Creative Industries

Brisbane.


The next speaker here at ANZCA 2009 is Sal Humphreys, presenting on the knitting Website Ravelry as a social network market. Discussions of intellectual property, distributed participation, and user-generated content have struggled to keep up with these developments: social economy is intertwined and interconnected with commercial economy, and there are serious questions about when participation becomes exploitation.

Social network markets characterise these ideas as emergent, and provide a useful basis for their theorisation. Mass media theory also fails to align effectively with these new interactive environments. HOw is power distributed, who has agency, what is the role and impact of institutions in relation to these environments?

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.

Hamburg.


The final speaker for Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Gabriele Siegert from the University of Zürich, who summarises the conference. She begins by noting the unwillingness of citizens to continue to pay for media, and suggests that changed orientation in media organisations will necessarily also change the content of the media - product placement, for example, will necessarily affect the content within which products are placed.

There are two key areas here: the structural changes in advertising, for which product placement is one phenomenon - it is a sign of a new logic which is present well beyond television entertainment. However, this new model will not replace more conventional advertising; not least, it has yet to be researched in full.

Hamburg.


The next speaker is Dieter Klumpp, Director of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation, host of Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009. Changes in what is considered to be quality content are driven by changes to the entire media sector - old media are perhaps being substituted in part by new media, but the demand for information has not grown as quickly as the availability of content, so this is nowhere near a full substitution. There is a suggestion that the public is being atomised, that it is fragmenting, and what quality means is ever more difficult to identify.

Hamburg.


The next speaker at the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 conference is me, speaking about produsage and appropriate approaches for business to cooperate with produsage communities. Here's the Powerpoint with audio soundtrack; audio to come as soon as possible:

Technorati : Alcatel-Lucent 2009, business, collaboration, community, pro-am, produsage, user-led

Del.icio.us : Alcatel-Lucent 2009, business, collaboration, community, pro-am, produsage, user-led

Hamburg.


The next speaker at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Volker Agüeras Gäng from Politik-Digital.de , a new online platform which has recently focussed especially on a Dutch policy programme to support digital pioneers. He begins with a statement by Ariana Huffington, saying that journalism will not only survive, but flourish: users surf and use search engines to identify, and collate quality content which is updated on an ongoing basis. This new model is based on the networking and interlinkage of content.

Hamburg.


The next speaker at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Volker Lilienthal, Augstein Foundation Professor at the University of Hamburg. He notes the reception theory-based definition of quality which Rainer Esser highlighted in the previous presentation, but himself continues with a production theory-based definition, which holds that journalists can also produce quality journalism even if their audience is no longer interested in such content.

Product placement, he notes, may be acceptable if editorial independence remain unaffected. But how can this work in a concrete case - editors and journalists, after all, are employees of their organisations, and are unlikely to be entirely independent from their economic agendas. Journalists must try, though, to make clear decisions about what content is relevant, what audiences should be confronted with, and what content is merely a result of particular business or other interests.

Hamburg.


We move on now to the economic perspective on quality content at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009, and begin with Klaus Goldhammer from Goldmedia. He notes the current financial crisis; Germany's economy is expected to shrink by 6%, for example, and this has led not least also to the demise of a number of major magazine publications in the country. There has been a 20% decline in the circulation of German newspapers over the past ten years (leading some to increase their sales price); there was a 82% decrease in the stock price of leading commercial television company ProSiebenSat.1; while at the same time proceeds from television licences to the public broadcasters have increased substantially.

Hamburg.


Stefan Engels from legal firm Lovells LLP is the next speaker at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009. He outlines the new rules for product placement, but begins by outlining again the indepence of publication processes, the protection of informed recipients, the need for neutrality of the media in the free market, as the three key drivers of the separation of advertising and content which is required of all edited media under German law.

New rules from the European Union, in December 2007, and their implementation under German law which is proceeding with current draft legislation and must be completed by the end of 2009, allow the possibility of loosening these separation requirements, but do not require changes.

Hamburg.


We move on to the post-lunch session at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009, which opens with an introduction by Wolfgang Schulz, Director of the Hans-Bredow-Institut where I'm currently based. He notes the legal problems with the integration of advertising into programming (as product placement, or in related forms). Traditionally, German law requires a clear separation of advertising and programme content; do changes in advertising principles weaken this separation, or can it be upheld?