Tag Archives: ANZCA

ANZCA Conference 2009 – Journalism and News Media panel

  By netcrit | July 10, 2009 - 12:15 | See
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Online Media and User-Created Content Flew, QUT Established news organisations are dealing with key socio-cultural questions around loss of deference to ‘the news’ and their declining relevance as gatekeepers; the questions are not technological per se. Clifford Stoll = Andrew Keen: there’s always populist critiques of the Internet’s ‘destruction’ of things we value. “Habermas is always dissatisfied with the current state of affairs” (laughter) citizenship and news media; important because, Flew is essentially asking, ‘who is the citizen’ in citizen journalism – what is a citizen, especially when the media is so important in creating ‘citizens’. Local / alternative news online – critical of trying to do it as inferior version of incumbent media (eg looks like it, but done with far rewer resources); notes possibility of drawing in bloggers from the blogosphere into incumbent media online. Importance of public broadcasters; need to analyse failure of indymedia A New Screen Face for Public Service Broadcasting Cinque, Deakin University Maintaining an informed citizenry via the Internet – journalism is not producing a product but participating in a real time process (Tumber, 2007). Challenges she identifies are the failure of existing media online to include links out to other sites, inputs from … Click to read more →

ANZCA Conference 2009 – Communication and Pedagogy session, Friday

  By netcrit | July 10, 2009 - 10:47 | See
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Three papers on communication and pedagogy, including Elaine Tay’s presentation of our research as part of the ALTC Link project. “Classroom 2.0: Is convenience the primary value in digital learning” expert developmental path; particular emphasis on metacognition only at higher levels of expertise. Judges that the assessment isn’t really authentic in its form, the location is authentic and some degree of authenticity in surrounding social context etc. Task is authentic to working in organisational communication industry. [Would comment that this reporting of curriculum innovation suggests that authenticity is never entirely achievable precisely because assessment is - in the form of student/teacher dyad - unique to education; there are both practical and theoretical constraints which mean authentic assessment is more of a dialogue between different worlds - the class and the workplace] “Re-invigorating the use of the Internet in higher education” Tay, Curtin University of Technology (and Allen) [disclaimer - am blogging research of which I am a part] networked knowledge – brief summary of the basic points – fragmented, distributed; knowledge is de-centred; summary of questions crucial to project (see also LINK website). Web 2.0 as ‘sensibility’ about participatory media which affects education when students are already participating in the … Click to read more →

ANZCA Conference 2009 – Qui Keynote

  By netcrit | July 9, 2009 - 12:36 | See
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Communication research in an era of recession: reflections from China Jack Linchuan Qui, Chinese University of Hong Kong Context provided by the global recession; do the new technologies and the new financial informatic processes matter when we see how the global recession developed and spread. This is a context of communications research, no longer in an era of apparent endless economic prosperity; not dissimilar to Frankfurt School in 1930s; wartime propaganda research in USA in 1940s. And, for Chinese scholars, very important, because communications research in China has always been conducted within prosperity (from 1990s onwards). Example: Uighur violence in China; revelation is this. China has control over Twitter; but not over the uploading of phone cam video via Youtube and related sites. CHhina now appears as a ‘broken picture’ – both modern and developed; also full of “ugly” strife. research in recession – “assumptions of scarcity, non-linear history, bottom-up action”; very different to research in prosperity; [I would note the interesting dialetical implication here; about the conditions of research and its purposes, counterposing approaches and needs based on whether we are in good or bad times; times determine the change in approach]. Continues to counterpose methods, motives depending on … Click to read more →

ANZCA Conference – Youth and digital media paper

  By netcrit | July 9, 2009 - 10:27 | Think
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Listening to Crawford and Goggin’s presentation on mobile telephony research at ANZCA 2009. Constrasts assumptions about the end of / decline of social cohesion and community because of mobile communications; and the rise or, reinforcement of community ties – this is the normative dialectic within the research field. Similar dichotomies throughout the field: isolated / connected; closed world / open world Youth are seen as excessive in both directions – occupying ‘extreme’ polar opposities at the same time; eg mobile telelphony closes off young people from the world, and yet they are too connected! useful insights: who is young? (because ‘youth’ is the focus) youth and technology are consistently aligned by commentators from 18th C onwards youth are a focus for particular attention because, from an adult perspective, they give a slimpse of what general social life might be like in future, when those youth become adult “youth as developmental narrative”: dependency to self-sufficiency through “trials of emancipation” – reviewing Ling’s work on mobiles; challenges the fixity of the ‘adult’ as ‘developed’ entity after childhood or youth youth is not the same category in different cultures youth as overly idealised state of individual freedom, read from the perspective of constrained … Click to read more →

ANZCA Conference 2009 – Couldry Keynote

  By netcrit | July 9, 2009 - 09:04 | See
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Voice: Culture and politics beyond the horizon of neoliberalism Nick Couldry Goldsmiths, University of London His project is the “crisis of voice”, under the conditions of neoliberalism (market function as dominant concept in economics; but also, wider set of metaphors, practices etc – that embed the concept in operation of society). Also notes critical importance (citing Foucault) of regulation within the neoliberal project; cites Brown also – state needs to enforce market logics, extend them, inculcate them. What might come after neoliberalism? Neoliberalism simplifies, reduces; the critical stategy against it is also to simplify; provide a limit to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism’s obsession with competition creates an unstable form of social organisation. Neoliberalism has led, in various ways, to a form of network organisation in which people are not permanently ‘attached’ to groups or organisations, but are connected in a contingent and potentially fragile manner. Couldry is critical of the failure of proponents of networked digital media culture to see the link between neoliberalism and digital media networking (eg criticises Leadbeater); Hayek – neoliberalism involves the triumph of aggregations of individual ends; not social ends. Therefore, participatory network media – which appears to be all about aggregated individualism – seems to Couldry … Click to read more →