Graeme Turner

Ordinary people and the media: The demotic turn

“An outstanding intervention in contemporary debates about the emancipatory potential of the new media landscape. While “power to the people” may be the rallying cry in an age of blogging, Web 2.0 interactivity, and reality TV, Turner cautions against confusing the “demotic” with democracy…Ordinary People and the Media is required reading for students and scholars navigating the shifting terrain of media and cultural studies.” — Serra Tinic, University of Alberta, Canada The ‘demotic turn’ is a term coined by Graeme Turner to describe the increasing visibility of the ‘ordinary person’ in the media today. In this dynamic and insightful book he explores the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of the ‘everyday’ individuals willingness to turn themselves into media content through: Celebrity culture; Reality TV; DIY websites; Talk radio; User-generated materials online. Analyzing the pervasiveness of celebrity culture, this book further develops the idea of the demotic turn as a means of examining the common elements in a range of ‘hot spots’ within media and cultural studies today. Refuting the proposition that the demotic turn necessarily carries with it a democratizing politics, this book examines its political and cultural function in media production and consumption across many fields – including print and electronic news, current affairs journalism, and citizen and online journalism. It examines these fields in order to outline a structural shift in what the western media has been doing lately, and to suggest that these media activities represent something much more fundamental than contemporary media fashion.

The mass production of celebrity ‘Celetoids’, reality TV and the ‘demotic turn’

In Understanding Celebrity, I coined the term ‘the demotic turn’ as a means of characterizing the increasing production of ‘ordinary’ celebrities through reality TV and DIY celebrity websites. Refusing the idea that this necessarily constituted a democratizing process - hence the term ‘demotic’ - I wanted to examine the role that the access to mass-mediated fame plays within the construction of cultural identities. In this article, I develop this idea a little further by asking whether the shrinking distance between TV and ‘reality’, and between the famous and the ‘ordinary’, means that we need to reconsider our understandings of what kind of cultural apparatus the media has become.

Approaching celebrity studies

The analysis of celebrity, celebrities and celebrity culture is one of the growth industries for the humanities and social sciences over the last decade. Psychologists warn us of the dangers of ‘celebrity worship’, sociologists interrogate young people about their personal expectations of fame, and even a discipline with as attenuated a relation to popular culture as literary studies now studies such things as ‘post-colonial celebrity’. The textual richness of celebrity culture is proving irresistible, and so the fetish for textual analysis that dominated so much of the 1980s has found itself right at home in the study of celebrity. But is this what we want from the study of celebrity? What are the approaches that are most needed, and which are likely to be the most productive for those of us in cultural and media studies for whom celebrity has become part of the heartland for the study of popular culture? This article will discuss some of the options, and in particular it will ask how we might establish a stronger base for the study of the industrial production, as well as the audience consumption, of celebrity.

Tabloidization, journalism and the possibility of critique

This article responds to what is regarded as a widespread critique of the phenomenon of tabloidization in television news and current affairs. Arguing that this is a phenomenon which cultural studies has found difficulty in critiquing - at least partly due to cultural studies’ populist heritage - this article sets out to suggest what kind of role cultural criticism should play in the analysis of contemporary television news and current affairs programming.

Television as digital media

In Television as Digital Media , scholars from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States combine television studies with new media studies to analyze digital TV as part of digital culture. Taking into account technologies, industries, economies, aesthetics, and various production, user, and audience practices, the contributors develop a new critical paradigm for thinking about television, and the future of television studies, in the digital era. The collection brings together established and emerging scholars, producing an intergenerational dialogue that will be useful for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between television and digital media. Introducing the collection, James Bennett explains how television as digital media is a non-site-specific, hybrid cultural and technological form that spreads across platforms such as mobile phones, games consoles, iPods, and online video services, including YouTube, Hulu and the BBC’s iPlayer. Television as digital media threatens to upset assumptions about television as a mass medium that has helped define the social collective experience, the organization of everyday life, and forms of sociality. As often as we are promised the convenience of the television experience “anytime, anywhere,” we are invited to participate in communities, share television moments, and watch events live. The essays in this collection demonstrate the historical, production, aesthetic, and audience changes and continuities that underpin the emerging meaning of television as digital media. Contributors . James Bennett, William Boddy, Jean Burgess, John Caldwell, Daniel Chamberlain, Max Dawson, Jason Jacobs, Karen Lury, Roberta Pearson, Jeanette Steemers, Niki Strange, Julian Thomas, Graeme Turner

After hybridity: Muslim-Australians and the imagined community

What would I know about Muslim-Australians? Not very much, as it happens. This is something I have in common with many other members of the Anglo-Australian community. In what follows, I want to acknowledge at the outset, I am not drawing upon primary research into this sector of the Australian community in order to say something new about it. Rather, my examination reads aspects of the media representation of Muslim-Australians as symptomatic of a cultural-political shift I wish to understand and challenge. At its simplest, this choice of topic derives from a growing alarm at the unprecedented degree of public antagonism to Muslim-Australians as members of the national community. The locations of that antagonism include speeches in national and state parliamentary debates as well as talkback radio, news reporting on radio and television, and (most persistently and disturbingly) the opinion columns of the metropolitan and national newspapers. Specific instances I have in mind include the following:

‘Media Wars’: Journalism, cultural and media studies in Australia

The relationship between journalism and cultural studies in the tertiary education system in Australia has never been a comfortable one. Communications studies, journalism studies, media studies and cultural studies programmes have all developed over the last two decades, but in an institution-specific manner. The tensions embedded in some of these ad hoc arrangements – tensions not necessarily confined to these disciplines but often implicit in any merger between critical theory and professional practice – boiled over in a series of newspaper articles by journalism educator Keith Windschuttle in 1998 which attacked the use of cultural and media studies in journalism programmes. A one-day conference was held in November 1998 specifically to debate the relationship between journalism educators and cultural studies academics. This review essay outlines some of the lessons to be learned from the ‘Media Wars’ conference, before defending the value of developing specific areas of common ground – both in the academy and in public debates about the function of the media – between the two disciplinary fields.

Television studies after TV: Understanding television in the post-broadcast era

Television studies must now address a complex environment where change has been vigorous but uneven, and where local and national conditions vary significantly. Globalizing media industries, deregulatory policy regimes, the multiplication, convergence and trade in media formats, the emergence of new content production industries outside the US/UK umbrella, and the fragmentation of media audiences are all changing the nature of television today: its content, its industrial structure and how it is consumed. Television Studies after TV leads the way in developing new ways of understanding television in the post-broadcast era. With contributions from leading international scholars, it considers the full range of convergent media now implicated in understanding television, and also focuses on large non-Anglophone markets - such as Asia and Latin America - in order to accurately reflect the wide variety of structures, forms and content which now organise television around the world.Television studies must now address a complex environment where change has been vigorous but uneven, and where local and national conditions vary significantly. Globalizing media industries, deregulatory policy regimes, the multiplication, convergence and trade in media formats, the emergence of new content production industries outside the US/UK umbrella, and the fragmentation of media audiences are all changing the nature of television today: its content, its industrial structure and how it is consumed. Television Studies after TV leads the way in developing new ways of understanding television in the post-broadcast era. With contributions from leading international scholars, it considers the full range of convergent media now implicated in understanding television, and also focuses on large non-Anglophone markets - such as Asia and Latin America - in order to accurately reflect the wide variety of structures, forms and content which now organise television around the world.

Cultural Identity, Soap Narrative, and Reality TV:

This article works from the established assumption that narratives produced for local audiences are always going to operate in some relation to established discourses of local or national cultural identities. In the case of Australian television soap opera, this is not in any way a radical assumption, given the format’s routine construction of a recognizable version of the local-everyday as the ground on which its narratives are staged. In this article, the author argues that it is likely, in the case of certain versions of reality TV that draw on the soap opera format for their narrative and formal structures, that reality TV’s representations of the real and the everyday are going to operate similarly—indigenizing even the most international of formats and genres. Thus, the way to examine “the local” in the “global” may well be through mapping processes of appropriation and adaptation rather than through the proposition of any thoroughgoing specificity or uniqueness.

The cosmopolitan city and its Other: the ethnicizing of the Australian suburb

Abstract In this article I argue that there has been a significant cultural change in the meanings attached to two specific sites in the Australian cultural imaginary—the city and the suburb. I see this change as the product of opposing versions of multicultural Australia. In several Australian cities, particularly Sydney, although the combination of multiculturalism and economic globalization has helped to create increasingly cosmopolitan inner city suburbs, it has also contributed to the development of an antithetical but perhaps more politically significant version of the middle or outer suburb. This new version of the suburb is defined by minority ethnic or racial identities; it is increasingly represented as criminalized; and its development runs against the grain of the traditional conception of the suburb in the Australian national imaginary, as well as the globalizing rhetoric endorsing a cosmopolitanizing transnational citizenship. The context for the discussion is given particular force by the series of ‘race riots’ which occurred in the Sydney beach suburb of Cronulla in December, 2005. These events raised serious concerns about the fate of multiculturalism in Australia and highlighted the tensions that lie beneath what is often regarded as a successful set of social policies.