Community participation in the development of digital radio : the Australian experience

The participation of the community broadcasting sector in the development of digital radio provides a potentially valuable opportunity for non-market, end user-driven experimentation in the development of these new services in Australia. However this development path is constrained by various factors, some of which are specific to the community broadcasting sector and others that are generic to the broader media and communications policy, industrial and technological context. This paper filters recent developments in digital radio policy and implementation through the perspectives of community radio stakeholders, obtained through interviews, to describe and analyse these constraints. The early stage of digital community radio presented here is intended as a baseline for tracking the development of the sector as digital radio broadcasting develops. We also draw upon insights from scholarly debates about citizens media and participatory culture to identify and discuss two sets of opportunities for social benefit that are enabled by the inclusion of community radio in digital radio service development. The first arises from community broadcasting���s involvement in the propagation of the multi-literacies that drive new digital economies, not only through formal and informal multi- and trans-media training, but also in the ���co-creative��� forms of collaborative and participatory media production that are fostered in the sector. The second arises from the fact that community radio is uniquely placed ��� indeed charged with the responsibility ��� to facilitate social participation in the design and operation of media institutions themselves, not just their service outputs.

Grant Stevens : Are You Upset with Me?

Grant Stevens is ambivalent. The young Brisbane artist made his name with a series of computer-generated animated-text videos that explore clich��s but seem undecided as to whether they are trivial and vacuous, profound and authentic or somehow both at once. Stevens plunders mass-media sources (the familiar image repertoire dished up by Hollywood, television, pop music and the Internet) as readymade content. He explores this everyday language, sometimes for its ambiguity, but more often for its almost uncanny lucidity. Resembling meditation and relaxation guides, his recent videos beg the question: what made us so anxious? This book examines Stevens' artistic output over the first ten years of his practice. It includes essays by Mark Pennings and Chris Kraus.

Entertainment architecture : constructing a framework for the creation of an emerging transmedia form

This thesis investigates the radically uncertain formal, business, and industrial environment of current entertainment creators. It researches how a novel communication technology, the Internet, leads to novel entertainment forms, how these lead to novel kinds of businesses that lead to novel industries; and in what way established entertainment forms, businesses, and industries are part of that process. This last aspect is addressed by focusing on one exemplary es-tablished form: movies. Using a transdisciplinary approach and a combination of historical analysis, industry interviews, and an innovative mode of ���immersive��� textual analysis, a coherent and comprehensive conceptual framework for the creation of and re-search into a specific emerging entertainment form is proposed. That form, products based on it, and the conceptual framework describing it are all re-ferred to as Entertainment Architecture (���entarch,��� for short). The thesis charac-terises this novel form as Internet-native transmedia entertainment, meaning it fully utilises the unique communicative characteristics of the Internet, and is spread across media. The thesis isolates four constitutive elements within Entertainment Architec-ture: story, play, ���dance,��� and ���glue.��� That is, entarch tells a story; offers playful interaction; invites social interaction between producer and consumer, and amongst consumers (���dance���); and all components of it can be spread across many media, but are so well interconnected and mutually dependent that they are perceived as one product instead of many (���glue���). This sets entarch apart from current media franchises like Star Wars or Halo, which are perceived as many products spread across many media. Entarch thus embraces the commu-nicative behaviour of Internet-native consumers instead of forcing them to de-sist from it, it harnesses the strengths of various media while avoiding some of their weaknesses, and it can sustain viable businesses. The entarch framework is an innovative contribution to scholarship that al-lows researchers to investigate this emerging entertainment form in a structured way. The thesis demonstrates this by using it to survey business models appro-priate to the entarch environment. The framework can also be used by enter-tainment creators ��� exemplified in the thesis by moviemakers ��� to delimit the room for manoeuvre available to them in a changing environment.

Shattered dreams : a community project

The research field was community empowerment through education and skill-building. The context was the high rates of domestic violence in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, and the dearth of culturally-appropriate resource materials to stimulate and encourage community engagement with the issue. The research question concerned the use of a specific media project ��� the creation of a 7-minute 48-second DVD on the causes and impacts of domestic violence ��� as a focus for community empowerment, education and skills development. The research represented an innovative partnership between the university research team, a non-government organisation, and various expert content-providers. The project generated new knowledge regarding best practice, in such areas as the culturally appropriate use of the voices of elders, focusing on the responsibilities of both men and women in relation to family and domestic violence, and the protection of Aboriginal and Islander children. The project has created an excellent tool for workshops on related issues including familiarity with the legal system. The film has been distributed to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander domestic violence services throughout the State, and has generated interstate interest, indicating a significant gap in available culturally-appropriate domestic violence resources. A support package for educational workers within Indigenous community groups wishing to use the resource has also been produced. In 2010, the DVD was nominated for a Queensland Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Award. Other non-government organisations have expressed interest in using the model created through this community-based project.

A silver bullet for Australian cinema? Genre movies and the audience debate

There has been a renaissance in Australian genre cinema in recent years. Indeed, not since the 1980s have Australian genre movies across action, adventure, horror, and science-fiction among others, experienced such prominence within production, policy discourse, and industry debate. Genre movies, typically associated with commercial filmmaking and entertainment, have been identified as a strategy to improve the box-office performance of Australian feature films and to attract larger audiences. Much of this conversation has revolved around the question of whether or not genre can deliver on these high expectations and transform the unpredictable local film industry into a popular and profitable commercial production sector. However, this debate for the most part has been disconnected from analysis of Australia���s genre movie heritage in terms of their position within Australian cinema and their reception with domestic audiences, and how this correlates to contemporary trends. As this chapter argues, genre production is not a silver bullet which will single handedly improve the Australian feature film industry���s commercial performance. Genre movies have occupied, and continue to occupy, a difficult position within Australian cinema and face numerous challenges in terms of reception with national audiences, limited production scale and enterprise structures, and ongoing tensions between culture and commerce.

The importance of entertainment for sexuality education

Researchers in sexuality education have tended to focus on formal schooling. However, young people learn about sexuality from a range of sources, including entertainment media. This is particularly important because young people actively seek out entertainment media. They do so because it gives them the kinds of information they want, in ways that seem relevant to them. This is often not the case for formal schooling, for reasons that may not easily change in the near future. Possibilities exist for sexuality education researchers to form productive relationships with entertainment producers: but only if these are approached with respect for the producers' particular skills, including the ability to give audiences what they want.

Supporting research at QUT : a tale of three librarians and a Creative Industries super-faculty

In 2012 the existing eight disciplines of Creative Industries Faculty, QUT combined with the School of Design (formerly a component of the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering) to create a super faculty that includes the following disciplines: Architecture, Creative Writing & Literary Studies, Dance, Drama, Fashion, Film & Television, Industrial Design, Interior Design, Journalism, Media & Communication, Landscape Architecture, Music & Sound and Urban Design. The university���s research training unit AIRS (Advanced Information Retrieval Skills) is a systematic introduction to research level information literacies. It is currently being redesigned to reflect today���s new data intensive research environment and facilitate the capacity for life-long learning. Upon completion participants are expected to be able to: 1. Demonstrate an understanding of the theory of advanced search and evaluative strategies to efficiently yield appropriate resources to create original research. 2. Apply appropriate data management strategies to organise and utilize your information proficiently, ethically and legally. 3. Identify strategies to ensure best practice in the use of information sources, information technologies, information access tools and investigative methods. All Creative Industries Faculty research students must complete this unit into which CI Librarians teach discipline specific material. The library employs a team of research specific experts as well as Liaison Librarians for each faculty. Together they develop and deliver a generic research training program that provides researcher training in the following areas: Managing Research Data, QUT ePrints: New features for tracking your research impact, Tracking Research Impact, Research Students and the Library: Overview of Library Research Support Services, Technologies for Research Collaboration, Open Access Publishing, Greater Impact via Creative Commons Licence, CAMBIA - Navigating the patent literature, Uploading Publications to QUT ePrints Workshop, AIRS for supervisors, Finding Existing Research Data, Keeping up to date:Discovering and managing current awareness information and Getting Published. In 2011 Creative Industries initiated a new faculty specific research training program to promote capacity building for research within their Faculty, with workshops designed and developed with Faculty Research Leaders, The Office of Research and Liaison Librarians. ���Show me the money��� which assists staff to pursue alternative funding sources was one such session that was well attended and generated much discussion and interest. Drop in support sessions for ePrints, EndNote referencing software and Tracking Research Impact for the Creative Industries were also popular options on the menu. Liaison Librarians continue to provide one-on-one consultations with individual researchers as requested. This service assists Librarians greatly with getting to know and monitoring their researchers��� changing needs. The CI Faculty has enlisted two Research Leaders, one for each of the two Schools (Design and Media, Entertainment & Creative Arts) whose role it is to mentor newer research staff. Similarly within the CI library liaison team one librarian is assigned the role of Research Coordinator, whose responsibility it is to be the primary liaison with the Assistant Dean, Research and other key Faculty research managers and is the one most likely to attend Faculty committees and meetings relating to research support.

Pornography as entertainment

For the majority of its producers and consumers, pornography functions as entertainment rather than art. This paper draws on my recent work mapping out entertainment as an area of study (for the new Entertainment Industries programme at Queensland University of Technology) to explore what it means for this object of study to treat it as adult entertainment. Entertainment is audience-centred culture. It is commonly based around characters and story. It encourages seriality, and is unafraid of adaptation. Its dominant mode is fun, its favourite narrative resolution the happy ending. It commonly encourages audience activity and its aesthetics are organized around fast-moving, vulgar spectacle. Its primary purpose is to create an emotional response. In this article I test mainstream pornography against each of these characteristics as a way of mapping out the shape of pornography as it functions in its everyday form, and explain the advantages of such an approach.

Enhancing women���s participation in Turkey through digital storytelling

This paper explores the process of introducing Digital Storytelling (DST) workshop practice to Turkey through a project called ���Digital Stories from Amargi Women���, which was part of my Ph.D. research in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. In the resulting dissertation, I examined the potential of Digital Storytelling workshop practice as a means to promote agency and self-expression in a feminist activist organization (such as Amargi Women), focusing in particular on whether or not Digital Storytelling can be used as a change agent ��� as a tool for challenging the idea of a single public sphere in ways that make it more inclusive of women���s participation. In order to explore the issue in depth, my thesis engaged with feminist scholarship���s critiques of the public/private dichotomy, as well as the concept of gender. The conducted workshops, the resulting digital stories, and in-depth interviews were analyzed to seek connections between these topics and narrative identity. The results indicated that the participating women defined new activist usages for digital stories, as well as their overall activated networking habits in the DST workshop settings. Digital Stories from Amargi Women became the first Digital Storytelling project that aimed to enable women���s participation in Turkey through facilitating a co-creative environment where the participants could share their stories and learn digital skills that they could make use of after the workshops.

Entertainment architecture : constructing a framework for the creation of an emerging transmedia form

The topic of this research is a novel entertainment form currently emerging from the youngest human communication technology, the Internet. This form, products based on it, and the conceptual framework describing it are all referred to as Entertainment Architecture (���entarch,��� for short). Entarch is classified as Internet-native transmedia entertainment ��� it fully utilises the unique communicative characteristics of the Internet and is not based on just one medium. A number of entarch examples are explored through ���immersive��� textual analysis ��� a new mode of textual analysis required for research into this kind of entertainment. As a secondary priority, entarch is related to the movie ��� which is chosen as an exemplary existing entertainment form finding itself in a radically uncertain formal, business, and industrial environment, and accordingly is struggling financially. Throughout, formal, business, and industrial consequences of the emergence of Entertainment Architecture are explored. This research is an example of applied cultural science, as it treats culture as a source of innovation and a complex dynamic system with technological as well as human characteristics. It analyses the dynamics of cultural change in the context of business development, consumer experience, and economic evolution ��� with an intrinsically transdisciplinary methodology.

Towards an understanding of Australian genre cinema and entertainment : beyond the limitations of ���Ozploitation��� discourse

While Australian cinema has produced popular movie genres since the 1970s, including action/adventure, road movies, crime, and horror movies, genre cinema has occupied a precarious position within a subsidised national cinema and has been largely written out of film history. In recent years the documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008) has brought Australia���s genre movie heritage from the 1970s and 1980s back to the attention of cinephiles, critics and cult audiences worldwide. Since its release, the term ���Ozploitation��� has become synonymous with Australian genre movies. In the absence of discussion about genre cinema within film studies, Ozploitation (and ���paracinema��� as a theoretical lens) has emerged as a critical framework to fill this void as a de facto approach to genre and a conceptual framework for understanding Australian genres movies. However, although the Ozploitation brand has been extremely successful in raising the awareness of local genre flicks, Ozploitation discourse poses problems for film studies, and its utility is limited for the study of Australian genre movies. This paper argues that Ozploitation limits analysis of genre movies to the narrow confines of exploitation or trash cinema and obscures more important discussion of how Australian cinema engages with popular movies genres, the idea of Australian filmmaking as entertainment, and the dynamics of commercial filmmaking practises more generally.

The Australian screen producer: Understanding screen production cultures in a period of industrial transition [Abstract]

The screen producer plays a vital role in shaping the creative, commercial and entrepreneurial dimensions of production. And yet Australian film history is most often presented as an appreciation of film directors or an examination of industrial governance measures. On the other hand, public funding agencies in Australia have, for the most part, supported independent film and television production as a producer-led, or producer-as-auteur production system, and as such the producer has played a critical role in shaping the broader independent production landscape. In recent years, fundamental changes to distribution and consumption practices have had a major impact on the nature of screen production. Screen producers are increasingly migrating into emerging online, transmedia and cross-media production; generating both opportunities and challenges for traditional producers. However, the production cultures and motivations of producers operating in these emergent spaces remain poorly understood. This presentation will focus on the largely unremarked role of the producer in Australian screen scholarship. It will explore the ways in which the practice of screen producing is evolving and the migratory pathways of traditional producers moving into digital/new media production. The presentation���s primary findings are drawn from the 2011 Australian Screen Producer Survey; a national study of the activities of Australian screen producers conducted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), Queensland University of Technology, with support from the Centre for Screen Business /Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). From longitudinal analysis, the presentation will compare and contrast data from the 2009 and 2011 survey across film, television, corporate production and new media industry segments. In so doing the presentation will delineate the practices, attitudes, strategies, and aspirations of screen producers operating in a convergent digital media marketplace and suggest ways forward for a more industrially cognisant approach to screen history.

News media representations of homelessness : do economic news production pressures prevent journalists from adequately reporting complex social issues

This study used both content and frame analyses to test news-media representations of homelessness in The Courier-Mail newspaper for evidence of restricted journalism practice. Specifically, it sought signs of either direct manipulation of issue representation based on ideological grounds, and also evidence of news organisations prioritising low-cost news production over Public Sphere journalistic news values. The study found that news stories from the earlier parts of the longitudinal study showed stereotypical misrepresentations of homelessness for public deliberation which might be attributed to either, or both of the nominated restricting factors. However news stories from the latter part of the study saw a distinct change in the way the issue was represented, indicating a journalistic capacity to thoughtfully and sensitively represent a complex social issue to the public. Further study is recommended to ascertain how and why this change occurred, so that journalistic practice might be further improved.