Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Future Of Audience Research, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

ECREA roundtable The future of audience research IAMCR conference @ BRAGA July 21 14:30-16:00 Convenor: Nico Carpentier Institutional and critical perspectives on audience representation This contribution focuses on institutional and critical perspectives on audience representation, i.e., how audience experience is formally accounted for through institutional processes of research (media literacy indices for instance) or through representative bodies such as Audience Councils. In other words, an area of overlap between audience studies and public policy debates, advocating that researchers should try to make their findings more widely available and understood in professional media environments.

Not Seeing The Joke: The Overlooked Role Of Humour In Media Production Research, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

This paper attempts to offer a methodological contribution to media production research. By reconsidering an earlier case study, and reviewing relevant literature, it illustrates how humour can fulfill several functions in media production. Importantly, humour is a central means of performing the ‘emotional labour’ that increasingly precarious media work demands. Methodologically, the everyday joking and banter of media workers can provide an important and, heretofore, overlooked means of accessing culture, meaning, consensus and conflict in media organisations. The article argues that humour’s organisational role should be considered when designing production research.

Blowing The Whistle On Bullying In The Workplace:The Aftermath Of Insider Research, Tom Clonan

Conference Papers

From 1996 to 2000, the author of this paper – then a Captain serving in the Irish Army - conducted doctoral research into the status and roles assigned female personnel in the Irish Defence Forces – Army, Navy and Air Corps. An unanticipated outcome of this equality audit of the Irish Defence Forces was the revelation of the widespread bullying, harassment, sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape of female soldiers by male colleagues. As a result of conducting this feminist research, the author was ostracised by his military colleagues and suffered from a campaign of vilification in the private and …

Beyond Europe: Launching Digital Radio In Canada And Australia, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

Eureka 147 was, as we have argued throughout this volume, a European technology designed within the very particular context of European public service broadcasting (see also Rudin 2006; O'Neill 2009). At the same time, the consortitum behind DAB technology had the ambition that Eureka 147 would become the world standard for digital radio. DAB was indeed the first such technological system to achieve standardisation at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and be recommended as a global standard for digital terrestrial sound broadcasting by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

Radio Broadcasting In Europe: The Search For A Common Digital Future, Brian O'Neill, Helen Shaw

Books/Book chapters

Europe’s radio is also characterised by a long history of being defined and driven by the state, in highly centralized fashion in the case of countries such as France (Meadel 1994), or indeed in former totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe (Paulu 1974), and along more federal or devolved lines in countries such as Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands (Kuhn 1985). The development of state broadcasting monopolies in most European countries, established in the early years of the twentieth century following the invention of sound broadcasting, has ensured that there is an enduring shared common ideological approach to radio broadcasting, which …

Dislocations: Participatory Media With Refugees In Malta And Ireland, Anthony Haughey

Books/Book chapters

Malta is located in the Mediterranean Sea between North Africa and Europe, a receiving country for significant inward migration. For most migrants the goal is to reach mainland Europe. However, every year a significant number of smuggler boats inadvertently drift into Maltese territorial waters often in severe distress, resulting in rescue by the Maltese Navy and an uncertain future.

Whilst working in Malta I was struck by the similarities between Ireland and Malta. Both islands’ are peripheral locations on the western and southern edges of Europe. Historically both countries have experienced significant outward migration of its citizens who live all …

A Political Economy Of Formatted Pleasures, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

No abstract provided.

Sounding The Future: Digital Radio And Cd-Quality Audio, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

Central to the early effort to win acceptance for DAB in the early 1990s was an extensive process of promotion of the many claimed advantages of the new broadcasting technology. Digital radio broadcasting under the Eureka 147 DAB project offered many technical enhancements – more efficient use of the spectrum, improved transmission methods, and lower running costs – features that were attractive to industry professionals, broadcasting organisations, regulators and spectrum planners. But digital radio was also designed as a consumer proposition offering audiences a new and improved listening experience with ease of tuning, reliable reception, text and data services, interactive …

Through The Lens Of A "Branded Criminal": The Politics Of Marginal Cinema In India, Rashmi Sawhney

Books/Book chapters

Images of Adivasis (Indian tribal communities) being displaced by the building of industries and dams have been regularly flashing across our television screens for the last twenty years or so, yet, media scholars have shown very little interest in this constituency either as producers or as audiences. This chapter argues that, contrary to the mass media’s favourite stereotype of the forest-inhabiting ‘native’, India’s tribal communities exist in a complex constellation of modernities, both urban and rural, and that many of these communities have at least a nominal contact with media cultures. One such group, the Chharas of Ahmedabad, popularly branded …

A Political Economy Of Formatted Pleasures, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

This chapter argues that, by promoting audience pleasures based in the pursuit of individual and materialistic goals, most television formats are consonant with a dominant orthodoxy which sees markets as the only way to organise society . This elective affinity between format pleasures and free market ideology, however, does not come about through deliberate design. Rather it is an unintended consequence of television production’s response to economic and practical necessity. In their form, content and production practices formats are pre-adapted to the demands of a globalised media market place. This commercial logic has given formats a peculiar signature in terms …

From Bruff To The Balkans: James David Bourchier, Michael Foley

Books/Book chapters

James Bouchier was an Irish journalist who served as the London Times correspondent in the Balkans and especially Bulgaria. Because of his championing of the Bulgarian nationalist interest he became a hero who is still remembered nearly 90 years after his death

Forty Years Of Movie Hacking: Considering The Potential Implications Of The Popular Media Representation Of Computer Hackers From 1968 To 2008, Damian Gordon

Articles

Increasingly movies are being produced which feature plots that incorporate elements of computer security and hacking, and cumulatively these movies are creating a public perception as to the nature of computer security. This research examines movies that feature hackers (and hacking) to identify if any common themes emerge from these movies in their representation of these issues. To achieve this, first a corpus of hacking movies is created, and then using a qualitative data analysis technique, guidelines are developed which distinguish those movies that actually have the potential to create a perception with the general public. The resultant dataset is …