Cushla Kapitzke is the next speaker here at ATOM2006. She focusses on the implications of copyright law changes in the wake of the Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, and how they may impact on media educators. She notes the rise of a large variety of neologisms - postindustrialism, fast capitalism, the information age, the creative economy, postmodernity, neoliberalism, globalisation, and McDonaldisation - even while the U.S. remains firmly routed in the traditional assumptions of modernity in a variety of ways. Libraries, for example, are often still excellently set up, but remain largely empty as they've failed to engage with the post-modern information needs of their clients. Cushla suggest a set of epochal shifts, from ancient ceremony to the traditional library of modernity, to the new 'libr@ry' which is being explored developed in a number of configurations by various organisations.

Lee Burton and Peter Maggs from the Australian Children's Television Foundation are the next keynote speakers at ATOM 2006, speaking on the children's television debate. The Australian Communications and Media Authority's current review of children's television standards provides a backdrop to this debate. They begin by showing a brief video of kids' statements of what thye'd like to see on TV - perhaps in the form of a dedicated kids' TV channel...

Peter now notes the long history and conflicted future of the ACTF. Government requirements call for 260 hours of C and 130 hours of P programming; within this C quota, Australian TV channels must show a total of 32 hours of first-run children's drama (financed usually around 30% with txpayers' money). However, such shows are invcreasingly shown at times when the intended audience isn't around - kids typically aren't home at 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon, for example. Daytime programming is largely filled with U.S.- and Japanese-made animation, which is often provided to channels free of charge and makes its money through selling related merchandise. In the afternoon, on the other hand, the 4 p.m. timeslot is filled with locally-made shows competing for the same audience, even though the audience isn't likely to be home yet. This could be seen as a waste of taxpayers' money. On the other hand, the audience figures for kid watching TV peak between 5 and 10 p.m. - along with primetime for other demographics.

As if there hadn't been enough conferences over the last few weeks: I'm spending this weekend (mostly) at the Australian Teachers of Media conference here at QUT in Brisbane, which was organised by my colleague Michael Dezuanni. I'm also going to be a featured speaker on Sunday afternoon, talking about how to educate the coming 'Generation C' of produsers.

However, the conference starts with Mizuko Ito from the University of Southern California, speaking about the social life of mobile media. Japan is of course one of the key drivers of (3G) mobile media uptake at this point, especially within the younger generation. Mimi has mainly focussed on the use of digital technology amongst young people outside of school or work - i.e. in what are traditionally seen as non-educational contexts. Here, it is important to understand young people's uses of new technologies on their own terms - to regard them as digial natives and study their uses as such. Further, it is important to understand the social construction of such technologies. What emerges here are kid-driven peer-to-peer knowledge economies, from which adults have much to learn. Compared to traditional anthropology, Mimi's work also looks at a hybrid of the real (the physically local) and the virtual (the online and the remote); this can capture everyday action and local knowledge in personalised, non-institutionalised, and fluid settings.

Well, the AoIR 2006 conference in Brisbane is over, and I'm slowly recovering... If I've been slow in updates to this blog in recent weeks, it's been simply because conference preparations had taken over my life - between running around to get things organised, dealing with last-minute registrations, changes, and other issues, and actually being there to make sure everything happened on the days as we'd planned it, there was very little time left for anything else (including luxuries like, say, sleep). Overall I'm very pleased with how it went, though, and we've had some great feedback on the conference - most importantly, I think we've proved that there is plenty of life outside of the North American and European conference circuits, and I hope that AoIR will continue its drive to engage with international communities of scholars. Asia, Latin America, South Africa - let's go!

As conference chair, of course I didn't get to see anything of the conference beyond my own panels, and the two keynotes. Slowly the reports from the conference are emerging, though, so I get to see a little more of it at last. My thanks especially to Kevin Lim, who not only blogged and photographed extensively at the conference, but also conducted a number of impromptu interviews at the closing reception - the video and some further discussion are over on Kevin's blog, but I've taken the liberty of also posting the video here...

I was interviewed for an ABC Online science story the other day, about an article published by a number of physicists recently. Not the most likely story to comment on for an Internet researcher, you might think (even if, as it turns out, my first degree was in physics) - but what's happened here is that the researchers in question have applied complex network theory to the musicians' database of the All Music Guide (AMG), which both tracks collaborations between musicians and provides recommendations of musical similarity made by its panel of expert contributors. What's come out of this are two datasets, one indicating the network of collaborations across the 30,000-odd musicians tracked by AMG, and one showing the similarities between these artists as AMG's pundits see them.

During the AoIR 2006 conference, we launched the latest addition to M/C - Media and Culture's stable of publications: M/C Dialogue, edited by my colleague Jinna Tay. M/C Dialogue focussed on publishing interviews with scholars, artists, and other public intellectuals, and I'm very excited about it - judging by the initial response there's a great deal of interest in the site already, and it seems to fill a real gap in the online publishing environment. Of course we're also very keen to encourage more interviews to be submitted (an interview with AoIR 2006 keynote speaker Guo Liang by Randy Kluver should be up soon), and I'm particularly hoping that anybody going to major conferences will think about interviewing keynote speakers and other key scholars there (audio and video interviews are particularly encouraged). We are hoping, too, that the peer review process (if for obvious reasons not blind peer review) which we follow for the site will enable interviews to be counted as 'proper' academic publications for once...

I should have expected little else, of course - all I got to see at AoIR 2006 were the two panels I participated in, and the two conference keynotes; my duties as conference chair (i.e. running about to make sure there were no major disasters) prevented me from anything else. The two panels, organised by Terry Flew and Ted M. Coopman, went very well, though. Together, they presented the two sides of citizen journalism: its grounding in the activist tactical media movements of the 1980s and 1990s (on Ted's panel "Byte Me! Digital Media as an Activist Critique and Parallel Mediasphere"), and its continuing longer-term establishment as a legitimate form of journalism in relation to the traditional news industry (on Terry's panel "Online News Media and Citizen Journalism").

At the Creative Places + Spaces conference in Toronto last year, I met a couple of colleagues from Breda University in the Netherlands, who run a number of creative industries-related courses - but in a leisure management context, which is quite different from the approach we're taking at QUT, but also includes exciting new concepts such as ' imagineering'. This week, Peter Horsten and Arend Hardorff are in Brisbane to visit QUT as well as a number of other local organisations (such as Michael Doneman's Edgeware) and explore opportunities for further collaboration. Last night, Ann and I took them out for dinner at the Tibetan Kitchen, and ended up chatting until the restaurant staff had to tell us in no uncertain terms 'we're closing now'. Let's hope we can maintain the connection - good to see you again, guys...

My colleague Graham Meikle from Macquarie University, author of the fabulous Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, has just let me know that his review of my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production will be published in the next issue of Media International Australia. He's kindly allowed me to republish his review here - many thanks, Graham!

I was lucky enough to be a team member in two education research projects proposed to the Carrick Institute in the last application round. One, with my friend and colleague Donna Lee Brien and a host of other colleagues, will work on developing a network of creative writing postgraduates, and I'll post more about it here soon as the project develops. The other, led by Robert Fitzgerald from the University of Canberra, has now been officially announced - here is our press release:

Social Software in Higher Education

Canberra - 24 August 2006