Communication and New Media: From Broadcast to Narrowcast Book

Foreword   Eric Beecher     v
Preface     xiv
Acknowledgments     xvi
Abbreviations     xvii
Political Economy, Technology, Culture, Media and Capitalism     1
Digital Futures: How the Mobile Phone has Replaced the Television     4
Digital futures     5
Keeping up with the future     7
Structure of the book     10
Young voices, new perspectives     12
Digital Dilemmas: Contradictions and Conflict in Thinking About Communication     16
What is the dialectic?     17
The dialectic of nature     18
Living and working in a 'material' world     19
Memes: The dialectic of information and communication     21
The information revolution: Digital dialectic     24
Vectors: A circuit for the viral transmission of mimetic code     25
Convergence as a dialectic     27
The Political Economy of Communication and Media     30
The political economy of communication     31
Why political economy?     32
Selling eyeballs: The production and consumption of an audience     33
A brief history of political economy     36
Political economy methodology     38
Value, capital, and the media     40
Communication and media as both 'base' and 'superstructure'     44
Mode of development and mode of production     45
Hegemony and communicative practice     49
Hegemony, subversion, and mimetic mutation     51
McLuhanism: A meme for our time?     53
Misreading McLuhan     55
Media and Capitalism: The Role of Technology in Production and Communication     57
What is technology?     58
Technology and society     63
The dialectic of technology     66
The economics of convergence     69
Digital determinism: A postmodern commodity fetish     71
Hot Metal to Hotmail: The (Recent) History of Mass Communication     77
From Gutenberg to Global News: A Brief History of the Print Media     79
Print culture     80
Journalism and the Age of Revolution     83
Typography, telegraphy, telephony, and photography converge to make 'news'     84
Print journalism in 19th-century Australia     85
Up to a point, Lord Copper: Media magnatism (sic)     86
The Brass Check     87
The future of newspapers: Circulation and credibility     93
Timeline for Print     99
Industrial Light and Magic: A Brief History of Still and Moving Pictures     103
From 'camera obscura' to pixeltopia     104
Silver nitrate to silicon chips: The technology of photography     106
Pictures on paper: Illustrated London News and Life magazine     109
When the camera goes to war     112
Fashion, celebrity, and the paparazzi     113
Moving pictures: Celluloid to pixels     116
Cinema and the state 1: Eisenstein and Stalinism     120
Cinema and the state 2: The Hollywood Ten and McCarthyism     121
The Australian film renaissance     122
Digital effects     124
Bigger than Ben Hur     124
Celluloid to Pixels: Timeline for Photography and Cinema     128
Telegraphy, The Talking Wireless, and Television     132
Telegraphy     133
Making airwaves: The development of commercial radio     135
Radio and all that jazz     137
Broadcast to podcast     141
Television, technology, and cultural form     144
Television and entertainment     149
Timeline for Telegraphy, Talking Wireless, and Television     156
The Governance, Regulation, and Ethics of Mass Communication Media      161
Citizen Murdoch: A law unto himself?     162
Media law and ethics     163
Forms of media regulation     165
Governance     169
Co-regulation     172
Media ethics     173
The institutionalisation of ethics     178
The future of media regulation     180
The Emergence of Convergence: New Century, New Media     185
From Calculation to Cyberia: The 2500-Year History of Computing     187
Convergence: From calculus to computing     188
Binary Code: One digit/no digit-on/off     198
The technologies of war     201
Postwar computing     204
Solid circuitry to silicon chip     205
Timeline for A (Modern) History of Computers     207
The Golden Age of the Internet?     213
Digital mythology     214
The Golden Age of the Internet     220
Being digital: A postmodern paradox?     227
Was there ever a Golden Age and does it matter?     233
Who's A Journalist Now? The Expanded Reportorial Community     238
Who's who in the digital zoo?     239
Citizen Kane to Citizen Journalist?     240
Journalists and technology: An unhappy marriage?     246
Backpack journalism     251
Participatory journalism     254
What of the future?     259
The Techno-Legal Time-Gap: Can the Law Keep Up With the Digital Revolution?     265
Broadcast to narrowcast: An ethico-legal minefield     266
Media regulation in Australia: One step forward or a giant leap backwards?     266
Who controls the Internet?     281
The techno-legal time-gap: An explanation     282
Privacy in the digital world     283
Careful what you click for     285
Piracy: Digital file-sharing and illegal copying     287
From Broadcasting to Narrowcasting: The Emergence of a Surveillance Economy     291
I Know What You Did Last Summer: The Surveillance Society has Arrived     293
Big Brother in the 'big brown land'     294
Surveillance societies in the West     297
When too much surveillance is barely enough: 9/11 is the tipping point     305
The digital battle lines     311
That's The Way the Cookie Rumbles: A Surveillance Economy     315
A surveillance economy, the key to a surveillance society     316
A surveillance economy     317
Convergence and surveillance: From broadcast to narrowcast      319
Surveillance in the market: Buying and selling identity     326
Politics and New Media     334
Have the old ways changed forever? Dick Morris and Vote.com     335
Agenda-setting online: The Internet as an election campaign tool     339
Going global, living local: Distanciation of politics on the net     345
Value, speed, and familiarity of format     347
Implications and strategies for Australian election campaigns     349
Online politics and the reportorial community     351
Alternative politics on the Internet     354
Can we Influence the Future of Narrowcasting?     358
If video killed the radio stars, will podcasting kill the video stars?     359
The surveillance society: Be careful what you wish for     363
Can we intervene to 'save' the future?     364
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will     368
Glossary     371
Bibliography     383
Index     420