Showing papers in "Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies in 2009"

Following you: Disciplines of listening in social media

Abstract: This paper develops the concept of listening as a metaphor for paying attention online. Pejorative terms such as ‘lurking’ have failed to capture much detail about the experience of presence online. Instead, much online media research has focused on ‘having a voice’, be it in blogs, wikis, social media, or discussion lists. The metaphor of listening can offer a productive way to analyse the forms of online engagement that have previously been overlooked, while also allowing a deeper consideration of the emerging disciplines of online attention. Social media are the focus of this paper, and in particular, how these platforms are changing the configurations of the ideal listening subject. Three modes of online listening are discussed: background listening, reciprocal listening, and delegated listening; Twitter provides a case study for how these modes are experienced and performed by individuals, politicians and corporations.

Listening across difference: Media and multiculturalism beyond the politics of voice

Abstract: Research and policy on media and cultural diversity routinely emphasize speaking or ‘voice’, whether in mainstream, community or diaspora media. An established tradition also examines representation and critiques examples stereotyping and racialization. This paper extends these discussions to focus on questions of ‘listening’. Attention to listening provokes important questions about media and multiculturalism: how do media enable or constrain listening across difference? Drawing on recent work in postcolonial feminism and political theory, this paper explores the productive possibilities of a shift beyond the politics of voice to explore ‘listening across difference’ in media studies and media advocacy work. To highlight listening shifts some of the focus and responsibility for change from marginalized voices and on to the conventions, institutions and privileges which shape who and what can be heard in the media.

Rethinking the politics of voice: Commentary

Abstract: The project of cultural studies has, for some time, lacked a focus. The once critical idea of paying attention to popular culture and its investments, now comfortably institutionalized, has lost it...

Adapting the mobile phone: The iPhone and its consumption

Abstract: In this paper, I look at the Apple iPhone as a fascinating instance of adaptation, especially as it relates to digital cultures. A theme in the rise of the mobile, or cell, phone has been how it underscores the active role that people play in the orchestration and use of culture. The gambit of the iPhone is that the mobile phone itself will be decisively remade, and through this that media culture will itself be reformed. To make sense of this rapturous reception, I examine the iPhone as a notable instance of consuming culture. The paper discusses the double sense in which the iPhone functions both as a signal adaptation of the mobile phone at the same time as it introduces new practices and politics of adaptation.

The problem with protection: Or, why we need to move towards recognition and the sexual agency of children

Abstract: Drawing on historical and contemporary reform narratives, we highlight the implications of and problems with the discourse of protection and its conceptualization of childhood sexuality. Within the reform materials discussed, the child's sexuality is constructed as the result of a dangerous and socially unacceptable outside stimulus, and as a result, any realization of subjective sexual expression is rendered abhorrent and in need of adult intervention. It is our contention that sexual agency is unthinkable and ultimately unattainable within this model. Drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler we forward her theory of recognition as a framework for rethinking the sexuality of children. We argue that foregrounding recognition will help us create a cultural context that fosters sexual agency and in so doing promotes the sexual citizenship of children.

Listening, pathbuilding and continuations: A research agenda for the analysis of listening

Abstract: This introductory paper posits ‘listening’ as a rubric for reframing contemporary media theory and practice. We propose moving beyond questions of voice, speaking and representation to focus on often-ignored questions of listening as the ‘other side’ of communication. This article sets out the ways in which it may be possible to address the neglected question of listening, not in isolation but rather, following Susan Bickford's notion of ‘pathbuilding’, through explorations of speaking and listening, voice and hearing, logos and interpretation/deconstruction. The article argues for more receptive forms of public discourse and media practice, while seeking to place the recent problematization of listening in a critical framework. Through a survey of theorizations of listening and explication of their research agenda, the authors consider listening in relation to conflict and inequality in diverse practices of citizenship. A central aim is to push discussion of listening practices beyond individual, persona...

Great adaptations: China's creative clusters and the new social contract

Abstract: The transformation of China's urban landscape has witnessed a boom in cultural adaptation, namely the adaptation of a Western idea, the creative cluster. This chapter examines the formatting of hundreds of creative clusters-art centres, animation bases, cultural zones, and incubators. The cluster has important implications for how we understand China going forward into the second decade of the 21st century. The cluster phenomenon has resulted in to a substantive remaking of the social contract, between officials, entrepreneurs, local residents, academics-and most significantly cultural producers. However, these processes of adaption are mostly driven by real estate developers working in partnership with local government officials. Cut and paste design is the fast road to completion. In this sense, the description ‘creative’ may well be redundant.

Global franchising, local customizing: The cultural economy of TV program formats

Abstract: Contemporary international television offers a rich site for the investigation of matters concerning cultural adaptation. Over the past 20 years, a formalized, organized system has developed whereby program production knowledge can be borrowed from place to place for the re-creation of a television program in another territory. The TV program format is a kind of template or recipe whereby particular industry knowledges are packaged to facilitate this process of remaking. This article provides a trade background to the development of the TV format industry. It links the TV format's emergence to the practice of franchising, with its attendant cultural need to customize the format to suit local audience taste and outlook in a particular territory. This process of localization is examined on three levels using a model derived from translation theory. The article finds that the localization which occurs in such processes primarily involves the development of content that is nationally unexceptional through whi...

Between listening and understanding

Abstract: My initial contribution to the discussion of listening came about as a result of my role as a modest foot soldier in the tormented struggle of UNESCO and the New World Information and Communication...

Journalism, change and listening practices

Abstract: This paper develops a theoretical account of listening as the ‘anchoring practice’ for change in all types of contemporary journalism. It contests the technological determinism implied in claims that citizen journalism will ‘naturally’ help us to listen. Instead, the paper makes the case for theorizing media as practice, attending to the practical and symbolic dimensions of the work needed to redistribute communicative power, and recognizing editorial vision, communicative expertise and financial resources as decisive factors in enabling ‘everyday people’ to speak, listen and be heard in the media. Three examples of media practices anchored in new approaches to listening are discussed: purposeful cross-cultural communication in SBS Radio, GetUp!'s strategic use of television advertising to achieve a public hearing for dissent, and the bridgeblogging activities of Global Voices that facilitate intercultural dialogue between strangers. Helping people to listen to and hear unfamiliar voices, break silences, ...

Global sport: Where Wembley Way meets Bollywood Boulevard

Abstract: As sport has circulated around the globe, its practice and expression have both replicated its established (and substantially Western-dominated) power formation, and to varying degrees challenged and modified it. The growing popularity of these sports-entertainment cultures reflects emergent media and leisure economies combining global aspirational cosmopolitanism with local cultural identities and histories. These multiple modes of cultural adaptation are evident in various Asian contexts in relation to the English Premier League (EPL) (and association football (soccer) in general), and hybridized local forms of global sport such as the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket and the J-League (Japanese professional soccer). This article examines, in reference to these cases, the ways in which global sport culture is constrained by its historical inheritance yet also making new, multi-faceted cultural histories. It argues that the trajectory of sport's global cultural development is not subject to a simple lo...

Crisis heterotopias and border zones of the dead

Abstract: In this essay, I examine transnational relations of biopower and colonialism in the context of two islands, Lampedusa and Christmas Island. By examining the manner in which both islands have been mobilized by Fortress Europe and Fortress Australia as frontline spaces that must thwart, through imprisonment and deportation, the landfall of asylum seekers and refugees on their shores, I mark their faultline status in the geopolitics of North/South relations. Even as both islands are sites marked by the harrowing presence of immigration prisons, they are also places that are destinations for luxury holidays. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of crisis heterotopias, as spaces that can simultaneously accommodate often violently contradictory differences, I attempt to theorize the biopolitical relations that inscribe and organize such sites. Situating them along the faultline of the border, I conclude by bringing into focus the border zones of the refugee dead that inscribe both islands.

Courageous listening, responsibility for the other and the Northern Territory intervention

Abstract: Public debate about reconciliation in Australia has been polarized by a distinction between the symbolic and the practical. Challenging this false dichotomy, this paper explores courageous listening as a practice that entails both responsiveness and creative action. Although listening can function as a way of responding to the other and expanding the possibility for shared action; it is nonetheless not inherently open or transformative. Indeed, public debate about the Australian federal government's Northern Territory Intervention is examined as a case study that manifests communicative practices which preserve, rather than transform, established hierarchies of attention. The terms of this debate also, however, contain listening practices grounded in the ideal of responsiveness.

Disability and the ethics of listening

Abstract: For Christopher Newell (1964–2008) The turn to listening in cultural studies, as a corrective to emphasis on voice and speaking, needs to engage with the varieties of listening to be found in the socio-political space of disability. While there are many different kinds of listening practices and concepts to be discerned in disability, these are yet to be systematically brought together and explored – let alone connected to the overarching idea of listening as a resonant problematic of culture, democracy and media. To offer a sense of these possibilities, I consider why this new, critical sense of listening is especially important for disability, discuss some established modes of listening and disability, identify emergent, alternative modes from new media practices in disability cultures, and imagine what an ethics of disability might look like.

Changing the climate: The politics of dystopia

Abstract: This paper aims to test the adequacy of various theoretical approaches to utopian studies and science fiction studies – especially those drawn from the work of Darko Suvin, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson – to an understanding of the history of Australian science-fictional dystopias. It argues that science fiction (SF) cannot readily be assimilated into either high literature (as utopia) or popular fiction (as genre) and rejects the widespread prejudice against both SF and dystopia in much contemporary academic literary and cultural criticism. It concludes that SF, whether eutopian or dystopian, is as good a place as any for thought experiments about the politics of climate change, a case made with special reference to the late George Turner's 1987 novel The Sea and Summer.

Strategic regionalization in marketing campaigns: Beyond the standardization/glocalization debate

Abstract: While the economic logic of globalization might impel global marketers to seek the economies of scale and other theoretical advantages of standardization, experience with the realities of linguistic and other cultural differences has obliged them to go some distance towards the ‘glocalization’ of their marketing campaigns. By examining the marketing strategies of Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Procter & Gamble over the last decade or so, with particular attention to Asia as a region, this article suggests that strategic regionalization in its various forms represents a kind of practical compromise with an extreme nation-by-nation approach – that is, a means of ensuring that campaigns are not glocalized any more than is strictly necessary. More generally, it points up the degree to which the global–local dialectic is, in practice, mediated not only by the national but also by the regional.

The Listening Cure

Abstract: This article explores how the recent problematization of listening can be understood as a form of therapy beyond politics, and outlines some strategies for counteracting this tendency. Departing from Claus Offe's observation that increasingly the state addresses policy not to ‘constituted collective actors, but directly to the everyday life praxis of individuals … [giving] the impression that the state is incapable of steering, or that conditions in its problem environment are irremediable’, I ask whether listening in and of itself is being offered as a ‘remedy’, and for what? Susan Bickford's attention to listening as ‘communicative interaction’ and Roger Silverstone's interest in the mediation of everyday life both raise the possibility of listening as a sort of symptom and panacea to social discord. I suggest that the historical formation of practices of listening around management point to a need for a new, culturally historical approach to understanding contemporary anxieties over representation and ...

Localizing a global amusement park: Hong Kong Disneyland

Abstract: We examine how the Disney Company localizes Disneyland in Hong Kong. Unlike most transnational corporations that adapt local culture to accommodate local tastes in foreign markets, we argue that Hong Kong Disneyland adapts to the Chinese market by retaining and bringing to the fore Disneyland's global form. Evidence gathered from multiple visits to the park shows that local residents and visitors from Asia understand how global consumption works. For tourists from mainland China, however, the park offers a chance for them to assume the role of aspiring global consumers, an experience that state control prevents them from having in their daily lives.

Place, identity and nationhood: The Northern Territory intervention as the final act of a dying nation

Abstract: The paper argues that the Australian government's intervention in the Northern pre-empts the end of Australia as a single nation state. Through a discussion of national identity, history and particular key (post 1965) policies/Acts and actions by the federal Government the paper considers the place of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in relation to the Australian nation-state and each other. The paper argues there has been a continued social and political marginalisation, displacement and exclusion of Indigenous Australians and continued construction of them as‘others’ to ‘Australianness’. It argues that at so a pivotal point in the history of this country, in the Post Apology society, the Intervention is a watershed institutionalising racism towards indigenous Australians in the new millennium. It suggests place and identity within the ‘Australian’ nation-state need to be re-framed for the possibility for Indigenous inclusion and/or provide for the sovereignty of the Indigenous nations. Without ...

Blogospheric pressures in Singapore: Internet discourses and the 2006 general election

Abstract: Singapore's technological prowess as one of the most networked cities, societies and nations is reflected in most statistical data. In its latest Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) master plan, Singapore plans to integrate all aspects of info-communications into a single ultra-fast broadband platform that will be capable of delivering ultra-fast Internet. This paper provides a brief update on the extent of technological and Internet deployment. More importantly, it looks at how the Internet has further developed by analysing the events surrounding the 2006 general elections in Singapore. Each election in Singapore is arguably a key regulatory milestone for the Internet because new rules are either invoked via new or revised legislation or new warnings are issued to keep a lid on the effectiveness of new technologies. While Singapore has been unique in its regulatory approaches with censorship of racial, religious, pornographic and terrorist-related websites, it has also enabled its citizens in acquiring and...

‘Boys love' in anime and manga: Japanese subcultural production and its end users

Abstract: Yaoi and BL (‘boys love') are a genre of Japanese cartoons, comics, videogames and fan art whose subject matter is erotic and romantic relationships between males Its producers and consumers are predominantly women Until very recently, there was virtually no English-language research on the fan base of yaoi/BL While the gap in quantitative knowledge is beginning to be filled, there are still virtually no English-language qualitative studies addressing the Western fan base of the genre This article aims to redress the lack of qualitative literature on yaoi/BL's fan base Its goal is to gain a better understanding of the nature and appeal of yaoi/BL by tapping the perspectives of Western consumers of the genre through the analysis of a particular kind of textual material where these perspectives are expressed: reviews of yaoi/BL works contributed voluntarily by yaoi/BL aficionados on the English-language website Boys on Boys on Film

Bare life of the virtuous shadow warrior: The use of silhouette in military training advertisements

Abstract: a silhouette suffices to express a physiognomy. Edouard Dujardin (1888) and the care of life coincides with the fight against the enemy. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 147 Napoleon is reported to hav...

Knowledge Limited: Public communication, risk and university media policy

Abstract: In an increasingly corporate and managerially-driven institutional environment, academics are being strongly encouraged to engage with the media in order to showcase their research and demonstrate their university's knowledge assets and relevance for wider communities. Many universities have recently introduced or updated policies and formally codified procedures for managing this academic-media contact to maximise positive media outcomes. A new wave of ‘media policy’ documents is supplanting earlier policies governing ‘public comment’ as a means of managing risk when academics engage in extra-mural commentary. These policies seek to regulate academic public interventions in various ways, including by establishing the institutional intellectual competency that licenses academic public speech. This paper explores some of the key policy and institutional contexts for managing academic-media relations, and considers how the ‘unscripted’ autonomy of comment beyond the academy may be compromised by contemporar...

White shores of longing: ‘Impossible subjects’ and the frontiers of citizenship

Abstract: This essay begins with an incident that occurred in 2001, the arrival of a group of asylum seekers from Sri Lanka who arrived off the coast of Coral Bay, Western Australia. It follows these castaway figures through a sequence of discursive histories and representational contexts, situating their stories against practices of embodied citizenship at the intersection of law, land (as territorialized geo-body) and nation, in the United Kingdom, Sri Lanka and Australia, the sites of different, but deeply entwined, dramas of citizenship.

Citizenship and global broadcasting: Constructing national, transnational and post-national identities

Abstract: In the context of increasing international mobility of bodies, goods and information, it is critical to understand the role that national and transnational media play in fostering social identities amongst citizens and denizens of nation-states. Traditionally, nations have attempted to control the flow of information to citizens through media regulation, ownership laws, broadcast licensing and similar legal structures. Until very recently, most countries of Europe, as well as Australia and other countries, had national broadcasting with strict limits on foreign content and all channels publicly available. The governing principle was that broadcasting should be in the public interest, and universally available within the nation, so that broadcasting, initially of radio and later television, became one of the key institutions through which the audience came to see themselves as members of an Andersonian imagined national community (Morley and Robins 1995, 10–11). National broadcasting, both public and private, had an explicit role in promulgating national identities, through quotas on local content and the like, thus, it was assumed, encouraging both civic participation and civic loyalty amongst the (singular) national audience. Yet in an era of globalization control over the movements of information and bodies has changed markedly. On the one hand we are seeing efforts to strengthen and enforce national borders for border protection, immigration controls, quarantine issues and the like. Although in some respects national borders are being loosened, for example within the European Union, there is a concomitant attempt to strengthen regional borders, leading to the situation sometimes described as ‘fortress Europe’. On the other hand, free trade agreements, dual citizenship, transnational broadcasting, and cyberspace transcend old geographically based controls and call the sovereignty of the nation-state into question. Governments of different countries respond to these threats in various ways. National media comprise an area which is increasingly shifting from addressing a singular audience in the national public sphere to being targeted towards a series of smaller, niche audiences which may exist locally, regionally, transnationally or globally. Such a fragmentation of the public sphere into numerous smaller sphericules (Cunningham and Sinclair 2000, 179) is a way of understanding the diversity of linguistic and cultural minorities within the national culture. Yet the internationalization, or post-national development of media content makes even such smaller sphericules interdependent in underlying ways. Now programs produced in a particular country, with local actors, local language and local context may be based entirely on a global program format, imported directly from a different country and culture, and in turn exported to a diasporic

Introduction: The global flow of creative ideas

Abstract: In the era of late modernism, various pressures play a decisive role in shaping the texture and meaning of the world around us. Population, work, transportation, new technologies of information and communication, lifestyle cultures and other forces are increasingly mobile, and this in turn helps make for a new set of public and personal surroundings. Social life everywhere now appears to share more and more in an international (if not a global) order, even if inequality and stratification remain common inside territories and across territories. Still, the perception is that a particular cultural life is increasingly universal. More and more consumers come to share in its practices and products, with those products becoming more and more homogeneous. This standardization argument finds much support in the apparent internationalization of many elements of media, entertainment, leisure and lifestyle cultures, with cultural conglomerates determined to maximize their global market reach. Once upon a time, in order to understand the economic, political and cultural forces affecting citizens and society, it was mostly deemed sufficient to look within the boundaries of the nation-state. Over the past two decades, these same pressures of globalization have impacted on critical research, highlighting the methodological need to adopt an optic that is more cross-border and transcultural as a means of gaining greater understanding of cultural life.

Everything old is good again: Myth and nostalgia in Spider-Man

Abstract: This paper is interested in why the application of the nostalgic mode to Spider-Man resulted in a movie which was staggeringly profitable and critically acclaimed at the 2002 box office. Accordingly, it relates the semiotics and plot of Spider-Man back to Joseph Campbell's monomyth of the male hero's journey, and cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser's theory of repisodic memory. Nostalgia, repisodic memories, and the monomyth are seen to complement each other when intertwined, especially when the text positively contrasts them against the dreariness of contemporary everyday life. The paper thus provides a suggestive representative analysis of the culturally central and powerful contemporary Hollywood comic-based blockbuster cinema form.

Idiomedia: The rise of personalized, aggregated content

Abstract: We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalization. (Eric Schmidt, CEO Google, cited in Daniel and Palmer 200...

India's uncanny: Anglo-Indians as (post)colonial Gothic

Abstract: This paper engages with Freud's theorisation of the uncanny to argue that the Anglo-Indian community occupies a position as India's unheimlich. Although familiar to the Indian nation, the community is alienated from it through narrative processes that construct the nation as progressive and independent from British colonial power. Dominant narratives of the Indian nation are strongly marked both by the anti-colonial Indian nationalism which characterised the freedom struggle and the repression of the ‘effects’ of British colonialism, including Partition and the existence of the Anglo-Indian community. I explore the ways Gothic strategies are often employed to signify Anglo-Indians as India's uncanny, and assert that such representation highlights the return of that which is repressed in the narration of the nation whilst highlighting the anxieties the community produces for the purportedly homogeneous and coherent Indian nation.

Negotiating generic hybridity: Audience engagement with The Office

Abstract: This article addresses the under-researched area of TV comedy audiences. Previous literature in this field has tended to focus on how viewers interpret comedic representations (e.g. Cooper 2003; Jh...