School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemRelatively benign corruption? Critical discourse analysis for media students( 2007)Don Watson, in his book Death Sentence, claims that the way in which the media disseminate information and the way politicians manipulate this process have resulted in a kind of corruption. Assuming this is the case, I suggest in this paper that it is therefore useful to equip students in media courses with the skills of critical discourse analysis. A useful starting point for teaching these skills to undergraduates, I have found, is a newspaper article by Alexander Downer, excerpted from one of his speeches about the 'war on terror'. Such a mediated political linguistic act as this will of course inherently involve power or resistance to power, and will contribute to the formation of a specific discourse community via strategies of coercion, resistance, opposition or protest, and dissimulation/de-legitimisation. This necessarily results in relations of struggle that are played out at the lexicogrammatical level, on which I invite students to focus. Such media texts, which represent and foreground starkly opposing ideologies, can be useful vehicles for teaching the concept of discourse communities, as well as the reading strategies of critical discourse analysis.
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ItemRealising Middle-earth: production design and film technology(Manchester University Press, 2008)Miniatures, bigatures, digital mattes, 3D animation, costume, set and prop design, forced perspective, location and studio shoots all contributed to the creation of Middle-earth. The panoply of visual effects LOTR uses to build Middle-earth’s image has become familiar, not just from the films but also from television specials, websites, DVD appendices and commentaries, and the remarkable travelling Exhibition. Armour, prosthetics, stunt and miniature doubles, animal wranglers, blue screen, and the Massive intelligent agents are part of our language now. Weta Workshop and Weta Digital, with their army of collaborators did more than visualise the most-read – and most-imagined – book of the twentieth century. They realised the script, made real the fictional world where the narrative would take place. The challenge of realisation is in some sense the challenge of cinema itself – the French even use the word réalisation to describe filmmaking. Realising Middle-earth is both a technical challenge and a special kind of problem in realism, the aesthetic field dealing with depictions of reality (as in documentary) and the illusion of reality (as in dramatic fiction). Most complicated of all is the realisation of a world whose highest technology, the explosive device in the culvert of the Deeping Wall, is portrayed as the work of Saruman’s dark arts. Tolkien’s hatred of industrialisation comes through in the firepits of Isengard. Yet the films depend on the use of and innovation in new media technologies, and much of our viewing pleasure comes from appreciating the craft that has gone into them. We watch entranced by a double magic: the fascination of illusion, and the fascination of how it has been achieved.
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ItemThe distinctiveness of digital criticism( 2000)The core concern of media studies today is the material form of mediation. In whichever direction we take our analyses, the specificity of the discipline lies in its attention to the detailed functioning of textuality. The sociology of communication, the political economy of the media, the philosophy of media aesthetics are distinctive subdisciplines of other, older, fields of research. What distinguishes ours is the irreducible materiality of mediation. We can perhaps feel that we are less prone to overgeneralisation, mythmaking and simple errors of fact because of that attention; and that we are in a better position to make statements about audiences, institutions, economies, societies, cultures and aesthetics because we have spent long years, both individually and as a research community, looking at the minutiae of historical and contemporary media. And yet we seem to have betrayed the digital media not only in the failure to archive electronic media but intellectually too: in the half-acceptance of a view that the digital media in some way effective dematerialisethe older media. Once dematerialised, media can no longer fall into our field or, alternatively, we are confronted with the proposal that we abandon the central object of our studies, the materiality of the text, and remake ourselves in the theoreticis mould with which the US academy in particular greeted the embarrassingly political discourses of 1970s 'Screen Theory'. As literary theory has pursued the dematerialisation of the book, print, paper and inks in the abstraction of the text, so media studies faces a choice between dematerialising and rematerialising its object.
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ItemProjection: Vanishing and Becoming(MIT Press, 2007)
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ItemNetwork Time and the New Knowledge Epoch(Sage Publications, 2003)This article analyses the temporal dimensions of knowledge production. Specifically it discusses the mechanics of the process and how these have changed through what are termed ‘knowledge epochs’. It argues that with the widespread dissemination of clock-time through the Industrial Revolution, the production of knowledge was significantly shaped by the temporality of the clock. Through the convergence of neoliberal globalization and ICT revolution a new powerful temporality has emerged through which knowledge production is refracted: network time. The article concludes that the spread of network time into the realm of the everyday has profound implications for the production of critical and reflexive knowledge in contemporary culture and society.
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ItemThe MIT Media Lab: techno dream factory or alienation as a way of life?( 2003)This article critically analyses the work and the ethos of the MIT Media Lab in the context of globalizing capital and the ICT revolution. It argues that the Media Lab owes its tremendous success in part to the public relations strategies of its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, and to the very real need for the Lab's products to 'fill in the gaps' left by the broad and irregular dynamics of globalization and the ICT revolution. The Media Lab and its research products insert information technologies into the interstices of cultural, social and temporal life, stitching together an 'informational ecology' of interconnectivity. This ecology has its own temporality, a synchronized 'chronoscopic' temporality or real-time duration that obliterates the many other temporalities that interpenetrate our lives and give them meaning. It is argued the 'informational ecology' of interconnectivity constructed by the Media Lab and many other emulative 'start-ups', lead not to a world of 'diversity' as Negropontean philosophy insists, but a one-dimensional world of alienation.
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ItemRacialized 'othering': the representation of asylum seekers in news media(Open University Press, 2005)An incident occurred off Australian territorial waters on 26 August 2001 that had significant consequences in the Australian parliamentary elections held that year. A Norwegian ship, the Tampa, rescued 433 survivors, mostly asylum seekers, from a sinking Indonesian ferry and took them to Christmas Island , part of Australian territory. Categorizing the rescued passengers of the Tampa as 'boatpeople' and 'illegal immigrants', the ruling Liberal Party sought to appeal to sections of the electorate by having Australian Special Forces board the ship in an attempt to stop the passengers from disembarking on Christmas Island - and thus being in a position to apply for asylum. What is of interest to our present concerns, however, is the role of the press in what subsequently came to be referred to as the Tampa affair. Some of the popular newspapers carried stories which reproduced the language of the government, as indicated in the headline in the front page of the Herald Sun on 31 August 2001: 'BACK OFF: Howard rejects UN call to take illegals'.
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ItemEthnicity, national culture(s) and the interpretation of television(Open University Press, 2000)Much of the academic debates concerning 'race', ethnicity and the media have been around issues of representation, power and identity, the constraints restricting minority broadcasting, and the aesthetics of resistance. While these provide various interrogations of the notions of 'race' and ethnicity, and are necessary interventions into the politics and economics of media representations and their hegemonic role in society, this chapter shifts the focus, attempting to explore a few of the current debates regarding both media and 'race' from the perspective of the audience, through the discussion of two studies which examine the interpretations of television programmes by ethnically and/or culturally diverse audiences. We will encounter, en route, the pertinence of 'tradition' in the explanations of understanding and interpretation in philosophical hermeneutics; developments in post-colonial studies and their relevance to notions of 'race' and ethnicity in the international context; and finally, a plea towards the need to revise the questions regarding the nature of cultural imperialism.
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ItemLibrary(Sage, 2006)The modern library derives from a vision of public service developed in the 19th century. At various times in the past a commercial service, an educational resource, a religious domain and a political institution, the library today exists in various forms, including all these but in addition the professional libraries held by law firms and scientific or technological associations, multimedia lending libraries and certain areas of the world-wide web.
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ItemDigital filming and special effects(British Film Institute, 2002)It is curious that digital photography should have spawned a respectable critical literature, while digital cinematography has, as yet, generated very little theoretical work that deals specifically with film. Two possible reasons come to mind. First, digital cinema approaches more closely the culture of animation than lens-based cinematography. And second, the darkroom has always been a key factor in photographic practice, whereas in cinema, postproduction has traditionally been understood as the editing process, rather than the developing and printing of the film strip. I raise this curiosity, which in all likelihood will be a brief and passing phase, only because it raises another conundrum. Traditionally, studies of cinema history have always devoted a chapter to pre-cinematic devices (phenakistoscopes,thaumatropes and so on) and especially to the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey and their contemporaries (the most influential, although now controversial, account is Ceram, 1965). Like other contemporary scholars, I rather distrust this continuity model of cinematic development. The quickest way to describe the difference between chronophotography and cinematography is to point out that the unit ofchronophotography is the still frame, but that of cinema is three frames: the one just past, the current one and the one coming up. Crudely put, chronophotography was an analytical medium: cinema is synthetic. This is why chronophotography rather than cinema became the tool of choice for Taylorism and ‘scientific management’.