News via Voldemort: Parody accounts in topical discussions on Twitter

Parody accounts are prevalent on Twitter, offering irreverent interpretations of public figures, fictional characters and more. These accounts post comments framed within the context of their fictional universes or stereotypes of their subjects, responding in-character to topical events. This article positions parody accounts as a ritualised social media practice, an extension of fan practices and irreverent Internet culture. By providing a typology of parody accounts and analysing the topicality of selected parody accounts’ tweets, the research examines how these accounts contribute to topical discussions. In-character framing of topical comments allows parody accounts to offer original interpretations of breaking news that receive more attention than their other tweets. The presence and longevity of parody accounts underline the importance of humour on social media, including within news and topical coverage.

Numerical simulation of anomalous infiltration in porous media

Nonlinear time-fractional diffusion equations have been used to describe the liquid infiltration for both subdiffusion and superdiffusion in porous media. In this paper, some problems of anomalous infiltration with a variable-order timefractional derivative in porous media are considered. The time-fractional Boussinesq equation is also considered. Two computationally efficient implicit numerical schemes for the diffusion and wave-diffusion equations are proposed. Numerical examples are provided to show that the numerical methods are computationally efficient.

Changing the game: The role of social media in overcoming old media's attention deficit toward women's sport

Social media is now an integral part of modern sports broadcasting, which combines old and new media into a redefined and multidimensional experience for fans. The popularity of social media has particular implications for professional women's sports due to this convergence, and may be utilised by organisations to address some of the issues women's sports face from a lack of traditional broadcast coverage. This article discusses Twitter activity surrounding the ANZ Championship netball competition and analyses the ways social media can help transcend the structural challenges that “old” media has placed on professional women's sports.

Working on the edge : Exploring the creative tensions experienced by practitioners facilitating participatory media projects with refugees and asylum seekers in Australia

This paper aims to provide a contextualised and embedded exploration of how the notions of "practice" and "participation", key concepts in the study of culture and media, are manifest in an example of a complex creative project. This project aimed to engage with refugees and asylum seekers through the co-creation of cultural material and is an outcome of an? ethnographic action research (Tacchi et al. 2003) partnership involving a community development worker in a settlement support agency and a storytelling/community media researcher (the author), along with other project collaborators. The discussion of this project focuses on the role of the facilitator and illustrates the processes of orchestrating a complex project involving a series of linked stages with cumulative effect. As practitioners at this site we are working in the space where personal narratives, participatory arts and media, and the staging of intercultural, civic dialogue events, intersect. Co-creative media facilitation in these contexts involves both managing hybrid communicative spaces and (re)combining the "integrative practices" (Schatzki 1996) of a range of professional approaches and creative roles. This is liminal work, located on the boundaries of several disciplines and practices. Drawing on reflections gathered from collaborative ethnographic descriptions (Bhattacharya 2008), this paper traces moments of practitioner uncertainty that can be linked to the way "practice" and “participation” is problematised within the community cultural development field in a way that is at times an uneasy fit with conventional ways of operating in social service roles. These moments of tension also indicate where this project pushed practitioners into spaces of improvisation and new learning. Keywords: Youth, refugees, community cultural development, co-creative media facilitation, ethnographic action research, intercultural dialogue.

Australian print media framing of mandatory reporting

Mandatory reporting is a key aspect of Australia’s approach to protecting children and is incorporated into all jurisdictions’ legislation, albeit in a variety of forms. In this article we examine all major newspaper’s coverage of mandatory reporting during an 18-month period in 2008-2009, when high-profile tragedies and inquiries occurred and significant policy and reform agendas were being debated. Mass media utilise a variety of lenses to inform and shape public responses and attitudes to reported events. We use frame analysis to identify the ways in which stories were composed and presented, and how language portrayed this contested area of policy. The results indicate that within an overall portrayal of system failure and the need for reform, the coverage placed major responsibility on child protection agencies for the over-reporting, under-reporting, and overburdened system identified, along with the failure of mandatory reporting to reduce risk. The implications for ongoing reform are explored along with the need for robust research to inform debate about the merits of mandatory reporting.

Global journalism in the digital age

Mass media have transitioned in the past five years from being one-way communication mediums, from journalists to audiences, into an era of networked digital media in which individuals can easily publish text, photos and video to a world-wide audience.The power of the press is severely threatened and its business model is broken...

Life storytelling at the ABC: Challenges of 'giving the audience a voice' in the context of public service media

Life storytelling projects have become an important means through which public service media institutions such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation are seeking to foster audience participation and involve particular cohorts in the creation and distribution of broadcast content. This paper contributes to the wider conversation on audience participation within public service media intuitions (PSMs), and focuses on the opportunities and challenges that arise within life storytelling projects that are facilitated by these institutions, and that aim to ‘give voice’ to members of ‘the audience’. In particular, it focuses on two of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s current life storytelling projects: ABC Open and Heywire.

Fresh Cuttings: A Celebration of Fiction and Poetry from UQP's Black Writing Series

As the first anthology of UQP's indigenous-authored books, Fresh Cuttings represents the very best of fiction and poetry publishing from UQP's Black Australian Writing series. An introduction by the editors and a biography of each author is included.

Co-creating stories in social learning systems : The role of community media and cultural organisations in disseminating knowledge

This paper investigates how community based media organisations are co-creative storytelling institutions, and how they learn to disseminate knowledge in a social learning system. Organisations involved in story co-creation are learning to create in fluid environments.They are project based, with a constant turnover of volunteers or staff. These organisations have to meet the needs of their funding bodies and their communities to remain sustainable. Learning is seen as dialogical, and this is also reflected in the nature of storytelling itself. These organisations must learn to meet the needs of their communities, who in turn learn from the organisation’s expertise in a facilitated setting. This learning is participatory and collaborative, and is often a mix of virtual and offline interaction. Such community-based organisations sit in the realm of a hybrid-learning environment; they are neither a formal educational institution like a college, nor do their volunteers produce outcomes in a professional capacity. Yet, they must maintain a certain level of quality outcomes from their contributors to be of continued value in their communities. Drawing from a larger research study, one particular example is that of the CitizenJ project. CitizenJ is hosted by a state cultural centre, and partnered with publishing partners in the community broadcasting sector. This paper explores how this project is a Community of Practice, and how it promotes ethical and best practice, meets contributors’ needs, emphasises the importance of facilitation in achieving quality outcomes, and the creation of projects for wider community and public interest.

The Media as Political Actors

This chapter provides a history of the media as political actors and identifies key principles that have shaped their role in both democratic and authoritarian polities (i.e., information, interpretation, participation, critical scrutiny). In addition, the chapter explores recent trends impacting on the performance of that role, such as the emergence of the Internet and, as a consequence of that process, a globalized public sphere of transnational news media outlets. It is argued that to make the Internet truly valuable as a political resource, democratic societies continue to require the work of skilled, professional journalists and their sense making, interpretative functions. Because of that journalists and their organizations remain crucial to the translation of content into meaningful messages.

Book review: Politics and the media in twenty-first century Indonesia: Decade of democracy

This is the third (but first edited) volume in Sen and Hill’s corpus on Indonesian media. An anthology built from contributions to a 2006 workshop, it is necessarily more fragmented than the editors’ earlier monographs. While this fragmented character helps to evoke a fractured context, it also makes for unwieldiness...

Sydney's media cluster: Continuity and change in film and television

A significant media city globally , Sydney is the production and design centre for the Australian media system and a subsidiary node of larger international systems principally headquartered in Los Angeles and London. Its media cluster is undergoing transformations to improve its position internationally by increasing capabilities and ties to other Australian and international production clusters. Sydney’s media cluster is a collection of suburbs forming an “arc” along major transport corridors stretching from Macquarie Park in the north to Sydney airport in the south. As a dispersed rather than tightly bound cluster, it is defined by the functional proximity provided by automobile and telecommunication networks Sydney’s media cluster is considered here along two dimensions—that of Sydney’s place within the ecology of Australian and international media and that of its internal organization within the geographical space of metropolitan Sydney. The first examines Sydney’s media cluster at the level of the metropolitan area of Sydney within its state, national and international contexts; while the second digs below this level to explore its working out in urban space.

Book Review: "Gender and Global Justice edited by Alison M. Jaggar, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014"

Hidden aspects of assumed gender-neutral global policies and transnational institutions that have “systematically disparate and often burdensome consequences for specific groups of women in both the global North and the global South” (10) are the focus of Gender and Global Justice edited by Alison M Jagger. In response to the frequent neglect of gender in considerations of moral philosophy in global issues, the chapters assembled in this edited collection highlight the manifold ways in which our attention to a broad range of questions of justice at a global level is enhanced by close attention to the gendered dimensions of injustice and inequality.

Social media, audiences, and audience co-creativity in contemporary performance: Restoring balance?

Producers, technicians, performers, audiences and critics are all critical components of the performing arts ecology – critical components of an ecosystem that have to come together into some sort of productive relationship if the performing arts are to be vital, viable and successful. Different performance practices developed in different times, spaces and places do, of course, connect these players in different ways as part of their attempt to achieve their own definition of success, be it based on entertainment, educational, expression, empowerment, or something else. In some contemporary performance practices, social media platforms, applications and processes are seen to have significant potential to restore balance to the relationship between performer and audience, providing audiences with more power to participate in a performance event. In this paper, I investigate prevailing assumptions about social media’s power to democratise performance practice, or, at least, develop more co-creative performance practices in which producers, performers and audiences participate actively before, during and after the event. I focus, in particular, on the use of social media as a means of developing a participatory aesthetic in which an audience member is asked to contribute to the cast of characters, plot or progression of a performance. Although diverse – from performances streamed online, to performances that offer transmedia components the audience can use to learn more about character, context and plot online, to performances that incorporate online voting, liking or linking, to performances that unfold fully online on websites, blogs, microblogs or other social media platforms – what a lot of uses of social media in contemporary performance today share is a desire to encourage audiences to reflect on their role in making, and making meaning, of the event. In this paper I interrogate if, and if so how, this democratises or develops deeper levels of co-creativity in the relationship between producers, performers and audiences.