Digital Futures

Congratulations to John Hartley, Distinguished Professor at QUT and Research Director at CCI, for his recent Member of the Order of Australia (AM) award announced last Monday in the Queens Birthday honours list.

Vice-Chancellor Peter Coaldrake has recently approved the award for the title of Distinguished Professor to Professor Stuart Cunningham in recognition of his outstanding achievements as a leading researcher and his contribution to humanities both nationally and internationally.

The announcement also notes the award also recognises his eminence in leading both the successful bid and a subsequent re-bid, for Australia's only ARC Centre of Excellence in the Humanities arena.

The CCI annual report for 2008 is now available to download as a PDF. Or if you would like to receive a print copy please email infocci@qut.edu.au to request a copy.

PLATFORM Journal of Media & Communication is an international peer review journal featuring postgraduate work in the field of Media and

Communication. PLATFORM is an online journal available at

http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/index.html

As part of our efforts to promote the work of promising emerging scholars in the field, we would like to invite you to nominate your postgraduate students as guest author for our inaugural issue, to be published in June 2009.

The CCI's Digital Futures Project has just released the First World Internet Project Report.

This marks the first time that a worldwide partnership of research institutions has compiled data on the behaviour and views of Internet users and non-users. In 2008 participating countries included Australia, Canada, China, Columbia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, Macao, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States.

In the past two months the Digital Futures team has been traveling the country talking to the various chapters of the Australian Computer Society.

The internet is everywhere: at work, at home, and on the move. And if the federal government has its way, it will soon be in every school.

But despite its ubiquity, we know very little about how the net is used, where and by whom. The World Internet Project is attempting to answer these questions and the Australian arm of the project has just released its initial findings with some surprising results.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has just announced that four new members will be joining its Communications Consumer Consultative Forum (CCF) including CCI's Julian Thomas. Julian is Professor of Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology and heads the International Creative Content Cultures and Australian Advantage program at CCI.

The main report from the survey will be released in April 2008. Thereafter we will be preparing for publication a number of articles based on the survey findings. In addition we will be providing presentation briefings to organisations including Telstra, the Australian government’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, and Multimedia Victoria. The first international comparative report from the broader project will be published in the first half of 2008.

In 2007 we hosted Professor Fred Fletcher as a Visiting Professor at Swinburne. Professor Fletcher is a distinguished Canadian media scholar. Based at York University, he is a key member of the World Internet Project.

The first survey has now been completed. It was administered by the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing team at the Swinburne University of Technology’s Australian Centre for Emerging Technologies and Society. We achieved the 1,000 responses we were aiming for and met quotas in terms of gender, region and age.

In July 2007 the Institute for Social Research and CCI jointly hosted the annual World Internet Project 2007 partners' meeting at the Melbourne Museum over three days (July 10-12). The 22 members in attendance represented 12 countries; in addition to the members, speakers and CCI and ISR staff, they were joined by representatives of Multimedia Victoria and the Department of Communications and Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA).

The meeting was a great success, and attracted significant coverage in The Age newspaper, which published some of our interim findings from the survey.