Guest Editorial

Across the Hemispheres

The articles from this issue of Global Media Journal/ Australian Edition flow from an institutional collaboration between researchers at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, the Department of Cultural Studies at Linkoping University, Sweden (Tema Q), and the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS). This collaboration was funded by the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation and Higher Education (STINT).1

The aim of the collaboration was to explore the interface between two major processual concepts: culturalisation (broadly conceived as the process by which culture in its many forms seems to acquire an increasingly central role in political, economic and social life), and globalisation (the heightened, accelerated socio-cultural exchange across the globe which, though uneven and contested, flows from the progressive erosion of constraints of time and space). The research program focused on four principal areas: cultural policy and cultural production; uses of history and museums; urban tourism; and media and popular culture.

This issue of Global Media Journal/ Australian Edition approached in particular the globalisation theme in wide-ranging terms, analysing various dimensions of globalism/transnationalism, culture and media from the perspectives of cultural researchers based in Scandinavia (particularly Sweden) and Australia.

The word collaboration stems from the Latin collaborates, meaning to “labour together”. Although academic labour may be rather different from other forms in some respects, the word does capture the essence of the various relationships that were built over the period of the project. Understanding, interrogating, researching and exploring the diverse and divergent cultural, political and media landscapes between two countries in different hemispheres is something that can only be undertaken through such intellectual labour – and this is precisely what happened over four years. While this journal issue represents only a fraction of the work produced by the people involved, it reflects the different ways in which the researchers interpreted and specifically engaged with the “mega abstractions” of globalisation and culturalisation. A collaboration that spans several years not only encourages in-depth exchange, but also allows those involved to take a critically reflexive view of their research interests that reflects social, cultural and political developments over that time period. Consequently, while these papers do not represent a straightforward theme, they should be viewed as a cross section of projects looking at global themes within the culturally-specific contexts of Australia and Scandinavia. In this way, those of us involved attempted to understand and explore how various cultural institutions and practices must be seen as representing specific histories, knowledge regimes, values and customs. This comparative approach both enhanced our knowledge of ‘the other place’ and demanded that we look anew at the familiar world that we inhabit.

Australia and Sweden are almost in diametrically opposite positions of the globe and on the surface have little in common. These national research contexts have evident differences (including geographical, linguistic, and ethnocultural), yet also similarities (such as economic, political, and technological). Thus, the collaboration and ensuing papers in this volume have allowed us to draw on the cultural practices that emerge in two medium-sized countries on the semi-periphery. Both sets of researchers stand, at least for most of their time, on the edge of regional geographic centres and look in, and both are attempting to deal with massive social and economic changes that make undertaking cultural research so relevant and important. There is much to learn from each other, as is demonstrated by this cross section of papers that cover, amongst other subjects, nationalism, the desire for love, changing media consumption and symbols of identity.

This issue opens with Glen Fuller’s “V8’s ‘til ‘98”: The V8 Engine, Australian Nationalism and Automobility’, which explores specific knowledge regimes and cultural customs within the high-performance street car culture that is both culturally specific while reflecting universal themes of nationalism. Here Fuller discusses articulations of national identity within a globalising social, cultural, technological and economic context disrupted by the social totality of a ‘globalised’ world. Fuller accomplishes this task by drawing on one striking historical example of such an articulation of a complex Australian nationalism – the “V8’s ‘till ‘98” media-led consumer campaign of 1984. The article captures and explains the aggressive nationalism that emerged following the announcement by car manufacturers that vehicles identified as uniquely Australian may well cease production because of a lack of national government and industry support. While the article focuses on an example from the mid-1980s, many of the themes about protecting manufacturing and economic nationalism remain relevant today, as both the Scandinavian and Australian car industries continue to experience uncertain times and their future viability is questioned.

Fuller’s article picks up on the themes of fandom and enthusiasm which also emerge in David Rowe’s and Stephanie Alice Baker’s “Live sites in an age of media reproduction: mega events and transcontinental experience in public space”. Based on their all-night observational research at Sydney’s Darling Harbour FIFA Fan Fest site during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Rowe and Baker look at the continued proliferation of Live Sites (which are also known as Public Viewing Areas) that are designed to expand and extend the scope of media audience participation. Such sites are especially prominent during mega-sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup and Olympics, and raise a series of questions regarding the quality of this relatively new mediated-embodied experience. The authors begin by looking at the polarised commentaries that have emerged around the Live Sites and whether they enhance or degrade the spectator experience through a democratising effect of ‘viewing from a distance’, as opposed to the emotionally engaged and assumed superiority associated with ‘being there’ live at the event. Rowe and Baker suggest that such dichotomies oversimplify the experience offered by these new mediated public spaces, and should be understood from the perspective of dynamic contemporary urban social life. From this perspective, while the experience of ‘being there’ remains highly prized and desired, it is, by its very nature, limited to a small number of ‘global citizens’. The emergence of these live sites creates public spaces across the globe that can simulate and extend elements of the live event by offering a level of communal sociability unavailable to viewers in private homes.

Live Sites represent a common, if not universal desire to ‘be there’ and so experience such mega-events and, again, are of particular interest with regard to the 2012 London Olympics. Another powerful desire that emerges in this journal issue is that of ‘love’ and the obsession of love gained, lost and unrequited that dominates mainstream popular music around the world. This is the focus of Ann Werner’s “Emotions in music culture: articulations of love in girls’ listening and producing”. In this article, Werner explores the emotions expressed and discussed by a group of fourteen to sixteen year old girls in Sweden when listening to, talking about and producing love songs. Werner’s article presents a fascinating qualitative study of how the girls in her study wrestle with the universal themes of emotional vulnerability and questions regarding the transition to adulthood. While the study of emotion and affect is a growing area of interest for cultural theory, particularly as a site of the cultural negotiation of desire and the symbolic realm, Werner grounds such emotions around a group of friends within a culturally specific setting.

Although cultural objects like records, cassette tapes and CDs have allowed young adults a mechanism to share music and to communicate emerging emotions, Werner’s article also highlights how social media have altered this process and allowed ‘unprofessional’ bands to enter this arena. This changing nature of media is the focus of Hart Cohen’s paper on new media and populism in which he argues that the sense of ‘social’ in social media has been given a very different slant to that understood and used in many of its intellectual antecedents. As such, Cohen goes on to explore how the current extensive use of ‘social’ in its adjectival qualification of media, and transformation into a compound noun, has replaced a complex term and its preferred meanings conditioned by historical circumstance. Within ‘social media’, the social collapses into a term of mediation and stands for the range of connecting instances in which media perform linkages across platforms and virtual places. Cohen’s paper reminds us that in recent journalistic contexts such as the Arab Spring and London Riots, social media have been tied terminologically to the opening of political and grassroots movements. While there are clear differences in political motivation and organisational tactics within these contexts, the mainstream media link them by focusing on the common use of social media. Cohen reflects on such “communalising tools” and the ways in which they allow us to understand social disruptions and changes.

New media technologies are also the focus of Martin Fredriksson’s “Piracy, globalisation and the colonisation of the Commons”. Fredriksson begins his discussion by looking at the last decades of the 19th century. During this time, a combination of new technology and changing trends in the music market radically redefined the conditions for distributing printed music – a process that became identified as music piracy. The spread of this concept and practice was largely a consequence of the “piano mania” that struck Victorian England in the second half of the 19th century, when the piano became a fashionable attribute for the growing middle class. A fascinating element of Fredriksson’s paper is that it allows us to draw parallels between fears in the late-1890s expressed by copyright holders, and those that have emerged today around file-sharing. While the technologies have radically changed, the claims and counter-claims of moral rights, accessibility and criminality are remarkably similar. Fredriksson also raises the problem of citizen access to cultural products, and it is this perspective that Georgie McClean discusses in “SBS’s multilingual dilemma: global media, ‘community languages’ and cultural citizenship”. McClean analyses the increasing complexity and challenge for media providers that result from globalising media trends. The article explores forms of citizenship, issues of community, and transnational media use by focusing on Australia’s multilingual and multicultural national public broadcaster, SBS, which developed as a key element of Australia’s multicultural policy in the early 1980s and was a response to the political pressures of a diverse society and the need for its recognition within broadcast media. But exactly what ‘multicultural’ means has changed since the broadcaster was founded, as have media technologies and their uses. McClean argues that SBS now needs to engage with contemporary forms of identity and increasingly sophisticated media use trends among its dynamic actual and potential audiences to maintain its relevance in 21st century Australia.

The last peer-reviewed article, Johan Fornäs’s “European identification: symbolic mediations of unity and diversity”, approaches questions of culture and identity in a regional rather than national context. The crisis in the European Union makes this article simultaneously timely and, potentially, on the cusp of significant change. Fornäs discusses examples of mediated and mediating symbols used to build trust in Europe as a shared transnational project. Commencing with a general discussion of globalisation and transnational mediation, he then outlines how symbols, including money, flags and anthems, work to suggest identification with the European ideal while simultaneously juggling signification of individual member states. This article links neatly and ironically with Fuller’s opening one as it, too, discusses identification with concrete and abstract symbols. Although Fornäs looks at the European anthem based on Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Fuller the very different domain of hyper-masculinity of celebrations of V8 supercars, both capture important cultural practices that simultaneously reflect globalising and nationalising tendencies. It is from such varied perspectives that we have attempted to wrestle with the themes of culturalisation and globalisation and in this journal issue.

The final contribution to this special section is a short essay by Konstantin Economou, “Simultaneous places: visiting, playing and representing Vimmerby, the Village of Astrid Lindgren’s childhoods”, which looks at a kind of theme park that has emerged in and around the Swedish small town of Vimmerby, the birthplace of Astrid Lindgren, the world-renowned author of the Pippi Longstocking children’s books. Economou takes us on a walking tour through the town and reflects on the experiences, meanings and practices of the nearly half a million visitors who go to this small town in summer. He finds it a place where people from various generations go to encounter a ‘genuine’ (if fantasised) Sweden, to encounter the characters of Lindgren’s books, and often to relive (perhaps unreliable) childhood memories while watching new generations of Swedes ‘perform’ childhood.

Culture, finally, is shown in the various articles to be a dynamic, integral component of everyday life and formal institutions, but it can neither be isolated from globalisation and transnationalism nor entirely deprived of the local and the idiosyncratic. These matters are not more dynamically relevant in contemporary Sweden and Australia than in any other global site. The editors and authors of this issue of Global Media Journal/ Australian Edition, then, offer it as a contribution to media and cultural scholarship wherever it is practised across the globe and irrespective of its principal object of inquiry.

About the guest editors

Dr James Arvanitakis researches in the transdisciplinary areas of globalisation, citizenship, young people, security and the cultural commons – incorporating issues around hope, trust, safety and intellect. Having held various positions within human rights-based organisations including AID/WATCH and Oxfam Hong Kong, his research seeks to maintain a particular focus on issues of social justice. He has also worked with playwrights and artists to document stories of injustice such as the production of Maralinga, which records the stories of nuclear veterans. He is the author of Contemporary Society: A Sociological Analysis of Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2009). James Arvanitakis is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Sydney and a research member of the university's Institute for Culture and Society.

David Rowe is Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society, at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His main current research interests are in media sport culture and in the urban night-time economy. Professor Rowe’s latest books are Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011) and Sport Beyond Television: The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport (with Brett Hutchins, New York: Routledge, 2012).