Publications

Social media sites Twitter and Facebook played a crucial role in disseminating information during the 2011 Queensland floods. That is the key finding of a report released today by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), and available for download at http://cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf.

CCI researchers Assoc. Prof. Axel Bruns and Dr. Jean Burgess from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Assoc. Prof. Kate Crawford and Frances Shaw from the University of New South Wales focussed especially on the role of Twitter, which was prominently used by the Queensland Police Service during the crisis.

“Through their @QPSMedia Twitter account, police staff provided timely updates directly from the Queensland Premier’s situation meetings,” said Professor Bruns. “Many mainstream media picked up on these updates and included them in their own news tickers.”

Dr Burgess added that social media did much more than just improve communication between police and media organisations. “During the week of 10 January 2011, some 15,000 users participated in the #qldfloods hashtag on Twitter, sharing news, advice, photos and videos of the inundation,” she said.

The rise of creative industries requires new thinking in communication, media and cultural studies, media and cultural policy, and the arts and information sectors. The Creative Industries sets the agenda for these debates, providing a richer understanding of the dynamics of cultural markets, creative labor, finance and risk, and how culture is distributed, marketed and creatively reused through new media technologies. This book:

-develops a global perspective on the creative industries and creative economy

-draws insights from media and cultural studies, innovation economics, cultural policy studies, and economic and cultural geography

-explores what it means for policy-makers when culture and creativity move from the margins to the center of economic dynamics

-makes extensive use of case studies in ways that are relevant not only to researchers and policy-makers, but also to the generation of students who will increasingly be establishing a ‘portfolio career’ in the creative industries

International in coverage, The Creative Industries traces the historical and contemporary ideas that make the cultural economy more relevant that it has ever been. It is essential reading for students and academics in media, communication and cultural studies.

The Creative Industries, Culture and Policy is available to purchase via Sage.

This submission made to the Independent Media Inquiry presents and analyses data from the Australian component of the World Internet Project. The data shows that the internet has quickly become a key news and information source for Australians. Online official news sources mostly run by existing 'offline' news organisations dominate. The data also points to most consumers reluctance to pay for news and information delivered online.

This submission has been prepared by Stuart Cunningham (Director, CCI, Queensland University of Technology), Luke Jaaniste (Research Fellow, CCI), Ruth Bridgstock (Vice Chancellor’s Research
Fellow, QUT Creative Industries Faculty) and John Banks (Senior Lecturer, QUT Creative Industries).

This submission was made to the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into the economic structure and performance of the Australian retail industry. It presents and analyses World Internet Project data from surveys undertaken in 2007, 2009 and 2011 to help the Commission understand the state of play in online retail in Australia.

New Deputy Director, thanks to Research Director

Jean Burgess has been confirmed by the ARC in the new position of Deputy Director. John Hartley has decided to step down from his role as Research Director to concentrate on his major project in the centre, Cultural Science, and also his continuing role in Risk and Representation.

Jean says this: “I am delighted to be taking on the role of Deputy Director at this moment in the Centre's history - a moment where our work is more relevant than ever, given the multiple national media and cultural policy reviews currently taking place against a backdrop of significant disruption centred around the digital media environment. It is also a moment which sees a number of new Chief Investigators and university nodes join the Centre, bringing with them new projects and new inputs to our forward research agenda, particularly in the digital media area. I am particularly committed to developing meaningful and productive collaborations across all the nodes of the centre, through sustained ongoing collaboration as well as strategic events like our regular Symposia and roundtables. I look forward to continuing the momentum that has been building among our outstanding Early Career Researchers. We have continued to receive very positive feedback from participants in our Emerging Scholars workshops, which have increasingly focused on providing opportunities for peer learning, collaboration and co-authorship. The sustained connections and relationships that are developing among our Early Career Researchers through the CCI have already led to new ideas and concrete collaborations; and will be an essential part of the legacy and future research agenda of the Centre.”

As we were able to do at July’s Symposium, this is again the place to acknowledge the tremendous role that John Hartley as Research Director has played throughout the life of the centre, and of course well before that in terms of the planning and work to make the original bid back in 2004. John’s thought leadership and exceptionally high standards of academic performance have set benchmarks that have lifted the centre and set its sights very high.

New partners

The centre has taken on an enhanced shape with the formal admission of UNSW, RMIT University and Deakin University as institutional partners. This means we can also warmly welcome new Chief Investigators Stephanie Donald and Larissa Hjorth (RMIT), Catharine Lumby (UNSW), and Deb Verhoeven (Deakin). Chief Investigator Denise Meredyth moves from Swinburne to RMIT as does Christoph Antons from Wollongong to Deakin. Our partnership with UNSW means that we will be holding our next symposium in Sydney from 16-18 November. We are currently finalising the symposium program which will be sent to all on our mailing list.

Our Advisory Board is also morphing. Farewell to Margaret Seares whose contributions to the board's deliberations have been characterised by great authority and value, particularly her role in urging us to develop a CCI ‘narrative’, the first draft of which is here: http://tiny.cc/5bstb. And welcome to Tony Bennett who has generously accepted our offer to join the Board, and will attend his first meeting in November. Tony joined UWS as Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory at the Centre for Cultural Research in 2009, and is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His influential work in the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, cultural sociology, and museum studies has been translated into many languages, and he has worked in a consulting or advisory capacity for a range of governmental organisations, including UNESCO and the Council of Europe, and conducted research collaborations with a wide range of cultural sector and government organisations in Australia and Britain.

CCI Symposium

Our symposium in late July, our tenth, was our best attended yet, with over 100 registrations for the main symposium and over 70 research higher degree students participating in the Emerging Scholars workshop. New QUT Creative Industries Executive Dean Rod Wissler welcomed delegates. The symposium opened with Advisory Board chair Terry Cutler addressing ‘The Big Picture: how socio-cultural research fits into the broader innovation framework’, proceeded by a panel on Policy Convergence featuring Malcolm Long, Terry Flew and Richard Eccles, leaders of current policy and review processes dealing with media and culture in Australia. There were also a number of international guests who featured as keynote speakers and discussion leaders around the symposium themes: policy convergence, social innovation and media ethnography—Yudhishthir (Raj) Isar, Professor of Global Communications and Jean Monnet Professor of Cultural Policy Studies at The American University of Paris; T.L. Taylor, renowned internet and games studies scholar based in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen; and Arthur Grau, community manager and social network organiser for ‘Applications for Good’ at One Economy in the US.

Amongst much else, the symposium featured Benchmarker (see http://www.benchmarker.org.au/), a case study of policy- and industry-relevant research. The project got this notice from our Advisory Board Chair, Terry Cutler in a speech to Oracle Thought Leaders in August called Are we innovating enough?

"Another outstanding example of the value of granular sectoral data is the Creative Business Benchmarker developed by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation for the Queensland Government. This is a unique business tool that allows firms to compare their own performance to similar firms in Queensland, measuring firm productivity, profitability, growth and exports. For individual firms it provides a practical performance tracking and diagnostic tool, for industry associations it provides an authoritative and dynamic situation analysis, and for Government it provides, almost uniquely, a tool to track the impact of industry development initiatives and the return on investment. The greater deployment of such granular performance measurement tools would greatly enhance the evaluation of how innovation is working on the ground, and help to better focus the efforts of all parties."

The symposium also saw the launch of five books written or edited by Centre staff: Copyright Future Copyright Freedom edited by Brian Fitzgerald and Benedict Atkinson; Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts (Fourth Edition) by John Hartley; Creative Industries and Economic Evolution by Jason Potts; China’s Creative Industries by Lucy Montgomery; and The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights: Comparative Perspectives from the Asia-Pacific Region edited by Christoph Antons. The centre’s incredibly productive researchers continue to produce core academic outputs of high relevance and quality.

The feedback we have received from those who attended has been overwhelmingly positive, and we look forward to continuing the momentum and dialogue at our next symposium from 16-18 November at UNSW. Video and images of the July Symposium are now available at http://t.co/aXtyco4.

Our brilliant early career researchers!

CCI Senior Research Associate Mark Ryan played a key role in QUT’s purchase of one of the nation's largest collections of ozploitation and art house films. The titles were amongst 20,000 videos and DVDs put on the market after the closure of Brisbane’s much-loved cult film rental shop Trash Video. Over 500 zombie flicks and Ozploitation reels like Alvin Purple, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Mad Dog Morgan are now firmly ensconced in the university's archives at Kelvin Grove. The story was widely reported in the media including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Screen Hub.

CCI PhD candidate Sonja Vivienne participated in The Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme this July, joining a multidisciplinary assortment of PHD researchers and presenters from around the world, discussing themes of ‘privacy’ ‘participation’ and ‘representation’ from computer science, social science, political, legal and cultural perspectives via a range of qualitative, quantitative and hybrid research methodologies. Sonja has blogged about her experiences at http://www.cciresearchspace.org/

Kylie Pappalardo, PhD Candidate in CCI and QUT’s School of Law, undertook the Master of Laws Program at Georgetown University in Washington DC From August 2010 to May 2011. Kylie graduated on the Dean's List and with the Thomas B. Chetwood S.J. Prize for the student with the best GPA in the LLM General Program. She shares her experience in her blog at http://www.cciresearchspace.org/ ‘One year in Washington DC’.

Policy developments in Australia

The CCI has been active in contributing to several inquiries and policy development processes happening this year. As reported to you last newsletter, Terry Flew is chair of a comprehensive review for the Federal Government into the classification of television, film, music, online content, video games and advertising. Recently CCI and Swinburne partner the Institute for Social Research (ISR), hosted the Content Crisis and Convergence Roundtable, which was attended by over 80 people at UNSW’s downtown campus. The Roundtable sought to provide a platform for those interested in what the research tells us about convergence, and how researchers and citizens can make a positive contribution at this important moment in Australian public policy. The event program and audio are available at http://tiny.cc/k3hxn (program) and http://tiny.cc/20zug (audio). The CCI’s substantial submission to the Convergence Review by Ben Goldsmith, Stuart Cunningham and Julian Thomas is available at http://tiny.cc/3tonq. A supplementary submission to the convergence review was prepared by Ben Goldsmith and Stuart Cunningham and is available at http://tiny.cc/l5jkc. And in his capacity as CHASS board member, Stuart Cunningham chaired a National Cultural Policy Workshop in Sydney in August. CCI is currently preparing a substantial submission to the National Cultural Policy process, after last year making a submission in the consultation phase (available at http://tiny.cc/x1s0f).

Essentially, the story of the CCI has been to give substance to the link between creative industries and innovation, to explore its implications for our core academic discipline fields and several policy domains and, working with industry and community, to assist in its application in practical circumstances. In short, it has sought to mainstream innovation in and through the creative industries for policy consideration, deepen it for academic engagement, and apply it for industry and community benefit.

The ‘object of study’ has been arguably more changeable over the period than fields of research intensity such as biotechnology, medical research or IT. Rapid developments, in particular in social media, have occasioned major social, economic and cultural impact. Significant theoretical work has been developed around economics and culture which attempts to feed into this volatile landscape. There is much further to be done.

This narrative is organised around the impact or ‘National Benefit’ claims the centre has set itself from day one. These are outcomes-based and thus most appropriate.

Download the full story here

This submission has been prepared by Ben Goldsmith, Senior Researcher, CCI, and Stuart Cunningham, Director, CCI, Queensland University of Technology.

Abstract

In late 2009, Sandra Haukka secured funding from the auDA Foundation to explore what older Australians who never or rarely use the Internet (referred to as ‘non-users’) know about the types of online products and services available to them, and how they might use these products and services to improve their daily life. This project aims to support current and future strategies and initiatives by:

This report documents the circumstances and experiences of 3 remote Indigenous communities in central Australia and outlines the reasons for the low level of internet take-up, and considers the future prospects for ‘home internet’ in these communities.

The global release of 250,000 United States Embassy diplomatic cables to selected media sites worldwide through the WikiLeaks web site was arguably the major global media event of 2010. As well as the implications of the content of the cables for international politics and diplomacy, the actions of WikiLeaks and its controversial editor-in-chief, the Australian Julian Assange, bring together a range of arguments about how the media, news and journalism are being transformed in the 21st century.

Concerted efforts to enforce global intellectual property rights (IPR) continue to focus intensely on the developing countries of East Asia, and China in particular. These efforts have spawned a complex system of legal mechanisms that is still very much in process of evolution, encompassing international and regional conventions, WTO dispute settlements, bilateral and plurilateral treaties, decisions of national courts and regulatory bodies, and a welter of local laws and border controls.

On 24 March 2011, Attorney-General of Australia, the Hon Robert McClelland MP, asked the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) to inquire and report on the framework for the classification of media content in Australia.

Description
The creative industries are key drivers of modern economies. While economic analysis has traditionally advanced a market-failure model of arts and culture, this book argues for an evolutionary market dynamics or innovation-based approach. The book explores theoretical and conceptual aspects of an evolutionary economic approach to the study of the creative economy. Topics include creative businesses and labour markets, social networks, innovation processes and systems, institutions, and the role of creative industries in market dynamics and economic growth.

This fourth edition of Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts is an indispensible guide to the most important terms in the field. It offers clear explanations of the key concepts, exploring their origins, what they’re used for and why they provoke discussion. The author provides a multi-disciplinary explanation and assessment of the key concepts, from ‘authorship’ to ‘censorship’; ‘creative industries’ to ‘network theory’; ‘complexity’ to ‘visual culture’.

The new edition of this classic text includes:

This submission has been prepared by Ben Goldsmith, Senior Researcher, CCI, Stuart Cunningham, Director, CCI, Queensland University of Technology and Julian Thomas, Director, Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University and Chief Investigator, CCI.

The Working in Australia’s Digital Games Industry: A Consolidation Report is the outcome of a comprehensive study on the games industry in Australia by Dr Sandra Haukka from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) based at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. The study responds to concerns that Australia’s games industry would not reach its full potential due to a lack of local, highly skilled staff, and a lack of appropriately trained graduates with the necessary knowledge and skills.

Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom

Over the last three hundred years copyright law has gone from being a law of sectoral application to one that impacts on nearly every member of the community. The ease with which we can create, reproduce and communicate digital content on the internet has been a key reason for this change.

Ramon Lobato and Mark David Ryan’s article Rethinking genre studies through distribution analysis: issues in international horror movie circuits has been published in the journal New Review of Film and Television Studies.