There it is, finally. I promised several posts ago that I would post this bumper-sticker on the ironies of the video-game-violence debate & if you click on it, you'll be swept off to the land of the uber-popular yet still underground as hell Penny arcade.

In more course-related blogging: I really disliked Catherine Lumby's article - it reeks of post-feminism. Her main jab against 'public policy feminists' regards objections to 'sexist' & 'unrealistic' depictions of women in the media. Lumby adheres to the idea of consumer-empowerment and respects modern woman enough to let her negotiate her own positive outcomes from these depictions.
I'm not so sure. I was reminded of this quote : '"There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.'I think the same thing applies here: Feminist criticism of depictions of women in advertising can be overly censorious isn't an argument against feminism, it's an argument against advertising. A similar argument can be made against her likening of feminism to religious conservatism.
The clash of sexual liberation and pro-censorship feminism is a real one (& I'm not a huge fan of pro-censorship feminism), yet whichever way you read your ad the body is still reduced to an object being used to sell something.
In cases such as this one that Lumby has identified what meaning a woman can negotiate from the commercial would not even enter the thinking of the advertising firm because they are selling to men.
Further, Lumby found the text attached to the newspaper ad for a watch ironic - because it limited possible interpretations to those which reduced the woman in the ad. to a sex object. However, it lacks irony, precisely because the explicit thinking behind most mainstream advertising is a lot less nebulous and free for interpretation than Lumby would like.
Richard Walsh's argument is suspiciously self-serving. If you characterise the argument in the way he or Lumby have done then there is indeed a syllogism to be addressed. The context of these images and the intentions with which they are deployed are all-important, Lumby's inability to recognise this hamstrings her argument. To provide a counter-example: You don't see Cheryl Kernot writing letters of complaint to SBS when they screen sexually explicit Catherine Breillat films: Perhaps because the images therein are of the 'realistic' women that the 'public policy feminists' have been yelling about.
Lumby's position - which should really be limited to the advertising she is speaking of, but (and I am making an unsupported claim here) I wouldn't be suprised if she did tried to attack other feminist concerns on the basis of it - leads her to the dubious conclusion that 'advertising is about what women want'. Better than saying opinion polls are the arbiter of what is best, Lumby reckons the marketing and advertising industry have everyone's best interests at heart.
I read another article by Lumby on primary-carer-dads - the content of which I was much happier to agree with. I thought it was funny though, how suprised she was to discover how unusual her (stay at home husband) situation was: Her domestic situation represents less than 1% of all homes nationally. Lumby strikes me as someone untramelled by the problems of society at large, not realising how different her own situation is from other people's. Maybe this makes her an example to be looked up to; maybe it makes her less qualified to be writing about causes of social advocacy.
This links in to a recurring theme in my thinking. Tom O'Regan (great lecture by the way) talked about the lack of traction Adorno has had with ensuing generations of media theorists thanks to his unrelenting anger & suspiciousness of the media and its products.
Yet, when I read Adorno - behind the rage there was a lot of thinking that was very valid. Many of his criticisms are more valid now than when he first made them. The media industries are much larger and laterally and vertically integrated than when he was writing - and as to notions of 'quality'...
Adorno at his angriest has made some accusations which seem a little loopy - Jazz as facism. Yet there are grains of truth, even there. That it is the case that jazz is not facism doesn't mean he was wrong - but that that there are both positive and negative elements to be recognised.
David Gauntlett, in this weeks reading (I really enjoy Gauntlett - I've read his work before: Splendid sense of humour, scintillating intellect and the ability to communicate with great clarity) pointed again to positive and negative assessments (speaking of criticisms of Butler's queer theory) where neither is definitively correct.
I'm not sure why all this has been obsessing me. I guess because I feel people react against the kind of anger you find in Adorno. Binary assessments of 'right' & 'wrong' are made & Adorno gets excluded. I want to reassert Adorno's place, not least beacuse I feel the same sort of anger myself.

One of the most interesting and topical media objects I've noticed as regards this week's reading was a Dufour deodourant ad. campaign. Here is a posting by the Advertising Standards Council on the complaints raised by the ad. and the (lack of)action resulting. Yo, look at this Vogue message board and the really interesting discussions regarding the ad (mostly among women) & some interesting intertexts. This is really throwing up some interesting stuff. All I was looking for was a picture of the ad. It got a mention on 'crikey' with a little reference to Ms. Lumby as well. See also here. Quite a hot topic I guess. Sadly (or otherwise) I can't find an image: It was of four bikini-clad girls smiling away (on the sides of bus shelters I think) with the slogan 'Why do one, when you can Dufour?' Ho, ho. Well that's what the Ad. standards council thought anyway, even after all the complaints (see the links above) they said it was tongue in cheek and that the Australian public would understand that (shades of Lumby?). Lumby actually mentioned in her article that some ad. companies cynically play on the controversy provoked by such commercials to generate greater publicity for the products being advertised.
In the case of Dufour this was certainly premeditated. I don't think anyone else has picked up on the fact that the caption on these bus-shelter ad.s was a removable sticker - underneath was another captions saying: You can't enjoy this joke, but you can still enjoy Dufour (rough paraphrase). If the ad standards council had handed down a decision against Dufour, rather than remove the ads, they could just remove the sticker. Of course the ad standards council didn't even get that far. Gah, jerks. I hate advertisers.

Hmm, we're supposed to have three points from the reading relating to the media - I reckon I've probably got enough in there somewhere - I don't like Lumby enough to really want to relate her to anything.
Oh, I liked Gauntlett more, and he strikes me as another one untramelled by life's limitations, but I think he's much smarter than Lumby. I'm not sure how far I'd go with the idea of socially-constructed gender - getting into that whole nature / nurture argument. Sure, I know there are large examples of gender troubling folk, all around the world. What about all those trannies in the Phillipines & Thailand for instance - that's quite normal over there. In fact you might remember this film based on the real story of a transvestite, Thai volleyball team. I dunno, maybe there is hope for change. I'm not sure all those queer theorists are going to destabilse the predominant genders of all San Francisco, never mind..um, Mt.Isa (?), any time soon.

I got other stuff to do,

Cya blog.

Hiya blog,

First of all I'd like to have a media related rant. Linux: Damn you cheeky techno-penguin
I thought I better have a picture of the little logo bloke just to explain the penguin in my venting of frustration.
...and look, there he is with a rocket launcher -that's so cute- I just can't hate him.

Yesterday tho! I was trying to blog from our Linux server at 4ZzZ and as usual, trying to do anything (except check my email - and sometimes even that) caused the whole system to come crashing down. I imagine it is the freaky incompetence of our tech-guerillas who decided it would be really 'alternative' to have an office run on Linux and then set one up that didn't work, rather than Linux itself, is to blame. It is kinda cool. Most people pay lip service to Linux, few actually work in that environment (and if you did you'd see why :) ). All this appears to be changing, tho, well in the Philippines, anyway. Linux is inevitable - your flesh is a shell, a mere relic.

I did manage to achieve a little at least: I put up a recent playlist for my show - I'm running behind, I should do more. Hee hee - I just noticed lots of little '?'s thrown into my playlist where quite different punctuation marks should be - Linux did that - that's what you get for opening a Word document in Open office - bastards.

Isn't that always the way. I think this week's reading was talking about the cycle of creating labour value vs. consumption value. I think we're a little heavy into the creation of labour value at the moment, need more time for the whole consumption value.
Hell, I'm not even sure that's what the article was saying - I found it very dense. It may just be that the jargon for political economny is very different from cutural studies, so the translation curve may have been quite steep.
Well, I think I got most of it. It seemed like a very deliniated version of what I already understood about the mass media. Some of those models (see espec. p26) of material, economic and ideological interaction were just mind-boggling.
I had a squiz at the article (front page of Thursday 19th Aug's Australian: Media & marketing section) 'bout the bloke behind the DMG Nova network. I thought this article was funny in light of Garnham's bit on 'direct economic control of the ideologists'. It should nauseate any left-leaning person. Check this next bit:

...[T]he real low point in his career came a few years later. DMG, a
regional player when the federal Government was deciding in the late '90s
whether to move ahead with its auction plans, found itself "in poor odour"
with the relevant politicians, denounced in the letters sections of many
newspapers for its negative impact on localisation in regional markets and
the only radio player lobbying for the auctions to proceed.
"I knew bad things were happening," Thompson says. "I just didn't know why."

The Australian reports this without any ironic emphasis. Hmm, maybe because it was having a negative affect on localisation. I don't expect the corporate shirt to admit that he's pillaging the airwaves - but c'mon.

Actually the left-wing vigilantes dobbing the big, bad radio network into the press, hilariously, turned out to be the Austereo network:

Private investigators were hired to identify the letter writers, but eventually a journalist alerted Thompson to the fact that a public relations consultant, who counted Austereo as a client, was involved. Austereo eventually settled out of court, paying DMG a seven-figure fee.

This is a neat example of the long point made by Garnham about the presence of non-capitalist practices in the mass-media. The Austereo folk were behaving anti-competitively in a number of ways & backing this up with left-wing rhetoric (as a lot of major media players do when they think they can benifit from it) because they're afraid that DMG will knock the stuffing out of them when they get a grip on the radio industry. At the moment it appears their fears are well-founded too.

Auctioning those metro licenses was also really vile. Why does it seem that the intelligent way to look at today's media landscape is to be really depressed? I remember the subtle swipe McKee took at the 'black arm band view of history' in last week's reading. He was saying how difficult it was to reasearch dominant discourses through academic literature because academics were always so negative. Hmmph.

Another issue raised by Garnham was to point out the massive amounts of surplus being poured into 'new media markets'. This is one reason our government (based on the example set by the UK) has so lucratively auctioned off these broadcasting licences (DMG has just acquired the last one it wants right now - for $52 million). The buying and selling of radio is quite rapid, at present. Investment groups (the wielders of revenue raised, once, by primary and secondary industries, and now just by investment) buy and sell massive radio 'properties'. The results for 'culture', way down the list of priorities for these financial institutions (in my own opinion) are horrendous.

The whole of the article from The Australian is about this, though it talks about it very blandly and doesn't draw any of the conclusions I would. The final article (I can't remember the author) in The Radio reader : essays in the cultural history of radio is a great indictment of the recent history of the radio industry in the context of a discussion of it's future.

The last few pages of Garnham's article concern the 'capitalist cycle' and the characteristics it creates in the mass-media: Monopoly, trying to get more for less, failure of public service commitments, etc. The end of The Australian's piece notes some of the recent experience of the Autralian radio industry.

Starcom chief executive Paul Leeds says although competition has so far attracted more revenue to radio, the audience is fragmenting and the medium's 8 per cent share of advertising revenue is unlikely to grow unless the market dynamics change radically.

Is the audience fragmenting or is radio programming becoming monolithically the same? I don't think that advertisers would be attracted to a radio industry that paid more attention to the 'needs' of its fragmented audience - most businesses aren't interested in advertising to minorities. Is it any wonder the number of applications for community radio licenses are higher than ever before?

I'm really quite tired now, I think the ratio of rant to info is going to get quite out of whack soon. I should probably quit while I'm ahead.

Oh hey, I read a book On the radio, about national radio broadcasting in the UK. I was specifically trying to glean info about how they thought about underground music. The differences and similarities to the Australian scene are really productive. Radio One's John Peel and his fiercely 'educational' post-punk elitism or the commercial cash-ins by Independent local radio or the pirates on neglected minority tastes: The ways of thinking about what music is considered to be underground (and how it is) and which broacasters accomodate it seem very different from the Australian experience. Mm, I'll talk more about this when I'm less tired.

Bye now.