School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemCommunication across cultural boundaries: Berlin(SAGE Publications, 2010)
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ItemThe Rise of A 'Me Culture' in Postsocialist China(SAGE Publications, 2010-04)China’s ‘Generation Y’ are the first to grow up with computer technology and the Internet. More affluent and better educated than their parents, and often the only child in the family, they consider individuality a highly sought-after quality, which has given rise to a ‘me culture’ primarily concerned with self-expression and identity exhibition. Drawing from a combined content and discourse analysis in conjunction with personal interviews with Chinese Gen Y bloggers, this study seeks to provide a qualitative examination of Chinese youth and their use of personal blogs. It fills a lacuna in current studies that focus largely on blogging in western contexts. The study elucidates how China’s youth use blogs in their own symbolic identity construction and self-presentation based around notions of individualism and consumerism — key features of China’s entry into its postsocialist age — and probes the motivations behind their blogging practices.
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ItemETHICAL FREE-FOR-ALL OVER MEDIA ACCESS TO THE FIRE ZONE(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2010-11)A major issue to arise in the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in February 2009 concerned access by the media to the places destroyed. This issue arose in five main forms: media efforts to circumvent roadblocks; use of deception by media to get into areas that were open only to residents; use of private property by media, with and without the connivance of the authorities, as venues for gathering material; balancing residents' rights of access and property protection against the media's need to discharge their legitimate function of informing the community; and managing crime scenes and protecting survivors from the media. This article explores these issues from the perspective of 28 media professionals who covered the fires. It identifies and discusses the ethical dilemmas raised, and describes how the journalists concerned resolved them. It contains many lessons for the media, the authorities and the public. It lays bare the lack of an ethical consensus among media people. In doing so, it points up some exemplary decision-making by individual journalists and the weaknesses of their profession's institutional framework. It is argued that these matter because ethical lapses at disaster scenes can cause harm to victims and survivors, as well as placing the safety of media personnel at risk. Parallel ethical issues confronted the authorities too. These are canvassed as well, and the implications for public policy discussed – particularly in relation to the justification for controlling media access, and balancing justifiable restrictions against competing interests such as the public right to information and the autonomy of survivors in being able to make their own decisions about whether to speak to the media.
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ItemRethinking media events: large screens, public space broadcasting and beyond(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2010-06)The current deployment of large screens in city centre public spaces requires a substantial rethinking of our understanding of the relationship of media to urban space. Drawing on a case study of the Public Space Broadcasting project launched in the UK in 2003, this article argues that large screens have the potential to play a significant role in promoting public interaction. However, the realization of this potential requires a far-reaching investigation of the role of media in the construction of complex public spaces and diverse public cultures.