CCI in the Media

Australia needs a national strategy to overcome the fears and uncertainty of older Australians about going online, if broadband is to deliver its full value to the nation.

Dr Sandra Haukka, a Senior Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), Queensland University of Technology, says that despite the Australian Government’s $43 billion national broadband network and $15 million Broadband for Seniors initiative, they need to do more to encourage older Australians to use the internet.

It is vital for Australia to offer strong support for artists as individuals, as well as for large artistic institutions, Professor Stuart Cunningham, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology said today.

Australia’s economy is powered by innovation – but our formal education system is not yet fully geared to deliver the innovators we need.

The nation’s innovators and entrepreneurs often achieve success in spite of their education, rather than because of it, says Dr Ruth Bridgstock of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) at Queensland University of Technology.

Australia has a superlative opportunity to generate new jobs, exports and cultural richness if it can tap the creative powers of all its citizens.

This is the view of Prof. John Hartley AM, research director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) at the Queensland University of Technology, who has just completed a ground-breaking five-year ARC Federation Fellowship investigating the new opportunities opening up with the digital age.

Stuart Cunningham | From The Courier-Mail | August 04, 2010

WHATEVER else defines contemporary Queensland, the attractiveness it holds for the rest of eastern Australia must rank highly.

By Emma Tom | The Australian | Saturday, July 10, 2010

CHICKEN Little responses to the online revolution have a familiar, if not hollow, ring.

OPPONENTS of Australia's proposed super-fast broadband must be spitting silicon chips over the latest news from Finland.

The home of sauteed reindeer and more than 40 different words for snow has just made broadband a legal right. Thus the right to vote, the right to equality before the law and the right to party like it's yhdeksantoista yhdeksankymmenta yhdeksikko (1999) are now joined by the right to access dodgy online translators.

By Fiona Mackrell ArtsHub | Monday, July 19, 2010

Australia has a rare opportunity to deepen its democracy, achieve more open government and improve public policymaking – using the best of the new tools on the internet.

Dr Nicholas Gruen, Chair of the Commonwealth Government’s ‘Government 2.0’ Task Force, says the internet can open a new era for Australian democracy and good governance if we take full advantage of the tools for communication, discussion, and collaboration it has to offer.

Fast broadband should herald a revolution in health, education and environmental care for the whole of Australia.

But the national focus needs to shift from building the network to delivering the huge public good benefits it should deliver, says Terry Cutler, Principal of Cutler & Company, and chair of the 2008 Review of the National Innovation System.

The Australian Financial Review published this article on Wednesday 19th May outlining some of the main findings from CCI Digital Futures 2010.

Date: 21 April 2010

Dr Mark Ryan was awarded a prestigious Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) Creative Industries Career Fund grant to attend the 2010 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference (SCMS) held in Los Angeles, March 17 to 21.

Dr Mark Ryan says SCMS is one of the pre-eminent annual screen studies conferences, bringing together leading film scholars from around the globe.

"The award was granted to present the paper, Independent from Everyone! Producing Australian Horror Movies for Global Markets, which continues my ongoing research into the horror movies industry.

This paper by Jason Wilson and myself has been published in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Vol. 11 no. 2, April 2010. The abstract is below:

The creative industries are now accepted internationally as a key feature of the post-industrial world, accounting for between 3 and 6 per cent of most nations’ economic activity and employing millions of people globally.

This is among the findings of a new review of the creative industries by Australian academics Professor Terry Flew and Professor Stuart Cunningham of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI).

The Australian arts should be funded to carry out research and to innovate in exactly the same ways as the technological sciences.

This will enable them to deliver even greater value to the public, innovate more, collaborate more widely and engage more deeply with business, a new investigation released by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) finds.

Anna Daniels article in Online Opinion: Monday, 22 February 2010

Late night violence near CBD entertainment venues in Melbourne has apparently escalated over recent months. For a variety of reasons the CBD is increasingly perceived as a late night danger zone, with escalations in glassings, alcohol fuelled attacks and gang bashings.

The campaign against internet piracy suffered a major setback in the iiNet
case last week, but the copyright wars are more than just a matter for the
courts. JULIAN THOMAS and RAMON LOBATO write...

The Perth-based internet service provider
iiNet, which won a remarkable victory against Hollywood in the Federal Court last week, used to advertise its various broadband plans on commercial

Mark Ryan
February 03, 2010 11:00pm

THE Australian film industry is evolving. The days when government film agencies handed out millions of taxpayers' dollars for filmmakers to produce "Australian stories" with little regard to commercial returns are limited.

Arts Minister Peter Garrett and Ruth Harley, the chief executive of film development agency Screen Australia, are championing a new era for Australian film – an era in which Australian movies must attract audiences and be financially viable.

The highly influential editorsweblog picked up the story from Crikey.

The lead item on Crikey on the 13th January 2010 was Margaret Simon's piece based on her analysis of Australian World Internet Project data. Read it here

Dr John Banks, was interviewed on December 17 for Radio National's 'Life Matters', discussing regulation and censorship of video games and the internet filtering debate.

A link with audio of the interview can be found here:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2009/2773953.htm

Mark Ryan talks horror movies on ABC Radio National's Australia talks program today.

Australia's Interactive Games and Entertainment (iGEA) Association and the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) in the United States are promoting the Creative Workforce Program's Games Industry Skills Project.

iGEA is an industry association representing Australian and New Zealand companies in the computer and video game industry.IGDA is the largest non-profit membership organisation serving individuals that create video games in the United States.

People's Daily Online, October 28, 2009

"In recent years, "design" has been a buzzword in Beijing and across the country, signifying a transformation shift from both the government and Chinese people from a low-efficiency "made in China" manufacturing economy to an innovative "created in China" brand, according to Michael Keane, principal research fellow at the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation."

In her blog for Crikey, journalist Margaret Simons reports on the lecture by Jeffrey Cole, one of the key instigators of the World Internet Project - a CCI project.

PETER CAVE: The Federal Government is reviewing patent law, in an attempt to boost innovation and bring in new technology.

Patent laws are supposed to encourage innovation by guaranteeing inventors the exclusive right to exploit their inventions.

But for many years there's been criticism that patents are handed out far too readily, and that this holds back important research and development.

Now the Government's patents body appears to agree with this diagnosis, and has proposed a series of changes to the law.

Oscar McLaren reports.

NINETEENTH-century thinkers and writers, from Charles Darwin to Thomas Hardy, would be awestruck if they could look forward to our times, in the developed world at least.

Once they had overcome the initial shock, they might be struck by four principal developments from their own times: mass education, general adult literacy, globalisation and digitisation, the last particularly embodied in the internet.

Digital media guru John Hartley believes the online domain is changing the ways in which we interact, though not everyone is up to speed. Phil Brown interviews John Hartley for Brisbane News.

SOCIAL networking sites are now more popular than personal email with Australians spending one in every 10 minutes online, research shows.

And it was not just young internet users who were behind the trend on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The biggest surge in social networking was among 35 to 49-year-olds, while almost a quarter of Facebook users were over the age of 50.

Nielsen Online's Global Faces and Networked Places report, released yesterday, found the use of social networking and blogging sites in Australia jumped 4.9 per cent last year.

By Mark David Ryan

Are the Academy Awards heading towards an identity crisis? This year's Academy Awards have been characterised by a major disconnect between the most popular films at the box office and socially important films deemed the 'best pictures' by the Academy.

Moreover, television audiences for the awards have generally been in decline since the early 2000s - though this year's audience improved upon last year's figure - and it's no secret that audiences increase when the most successful box office films are nominated for major awards.

MEDIA RELEASE

Research into our Creative Economy Gets a Boost

Australian Research Council (ARC) Chief Executive Officer, Professor Margaret Sheil, yesterday announced that the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) will receive almost $6 million in further funding. The announcement confirms CCI’s status as Australia’s premier research centre into the impact on the broader economy of the emerging creative sector.

Some interesting research in this report by Scott Ewing, Julian Thomas and from Julianne Schiessl from ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology.

An international workshop on ‘IP aspects of Free Trade Agreements in the Asia-Pacific Region’ is being held today (25 November) and tomorrow at UOW’s Centre for Comparative Law and Development Studies in Asia and the Pacific (CLDSAP).

The workshop has been organised in collaboration with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) and the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law in Munich (MPI).

IN naming his much-hyped $180 million film Australia, director Baz Luhrmann has confidently taken ownership of a brand name so grand, so mighty, that if it bombs it will do so in spectacular fashion.

And if it soars, it will soar like the blackest of eagles against the bluest of Australian skies.

You've heard of 'fair trade' coffee. Well what about 'fair trade' media. Is it possible to develop a labelling system that would give people confidence in the ethical values of the sites they view?

Ellie Rennie spoke to Radio National’s Antony Funnell about the Quality/Control symposium and Open Spectrum Australia's community media labelling scheme. The interview was broadcast on The Media Report on Thursday November 6, 2008.

CANNIBALS, vampires, zombies, serial killers and man-eating crocodiles walk among us in a local revival of the horror movie genre.

They are stalking Australian cinema screens and DVD shelves in unprecedented numbers as the local horror film industry experiences a stunning revival.

Today brings us one of the latest home-grown horror entries, Dying Breed, starring Leigh Whannell, one of the stars and co-creators of the hit film franchise Saw.

Dying Breed melds two Australian legends, the Tasmanian tiger and an escaped convict who turned to cannibalism to survive.

While the rest of the Australian film industry is languishing, horror movies are alive and thriving and reaping in the big bucks according to a Queensland University of Technology researcher.

PhD student Mark David Ryan is undertaking the first in-depth study into the re-emergence of horror films and the reasons why horror hungry fans can't get enough of our Aussie schlock.

Mr Ryan said while the rest of the Australian film industry had experienced a contraction in the sales of films to overseas markets, the demand for Aussie horror films had never been stronger.

Australian horror movies are refusing to die, going against the grain of the languishing Australian film industry, says a university researcher.

Queensland University of Technology PhD student Mark David Ryan is undertaking the first in-depth study into the re-emergence of horror films and the reasons why worldwide horror fans are hungry for productions from Aussie brains.

Mr Ryan said while the rest of the Australian film industry had experienced a contraction in overseas sales, Australian horror movie production had trebled to 60 titles in the past eight years.

Australian horror movies are refusing to die, going against the grain of the languishing Australian film industry, says a university researcher.

Queensland University of Technology PhD student Mark David Ryan is undertaking the first in-depth study into the re-emergence of horror films and the reasons why worldwide horror fans are hungry for productions from Aussie brains.

Mr Ryan said while the rest of the Australian film industry had experienced a contraction in overseas sales, Australian horror movie production had trebled to 60 titles in the past eight years.

Queensland University of Technology PhD student Mark David Ryan is undertaking the first in-depth study into the re-emergence of horror films and the reasons why worldwide horror fans are hungry for productions from Aussie brains.

Mr Ryan said while the rest of the Australian film industry had experienced a contraction in overseas sales, Australian horror movie production had trebled to 60 titles in the past eight years.

"Like the undead from beyond the grave, Australian horror films are alive and well," Mr Ryan said.

What do the movies Saw and Wolf Creek have in common?

If you said they were both Australian horror movies, give yourself a star. But you get a bonus point if you managed to say they were the most profitable Australian horror films ever made.

At a cost of just $1.4 million, Wolf Creek - described by one British magazine as "the nastiest horror film since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" - was sold to a division of Miramax Films for $7.5 million before its world premiere at Sundance, the highest sum a US distributor has paid for an Australian film.

The Media Report on the ABC's Radio National Investigates new research on Australians and their use of the internet. The first comes from the latest Sensis e-Business Report and the second from the Australian Arm of the World Internet Project and it honed in on the use and availability of broadband.

If you are reading this, the popularity of YouTube won't be news, but there is more than one way to measure popularity writes Matthew Ricketson in his blog on The Age website. Ricketson discusses new research into Youtube being conducted by CCI's Jean Burgess and Joshua Green for the Uses of Multimedia project.

INTERNET use is now deeply embedded in Australian culture, with most people seeing it as a prime source of information, an increasingly appealing source of entertainment and the place to turn for breaking news. This is the picture emerging from a major new study of Australians' internet use conducted by the ARC Centre for Creative Innovation at Swinburne University that will be published this month writes Matthew Ricketson in The Age.

Three noted thinkers on the changing nature of media and its consumers. ABC Radio National's Media Report program interviews MIT's Henry Jenkins, Mark Deuze from Leiden University in the Netherlands and Australia´s John Hartley, Research Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript.

ABC television chief Kim Dalton has called on the federal Government to extend Australia's TV content standards to web-based video, a move that would greatly increase government regulation of the internet.

Andrew Field reviews Internet and e-commerce law in the February 2008 issue of the Law Institute Journal.

On the ABC's Radio National Media Report program Anthony Funnell interviews three academics who've been closely studying areas of the Chinese media.

McWilliam, E. ‘Fresh Solutions with stigma’. Higher Education. The Australian. 31 October 2007.

McWilliam, E. ‘Learning in the 21st Century’. Curriculum Matters, Vol 6 (4), October 2007, pp.31-34.

Haukka, S. and Muirhead, B. Investing in ourselves. Online opinion. Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate. 19 September 2007. Available at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6379

McWilliam, E. ‘Creative Futures for a Conceptual Age’. Asian Business Leaders Magazine (Beijing). August 2007.

Tensions generated by the rapid development of intellectual property law and the various interests that define its further role in the economic and legal development processes of Southeast Asian countries was the focus of the latest presentation in UOW's Professorial Lecture Series.

Professor Antons told a lunchtime audience that Southeast Asian developing countries have long had a reputation for copyright piracy and the unauthorised use of trade marks and other forms of intellectual property.

CHASS today (Monday) welcomed the announcement of a new Advisory Council for the Australian Research Council (ARC).

Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Senator Kim Carr has appointed six researchers to provide strategic and policy advice to CEO Professor Margaret Sheil.

Toss Gascoigne, Executive Director of CHASS (the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) said that the appointments will strengthen the ARC.

"The ARC lost some of its independence and a little of its international credibility when the Board was abolished in 2005," he said.

22 January 2008

Professor Stuart Cunningham, CHASS president welcomed the announcement of a review of Australia's national innovation system.

Professor Stuart Cunningham, President of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, said that CHASS sees this as an important step to enable Australia to move beyond an old 1960's smokestack view of innovation.

"Modern innovation depends on bringing people together to work on a problem, making the best use of the available talent," he said.