) expenses scandal of 2009 used crowdsourcing and computational journalism techniques. Computational journalism can be broadly defined as the application of computer science techniques to the activities of journalism. Its foundation lies in computer assisted reporting techniques and its importance is increasing due to the: (a) increasing availability of large scale government datasets for scrutiny; (b) declining cost, increasing power and ease of use of data mining and filtering software; and Web 2.0; and (c) explosion of online public engagement and opinion.. This paper provides a case study of the Guardian MP expenses scandal reportage and reveals some key challenges and opportunities for digital journalism. It finds journalists may increasingly take an active role in understanding, interpreting, verifying and reporting clues or conclusions that arise from the interrogations of datasets (computational journalism). Secondly a distinction should be made between information reportage and computational journalism in the digital realm, just as a distinction might be made between citizen reporting and citizen journalism. Thirdly, an opportunity exists for online news providers to take a ‘curatorial’ role, selecting and making easily available the best data sources for readers to use (information reportage). These activities have always been fundamental to journalism, however the way in which they are undertaken may change. Findings from this paper may suggest opportunities and challenges for the implementation of computational journalism techniques in practice by digital Australian media providers, and further areas of research.

Deliberation and journalism

The first chapter in 'International Journalism and Democracy' re-examines current ideas about the role of journalism in promoting democracy, introducing the concept of "deliberative journalism". 'Deliberation and Journalism' lists the ways in which journalists can assist deliberation and politics in communities around the world. The chapter defines deliberation as a specific form of conversation that precedes and promotes decision-making and action by members of a community. The author recognises the difficulty of engaging in deliberation in communities that are divided by different interests, identities, backgrounds, resources and needs. She provides examples of strategies that journalists can use to encourage inclusive and productive deliberation in the face of community diversity. The chapter introduces examples of types of deliberative journalism that have emerged around the globe. These include strategies that have been sometimes been labeled as public journalism, civic journalism, peace journalism, development journalism, citizen journalism, the street press, community journalism, environmental journalism, and social entrepreneurism. The chapter also includes models of journalism that have not yet been given any particular name. Although the book identifies problems surrounding the theory and practice of these forms of journalism, the author notes that this is to be expected. Most models of deliberative journalism are relatively new, with none being more than a few decades old. The author concludes that resolution of these problems will only occur incrementally.