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.

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?

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!

YouTube is one of the most well-known and widely discussed sites of participatory media in the contemporary online environment, and it is the first genuinely mass-popular platform for user-created video. In this timely and comprehensive introduction to how YouTube is being used and why it matters, Burgess and Green discuss the ways that it relates to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy.

Story Circle is the first collection ever devoted to a comprehensive international study of the digital storytelling movement, exploring subjects of central importance on the emergent and ever-shifting digital landscape.

* Covers consumer-generated content, memory grids, the digital storytelling youth movement, participatory public history, audience reception, videoblogging and microdocumentary
* Pinpoints who is telling what stories where, on what terms, and what they look and sound like

Faculty Seminar Series

Professor Justin O’Connor, Research Capacity Building Professor Tuesday 28th April 12pm-1pm The Hall (Z2-226) CI Precinct QUT Kelvin Grove

Creative labour: emancipation or honey-trap?

Digital media guru John Hartley believes the online domain is changing the ways in which we interact, though not everyone is up to speed.

Online_social_networks, user-created content and participatory media are often still ignored by professionals, denounced in the press and banned in schools. But the potential of digital literacy should not be underestimated.

Submission to the ABC and SBS Review, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

We identify some tensions between formal education and informal learning in the uses of popular literacy since the nineteenth century, in order to argue for a ‘demand-led’ model of education in digital literacy.

This issue of Media International Australia is based on several of the papers presented at the Digital Literacy and Creative Innovation in a Knowledge Economy symposium held by CCI and the ARC Cultural Research Network in March 2007. Guest edited by CCI researchers Kelly McWilliam and John Hartley, along with Mark Gibson, the articles in this issue consider how the rapid development of digital technologies has changed the production and consumption of media content, altering the very nature of the relationship between 'producers' and 'consumers'.

YouTube: home port for lip-syncers, karaoke singers, trainspotters, birdwatchers, skateboarders, hip-hoppers, small-time wrestling federations, educators, third-wave feminists, churches, proud parents, poetry slammers, gamers, human rights activists, hobbyists. It gets 10 hours of new content every minute. Where did all that come from ask Henry Jenkins and John Hartley.

After 50 years, what are the implications of Uses of Literacy for educational modernisation, in the light of subsequent changes from 'read only' literacy to 'read-write' uses of multimedia?

For analysts interested in social change the creative industries are a bellwether for the ‘open future’ predicted by Richard E Lee. Current directions in the study of the continuing encounters among culture, economy and politics do not focus so much on struggle, subject-positioning or structure, as on change, disequilibrium, and growth. It does seem to many that the current period is one of indeterminacy between two relatively stable ‘long centuries’ – the existing ‘American’ one and the coming ‘Chinese’ one (Shenkar 2004; Fishman 2004; Rees-Mogg 2005).

The production of knowledge has become central to economic life. Competitiveness in the 21st century market place is now characterized by the ability to translate scientific and technological knowledge into innovation. But does this render cultural and social knowledge unimportant?

Television Truths considers what we know about TV, whether we love it or hate it, where TV is going, and whether viewers should bother going along for the ride.

Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy was published 50 years ago in 1957. It was an intellectual response to the challenge of mass media and it was also a popular bestseller in its own right. It set the agenda for educational and disciplinary reform that lasted a generation.

Georgina Born is Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music at Cambridge University, and was Official Fellow and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

In the early 1990s a new image of British national identity emerged on the pages of The Face, Dazed and Confused and Vogue. Fashion and style photography created an aesthetic out of the lives of young Londoners and the places they lived in, including second-hand markets, the rave scene and shared flats.

2006 marks the fiftieth anniversary of broadcast television in Australia. It was launched in Sydney and Melbourne in 1956, just in time for the Melbourne Olympic Games.

After 50 years, what are the implications of the Uses of Literacy for educational modernisation, in the light of subsequent changes from 'read only' literacy to 'read-write' uses of multimedia? This article argues that a broad extension of popular literacy via consumer-generated content offers not only emancipationist potential in line with Hoggart’s own project, but also economic benefits via the dynamics of creative innovation.

The International Journal of Cultural Studies (IJCS) marks its tenth year of publication with this special issue on ‘The Uses of Richard Hoggart,’ co-edited by Sue Owen and John Hartley.

‘Politicotainment’: The very form of Kristina Riegert’s neologism says something about how the realms of politics and entertainment have crash-merged. The term itself is not a pretty sight, perhaps because it describes an unlikely amalgam; two opposing worlds whose 'heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,' as Dr Johnson would have put it. The resulting idea is counter-intuitive, since it seems to betray the essence of both of the originating terms. Surely entertainment is characterized by escapism; while politics ought not to be confused with private pleasure consumption?

The TV50 exhibition catalogue is a fascinating A-Z guide to fifty years of television in Australia.