Snurb's blog

Brisbane.
We begin the morning of the second day at ANZCA 2009 with a keynote by Nick Couldry, whose focus is on the question of voice, especially in the context of neoliberalism. There are two schools of neoliberalism here, though - orthodox, scholarly informed economic neoliberalism as well as a broader neoliberal doctrine which has been applied to much larger areas of society, and especially to culture.

Neoliberalism works with a simplifying force: it uses hegemonic terms such as markets to convince us to treat very different areas as similar - local detail and difference is erased in the process. The response to this is to treat the term neoliberalism similarly, and point out its limitations, in order to be able to think beyond it. We may return to an older idea of the market as a reference point, and ask the economy how its freedom can have a state-creating function. In this, markets provide an organisational function.

Brisbane.
The final speaker at ANZCA 2009 today is Ian Ward, whose focus is on political lobbying - for which new regulations have been introduced by the Rudd government recently. Lobbying is integral to Australian politics, but remains understudied; it is an increasingly professionalised area of politics in Australia. And interestingly, on the new register of lobbyists in Australia, there is also a substantial number of public relations firms - lobbying is no longer driven by old boys' networks, but by professional communicators.

Brisbane.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2009 is Gwilyn Croucher, who focusses on the citizen-consumer and researches this in the context of the pension debacle in the UK. There was a major push under the Blair government to give citizens more choice in public services, and during the 1980s and 1990s the UK government privatised pension schemes, but it is now required to compensate citizens for the loss of pension entitlements due to the systematic provision of incorrect information by the Department of Work and Pensions as part of the privatisation scheme. This information incorrectly implied a government guarantee for pension schemes, many of which subsequently collapsed.

Brisbane.
I'm the first speaker of the next session of ANZCA 2009, presenting some baseline data from our first test run of our blog mapping methodology during the Australian federal election in November 2007. The Powerpoint is below (with audio to follow soonish also online now), and the full paper is online as well. Links to more information are in the final slide of the Powerpoint.

Technorati : 2007, ANZCA 2009, Australia, blogs, election, mapping, politics
Del.icio.us : 2007, ANZCA 2009, Australia, blogs, election, mapping, politics

Brisbane.
The next session at ANZCA 2009 is a panel session discussing the future role of public service broadcasting, focussing on Australia's multicultural broadcaster SBS. This is introduced by my colleague Terry Flew, who notes that SBS is a distinctively different type of public broadcaster, making a very specific contribution to multiculturalism and citizenship.

The first panellist to speak is Stuart Cunningham from the CCi. If SBS had to be invented today, he says, it wouldn't be - today's media environment is fundamentally different from that of the 1970s and 1980s from which it emerged, and today there is a plethora of media channels available to citizens. Additionally, the role of public broadcasters has changed fundamentally - the culture wars of the past decades render a government intervention for the development of a public broadcaster to promote multiculturalism inconceivable today. Protection and projection of public culture is no longer an unproblematic public goal.

Brisbane.
The second keynote at ANZCA 2009 is by Philip Kitchen, whose interest is in integrated marketing communication, which he says is especially important in the context of the current financial crisis. In this context, there's a need for curriculum, not conquest marketing, for relationship building rather than just sales, for sharing with consumers rather than shouting at them. Consumer marketplace empowerment, however, may only be apparent at this point - while we are moving in that direction, we haven't reached the end yet.

Brisbane.
The third speaker in this ANZCA 2009 session is Rowan Wilken, whose interest is in the metaphors applied to mobile telephony. The power of metaphor lies in the fact that it enables one well-know domain to provide an interpretive framework for another, less known domain. Metaphor proliferates, therefore, especially also in descriptions of new technologies, and has been studied in some detail in relation to the Internet, but less so for mobile technologies.

Common metaphors include navigation - cyber, for example, comes from the Greek kybernetes, or steersman, and the information superhighway is a more recent metaphor in the same vein. Such metaphors also point to the need to regulate and control these spaces, and are also related to a common group of transportation metaphors. Another common metaphor is linked to pioneer myths - as in Howard Rheingold's book Virtual Communities, at one point subtitled Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. These perpetuate western colonial metaphors and a private property model, some have argued - again highlighting possible regulatory frameworks for these new technologies.

Brisbane.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2009 is Jess Pacella, who focusses on new opportunities in cultural geography by combining Global Information Services and cultural studies approaches. The role of mental maps emerging from semi-structured interviews is particularly interesting here, and Jess explores this in the context of media depictions of Adelaide's northern suburbs and their effects on residents' mental depictions of the area.

South Australian media present a consistently negative image of the northern suburbs; this leads to Adelaide watching this place in a particular way. Jess and her team monitored news stories in a number of state outlets, and found an overwhelmingly negative coverage, focussing especially on crime. This also leads to residents downplaying their origins in job applications and similar documents.

Brisbane.
The first session here at ANZCA 2009 begins with a paper by Lincoln Dahlberg, whose interest is in the analysis of economic systems by various discourse theories. He begins by noting that Habermas after 1989 gave up on the possibility of post-capitalism, shifting to arguing for a democratic oversight of capitalism instead; critics say that at best this is a weak stance. His separation of spheres between culture and economy is also seen as flawed, according to his critics.

Laclau's theory provides what may be a more cogent theory of capitalism; it dispenses with that binary division, and more explicitly focusses on power and contestation of dominant forces and social relations, providing opportunities for how capitalism may be countered. What does it mean to think of capitalism and contestation in terms of discourse, then? In contrast to Habermas, Lincoln sees discourse as all meaningful practices, ideas, objects, and thus includes the economy in this; capitalism can therefore be seen as a hegemonic discourse in its own right, which positions its subjects. It is ideological in that it has become seen as natural.

Brisbane.
Over the next few days I'll be blogging from the ANZCA 2009 conference - one which I didn't have to travel very far for, as it's held right here on the QUT Creative Industries Precinct down from my office. We begin with a keynote by Barbie Zelitzer, President of the International Communication Association, whose focus is on the visual depiction of death in the news. Such images require the viewer to imagine what we cannot see, but then, news is supposed to tell us what is there. The moment of death is one of the most powerful images in the news, and raises (amongst others) a wide range of ethical issues. Key recent examples include images related to the 'war on terror', from the 11 September attacks to the hanging of Saddam Hussein.