Media International Australia

This article examines the communicative activities and press coverage of the alcohol industry-funded social-change organisation DrinkWise. Established in 2005, DrinkWise funds health research in universities, runs public health campaigns and engages in public relations activities. We use a framing analysis to examine the way DrinkWise frames problems, judgements and solutions related to alcohol consumption and policy. The aim of this analysis is to examine how journalistic practice legitimises DrinkWise and facilitates the organisation's communicative activities. In addition, we consider how DrinkWise's representation in the press works alongside the organisation's array of communicative activities to facilitate the commercial objectives of the alcohol industry. We draw on the implications of this analysis to conceptualise how distinct forms of communicative work – such as academic research, policy-making, journalism and marketing, advertising and public relations – are interconnected.

How did ‘remix’, a post-production technique and compositional form in dance music, come to describe digital culture? Is it an apt metaphor? This article considers the rhetorical use of remix in Lawrence Lessig's case for copyright reform in Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008). I argue that Lessig's understanding of remix is problematic, as it seems unable to accommodate its musical namesake and obscures the particular history of media use in recent music culture. Drawing on qualitative analysis of popular music cultures, I argue that the conceptualisation of remix as any media made from pre-existing media is problematic. The origins of remix, I argue, provides a lens for thinking critically about the rhetorical uses of the term in current discourse and forces us to ponder materialities. My aim is not to dispute the word's contemporary meaning or attempt to establish a correct usage of the term – clearly a wide variety of creators call their work remix; instead, this article considers the rhetorical work that remix is asked to perform as a way of probing the assumptions and aspirations that lurk behind Lessig's argument.

Televised on Network Ten's new digital multi-channel One HD in April 2010, the Foot Locker Elite Classic – High Stakes Hoops (HSH) was a one-off made-for-television event. Highlighting an intersection between media policy decisions, fan culture and sports media, this basketball tournament is an unlikely source of insight into the contemporary media marketplace. The event was born out of changing television industry conditions. It served the mutual dependencies of a media-starved sport in Australia – basketball – and a brand new commercial network digital multi-channel, One HD, that required extensive content to fill its 24-hour, seven-day-a-week schedule. One HD was launched by Network Ten in 2009, and competes with the specialist pay television provider Fox Sports. This article argues that it was knowledge of these broader television market conditions that significantly informed the staging and collective meaning of HSH for many fans, rather than just the quality of the play or the teams taking part. Media sport market literacy – discussion about the business and strategic value of television and media coverage – is now an under-acknowledged but important part of fan discussion.

The main aim of this article is to examine the history of radio in Spain using a cultural industries approach, in order to analyse how the social and economic context and the various communication policies (or lack of them) have contributed to making the Spanish radio system what it is today. Through this approach, a greater understanding will be reached of its past and present business model, the agents involved and the market structure supporting it. Spanish radio is highly regulated at the national level, which is why the study of communication policies is a fundamental – but not the only – pillar of the theoretical tradition under consideration.

The Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 brought widespread loss of life and destruction to most of the coastal communities of Sri Lanka. Communities attempting to make sense of the natural disaster and subsequent destruction struggle to describe such unusual and cataclysmic events, which can transform benign physical local environments into disaster zones. Natural disasters force people to rethink the relationship between culture and nature, often using the bricolage of available signs and concepts. This case study uses data from Sri Lankan English-language newspapers, in-depth interviews and a focus group to identify prominent themes in the recollections of the tsunami and its aftermath. Four themes are drawn primarily from oral narratives of a small coastal community near Galle in the south: monster and monsterisation of victims; metaphysical reciprocity; reconsideration of mythical events; and unique corporeality. Arguably, these themes resonate to varying degrees with descriptive and explanatory force to facilitate psychological recovery for those affected. The findings suggest that communities affected by natural disasters make sense of traumatic events through descriptions and narratives that give symbolic and/or ideological agency to events in an effort to rationalise them and restore order to people's lives and place in the universe.

This article examines the relationship between Australian press coverage of, and public opinion on, the Israel–Palestine conflict using a framing perspective. The first part of the study involves analysis of almost 10,000 articles published in The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald between 2000 and 2010. The second part of the study is based on an online survey conducted with 1021 participants nationally. The main aim of this study is to identify the extent to which the issues deemed most central to resolving the conflict have been covered by the Australian press and the extent to which Australian public opinion is either reflective of this content or represents alternate views. The study found that respondents expressed perspectives inconsistent with prevalent news frames, including a close identification with the Palestinian narrative as well as views on a resolution of the conflict reflective of a concern for human rights and universal values.

This article sets the context for this special themed issue on the ‘Korean digital wave’ by considering the symbiotic relationship between digital technologies, their techniques and practices, their uses and the affordances they provide, and Korea's ‘compressed modernity’ and swift industrialisation. It underscores the importance of interrogating a range of groundbreaking developments and innovations within Korea's digital mediascapes, and its creative and cultural industries, in order to gain a complex understanding of one of Australia's most significant export markets and trading partners. Given the financial and political commitment in Australia to a high-speed broadband network that aims to stimulate economic and cultural activity, recent technological developments in Korea, and the double-edged role played by government policy in shaping the ‘Korean digital wave’, merit close attention from media and communications scholars.

South Korea frequently is regarded as standing at the vanguard of the digital revolution, and its status as perhaps the world's most wired society makes it a fruitful case study for considering how digital culture may develop. South Korea's reputation rests in part on statistics that place it at the global forefront in terms of broadband penetration and internet speed – that is, its infrastructural ‘hardware’ – but it is equally in the cultural expression of Korea's engagement with digital media – its ‘software’ – that the nation evinces characteristics that call for attention. Compressed modernisation in South Korea has brought about contestation over acceptable behaviour, and several recent incidents highlight the thorny negotiation of cultural practice in the Web 2.0 era. This article focuses on two interrelated phenomena: first, the use of digital media to confront convention and foster activism; and second, an opposing desire to police violations of norms, often at the expense of invasion of privacy and human rights.

This article examines the political role of online media in the process of democratisation in South Korea. It argues that online media in Korea emerged when the institutionalisation of the political parties was weak, and when the mainstream media were polarised, losing the trust of the general public. These two factors allowed new forces in civil society to emerge as influential mediators in political communication and mobilisation. The political impact of online media experienced in the Korean context shows that the great potential of the internet demonstrated in the first half of the 2000s proved to be less potent in the 2007 presidential election because political and media contingencies had neutralised it. In 2007, online media were adopted by the incumbent political party and also by the mainstream media, which utilised their existing power resources and advantage.

This article explores how Korean bloggers, in contestation, participate in the social structure of communication and potentially transform it through their vernacular practices of decoding and recoding in the blogosphere. As a neo-liberal regime has been established, citizens practise discursive politics in a seemingly democratic and technologically advanced society that is actually a coercive-controlled communication system. Through the analysis of news blogs on the Cheonan disaster, it is suggested that a majority of bloggers are seen to utilise news media stories to gain leverage for their points of view or to provide counter-arguments against the dominant frames generated by the established news media. The critical reframing of the digital network in Korean society allows a reflexive reading of the Korean digital wave, which should be contextualised within generation politics, economic polarisation and ideological contestation. In order to avoid a nationalistic celebration of the IT power of the country, citizens' digital media practices are analysed as contributions to the democratisation of the public sphere and the enhancement of social openness and participation in the digitised arena of discursive politics.

This study investigates the realistic conditions of ‘digital Korea’, especially as they are exemplified by the Samsung SDI scandal in South Korea. Samsung SDI, the world's largest plasma TV maker and a subsidiary of the Samsung Group, has fallen under suspicion due to using illegally cloned mobile phones to track the location data of some activist workers who tried to organise a union. The study stresses that this example of mobile tracking represents the shady side of mobile phone use created by management's excessive desire for labour control, and confirms that mobile tracking techniques make possible the spatial expansion of the scope of power. The spatial vocabulary of power is not totalitarian, but dispersed and nomadic in action, and resides in the space of ‘flows’ constructed by electronic impulses. This study discloses that, for private corporations, mobile tracking facilitates a form of efficient, invisible labour control over ‘targeted’ workers, even outside the workplace. It concludes that the control of labourers in Korea has been reinforced by the confluence of business interests, the under-developed political system and a societal lack of interest in privacy.

As one location boasting high broadband speeds, infrastructure, strong techno-nationalist policy and some of the early examples of so-called ‘digital natives’, South Korea has been seen as the model for the future of online culture. However, beyond these images of techno-fantasies is a technoculture that is marred by an increasing ambivalence towards online media. Specifically through user-created content (UCC), researchers can gain insight into some of the paradoxes emerging around online creativity, community and politics. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2011, this article considers what UCC means in Korea and how this reflects the particularities of Korea's technoculture.

In the twenty-first century, the Korean wave has been expanding with the growth of digital culture, particularly online gaming. The rapid growth of the Korean online game industry and exports to Western markets have raised the fundamental question of whether digital culture has changed the Korean wave from a regionally focused cultural flow to a Western-focused contra-flow. This article discusses the Korean online gaming industry as an example of contra-flow. It also maps out the process by which local online games are appropriated for Western game users through content hybridisation and glocalisation. Finally, it questions whether this new trend can diminish asymmetrical cultural flows between the West and the East.

Since censorship was lifted in Korea in 1996, collaboration between Korean and foreign filmmakers has grown in both extent and visibility. Korean films have been shot in Australia, New Zealand and mainland China, while the Korean digital post-production and visual effects firms behind blockbusters infused with local effects have gone on to work with filmmakers from greater China and Hollywood. Korean cinema has become known for its universal storylines, genre experimentation and high production values. The number of exported Korean films has increased, as has the number of Korean actors starring in films made in other countries. Korea has hosted major international industry events. These milestones have facilitated an unprecedented international expansion of the Korean film industry. With the advent of the ‘digital wave’ in Korea – the film industry's transition to digital production practices – this expansion has accelerated. Korean film agencies – the pillars of the national cinema – have played important parts in this internationalisation, particularly in promoting Korean films and filmmakers outside Korea and in facilitating international events in Korea itself. Yet, for the most part, projects involving Korean filmmakers working in partnership with filmmakers from other countries are the products of individuals and businesses working outside official channels. That is, they are often better understood as ‘transnational’ rather than ‘national’ or ‘international’ projects. In this article, we focus on a range of collaborations involving Korean, Australian, New Zealand and Chinese filmmakers and firms. These collaborations highlight some of the forces that have shaped the digital wave in the Korean film industry, and illustrate the increasingly influential role that the digital expertise of Korean filmmakers is playing in film industries, both regionally and around the world.

This article examines the relationship between digital publicity and cosmetic surgery. While focused on South Korea, it also discusses China because of the conspicuous Chinese demand for Korean cosmetic surgery in recent years. In fact, China has become the largest export market for Korean cosmetic surgery. The analysis is based on the premise that there is a vital link between cosmetic surgery and digital technology in both these countries. We argue that the celebrity culture spawned by entertainment media has facilitated the normalisation of cosmetic surgery to the extent that it is commonly viewed, quite unproblematically, as a form of human physiological enhancement. The article examines the publicity surrounding cosmetic surgery (comprising media reports, advertisements and commentaries) to see how it is presented in the Korean media and on the internet. These findings are then considered in relation to the promotion of Korean cosmetic surgery in China.