I’ve decided to set up a new academic blog for me to ruminate on the big questions I grapple with in my studies and, in the future, my work.
I chose the title ‘Blergh’ from one of my favourite TV shows, 30 Rock. For a blog that will mesh my interests in academia, pop culture, digital media, government, democracy, politics, participatory culture and more, I think this is the perfect title.
You can access the new site at www.blergh.org or follow it on Twitter @BlerghOrg.
While buzzing around the University of Wollongong website yesterday, I came across this little news story talking about the role of television in constructing ideas about the nation. The story talked about a seminar at UOW today titled ‘Television, Popular Memory and the Nation’, which is very similar to the topic of my honours thesis. Despite already having plans for the day, I decided to attend and listen to the discussions.
The sessions went like this:
Television as nebulous cloud, and television scholars as “astronomers of television”, by @suetinthirroulat Television & Nation Symposium
— Travis Holland (@travisaholland) November 7, 2012
The members of this panel were Frances Bonner, Alan McKee, John Hartley, and Sue Turnbull.
After the last session, a book titled Remembering Television: Histories, Technologies, Memories, edited by Sue Turnbull and Kate Darian-Smith was launched. You can get it on Amazon.
I tried to keep quiet for most of the day (always a challenge for me) in deference to the much more learned people in the room, and the discussions were fascinating. I did take issue with the term user-generated-content (UGC) being thrown around without much distinction as to who the ‘users’ were. I’ve always found ‘UGC’ to be a bit problematic, especially in relation to YouTube as there is a lot of content on YouTube that is created by professional organisations, including mass media. So I think UGC is essentially a misnomer.
Nonetheless, it was a great day, and congratulations to all those who organised it. I only wish it had occurred before I finished my honours thesis!
The extraordinary developments at Fairfax have been well-covered throughout the Australian media and blogosphere. In particular, the Jonathan Green on The Drum, Andrew Jaspan in The Conversation and Eric Beecher in Crikey are very good articles, full of insight and context. But, if Fairfax falls, what will become of rural and regional papers? Or, perhaps more pertinently, what will happen to those papers during the process? Bloggers, The Conversation and the ABC might be able to pick up some of the slack at a national level, but they cannot hope to replace the (often) single-source media voices in many rural and regional markets.
Fairfax announced job cuts to sub-editing positions at the Illawarra Mercury, the Newcastle Herald and their affiliates only a few paltry weeks ago. Those cuts seem miniscule compared to the 1900 across the country and it is now doubtful those cuts will be all that regional mastheads will face.
Newspaper industry marketing body The Newspaper Works says the weekday editions of The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian collectively dropped 10.6% readership in the year to March 2012. The worst performer of these three was the SMH, which lost 13.6%.
In contrast, Australia’s regional papers dropped only 6.5%. Ironically, in NSW the best and worst weekday performers respectively were our old friends the Newcastle Herald (-4.2%) and the Illawarra Mercury (-9%). Only two weekday regional papers surveyed outperformed the Newcastle Herald: the Gold Coast Bulletin (-1.21%) and the Gladstone Observer (-3.7%). The only papers to increase circulation were the Saturday Daily Telegraph (+0.8%), the Saturday West Australian (+0.5%) and South Australia’s weekday The Advertiser (+0.1%). In all, it paints a horrible picture, but regional and national papers are faring much better than the state/metro papers upon which the Fairfax business is based.
Fairfax may evoke some form of devolution with the rural network (Rural Press) and the regional papers (like the Illawarra Mercury and the Newcastle Herald) breaking away from their metro businesses. This approach makes little sense given these papers seem to be performing much better than the SMH and Age. Another option is that non-metro papers are more tightly integrated with Fairfax and take over writing stories for the metros. In my experience, the SMH usually re-writes stories from rural papers rather than publishing them directly, but with fewer editorial staff, content sharing becomes much more likely. Some rural papers already borrow, with attribution, articles from their metro cousins, so further integration is not unlikely.
Should Fairfax fall, many rural and regional areas would be left without their only print news company. In NSW, News Limited has virtually no community newspapers outside of Sydney and given they are facing their own big cuts, they would be unlikely to establish new titles. Of other media, many communities have only local radio stations supplemented by regional television. Media consolidation and ownership seems like a big deal for metro areas, but it is a much bigger issue when there are already only three voices.
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In his seminal work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson wrote of the ways nations are constructed – of the common symbols and artefacts that define peoples within national borders. Equally potent are the symbols used to define others within those borders, or to signify they are outsiders. It is the symbols used in The Simpsons to define non-American characters that will be the subject of my thesis.
I thought the term ‘non-American’ was problematic, for a whole range of reasons. And it is. But in the context of Anderson’s theory, it makes perfect sense. His work is all about nationalism and national communities, so it works well in this context.
By studying The Simpsons – a cultural product to which so many have given so much – I hope to discover something about how Americans interpret our (being non-Americans’) place in the world and, by extension, how they interpret themselves. It will not, of course, provide a comprehensive or definitive text by which all American cultural products and attitudes can be judged, but it should contribute something to the overall picture. It is not American exceptionalism that is under examination here, but the unexceptional aspects of one of the most enduring, penetrating and overtly American cultural products that exists. It is the everyday depictions of a particular subset of characters within the show, and I hope to demonstrate something of that culture, and its view of others.