Politics

Brisbane.


The third speaker in this session at ANZCA 2009 is Tim Highfield, who works on a comparative study of political blogs in Australia and France (and is one of my PhD students). He focusses here on the Australian side and its reaction to the inauguration of Barack Obama. The project tracks some 245 blogs and news Websites in Australia, and extracts from these each post (and its links) as they become available online. These data are then quantitatively analysed for keyword and link patterns.

The Obama inauguration was a major political event, of course, and provided a useful case study for this work; other such samples could be the swine flu epidemic or the 'utegate' controversy storm in a teacup. Interestingly, only about 50 blogs in the population published a post or more during the two weeks surrounding the inauguration (possibly due to the fact that January is a major holiday month in Australia). There was no major spike on inauguration day itself, either.

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.


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.

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.

Copenhagen.


The third speaker in this session at COST298 is Funda Başaran Özdemir. Her interest is in the use of alternative news Websites in Turkey - in particular, of the labour movement site Sendika.org. Traditionally, monopolies of knowledge have determined what qualifies as knowledge and how it it disseminated; they derive their power from mastery of complexity, the control of raw media materials, and their performativity, speed, and the ability to afford high costs. Opposed to such strategic interests are tactical initiatives which insert themselves into the cracks and exploit temporary opportunities.

Athens.


From here we move on to Panayotis Pantos as the final WebSci '09 speaker on online politics. He begins by posing the fundamental question 'what is politics'? Do we understand by the term only elections and campaign, political parties, unions and other political organisations, and lobby groups, or is politics the process by which groups make collective decisions?

Online communication addresses the tensions between private and collective, participation and mediation, and physical distance and the increase of communication - we are no longer merely receivers, but also producers of information; our existence online abolishes some long-held understandings of how the communicatory and political process is supposed to work (but of course it does not eradicate all differences or enables all of us to participate in the same way).