Publications

This paper proposes that publicly funded arts and cultural organisations should aspire to, and be funded to, engage in Research and Experimental Development (R&D), particularly that which aims at innovation, that is, new social application.

Abstract

It has now been over a decade since the concept of creative industries was first put into the public domain through the Creative Industries Mapping Documents developed by the Blair Labour government in Britain. The concept has developed traction globally, but it has also been understood and developed in different ways in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America, as well as through international bodies such as UNCTAD and UNESCO.

Julian Thomas
The Australian
February 22, 2010 12:00AM

CONFUSION and disarray surround Stephen Conroy's decision to rebate licence fees for commercial television broadcasters.

The decision raises the most basic question that can be asked about government dispensation of any kind: what was this money for?

There are young Australians who are already making a name (and money) for themselves in the latest market for creative content – and it didn’t exist a moment ago. YouTube is a huge repository of amateur content, but it is also rapidly evolving into a site that has legally contracted Hollywood movies and TV shows but is working out ways to share revenues from advertising with gifted and committed amateurs whose creativity attracts a big following.

Can government play a role in assisting Australian creative talent to catch some of dynamism of emerging markets for culture?

Media companies’ campaign against internet piracy suffered a major setback last week when a federal court judgement let internet service providers off the hook for their customers’ illegal downloads. But the copyright wars are more than just a matter for the courts, write Julian Thomas and Ramon Lobato in Inside Story

The following report considers a number of key challenges the Australian Federal Government faces in designing the regulatory framework and the reach of its planned mandatory internet filter. Previous reports on the mandatory filtering scheme have concentrated on the filtering technologies, their efficacy, their cost and their likely impact on the broadband environment. This report focuses on the scope and the nature of content that is likely to be caught by the proposed filter and on identifying associated public policy implications.

Outlining their radical new roadmap for cultural R&D, the authors’ proposals challenge two entrenched prejudices, which block arts and cultural organisations from playing their full role in society and economy.

Australian Financial Review

Creativity is today’s ultimate black box a Rorschach blot onto which there are projected innumerable meanings. When academic Richard Green reviewed the literature recently, he found so much variation that he concluded the field was ‘so attenuated, extenuated, or misunderstood that operationalising of the key concepts is missing or impossible’. He tried to order the field, and constructed a profile of 42 models of creativity which, when combined with assorted variations and typologies, totted up 303 variables!

One of the most wide-ranging and sophisticated critiques of creative industries policy argues that it is a kind of Trojan horse, secreting the intellectual heritage of the information society and its technocratic baggage into the realm of cultural practice

This paper explores the rise of cultural economy as a key organising concept over the 2000s. While it has intellectual precursors in political economy, sociology and postmodernism, it has been work undertaken in the fields of cultural economic geography, creative industries, the culture of service industries and cultural policy where it has come to the forefront, particularly around whether we are now in a ‘creative economy’.

A fully revised edition of the leading Australian introductory text on media studies, incorporating extensive analysis of the impact of communications.

With the revenue downturn for Fairfax Media being announced on Monday, I got the call from Ashley Hall at the ABC’s PM program to give my opinion. At 2.45pm I may not have been sure that I had an opinion, but the nature of the relationship between news journalists and academics is that it would be good for all concerned if you could get an opinion, and give that to us to put on air. With Crikey publisher Eric Beecher and former ACCC head Allan Fels also offering their opinions, I was in good company on the PM program.

Much recent research into citizen journalism has focussed on its role in political debate and deliberation. Such research examines important questions about citizen participation in democratic processes – however, it perhaps places undue focus on only one area of journalistic coverage, and presents a challenge which only a small number of citizen journalism projects can realistically hope to meet.

In this paper, we provide specific examples of the educational promises and problems that arise as multiliteracies pedagogical initiatives encounter conventional institutional beliefs and practices in mainstream schooling. This paper documents and characterizes the ways in which two specific digital learning initiatives were played out in two distinctive traditional schooling contexts, as experienced by two different student groups: one comprising an elite mainstream and the other an excluded minority.

This paper traces how the concept of globalisation has been understood in media and communications, and the ongoing tension as to whether we can claim to be in an era of ‘global media’. A problem with this discussion is that it continues to revolve around a scalar understanding of globalisation, where the global has superseded the national and the local, leading to a series of empirically unsustainable, and often misleading, claims.

A pyrrhic victory for the American recording industry shows that fast broadband and new applications demand a rethink of the law, writes Julian Thomas on Inside Story.

YouTube is one of the most well-known and widely discussed sites of participatory media in the contemporary online environment, and it is the first genuinely mass-popular platform for user-created video. In this timely and comprehensive introduction to how YouTube is being used and why it matters, Burgess and Green discuss the ways that it relates to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy.

Story Circle is the first collection ever devoted to a comprehensive international study of the digital storytelling movement, exploring subjects of central importance on the emergent and ever-shifting digital landscape.

* Covers consumer-generated content, memory grids, the digital storytelling youth movement, participatory public history, audience reception, videoblogging and microdocumentary
* Pinpoints who is telling what stories where, on what terms, and what they look and sound like