Talk in activity during young children’s use of digital technologies at home

Internet-connected tablets and smart phones are being used increasingly by young children. Little is known, however, about their social interactions with family members when engaged with these technologies. This article examines video-recorded interactions between a father and his two young children, one aged 18 months using an iPhone and one aged three years accessing an iPad. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, analysis establishes ways the family members engage and disengage in talk so as to manage their individual activity with mobile devices and accomplish interaction with each other. Findings are relevant for understanding children’s everyday practices with mobile technologies.

Charting a theoretical framework for examining Indigenous journalism culture

Indigenous media around the globe have expanded considerably in recent years, a process that has also led to an increase in the number of Indigenous news organisations. Yet, research into Indigenous news and journalism is still rare, with mostly individual case studies having been undertaken in different parts of the globe. Drawing on existing research gathered from a variety of global contexts, this paper theorises five main dimensions which can help us think about and empirically examine Indigenous journalism culture. They include: the empowerment role of Indigenous journalism; the ability to offer a counter-narrative to mainstream media reporting; journalism’s role in language revitalisation; reporting through a culturally appropriate framework; and the watchdog function of Indigenous journalism. These dimensions are discussed in some detail, in an attempt to guide future studies into the structures, roles, practices and products of Indigenous journalism across the globe.

The strange death and curious after-lives of the academic journal

Discussion at a session featuring a panel of editors of six leading media and communication journals. Annual conference of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, University of Melbourne, July 2007.

Using digitally distributed vulgar comedy to reach young men with information about healthy sexual development

Focus groups show that young men do not have available to them the same resources to learn about healthy sexual development as do young women. A collaborative project led by a leading provider of sexuality education aimed to reach young men with information about healthy sexual development by using a genre that focus groups showed they favoured - vulgar comedy. This project raised two important issues. First, comedy is ambivalent - it is by definition not serious or worthy. This challenges health communication, which traditionally favours the clear presentation of correct information. Second, vulgarity can be challenging to the institutions of health communication, which can be concerned that it is inappropriate or offensive. This article addresses these issues and reports on the materials that emerged from the project.

Social media and niche sports: The netball ANZ championship and commonwealth games on twitter

This article analyses and compares Twitter activity for the niche sport of netball over the 2013 trans-Tasman ANZ Championship competition and the international Commonwealth Games event in 2014. Patterns within the Twitter data that were discovered through an analysis of the 2013 ANZ Championship season are considered in terms of the Commonwealth Games, and thus compared between a quasi-domestic and an international context. In particular, we highlight the extent to which niche sports such as netball attempt to capitalise on the opportunities provided by social media, and the challenges involved in coordinating event-specific hashtags, such as the #netball2014 hashtag promoted by the Commonwealth Games Federation.

Napster: Infinite digital jukebox or pirate bazaar?

This paper considers the copyright litigation over the file-sharing program, Napster. The first section examines the culture of collecting at work in Napster. The next part examines the litigation by the major record companies and Metallica against Napster. The final section considers the future of file-sharing, looking at alternatives to Napster, such as Filetopia, Freenet, Gnutella, MP3board.com and streaming media.

Virtual countries: Internet domain names and geographical terms

This paper examines the dispute between the Seattle company Virtual Countries Inc. and the Republic of South Africa over the ownership of the domain name address southafrica.com. The first part of the paper deals with the pre-emptive litigation taken by Virtual Countries Inc. in a District Court of the United States. The second part considers the possible arbitration of the dispute under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Process of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and examines the wider implications of this dispute for the jurisdiction and the governance of ICANN. The final section of the paper evaluates the Final Report of the Second WIPO Internet Domain Name Process.

Prophets of the beast: the modernist esotericism of D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats

This thesis analyses the influence of the esoteric tradition on D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats’ thought and examines both authors’ writings in light of the antidemocratic political religions that emerged during and after their respective careers. While a number of extant studies investigate the connection between modernism and the occult and a number of critics have discussed the importance of antidemocratic politics to modernism, this study is unique in its emphasis on the relationship between modernist esotericism and antidemocratic politics, and in its insistence that the interconnection between the two constitutes a fundamental part of both authors’ world-views. This study calls for the development of a multivalent understanding of modernism, which appears as neither a “cultural movement identifiable with bourgeois, capitalist, paternalist, ethnocentrist, phallocentrist, and logocentrist ideologies” (Surette 5) nor entirely the opposite; Romantic, feministic, primitivistic and countercultural. Rather, modernism will be shown to have encompassed both of these ideological orientations, effectively operating on a double front in its crusade to establish a new age. This complexity is visible in both Lawrence and Yeats’ work, as both authors advocate a return to traditional structures while simultaneously endeavouring to usher Western civilisation into a new modern paradigm. Although they primarily grounded their writings in a mythico-pastoral discourse that masked the practical implications of their revolutionary agendas, both authors possessed an attraction to Futurist thought and, albeit rarely, showed an awareness that the change they envisioned could not be brought about without a radical intervention in the political and economic sectors – an intervention that would necessarily take place through the medium of the “machine” from which they were often so adamant to distance themselves. This fusion of technophilic and Arcadian thought-currents – dubbed “archeofuturism” by the French right-wing intellectual Guillaume Faye – constitutes the central focus of this discussion of Lawrentian and Yeatsian thought.

Exhausting dance : performance and the politics of movement, by Andre Lepecki

The article reviews the book "Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement," by Andre Lepecki.

Secrecy and illusion : Second Life and the construction of unreality

This paper analyses the main Second Life Grid-an Internet-based business platform with dynamic social, techno-economic, sensual-aesthetic, and psychological complexities-as an example of public relations. It argues that Second Life is a more subversive, politically oriented, and powerful form of public relations, because it invisibly exploits and invades the process of the formation of public opinion. The paper argues that Australian organisations such as Telstra, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), which lend Second Life credibility through their recruitment, need to ask critical questions about the ethical implications of promoting this market-driven cyber-illusion. The paper begins by defining public relations (Habermas, 1995, 1984, 1989; Gramsci in Storey, 2006) and investigating any links between public relations and Second Life. In particular, it investigates Second Life's defining claim that it is 'imagined, created and owned by its residents', and concludes with a series of questions that organisations seeking involvement in Second Life should consider as part of their decision-making.

Dancing and listening : Odissi across cultures

I want to take the opportunity afforded by this conference on post-colonial writing to reflect upon the oral aspects of the transmission of knowledge in a research interview.I want to view the interview as a singular event of narration. I want to use the theme or 'content' of my interview with a young Bengali-Australian dancer to draw attention tothe interview 'form'. The interview occurred because of my interest in how this dancer had come to learn Odissi dance, how knowledge of Odissi had passed to her. In retrospect, I am trying to see myself as someone to whom, through the face-to-face interview, knowledge was 'passed' orally, not textually. I am trying to think about it in terms of some of the principles of orality discussed by Walter Ong (1982), and through the concept of 'enunciation' which foregrounds not the content of a statement but the 'position of the speaking subject in the statement.'

Dance is an oral culture. It is a set of practices transmitted from body to body. You cannot learn dancing from a book. The western researcher however learns a lot about dance of other cultures from books and articles. From my own reading I have been alerted to, and become conversant with, many of the complex negotiations of gendered, historical, national, class and aesthetic meanings at work in Classical Indian Dance practices.

I learned something of the limits of literacy, however, through the experience of interviewing Sunita (not her real name) about her learning and background in Odissi dance. She has had Odissi knowledge passed on to her in a quasi-traditional guru-sisya relationship. Her authority is in her dancing - she now embodies Odissi dance in her person - and her experience is in the oral modes of transmitting dancing knowledge. Through her telling me, through remembering out loud she was reenacting or rehearsing the 'orality' of her dance knowledge.

In my conversation with Sunita, then, wasn't it a question not of what she might say about Odissi, of what discourses she might deploy, but of what she as the subject of her own enunciations might say to me? It was also a question of how I might have listened to her and what I was able to hear.

Communicating climate change: public responsiveness and matters of concern

Since climate change captured global attention in the 1990s, the private individual, addressed as a member of a concerned public, has occupied a focal position in the discourse of environmental amelioration. Recently, a range of prominent books, films and television programs — for example, Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers (2005), Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and ABC TV’s Carbon Cops (2007) — have promoted the role of the individual as the ‘starting point’ for effective environmental action. These texts assume that the provision and comprehension of sufficient information to the public about climate change will change individual habits and practices. This accords with the ‘information-deficit model’ in environmental communication research, a concept that asserts a direct connection between individual awareness and response, and collective action. This paper discusses the limitations of this model, pervasive in both popular and official approaches to climate change. It will interrogate the philosophical assumptions that underlie it, in which nature and culture are polarised and the human is positioned in a certain, and separate, relationship to the non-human world — an inheritance of the very logic that enables the continued exploitation of nature. Applying Bruno Latour’s notion of a ‘matter of concern’ to climate change, where the gathering of a range of irreducible forces and im/materialities continually produce these phenomena, this paper proposes that, in thinking about climate change as essentially unrepresentable, a different mode of public engagement with the issue is asserted.

ABC online : a vortal for new opportunities?

This article undertakes an analysis of the ABCs website, ABC Online -- www. abc.net.au -- to explore how the public broadcaster uses the Internet to offer new services. While recognising that the ABC aims to enhance its traditional radio and television services using the Internet, the article establishes the extent to which ABC Online also provides innovative, original, and interactive new services, including those with no connection to traditional radio and television programs, as is often demanded by audiences. This article examines the capacity for ABC Online to develop a unique and distinctive role via the Internet through the potential to offer novel and interactive content and services.