Publications

What does the Australian census tell us about how artists earn their living?

Life without the internet, a very new technology, seems almost unimaginable for most people in western nations. Today the internet is intrinsic to media and communications, entertainment, politics, defence, business, banking, education and administrative systems as well as to social interaction. The Internet disentangles this extraordinarily complex information and communication technology from its place in our daily lives, allowing it to be examined anew.

This report presents findings from the second survey of the Australian component of the World Internet Project. This survey is a project of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology.

This report provides an overview of the study, presenting a broad picture of the Internet in Australia, with comparisons to our earlier 2007 study, and to the international findings of our partners in the World Internet Project.

Australia currently lacks a mechanism to gather evidence on the formation of public attitudes to the introduction of new technologies, particularly the formation of attitudes to nuclear energy technology.

This is a limiting factor in achieving informed debate in the development of a national energy policy.

These are key findings in a research project recently completed by the National Academies Forum. Its report, Understanding the Formation of Attitudes to Nuclear Power in Australia, will be released today at a CEDA function in Perth (details below).

The Creative Economy Report Card provides a snapshot of key facts about Australia's creative industries, the creative workforce and businesses -- based on analysis of national statistics and reports.

Abstract

It has now been over a decade since the concept of creative industries was first put into the public domain through the Creative Industries Mapping Documents developed by the Blair Labour government in Britain. The concept has developed traction globally, but it has also been understood and developed in different ways in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America, as well as through international bodies such as UNCTAD and UNESCO.

The phenomenon of consumer co-creation is often framed in terms of whether either economic market forces or socio-cultural non-market forces ultimately dominate. We propose an alternate model of consumer co-creation in terms of co-evolution between markets and non-markets.

This paper proposes that publicly funded arts and cultural organisations should aspire to, and be funded to, engage in Research and Experimental Development (R&D), particularly that which aims at innovation, that is, new social application.

Julian Thomas
The Australian
February 22, 2010 12:00AM

CONFUSION and disarray surround Stephen Conroy's decision to rebate licence fees for commercial television broadcasters.

The decision raises the most basic question that can be asked about government dispensation of any kind: what was this money for?

There are young Australians who are already making a name (and money) for themselves in the latest market for creative content – and it didn’t exist a moment ago. YouTube is a huge repository of amateur content, but it is also rapidly evolving into a site that has legally contracted Hollywood movies and TV shows but is working out ways to share revenues from advertising with gifted and committed amateurs whose creativity attracts a big following.

Can government play a role in assisting Australian creative talent to catch some of dynamism of emerging markets for culture?

Media companies’ campaign against internet piracy suffered a major setback last week when a federal court judgement let internet service providers off the hook for their customers’ illegal downloads. But the copyright wars are more than just a matter for the courts, write Julian Thomas and Ramon Lobato in Inside Story

The following report considers a number of key challenges the Australian Federal Government faces in designing the regulatory framework and the reach of its planned mandatory internet filter. Previous reports on the mandatory filtering scheme have concentrated on the filtering technologies, their efficacy, their cost and their likely impact on the broadband environment. This report focuses on the scope and the nature of content that is likely to be caught by the proposed filter and on identifying associated public policy implications.

Outlining their radical new roadmap for cultural R&D, the authors’ proposals challenge two entrenched prejudices, which block arts and cultural organisations from playing their full role in society and economy.

Australian Financial Review

Creativity is today’s ultimate black box a Rorschach blot onto which there are projected innumerable meanings. When academic Richard Green reviewed the literature recently, he found so much variation that he concluded the field was ‘so attenuated, extenuated, or misunderstood that operationalising of the key concepts is missing or impossible’. He tried to order the field, and constructed a profile of 42 models of creativity which, when combined with assorted variations and typologies, totted up 303 variables!

One of the most wide-ranging and sophisticated critiques of creative industries policy argues that it is a kind of Trojan horse, secreting the intellectual heritage of the information society and its technocratic baggage into the realm of cultural practice