Inside the Institutions
Culture and Communication from Digital Transformations to Automation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2973972 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Julian Thomas (0000-0002-2907-4586, MIT University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2019-11-12 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cultural Studies Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1446-8123 • E-ISSN: 1837-8692 |
| Publisher | University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5130/csr.v25i2.6882 |
| OpenAlex | W2999377841 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 3 |
Not the institutions of the Academy itself, the universities, or the disciplines, but the invisible fictions, in John Hartleys words, the environment of mainly public rules and policy or administrative organisations, which was a major object of attention and controversy in the period.1 A longer discussion would follow some of the threads connecting todays historical institutionalism in communication studies (Bannerman and Haggart2), institutional economics (North3 and his successors) and regulatory theory, with the 1990s strands of Foucauldian, Weberian, and Latourian culture and government research. The CMP was my first experience of working in a multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary research centre, and it gave me the chance to learn from an extraordinary and inspiring group of screen industries and media policy researchers, intellectual property specialists, museum and library experts, scholars of Indigenous media and culture, and many others. Here, there was a distinctive orientation to the public sector, reflecting not only Labor's long national ascendance, but perhaps also white Australia's much older predisposition to look to government for solutions-the predisposition, as Keith Hancock famously described it, to think of government as 'a vast public utility'.4 The universities themselves in this period had been the subjects of a landmark institutional restructuring, producing an expansion of social, human and cultural capital, encompassing of course the 'new humanities'. A few additional results of Australia's formative, cross-cutting policy imperatives of liberalisation, new international orientations, digital transformation and national cultural development can be very briefly noted: * the development of a national cultural policy in Creative Nation (1994);5 * the passage of the Broadcasting Services Act in 1992, and what became remarkably long-lived sector-specific and economy-wide regulatory structures for linear media;6 * the privatisation of AUSSAT and the beginnings of competition in telecommunications in 1991, leading to the Telecommunications Act 1997;7 * the expansion of the museum and heritage sectors from the 1980s, including the establishment of the National Museum of Australia (enacted in 1980, announced as a major Centenary of Federation project in 1996, and opened in 2001); * ongoing attempts to reform and modernise intellectual property on fronts ranging from digital publishing to Indigenous cultural property; * the protracted reorganisation of broadcasting through regional aggregation of commercial services, the emergence of SBS as a second national broadcaster, and the emergent community and remote Indigenous broadcasting sectors; * the work of the library sector and the ABC in creating organisational capacities for expanding access and content for the nascent public internet
Art · Communication studies · Digital culture · Literature · Media studies · Project commissioning · Publishing · Social science · Sociology · Telecommunications · Computer Science · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Globalization and Cultural Identity
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |