Category: Podcasts

In this seminar, Dr Bunty Avieson examines how death and success exacerbate the ethical dimensions of truth and representation using a casestudy of Timothy Conigrave’s memoir Holding the Man. The book waspublished in 1994 by Penguin Australia, who promoted it as a “tender andsexy” account of his 15-year love affair with schoolmate John Caleo. Theirromance flourished despite resistance from their middle class conservative Catholic families, various infidelities and relationship struggles, andultimately their shared battle with AIDS. It has been described as “soulshaking”,“one of Australia’s most beloved non-fiction books” and “Romeoand Juliet for the AIDS era”. Ten days after Conigrave delivered themanuscript to Penguin, he died, leaving the aftershocks of his personal revelations to reverberate in his absence. This might have been a small butcontained moment of attention for the two families, who could then have returned to privately grieve, except that the book became a bestseller, then a play performed in Australia, NZ, USA and London’s West End andan international feature film with Guy Pearce and Anthony LaPaglia. Holding The Man has become a “living” memoir and it is thefamilies left behind who carry its legacy in a plurality of ways.

Dr Bunty Avieson is a Lecturer in the Department of Media andCommunications at the University of Sydney. She has published three novels, a novella and two memoirs, which have been variously translated intoJapanese, German and Thai, and been awarded two Ned Kelly Crime Writing Awards for her crime fiction.

In this presentation, Dr Kathleen Williams (University of Tasmania), explores the relationship between waste and media. Her work maps how media technologies are disposed of or recirculated in ad hoc economies and networks; creatively reused by hoarders and collectors; or destined for the scrapheap. Through interviews and site visits with waste management and community resource initiatives, this research charts how decisions are made around what becomes waste, how organisations seek to engage communities, and how the lifecycle of media objects can be extended or disrupted. Her work also turns to representations of waste in order to understand our mediatised relationship to it. As media objects become trash, how are these objects being used differently, and how does this influence everyday practice? Drawing upon work in waste studies, memory studies and media archaeology, this presentation combines theoretical understandings of media materiality and disuse alongside emergent community practice and engagement (image: chinatechnews.com).

Dr Kathleen Williams is a lecturer in media at the University of Tasmania. Her work looks at how media technologies can be co-opted from their intended or assumed uses, particularly through the relationship between screen and digital cultures, and nostalgia.

This presentation explores and outlines how we can use social media conversation and social media metrics to understand how citizens value their PSM organisations in real time. This research focuses on the Australian context, and its public service media organisation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which relies on government funding to perform its day-to-day activities, including content production as per its legislated Charter. The research findings indicate there are new agents emerging in these social conversation spaces, recalibrating how users act, communicate and produce content. These new agents are cultural intermediaries who demonstrate high social capital, and are able to interact between distinct stakeholder groups, while negotiating appropriate online governance models, especially with social media ‘ad-hoc publics’ (Bruns and Burgess, 2011).

Dr Jonathon Hutchinson (Ph.D. 2013, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, QUT) lectures in Online and Social Media Communication at the University of Sydney. His current research explores everyday social media use, the role of social media influencers within co-creative environments, and how social media is used in cyber-terrorism. He is a trained ethnographer, has been published in many leading national and international journals, and is developing eResearch methodologies for social media network analysis. He tweets from @dhutchman.

Visiting Norwegian journalism scholar Ivar John Erdal is currently developing a model of locative journalism.

In this two-part lunchtime presentation, Associate Professor Erdal first discusses an innovative research collaboration between Volda University College located in western Norway, and Sunnmorsposten (smp.no), a regional newspaper, which introduced data journalism in 2012. The project, entitled, Situated technology – mediation, experience and journalism, sees selected students working with experienced SMP journalists and editors to develop new forms of digital storytelling; the news content is then co-published on both the newspaper and students’ websites. The next phase of the project includes experimenting with locative content for mobile devices.

In the second part of the presentation, Associate Professor Erdal examines recent conceptualisations of locative media, and journalism for mobile devices, by a range of scholars (Goggin et al., 2015; Westlund, 2013; Campbell, 2016) before sharing some preliminary ideas about his own proposed model. This theoretical inquiry is informed by recent empirical research on the journalism for mobile devices published by Scandinavian and English-language legacy media in Norway, and, in particular, efforts to classify this output in terms of locativeness.

This presentation explores global variation in the uses and consequences of social media. The project involved nine anthropologists living in eight countries in communities as varied as an English village, a factory town in China, a town on the Turkish-Syrian border, an IT complex set in villages within South India, a low income settlement in Brazil, as well as sites in Chile, Italy and Trinidad. It offers a comparative analysis on the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. Some questions we asked are what is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet?

Jolynna Sinanan is a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT University. Previously, she was a Research Fellow in Anthropology at University College London with the Global Social Media Impact Study. She is the author of Social Media in Trinidad (forthcoming, UCL Press) and co-author with Daniel Miller of Webcam (2014, Polity) and Visualising Facebook (forthcoming, UCL Press).

Digital journalism defines its relationship to democracy differently to When traditional journalism. Technological changes have made it possible to participate actively in the creation and distribution of news, a role previously confined to journalists and media houses, thus potentially democratizing journalistic processes. This talk first sets out different models of communicative democracy, notably the elitist, the participatory and the deliberative model. It then explores how these new possibilities of participation affect journalism, journalists and society as a whole, discussing both gains and losses. As yet digital journalism is unevenly spread across the globe, but its affordances have the potential to reinvigorate the participatory and deliberative model of democracy.

Dr Beate Josephi is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. Her research queries the role of democracy in journalism. Recent publications include a chapter on ‘Digital Journalism and Democracy’ in the forthcoming Handbook on Digital Journalism (Sage), edited by Tamara Witschge, Chris Anderson, David Domingo, and Alf Hermida; and a guest-edited issue of Journalism on ‘Decoupling Journalism and Democracy’ (2014).