Senses of Cinema: Australian-based online film journal
"Senses of Cinema is an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema. We believe cinema is an art that can take many forms, from the industrially-produced blockbuster to the hand-crafted experimental work; we also aim to encourage awareness of the histories of such diverse forms. As an Australian-based journal, we have a special commitment to the regular, wide-ranging analysis and critique of Australian cinema, past and present.
Senses of Cinema is primarily concerned with ideas about particular films or bodies of work, but also with the regimes (ideological, economic and so forth) under which films are produced and viewed, and with the more abstract theoretical and philosophical issues raised by film study. As well, we believe that a cinephilic understanding of the moving image provides the necessary basis for a radical critique of other media and of the global 'image culture'."
(Nicola White, Senses of Cinema Inc)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
NZ on Screen: An Archive of Aotearoa New Zealand Screen Culture
"In 2007 NZ On Air initiated the NZ On Screen project as an integral part of its digital strategy. Since 1989 NZ On Air has funded over 15,000 hours of local television production. Much of this content, as well as thousands more hours supported by broadcasters, film investors and other funding sources, is not easily accessible to the public.
NZ On Screen is unlocking the treasure chest, providing access to the wealth of television, film, music video and new media produced in NZ, along with knowledgeable background information."
(New Zealand on Screen)
Fig.1 Murphy, G. (1981). Goodbye Pork Pie. Aotearoa New Zealand, NZ Film.
Fig.2 Tamahori, L. (1994). Once Were Warriors. Aotearoa New Zealand, New Zealand Film Commission
Fig.3 Ballantyne, A. (2009). The Strength of Water. Aotearoa New Zealand, NZ Film.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Digital Britain: Media today is participative, interactive, equal and many-to-many
"This will represent a significant change to the old analogue models of distribution, of monetisation and of participation. Media today is participative, interactive, equal and many-to-many. Where traditionally innovation and creativity was largely the domain of specialist teams in large organisations, today there is a creative revolution which is rooted in the opportunities afforded by connectivity. There is a significant opportunity to take the success of our creative industries into this interactive and participative world."
(Digital Britain: Final Report, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, June 2009, UK)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Power of 8: Towards a New Media Literacy
"Media literacy in the age of YouTube, Twitter and Google? Some argue that online youth cultures now understand more about this than traditional academics and media professionals. So what do this new generation need from the BBC and what can it learn from them?
So - when we talk about 'media literacy', we are faced with two key questions: Just which media are involved? And precisely who do we expect to be literate? This essay explores the need for an entirely fresh look at media literacy as we approach the end of the first decade of what is already a remarkable new millennium.
...
Secondly the education system that seeks reluctantly to embrace media literacy - from school to university - has been built around systemic convenience. So much of what passes as acceptable practice exists only for the convenience of the system, and certainly not for the learners. We have a curriculum wrapped around the factory learning concept of 'met before': as students turn over their test papers, their teachers outside the exam room fret, worrying whether everything on the paper has been properly introduced and covered previously. The students turn their papers over nervously hoping for 'no surprises'.
But current youth is not to be found in areas populated by previous generations. The chattering classes are largely not to be found in online forums devoted to machinima or fan fiction. Youth user-generated media leaps virally and unheeded from phone to phone and achieves status via word of mouth in social networks. Youth culture has been led to new and often unseen places. The question is how should media literacy, as a broad concept, respond to that?"
(Professor Stephen Heppell, p.6)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Mimi Ito: ecologies of cultural production and exchange
"Many of the essays in this volume bear witness to the powerful alchemy of personal cultural production and communication combined with large-scale networks of digital distribution and archiving. While the implications of peer-to-peer exchange for the media industries have attracted considerable public attention, there has been much less consideration of how these exchanges operate in the everyday practices of individuals. In a world of networked and viral cultural exchange-of cultural life captured in distributed archives, indexed by search engines, and aggregated into microcontent feeds for personal information portals...
The current digital culture ecology introduces two key sociotechnical innovations central to my framing of the Yugioh case. The first (guided primarily by media industries and by Japanese culture industries in particular), involves the construction of increasingly pervasive mass-media ecologies that integrate in-home media such as television and game consoles, location-based media such as cinema and special events, and portable media such as trading cards and handheld games. Following the industry label, I call this the 'media mix.' The second (primarily user-driven) is characterized by peer-to-peer ecologies of cultural production and exchange (of information, objects, and money) pursued among geographically-local peer groups, among dispersed populations mediated by the Internet, and through national peer-to-peer trade shows. This is what I call 'hypersociality.' These twinned innovations describe an emergent set of technologies of the imagination, where certain offerings of culture industries articulate with (and provide fodder for) an exploding network of digitally-augmented cultural production and exchange, fed by interactive and networked cultural forms.
Together, these dynamics describe a set of imaginaries-shared cultural representations and understandings-that are both pervasive and integrated into quotidian life and pedestrian social identity, and no longer strictly bracketed as media spectacles, special events, and distant celebrity. I treat the imagination as a 'collective social fact,' built on the spread of certain media technologies at particular historical junctures (Appadurai 1996a, 5). Anderson (1991) argues that the printing press and standardized vernaculars were instrumental to the 'imagined community' of the nation state. With the circulation of mass electronic media, Appadurai suggests that people have an even broader range of access to different shared imageries and narratives, whether in the form of popular music, television dramas, or cinema. Media images are now pervasive in our everyday lives, and form much of the material through with we imagine our world, relate to others, and engage in collective action, often in ways that depart from the relations and identities produced more locally.
To appear in Joe Karaganis and Natalie Jeremijenko Ed., Structures of Participation in Digital Culture. Duke University Press, 2005."
(Mizuko Ito)
Fig. 1 Cika. 'Yu GI Oh Sketch Collection', Deviantart.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
