Australian Politics in a Digital Age


Book Description

The first comprehensive volume on the impact of digital media on Australian politics, this book examines the way these technologies shape political communication, alter key public and private institutions, and serve as the new arena in which discursive and expressive political life is performed. -- Publisher's description.




Investigative Journalism, Democracy and the Digital Age


Book Description

Theoretically grounded and using quantitative data spanning more than 50 years together with qualitative research, this book examines investigative journalism’s role in liberal democracies in the past and in the digital age. In its ideal form, investigative reporting provides a check on power in society and therefore can strengthen democratic accountability. The capacity is important to address now because the political and economic environment for journalism has changed substantially in recent decades. In particular, the commercialization of the Internet has disrupted the business model of traditional media outlets and the ways news content is gathered and disseminated. Despite these disruptions, this book’s central aim is to demonstrate using empirical research that investigative journalism is not in fact in decline in developed economies, as is often feared.




Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age


Book Description

The practices of world politics are now scrutinised in a way that is unprecedented, with even those previously – or conventionally assumed to be – disengaged from international affairs being drawn into world politics by social media. Interactive websites allow users to follow election results in real-time from the other side of the world, and online mapping means that the world ‘out there’ is now available on your mobile phone. Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age engages these themes in contemporary world politics, to better understand how digital communication through new media technologies changes our encounters with the world. Whether the focus is digital media, social networking or user-generated content, these sites of political activity and the artefacts they produce have much to tell us about how we engage world politics in the contemporary age. This volume represents the starting point of a dialogue about how digital technologies are beginning to impact the research and practice of scholars and practitioners in the field of International Relations, with the collection of cutting-edge essays dealing specifically with the intertextuality of world politics and digital popular culture. This book will be of use to International Relations research academics (and critically engaged publics) interested in the core themes of global politics – subjectivity, militarism, humanitarianism, civil society organisation, and governance. The book also employs theories and techniques closely associated with other social science disciplines, including political theory, sociology, cultural studies and media studies.




Paper Emperors


Book Description

‘A tour de force.’ — Professor Rodney Tiffen Before newspapers were ravaged by the digital age, they were a powerful force, especially in Australia — a country of newspaper giants and kingmakers. This magisterial book reveals who owned Australia’s newspapers and how they used them to wield political power. A corporate and political history of Australian newspapers spanning 140 years, it explains how Australia’s media system came to be dominated by a handful of empires and powerful family dynasties. Many are household names, even now: Murdoch, Fairfax, Syme, Packer. Written with verve and insight and showing unparalleled command of a vast range of sources, Sally Young shows how newspaper owners influenced policy-making, lobbied and bullied politicians, and shaped internal party politics. The book begins in 1803 with Australia’s first newspaper owner — a convict who became a wealthy bank owner — giving the industry a blend of notoriety, power and wealth from the start. Throughout the twentieth century, Australians were unaware that they were reading newspapers owned by secret bankrupts and failed land boomers, powerful mining magnates, Underbelly-style gangsters, bankers, and corporate titans. It ends with the downfall of Menzies in 1941 and his conviction that a handful of press barons brought him down. The intervening years are packed with political drama, business machinations and a struggle for readers, all while the newspaper barons are peddling power and influence.




Media Power in Indonesia


Book Description

Indonesia is undergoing a process of rapid change, with an affluent middle class due to hit 141 million people by 2020. While official statistics suggest that internet penetration is low, over 70 million Indonesians have a Facebook account, the fourth highest group in the world. Jakarta is the Twitter capital of the world with more tweets per minute than any other city around the globe. In the past ten years digitalisation of media content has enabled extensive concentration and conglomeration of the industry, and media owners are wealthier and more politically powerful than ever before. Digital media is a prominent place of contestation between large, powerful oligarchs, and citizens looking to bring about rapid and meaningful change. This book examines how the political agencies of both oligarchs and ‘netizens’ are enhanced by digitalisation, and how an increasingly divergent society is being formed. In doing so, this book enters this debate about the transformations of society and power in the digital age.




Young Citizens in the Digital Age


Book Description

This book explores alternative approaches for engaging and understanding young people’s political activity and looks at the adoption of information and ICTs as a means to facilitate the active engagement of young people in democratic societies.




Governing in the Age of the Internet


Book Description

Over the past thirty years, the internet has transformed virtually every area of human activity, social and economic. The bulk of these changes have been positive, allowing people to work, imagine and connect with each other in new ways. The boost to economic activity has been enormous. But along with the benefits have come new risks. The result is a rich set of policy challenges for governments. Paul Fletcher is Australia's Minister for Communications and has worked on internet policy issues for twenty-five years. In Governing in the Age of the Internet, he outlines the key challenges the internet has posed for governments as they seek to preserve their sovereignty, protect their citizens from harm, and regulate neutrally between traditional and online business models. Yes, the internet has changed everything--and that goes for governing, too.




Retooling Politics


Book Description

Provides academics, journalists, and general readers with bird's-eye view of data-driven practices and their impact in politics and media.




Australian Social Attitudes IV


Book Description

Around the world, democracies have seen a decline in social and political trust. Australian Social Attitudes IV: The Age of Insecurity is an in-depth look at the economic and geopolitical uncertainty that pervades Australian public discourse. In the decade following the Howard administration, Australian politics has been defined by growing uncertainty, instability, and the emergence of popular disaffection with the political class, similar to what has been seen in the United States and Britain. Featuring contributions from Australia’s leading social scientists, this book explores the connection between insecurities and disaffection, and the ways in which they have manifested ­– in populist voting patterns, suspicions about climate science, and hostilities to immigration. A fascinating insight into what Australians think about contemporary political and social issues, this book is designed to present the public, media, and policymakers with up-to-date analysis of public opinion about important topics confronting Australian politics and society.




Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age


Book Description

The experimentalist phenomenon of 'noise' as constituting 'art' in much twentieth-century music (paradoxically) reached its zenith in Cage’s (’silent’ piece) 4’33 . But much post-1970s musical endeavour with an experimentalist telos, collectively known as 'sound art', has displayed a postmodern need to ’load’ modernism’s ’degree zero’. After contextualizing experimentalism from its inception in the early twentieth century, Dr Linda Kouvaras’s Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age explores the ways in which selected sound art works demonstrate creatively how sound is embedded within local, national, gendered and historical environments. Taking Australian music as its primary - but not sole - focus, the book not only covers discussions of technological advancement, but also engages with aesthetic standpoints, through numerous interviews, theoretical developments, analysis and cultural milieux for a contemporary Australian, and wider postmodern, context. Developing new methodologies for synergies between musicology and cultural studies, the book uncovers a new post-postmodern aesthetic trajectory, which Kouvaras locates as developing over the past two decades - the altermodern. Australian sound art is here put firmly on the map of international debates about contemporary music, providing a standard reference and valuable resource for practitioners in the artform, music critics, scholars and educators.