School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 268
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableCyberspace Romance: The Psychology of Online Relationships(Macmillan Education UK, 2006)This book focuses on online relationships and specifically cyber-flirting; the authors examine how flirting offline can be transferred to an Internet setting, through their own empirical and theoretical research.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableOnline Matchmaking(Springer, 2007-03-14)Brian H. Spitzberg and William R. Cupach Online technologies, such as online matchmaking services, are increasingly becoming a normal and normative medium through which relationships are initiated, developed, maintained, and ended.
-
ItemGenevieve Grieves(un Projects Inc., 2006)
-
ItemHaywood’s re-appropriation of the amatory heroine in Betsy Thoughtless(University of Iowa, 2006)Eliza Haywood’s domestic fiction, epitomized by The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), does not reject the modes of her earlier amatory fiction work (such as her 1724 Fantomina), but instead dialectically incorporates it. By considering both Pamela and Betsy Thoughtless in the context of Haywood’s amatory fiction of the 1720s, this paper argues that the struggle to appropriate the narrative of the sexually experienced woman highlights the dialogic complexities of the relationships between amatory and domestic fiction in the mid-eighteenth century. The perseverance of amatory modes of writing in later eighteenth-century domestic novels gestures toward alternate ideological possibilities for female subjectivity through both the exercise of virtue and the exploration of sexual desire.
-
ItemMornings with Radio 774: can John Howard’s medium of choice enhance public sphere activity?( 2007)This paper addresses the necessity for program-specific analysis in radio research by focussing on Jon Faine’s Morning Program on ABC Radio 774 (Melbourne). After establishing the present Prime Minister’s preference for radio appearances over all other types of media, I examine the extent to which Faine’s particular iteration of talkback has the capacity to enhance public sphere activity, given the view that this medium is being strategically utilised by politicians to gain virtually uncontested access to listeners. My examination occurs principally through a morning’s observation of Faine’s program, supported by information from recordings of a constructed week of the program from the previous two months. My findings suggest that while a certain amount of ‘top-down’ flow of information is unavoidable, some contestation of ideas often occurs, mitigating politicians’ exploitation of at least this particular program. Faine’s program does, moreover, seem to give the impression of an acceptance of listeners calls on topics that affect their daily lives, even though only a small number of ‘ordinary’ callers are featured each day. My observations suggest this program does offer processes that enhance public sphere activity, although with some qualifications.
-
ItemImmersion, reflexivity and distraction: spatial strategies for digital cities( 2007)This essay focuses on the ways that cinema and the city have mutually constituted new immersive experiences of urban perception.
-
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.
-
ItemEpic fantasy and global terrorism(Rodopi, 2006)There are many cues for an article like this, which looks at J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings - and in particular, the recent films of the trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson - alongside recent commentaries on, and anxieties about, the rise of global terrorism and the ‘war on terrorism’. There have already been links drawn between these events and literary texts, of course: for example, Jason Epstein has compared the United States, in its pursuit of terrorists, to Melville’s Ahab. But a more relevant cue comes from an article in the New Left Review by Mike Davis, which situates the aeroplane bombings of the World Trade Centre buildings in New York on September 11th 2001 in the context of fantastic images of the fire-storming of Lower Manhattan in a work by H.G. Wells, War in the Air, published eighty-four years earlier in 1907. Under zeppelin attack by Imperial Germany, ‘ragtime New York’, as Davis describes it, ‘becomes the first modern city destroyed from the air’. Davis is one of a number of commentators on S11 who reads the reality of the event through the logic of fantasy, as if it was a moment of terror, or terrorism, that made it impossible to distinguish between the two: ‘the attacks on New York and Washington DC were organised as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise en scene. Indeed, the hijacked planes were aimed to impact precisely at the vulnerable border between fantasy and reality’ (p.37). That phrase - ‘the vulnerable border between fantasy and reality’ - also resonates with anxieties about terrorist activity itself, planned and executed (in this case) from within the borders of the US, and so speaking to America’s own sense of border vulnerability: of the possibility that the outside is already or always inside.
-
ItemA note on psychoanalysis and the crime of torture( 2006)Let's be clear. Torture is an international crime under all circumstances. Countries in which torture is sanctioned are considered states that violate human rights - to the extent that they may well be vernacularly denominated 'criminal states.' Every country has a legal and moral obligation to prevent the use of torture. This includes prosecuting those who have engaged in torture or otherwise supported its practice, discouraging other states from the use of torture, and, if the acts have been committed outside their jurisdiction, to extradite the alleged perpetrator to a state that has such jurisdiction.
-
ItemAra Irititja: adding more value to Aboriginal art through education( 2007)The Ara Irititja project enables the Anangu (Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people) of Central Australia to re-engage with their own history through digitized archives. Specialized software, housed in purpose-built work stations called niri-niri, named after a similar looking beetle, protect the computers in a dust-, dirt- and bug-proof case. The project makes the wealth of recordings, images and written material that has accumulated in collections over time, available to Anangu in their own communities via computer. Through the active re-engagement with this material, Anangu people in central, southern and western Australia relearn, refine and re-engage with their own social history. This article argues that there is scope to apply this program to the recording of the history of Aboriginal art. An open access version of the entire history of Aboriginal art could help curb the over-emphasis on the monetary value of Aboriginal art.