Julian Thomas

Histories of User-Generated Content: Between Formal and Informal Media Economies

Debates about user-generated content (UGC) often depend on a contrast with its normative opposite, the professionally produced content that is supported and sustained by commercial media businesses or public organisations. UGC is seen to appear within or in opposition to professional media, often as a disruptive, creative, change-making force. Our suggestion is to position UGC not in opposition to professional or producer media, or in hybridised forms of subjective combination with it (the so-called pro-sumer or pro-am system), but in relation to different criteria, namely the formal and informal elements in media industries. In this article, we set out a framework for the comparative and historical analysis of UGC systems and their relations with other formal and informal media activity, illustrated with examples ranging from games to talkback radio. We also consider the policy implications that emerge from a historicised reading of UGC as a recurring dynamic within media industries, rather than a manifestation of consumer agency specific to digital cultures.

Measuring Australia's digital divide: the Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2016

In setting out the first findings of the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (ADII), this report provides our most comprehensive picture yet of Australians online participation. The ADII has been created to measure the level of digital inclusion across the Australian population, and to monitor this level over time. Based on data from Roy Morgan Research, the ADII measures three key dimensions of digital inclusion - Access, Affordability and Digital Ability - and shows how they change over time, according to peoples social and economic circumstances, and across geographic locations within Australia. This first report presents findings for the years 2014-2016.

Where is the evidence? Realising the value of grey literature for public policy and practice

This paper discusses the ways in which the internet has profoundly changed how we produce, use and collect research and information for public policy and practice, particularly focusing on the benefits and challenges presented by grey literature. The authors argue that grey literature (i.e. material produced and published by organisations xa0without recourse to the commercial or scholarly publishing industry) is a key part of the evidence produced and used for public policy and practice. Through surveys of users, producing organisations and collecting services a detailed picture is provided of the role, importance and economic value of grey literature. However, finding and accessing policy information is a time-consuming task made harder by poor production and management of resources and a lack of large-scale collection services able to host and make available xa0relevant, high-quality resources quickly and efficiently. The paper makes recommendations for changes that would maximise the benefits of grey literature in the public interest and seeks feedback from readers to inform the final report of the research project. Public policy work increasingly relies on a wide range of resources — some are traditional scholarly publications, but the majority are ‘grey literature’. Reports, discussion papers, briefings, reviews and data sets produced by government, academic centres, NGOs, think tanks and companies are heavily used and highly valued in policy and practice work, forming a key part of the evidence base. The huge amount of information and research published online provides unprecedented access to knowledge, from a wide range of sources, enabling a much greater level of understanding and participation in public interest issues. It also brings a number of challenges: searching, sifting, evaluating and accessing information and research are time-consuming and often frustrating tasks occupying a large portion of the work hours of those engaged in policy work. Online publishing also creates a new paradigm for those whose task it is to support policy and practice work through effective resource provision and information management. As a result, digital curation of policy resources, particularly grey literature, is dispersed and fragmented, creating a digital black hole of resources that are lost from online access over time. The aim of the Grey Literature Strategies research project is to investigate grey literature’s role and importance in policy work and find ways to enhance its value. A key method used was online surveys of producers, users, and collectors of information and research for policy and practice, conducted during 2013.

Collecting the Evidence: Improving Access to Grey Literature and Data for Public Policy and Practice

The internet has profoundly changed how we produce, use and collect research and information for public policy and practice, with grey literature and data playing an increasingly important role. Reports, discussion papers, briefings and many other resources produced and published by organisations, without recourse to the commercial or scholarly publishing industry, are a key part of the evidence used for public policy and practice. Yet finding and accessing this material can be a time-consuming task made harder by poor production and management of resources and the lack of digital collecting services. Even knowing what is being collected and what collections exist is a difficult task. Based on research conducted as part of the Grey Literature Strategies ARC Linkage project, this article reports on the results of online surveys of users, producers and collectors of policy and research information with a particular focus on the results for collecting services. It discusses the state of collecting digital gr...

Inside the house of SYN: digital literacy and youth media

This paper examines the role of community media organisations in the diffusion of digital literacy. In Australia, a number of media organisations, established by the so-called ‘digital generation’, are experimenting with new training methods and content forms. Such groups aim to provide their constituents with deep and immersive media opportunities. We examine the methods and outcomes of SYN Media (a youth-run media organisation in Melbourne) and discuss the implications for digital literacy. Our research suggests that, although the systems and forms that make up digital literacy are in still under development, organisations like SYN are allowing that development to occur. Both audience and the particular habitus of the media workplace are important factors in SYNs success.

The skilled social voice: an experiment in creative economy and communication rights

Recent approaches to human rights and communication have emphasized the move beyond traditional politics of recognition and self-representation towards the ‘right to be understood’. But how might we better understand the scope and content of such a right and its practical application? This article suggests that the right to be understood has a useful application in interventions aimed at promoting social inclusion and economic participation, and is therefore an important concept beyond its immediate domain of communication policy reform. As an example, the study focuses on YouthWorx, a collaborative youth media project that combines the creative, distributive and social service capabilities of Melbourne youth community broadcaster Student Youth Network, the Salvation Army and the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation. Drawing on ethnographic research at the YouthWorx site, this article explores the content and practical possibilities of the notional ‘right to be understood’, in the context of a targeted community initiative for ‘youth at risk’.

Trade marks, newspapers and reading publics

ABSTRACT How did the nineteenth-century trade marks registration system with its preference for distinctive trade marks accommodate Britain’s newspapers and reading publics, who seemed able to distinguish between newspapers despite their common descriptive names? In this article, it is argued that the situation presents another example of intellectual property law’s ‘negative spaces’, of creativity and innovation thriving in the absence of significant formal protection from intellectual property law. Moreover, it shows, yet again, the place of informal control in what is in other respects a formalised media industry sector. The historical analysis helps to explain the recent decision of an Irish judge that The Times and The Irish Times should continue to ‘co-exist peacefully’ in Ireland, with The Times permitted to launch a digital Times (Irish Edition) over the objection of the similarly named Irish Times, its nineteenth-century counterpart.

Programming, filtering, adblocking: advertising and media automation

This article considers automation in relation to digital advertising. At the intersection of the advertising industries and everyday media experience, we now find two connected, contending technologies, embodying different visions of automation and the future of advertising and digital media. On the industry side, there is programmatic advertising – defined broadly as the automation of the sale and delivery of digital advertising, where the appearance of advertising on a website is controlled by software rather than human decision-making. On the consumer side, there are the filtering technologies of adblocking, designed to enable users to remove unwanted ads from websites or other Internet applications. This article discusses each of these technologies, before considering the challenges raised for them by an increasingly mobile, diverse and stratified Internet.

Information and research for policy and practice: survey of collection and information services dataset

This survey aimed to gather data that would help understand how information and research produced by organsations on public interest issues is discovered, selected, catalogued and collected by libraries and other collecting organisations and services. The survey asks about the kinds of resources that you collect and catalogue, particularly material such as reports, reviews, discussion papers, working papers, briefings, conference papers, speeches etc. produced by organisations (not commercial publishers) including government departments and agencies, academic centres, NGOs, think tanks and research/consulting companies etc. (also known as grey literature). This survey of collection and information services was designed to be answered at an organisational level or a unit within a larger organisation such as a centre or a department. The survey had 125 full responses with 114 from Australia (91%). The survey was conducted as part of the Grey Literature Strategies project, an ARC Linkage project (LP120100309) conducted in partnership with the National Library of Australia, the National and State Libraries Australasia, the Australian Council for Educational Research and the Eidos Institute. The data from this survey, and other surveys from this project, is discussed in various publications which are linked below.

The power of observation: making research visible, accessible, and usable for the Asian digital economy

Research in digital form is now so abundant, in so many forms, on such a comprehensive array of topics, that it is somewhat surprising to find that while the Internet has done so much to make knowledge accessible, we still face numerous problems if we want to find, evaluate, access, understand and - most importantly - use, much of this information. Too much useful knowledge is locked up in expensive, subscription-only journals; too much data is never made public; too much material is lost through ‘link rot’, where links are not updated and lead users nowhere. The result is that the great potential of the Internet to provide universal access to information is not yet being realized. This essay considers the benefits and possibilities of an online ‘observatory’ focusing on digital economy and policy issues in Asia. We draw upon our experience developing an open-access, policy-oriented repository in Australia, (APO) which aims to make relevant research visible, accessible, and usable for policy-makers, journalists, advisors, activists, and advocates. Our work suggests that with some new ways of gathering and accessing information, initiatives such as observatories can improve the current fragmentation of knowledge across the Internet in ways that will benefit researchers, policy makers, public interest advocates, and society as a whole