Volume 3, Issue 1: 2009
Editorial
GMJ/AU is pleased to release Volume 3 #1 issue for 2009.
This issue highlights the work of several important Australian academics that contribute regularly to communications and media debates in this country.
We lead this issue with a significant piece by Professor Terry Flew of the Queensland University of Technology titled “Beyond Globalisation: Rethinking the Scalar and the Relational in Global Media Studies”. This work is a thorough rethink of the idea of the ‘global’. It argues for a view that reworks the idea of the global by introducing new concepts of spatial definition – the ‘scalar’ and the ‘relational’. This gives a different nuance to terms such as ‘local’ or ‘regional’ by reinvigorating the multiplicity of ways in which the global is redefined by a rescaling of its territorial claims. This point is derived from Nick Couldry’s work and is the key point on which this argument turns. Flew insists that the older models of fixed global-local dominant-recessive intellectual regimes need a corrective, with the view that multiple points of local-local or cross regional links significantly complicate the contemporary media landscape. Flew calls this rethink ‘relational’ thinking about media and globalisation – one that moves in step with the massive shifts across the world in which former regions on the cultural and economic margins have become new centres of influence.
If Flew theorises issues of space, Dr. Chris Chesher from the Digital Cultures Program in Sydney University’s Faculty of Arts, has provided a companion piece on the theme of time. He specifically offers a re-calibration of early to mid 20th century communications theorist, Harold Innis’s idea of the bias of time as a feature of how media influence the growth and decline of civilisational empires. Chesher is interested to test out Innis’s theories when considered within the introduction of the microcomputer and to see this machine as intensely as Innis saw the great communication revolutions from writing to the printing press. There is a double act here that Chesher brings through this work: he rethinks the importance of the computer in civilisational terms and reassesses Innis’s contribution to communications theory and history in light of the digital worlds we now inhabit.
Dr. Lyn Dickens also of Sydney University writes perceptively about the absence in press reviews of Miss Saigon of the themes of multi-raciality. The case made by Dickens is pressed home by specifying the multi-racial themes that are not incidental to the musical. In a content analysis of press articles, she demonstrates the press’s silence on this theme. Using a cultural politics of identity, Dickens shows how the underlying issues of multi-racial experience can be exoticised and in this way the uncomfortable issues when race and culture meet are covered over.
We are also extremely pleased to have this issue highlighted by two important contributions by the former ABC journalist, academic and author, Neville Petersen. The first is an account of the amazing life of Sir Charles Moses – a broadcaster and broadcasting executive associated with the ABC from its inception in 1932. This account has unique and original insights into the life of a man who was a huge influence on the shape and direction of the national broadcaster through the middle of the 20th century. Continuing on the theme of Australian communications history, we feature an interview conducted by Petersen with Associate Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley, Director of the Centre for Media History of Macquarie University. We thank Neville Petersen for both these contributions.
This issue features the usual book reviews ably edited by Dr. Antonio Castillo, our Australian Media Monitor edited by Dr. Tim Dwyer and our postgraduate student section edited by Dr. Rachel Morley. I would like to thank all the referees, reviewers and authors as well as those who assisted us with the production of the issue: Myra Gurney and Roman Goik.
We invite feedback to this issue to be forwarded to Associate Professor Hart Cohen (h.cohen@uws.edu.au) or Dr. Rachel Morley (r.morley@uws.edu.au).
Hart Cohen
For the Editorial Committee
