Law Commons^™

The Douban Online Social Media Barometer And The Chinese Reception Of Korean Popular Culture Flows, Brian Yecies, Jie Yang, Ae-Gyung Shim, Kai Ruo Soh, Matthew J. Berryman

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Since its launch in 2005, the Chinese online social networking site Douban has become a key platform for creating and sharing user-generated content on a rising tide of global popular culture. Such content and its corresponding user data has become so prolific that Western media outlets are now using Douban a key barometer for gauging representative opinions and attitudes towards foreign content in China. However, a full range of tools for harvesting and analyzing Chinese-language datasets has yet to be explored in English. This article attempts to fill this gap by investigating the applicability of an analytical framework that can …

12 Deadly Indigenous Australian Social Media Users To Follow, Bronwyn Carlson

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

No abstract provided.

Mining Chinese Social Media Ugc: A Big Data Framework For Analyzing Douban Movie Reviews, Jie Yang, Brian Yecies

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Analysis of online user-generated content is receiving attention for its wide applications from both academic researchers and industry stakeholders. In this pilot study, we address common Big Data problems of time constraints and memory costs involved with using standard single-machine hardware and software. A novel Big Data processing framework is proposed to investigate a niche subset of user-generated popular culture content on Douban, a well-known Chinese-language online social network. Huge data samples are harvested via an asynchronous scraping crawler. We also discuss how to manipulate heterogeneous features from raw samples to facilitate analysis of various film details, review comments, and …

Sex, Censorship And Media Regulation In Japan: A Historical Overview, Mark Mclelland

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Over the past several decades alarmist reports about the supposed dangers of the sexualised nature of much Japanese popular culture have regularly featured in the English-language press. It has been claimed that Japan is 'awash' in all kinds of pornography, including child pornography (Larimer 1999; Fallows 1986: 38) and that insufficient attempts are made by the authorities to properly regulate the expression of sexual matters. A major concern of such reporting has been the supposed 'dark side' (McGinty 2002) of the manga (comics) which are ubiquitous in Japan and, since the 1980s, have become popular with young people worldwide. International …

New Media, Censorship And Gender: Using Obscenity Law To Restrict Online Self-Expression In Japan And China, Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The widespread take-up of Internet technologies from the mid-1990s has proven challenging to nation states that seek to limit access to ideas, information or images that the political class considers dangerous or inappropriate for the general population. As a largely deterritorialized technology, the Internet allows access to material that circumvents national legislatures and ignores local ratings systems and in so doing facilitates all kinds of inter-cultural and transnational flows of communication. Different countries have different sensitivities regarding the kinds of material that should not be freely available to their citizens and although the entry of such material is closely scrutinized …

It's Like Going To A Cemetery And Lighting A Candle: Aboriginal Australians, Sorry Business And Social Media, Bronwyn Carlson, Ryan Frazer

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Death and funeral practices are a constant presence in many Aboriginal Australians’ lives— research in some communities found they are eight times more likely to have attended a funeral in the previous 2 years than non- Aboriginal people. This can be explained by two major factors: inordinately high rates of Aboriginal mortality and cultural practices around death (broadly referred to as Sorry Business). Research in other contexts has found traditions once reserved solely for face- to- face interactions are now also taking place online on social media. This paper draws from interviews conducted with Aboriginal social media users from New …

Media Reforms Take One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Eric Loo

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Malaysians are evidently freer today to openly criticise their government than they were prior to 1998.

But fundamental reforms that civil societies had hoped for during the internet-driven Reformasi movement in 1998 and Bersih rallies (in 2007, 2011 and 2012) are wanting.

Instead, Malaysians have a government focused on achieving a high-income developed-nation status by 2020 while eschewing the cultural prerequisites of a normative democracy — freedom of access to public information, free and fair elections, vigilant media and press freedom.

Online And Onwards: It Gets Better For Gay And Lesbian Media, Marcus O'Donnell

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Last week’s announcement that Australia’s oldest and most respected lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) weekly newspaper, Sydney Star Observer (SSO), will change to a monthly print format and a reinvigorated web presence does not come as a surprise given the global state of newspapers.

I edited SSO from 1999 to 2006 and, to me, the shift makes sense. What’s more, the publication’s move online says just as much about the evolution of the LGBTI community as it does about the changing fortunes of print media.

Gay and lesbian media have been one of the essential elements in the …

Dodgy Science Or Global Necessity? Local Media Reporting Of Marine Parks, Michelle Voyer, Tanja Dreher, William Gladstone, Heather Goodall

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The digital age and globalization has brought international issues to our doorstep and placed the local in the context of the global. News media have played a crucial role in allowing recognition and exploration of the global origins and outcomes of many environmental crises such as climate change, deforestation, threatened species management and biodiversity loss (Cottle, 2011c). The modern environmental movement has responded to the global scale of these crises with campaigns for global solutions. Many of these campaigns rely heavily on coordinated, collective action across a multitude of jurisdictions around the world, with the success of global campaigns dependent …

The ‘New Frontier’: Emergent Indigenous Identities And Social Media, Bronwyn Carlson

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The rapid rise in the use of social media as a means of cultural and social interaction among Aboriginal people and groups is an intriguing development. It is a phenomenon that has not yet gained traction in academia, although interest is gaining momentum as it becomes apparent that the use of social media is becoming an everyday, typical activity. In one episode of Living Black (an Australian television show featuring stories of interest to Indigenous people) entitled ‘‘Cyber Wars’’ (April 19th, 2010), several Aboriginal people commented on their Facebook use. Allan Clarke, one of the Aboriginal Facebook users featured, stated …

Pre-Socratic Media Theory, Brogan S. Bunt

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Drawing inspiration from Siegfried Zielinski’s ground-breaking study of media archaeology, Deep Time of the Media, this paper explores the potential for pre-Socratic philosophy to provide a model for alternative conceptions of mediation within contemporary media art. It argues that pre-Socratic philosophy develops notions of mediation that extend beyond the contemporary focus on technical media. In their exploration of fundamental dynamic principles within nature and in their sensitivity to the uncertain relation between truth, appearance and finite human understanding, they suggest diverse conceptions of mediation that have continuing critical and creative relevance.

Erewhon: Media, Ecology, And Utopia In The Antipodes, Susan (Su) Ballard

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

On June 22, 2005, an essay by the Association of Freed Time was published in Artforum International. With little contextual information, "El Diaro del Fin del Mundo: A Journey That Wasn't" described environmental damage to the Antarctic ice shelf and the subsequent mutations that were occurring within the Antarctic ecosystem. One of these mutants was rumored to be a solitary albino penguin, living on an uncharted island near Marguerite Bay. The Artforum article tells of French artist Pierre Huyghe's journey with ten others to find the island and its mysterious inhabitant. The article forms the first part of an event …

Costings Row Torpedoes The Media, Marcus O'Donnell

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The ABC’s economics correspondent Stephen Long has delivered a scathing assessment of the Coalition’s costings statement this morning but just as significantly he also delivered a harsh judgment on his own colleagues. He pointed to perhaps the most egregious error in the media’s reporting of election 2013.

Jihad Sheilas Or Media Martyrs: Muslim Women And The Media, Julie N. Posetti

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Muslim women are both highly visible members of one of the most marginalised groups in Western society and the most vulnerable to vilification and media stereotyping, suffering the 'triple-whammy' effect of sexism, racism and religious bigotry. Ubiquitously portrayed as veiled, they are concurrently represented as oppressed and radical non-conformists, as threatened and threatening, as passive sexslaves and exotic, erotic beings. Symbolised generically by the distinctive religious clothing some choose to wear, Muslim women of all cultures have become the most recognisable, visible targets of racism on the streets, yet at the same time they are almost invisible and voiceless in …

Journalism Eduction 2.0: Training In An Age Of Radical Change In Mediashift - Your Guide To The Digital Media Revolution, Julie Posetti

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. “We are not going to make it with uninspired and uninspiring teachers!” Archbishop Desmond Tutu challenged delegates in his closing address to the second World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC2) in South Africa last month. The anti-Apartheid warrior and Nobel Laureate described journalism as a “noble calling” and recounted his country’s hard-fought struggle for media freedom. During the event he also signed the Table Mountain Declaration, …

Narrative And Media: Helen Fulton With Rosemary Huisman, Julian Murphet And Anne Dunn, Melbourne, 2005., Helen Caple

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Book review

Narrative and Media Helen Fulton, with Rosemary Huisman, Julian Murphet, and Anne Dunn, Melbourne, 2005.

The book Narrative and Media should be of great interest to students and scholars of Media Studies alike. Coming from a post-structuralist perspective, the book interrogates the ideological implications of narrative strategies across the major forms of the media, and offers a clear and cogent explanation of how readers are positioned as consumers of the media. With the commodification of the media becoming more and more prevalent, media scholars need to develop a reliable set of theoretical tools rigorous enough to unpack how …

Media Representations Of The Hijab, Julie N. Posetti

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Over the past decade, the appropriateness of traditional clothing worn by some Muslim women, particularly the head covering known as the hijab, has been the focus of often fierce media debates. The hijab debate has come to symbolise the clash of cultures fanned by links between Islamic extremism and 21st century terrorism. While in several Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iran, the full covering, known as the chador or burqa, has been mandatory, a backlash against Muslim culture has seen such clothing banned, along with the much more common hijab, in the interests of secularism. In this …

Promoting The Ideals Of Integration And Diversity. Media Coverage Of Special Olympics Australia, Stephen J. Tanner, Sandy Haswell, Mandy Lake

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Australia's media organisations have long had an obsession with the exploits of our sporting 'champions', both on and off the field. This coverage is often said to be a response to the demands of a sports-mad nation. In a society in which sport is often considered a symbol of unity and integration, this paper investigates whether the media (1) contributes to the spirit of diversity by covering sport involving people with intellectual disabilities, and (2) encourages greater awareness of disability issues by writing with authority and understanding, or instead promotes elitism by focusing on so-called 'real sports' that feature able-bodied …

"A Mirror For Men?" Idealised Depictions Of White Men And Gay Men In Japanese Women's Media, Mark Mclelland

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper argues that Japanese women's media which portray images of foreign (nearly always white) men and Japanese gay men as objects of desire and fascination for Japanese women function as rhetorical mirrors whose real intent is to reflect back the supposed deficiencies of 'traditional' Japanese men. The paper concludes that women's media are being used as a vehicle for anti-male rhetoric, a channel for an indirect discourse of complaint whose main purpose is to critique the perceived shortcomings of ordinary Japanese men.

Convivial Media, Brian Martin, Wendy Varney

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The Net has been used in numerous episodes of people's action in varying ways, from straightforward communication to Website blockades and sabotage. Here we look briefly at two Net campaigns: the campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the ongoing Net campaign in support of the Zapatistas in Mexico. These case studies help provide insight into features of "convivial media" that activists should be using and promoting.

Celebrity And The Media, Frances Bonner, Rebecca Farley, Philip Marshall, Graeme Turner

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper presents the results of a survey of stories dealing with celebrities in a sample of newspapers, magazines, and television programming. Aimed at testing anecdotal accounts of an increase in the volume of such material within the media generally, the survey provides detailed evidence for the view that this now constitutes a significant portion of media output. The paper discusses these findings in the context of attempting to better understand the cultural function of such stories for their audience.