Blogs

Bremen.
It’s too early, too chilly, and too foggy for words – but regardless, the second day of the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference to ECREA 2010 is about to begin. The keynote speaker this morning is Tristan Mattelart, whose focus is on audiovisual piracy - and he begins by noting the substantial attention already paid to this phenomenon, though mainly as a for of 'criminal' activity. He notes that there is a difference between Internet piracy and physical piracy (the sale of counterfeit DVDs and CDs), and that there are differences in such piracy between different countries.

We already know the legal economy of communication in southern and eastern countries pretty well – but that’s less true for the informal economy of communication, which is nonetheless an important aspect of these overall economies. This informal economy plays a central role in the circulation of media and cultural products, in fact – and what Tristan means by ‘southern and eastern countries’ are countries as far afield as Tunisia, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, and others.

Sadly, the existing literature on the subject of piracy in southern and eastern countries is voluminous, but very narrow in coverage. It is formed mainly of self-interested reports by copyright industries (MPAA, IFPI, BSA, IIPA), and contains alarmist analysis of the dangers which piracy poses to the movie, music, and software industries. What such reports contain are figures on the calculated ‘losses’ to the industry due to pirated content; many southern and eastern countries especially appear as zones of maximum instability for the industry.

Bremen.
The final speaker for the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference is Miriam Stehling, whose focus is on doing a comparative study of globally traded television formats; she’ll use the Top Model format as a case study. The key challenge here is to understand transculturality: new forms of cultural phenomena that go beyond or across cultures. There no longer is necessarily a congruence between culture and territory, and binary approaches to researching international communication cannot work here; instead, there needs to be a focus on similarities and connections between cultures.

Transculturality, then, requires new methods for empirical research, differentiating between transculturality as a research perspective and transculturality as practices of discourse and social action. Miriam’s study of global TV formats provides a perspective on this: there is a strategic transculturality that is used to maximise global profits, but also a transculturality of text (a common subject matter that makes sense for diverse audiences), and a transculturality of reception – in the production of transcultural meanings and/or in transcultural modes of reception.

Bremen.
The final session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 today starts with Hanna Domeyer, who was briefly my office mate at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg when I visited there a couple of years ago. Her interest is in how media users relate to one another across borders and cultures. Such intercultural communication is to be seen as a special mode of social interaction that may happen anywhere and at any time. So, the research challenge is less in finding new research methods, but in developing a specific research perspective on such forms of interaction.

Media use across cultures is made possible by the increasing range of media options available to us. These options can be combined in a wide range of ways. Research into this is often limited to a predefined segment of the media, or a specific form of transnational or transcultural relations. Responses to these limitations include a focus on the entirety of the media forms that a particular person uses, and/or by examining a variety of transnational or transcultural relations.

Bremen.
The final speaker in this session of the ECREA 2010 ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference is Élisabeth Le, whose interest is in a framework for comparing print and online news media. A first step in this could be to compare newspaper front pages and online news homepages. How do they macro-frame the news – and what are the differences between the print and online versions of the same newspapers, or across different countries?

This can be examined using the concept of substantive frames (focussing on issues/events or political actors); studying language, picture, the combination of language and picture, and layout for each. Layout, for example, points to the underlying information hierarchy, from this, it is possible to assess the importance of specific news items and other functionality.

Bremen.
The next speakers in this ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference session are Tobias Kohler and Jan Müller, whose interest is in the computer-based analysis of television footage from multiple countries. This is part of a larger study into automated TV content processing, covering German, US, Brazilian, and Chinese television content. The material examined here, in particular, are the annual year-end review broadcasts. There are substantial format differences here, of course (in length as well as original placement in the broadcast schedule – German clips are longer stand-alone review shows, while US content was broadcast during news bulletins).

This content was coded by a team of students, annotating videos according to a variety of criteria (presence of key actors, setting, topics, etc.). This was done segment by segment, since a universal coding sheet which was applicable across some very different segment types proved very difficult to develop. This allows for a precise analysis – for example, comparing the amount of broadcast time devoted to media actors from specific countries.

Bremen.
The next session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference starts with Stefan Hauser and Martin Luginbühl, whose focus is on textual analysis. Their background is in linguistics, and they are interested in moving beyond the idea that culture, language, nation, and territory form one unproblematic entity – more promising is a more flexible definition by which cultures articulate themselves along a variety of dimensions.

They take a praxeological understanding of culture, therefore: respecting the performative as well as semiotic dimension; taking culture as a category of both content and form; and seeing language as a reflection on spatial affiliation as well as a means of creating space. This connects to contrastive textology, which through parallel text analysis (the comparison of parallel textual corpora) has shown that genres vary according to national and language borders.

Bremen.
If it’s Monday, this must be (a very chilly) Bremen – I’ve made it to the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ conference that is itself a pre-conference to the European Communication Conference (ECREA) in Hamburg. We start today with a keynote by Sonia Livingstone, who begins by noting the importance of cross-national research, but also the difficulties in scaling up research in this way. What are the key problems here, then – intellectual, political, and practical, not least also for multicultural and multinational research teams?

There is also a strong push towards the international sharing of research outcomes, of course; there is significant growth in large-scale research projects, and this is driven by the imperative to understand global communications phenomena. But when is it reasonable also to retain some boundaries around projects? Comparative research is at the cutting edge of research in media and communication, but has yet to be fully thought through – organisationally, methodologically, and from many other perspectives. Two key areas can be distinguished here: cross-national research, and open-ended cross-border mapping of transnational media flows. Published projects often tend to turn out to be hybrid, however – theoretical principles are not always translated into methodological approaches.

It’s that time of the year again – I’m frantically working to get ready for my October overseas trip, which will take me through much of northern Europe. Here’s what’s on the agenda – if you’re in the neighbourhood, say hi (and connect with me on Dopplr to make catching up easier).

My first stop is in Berlin, where we’ve scheduled a couple of workshops for our Mapping Online Publics ARC Discovery team (involving my CCI colleague Jean Burgess as well as our partner researchers Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai from Sociomantic Labs). From there, I’m heading on to Bremen and Hamburg, where we’re presenting our blog and Twitter network mapping at the ECREA 2010 conference (Hamburg, 12-15 Oct.) and its Doing Global Media Studies pre-conference (Bremen, 11-12 Oct.). Afterwards, we’re returning for our second round of project workshops with the guys from Sociomantic.

It’s that time of the year again: my research centre, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), is calling for applications from prospective PhD students (and while this call focusses on PhDs, Masters and Honours applications are also due around the same time…). Undertaking your PhD at the CCI means you will be working with world class researchers who can offer supervision of the highest standards. Our research activities cover a broad range of emerging issues, themes and projects across the entertainment and creative industries including innovation and policy development; significant project collaborations with Asia; a major project looking at broadband services; mapping the creative industries; IP law; a global cultural futures study and other projects which engage community and industry partners in creative industries from major film studios to the Salvation Army and ‘at-risk’ young people working as media co-creators. visit the CCI Projects Page at http://www.cci.edu.au/projects to find out more about the Centre’s activities. There are a broad range of research opportunities available across the CCI’s member organisations in Australia, and I encourage you to have a look at the Website for the full details – application deadlines vary from university to university. Successful PhD projects would start in early 2011.

For applications to my university – Queensland University of Technology, based in Brisbane, Australia –, the relevant application deadlines are 30 September 2010 for international students, and 15 Oct. 2010 for domestic students.

Overall, I am interested in PhD applications from anyone with a research interest in the broad areas of produsage, Web 2.0, and social media, either in general or with a specific focus on fields and technologies including blogs, citizen journalism, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, social network analysis, government 2.0, or related themes. If any of those themes are of interest to you, please get in touch.

In addition to these broader themes, we’re also calling specifically for expressions of interest for a number of concrete research projects. In my own case, these are related to our research into mapping Australian online publics which will examine interactions across blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr, which we’re undertaking as part of an ARC Discovery project, and to our work researching our changing media ecologies. For these projects, we’re particularly interested in expressions of interest from potential students who operate in the following areas:

I spoke at an event organised by the Queensland Chapter of the Australasian Study of Parliament Group last night, in the Queensland Parliamentary Annexe – alongside Democrats leader turned Greens candidate Andrew Bartlett, On Line Opinion founder Graham Young, and Courier-Mail political journalist Craig Johnstone.

The theme of the evening was ‘whether bloggers are the new fourth estate’ – and here’s what  had to say (a bit of a rant, as is pretty much unavoidable after the election campaign we’ve had):