Blogs

London.
The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Richard Mills, whose interest is in the presence of the Beatles on YouTube. The Beatles' image was carefully guided and constructed by their manager Brian Epstein, of course, and the nascent music press of the early to mid-1960 bought strongly into that, creating Beatlemania and connecting it to the wider Swinging Sixties rhetoric. The Beatles themselves eventually reacted against this commercialisation and commodification, and gradually changed their image to embrace countercultural ideas. The evolution of Beatles iconography on their record covers over time also points powerfully to this shift, of course - from the identical suits and haircuts of the first albums to the blankness of The White Album.

London.
The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Sebastien Francois, whose interest is in the fan videos deliberately combining material from various movies and television shows which are posted to spaces like YouTube; Sebastien describes this as 'homemade crossover'. Such videos are created only by a relatively small number of fans, of course, but may provide useful insights into active audiences.

Sebastien has studied such videos on YouTube using the ContextMiner analysis tool to examine the titles, descriptions, and other identifying characteristics of such videos. Such videos are often relatively short, with creators coming from a wide variety of countries; they exist at the intersection of vidding (adding popular music to edits of TV shows) and trailer mash-ups (parodies adding the soundtrack of movie trailers to collages of other movie or television material). Homemade crossover videos as Sebastien defines them do not necessarily use popular music, and are not necessarily parodic in intent - but instead often touch on the narratives within the original material.

London.
My paper at Transforming Audiences starts off the first of the paper sessions this morning. Here's the Powerpoint, and I'll try to add the audio as soon as possible the audio is online now, too...

Technorati : London.Transforming Audiences 2009, collaboration, produsage, produser, prosumer, user-led
Del.icio.us : London.Transforming Audiences 2009, collaboration, produsage, produser, prosumer, user-led

London.
I've arrived in occasionally sunny London for the Transforming Audiences conference, which kicks off with a keynote by Liz Bird. She notes that conversations about the death of the media audience go back some decades now; the idea of an 'audience' no longer fully captures the reality of media usage and participation, and Web 2.0 and similar phenomena have only provided an even more pointed reminder. There is rhetoric about 'the people formerly known as the audience', but of course these people - audience or not - still matter to us. What is the nature of the dynamic between media and their users, and how may this dynamic be researched further in the current context?

On Tuesday I'm heading off to Europe again, for a whirlwind tour of three conference in three countries within ten days. In combination, they provide a pretty good overview of my current research interests - I'll be presenting what is more or less an English-language version of my paper on prosumption and produsage from the Prosumer Revisited conference in March at a conference called Transforming Audiences in London; from there I'm heading to Vienna for the 2009 Conference on Electronic Democracy to present a paper co-authored with Gatewatching.org's Jason Wilson which discusses various developments in e-government and e-democracy in Australia (including the DBCDE government consultation blog trial and GetUp!'s Project Democracy); and finally I'm off to Cardiff for the Future of Journalism conference where I'm presenting the outcomes of my interviews with some of the principals behind Germany's successful community news platform myHeimat.de. (This Future of Journalism conference is not to be confused with the MEAA's somewhat lacklustre series of 'Future of Journalism' talkfests in Australia last year, incidentally...) Along the way, I guess I'll also take a little time off to celebrate my recent promotion to Associate Professor...

I'm currently developing an ongoing research relationship with the ABC's fabulous Pool.org.au site for user-generated content - and as a first step in this, I am now looking for a researcher to work with Pool staff at the ABC in Sydney. The successful applicant will participate in overseeing and coordinating the activities of the Pool user community, and examine practices and dynamics within the community. (More information on Pool and its future development are available in a recent ACID report.)

Initially, this will be a part-time (two days per week) research assistant job from September to December 2009. On the basis of this lead-up work, we also expect the researcher to submit a competitive application for a full-time PhD scholarship from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) at QUT, on a project negotiated between the researcher, the CCi, and the ABC which further extends this community research and applies its insights into strategies for the further development of the Pool site.

It's nice to see that we're getting some good press on the recent Social Media: State of the Art report for the Smart Services CRC - QUT has put out a press release for it now, and it's also been featured on Australian Policy Online. Mark Bahnisch and I are currently working on Volume Two of the report, which should be delivered to the CRC in a couple of weeks and will hopefully be released publicly not too long after that.

Brisbane.
The final speaker in this ANZCA 2009 session is Bronwyn Beatty, speaking about the YouTube election debate last year, hosted by New Zealand's One News. This follows similar events in other countries, chiefly the US - it is part of an ongoing YouTubeification of politics, some have said.

TVNZ had an agreement with political leaders in New Zealand for three debates between the two main candidates. For the final of these debates, it invited video questions from its audience, uploaded through YouTube. This was framed as participating in the democratic process, and closely followed the model established by CNN for its debates between the US presidential candidates - TVNZ selected 'the best' of the user submissions to show to the candidates.

Brisbane.
We're now in the final session of ANZCA 2009, which starts with a paper by Mary Debrett. Her interest is in the politics of accountability and risk-taking at the ABC, and she begins with some reflections on the social value of trust - it serves as social glue, generates social capital, manages social complexity, acts as a solution for risk, and is a prerequisite for forming self-identity. Trust and authority are constantly being raised, invoking active trust in which trust is always contingent.

Trust is an especially important point of difference for public service broadcasters , of course - they need to be seen as independent from vested interests, as delivering fair and independent news, reflecting national culture and identity, serving diversity through representing minority voices, and adressing audences not served by commercial media. Public broadcasters position themselves as trusted brands in the media landscape.

Brisbane.
The final speaker in this ANZCA 2009 session is Jane Johnston, whose interest is in the economy of news agencies - and she begins with a couple of hoax press releases which were converted into mainstream news stories by the Australian-based press agency AAP. Such stories were widely published by a number of Australian mainstream online news sites and newspapers.

This is great success for the press release writers, but it was conversion into stories by the AAP which created such wide coverage; it highlights the role of press agencies, and points to the near-monopoly of the AAP as a news agency in Australia.