Blog

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Cathy Greenfield, whose interest is in communication studies’ contribution to ‘talking country’ at a time of global crisis. This must necessarily proceed through cross-cultural engagement between First Nations and non-Indigenous people, and is especially important in the context of enduring and renewed struggles for Indigenous sovereignty.

The present project was prompted especially by the development of a mobile walking tour app called Land of Birds in collaboration with the Dja Dja Wurrung people northwest of Melbourne, which would provide access to selected locally relevant stories as users explored the countryside and …

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Cameron McTernan, who is interested in news diversity on social media. Media diversity has long been an issue and a priority in media policy, but has often focussed on media ownership and media content at the outlet level, without necessarily taking into account the role of social media in the distribution of content. This is becoming increasingly important because media supply chains are becoming less linear as social media logics and algorithms affect news distribution.

There is a distinction arising between direct access (through the original sources) and distributed access (as …

The next session at ANZCA 2023 starts with David Nolan, who introduces the idea of ‘racial reckoning’ as both amplified by as well as directed at media; this highlights the failures of racial inequality and is being performed through the ‘diagnostic’ of digital media, which provide a space for critiques of conventional media. Such reckoning has often been addressed, in Australian, by the hiring of Indigenous journalists.

David and team approached this through a series of interviews with practicing Indigenous journalists on the Australian east coast, exploring their own experiences and positionality. This also highlights the embedded knowledge of First …

The second speaker in this ANZCA 2023 is Alysson Watson, whose focus is on the journalistic ‘death knock’: the way journalists approach families who have lost someone in newsworthy circumstances. This is obviously difficult, given the circumstances; it has moved from a literal knock on the door to the use of other technologies, including now especially also social media technologies.

How and why do Australian journalists use such digital death knocks? Alysson conducted a survey of some 100 journalists with extensive experience of death knocks, and interviewed 10 of them. The journalistic field is a microcosm with its own rules …

The next session at ANZCA 2023 is on journalism and war, and starts with Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen, whose interest is in how to visualise twentyfirst-century state and corporate power. Neglected from a visual perspective is that which is not seen – the invisible systems, structures, and processes of corporate-military power, and the indirect, systemic, or socially abstract invisible warfare in which we are immersed daily, and ineluctably participate on various levels.

Today, this happens at the nexus of global corporatisation, digital information and communication technologies, and modern, AI-driven warfare, and is aided by the global digitisation, corporatisation, datafication, and financialisation of …

The second full day at ANZCA 2023 started with my own keynote, on the not-so-slow demise of Twitter under Elon Musk. There was quite a substantial amount of material to work through, of course – here are my slides:

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Julie Browning, whose focus is on the role of campaigning media during the October 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. A referendum represents an unusual campaign in that it is polarised by design (the choice is a simple Yes or No), and can cut across party lines (as it did in this case, at least to some extent).

This can be both an advantage and disadvantage, as it can also lead to disorganised campaigning by multiple groups that otherwise have little in common with each other and do not …

And the next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is my colleague Samantha Vilkins, who continues our focus on the Voice to Parliament referendum by addressing especially the role of opinion polling and poll reporting in the context of the Voice referendum campaign. She begins by noting the long period of public debate about the Voice, going back at least to the election of the Albanese government in May 2022, with a much shorter formal campaign period before the referendum date of 14 October 2023.

Opinion polls provided a kind of spine for the coverage of the Voice debate throughout …

OK, so I skipped the previous session as I got talking about current research projects with a number of colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while, but I’m back for the final session this afternoon, on the recent Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia, where my colleague Sam Vilkins and I are presenting our own papers. I’m the first presenter in the session, so here are my slides:

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Howard Lee, whose focus is on truth in Singapore’s online mediascape. He begins by highlighting the independent media outlet The Online Citizen Asia and the current affairs magazine Jom, who have had various run-ins with the Lee family who have been in control of Singaporean politics for several years.

One example is the saga over former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s house, which was destined for demolition but was saved by one of his sons, who became the current Prime Minister; this resulted in an unusual spat between the siblings …