Maureen Burns

The disengaged in science communication: How not to count audiences and publics:

In this article, we suggest that three concepts from cultural and media studies might be useful for analysing the ways audiences are constructed in science communication: that media are immanent to society, media are multiple and various, and audiences are active. This article uses those concepts, along with insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), to examine the category of ‘the disengaged’ within science communication. This article deals with the contrast between ‘common sense’ and scholarly ideas of media and audiences in the field of cultural and media studies. It compares the ‘common sense’ with scholarly ideas of science publics from STS. We conclude that it may be time to reconsider the ontology of publics and the disengaged for science communication.

Remembering Public Service Broadcasting: Liberty and Security in Early ABC Online Interactive Sites

In the late nineties the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) website, ABC Online, was very successful at a time when the ABC experienced severe political hostility and funding reductions. This paper offers case studies of the early implementation of interactive online sites at the ABC to explore an alternative remembering of the ABC. Using the success of ABC Online as a model of how to remember the ABC, one might choose to remember the ABC as dispersed and plural, even rhizomic. Rather than being nostalgic for a unified past or future, we might instead be nostalgic for the diversity, plurality and in-between nature of ABC practices and programming.

Investigating public service media as hybrid arrangements

This theme issue of Media International Australia explores public service media as increasingly organised via hybrid arrangements that function at any given time according to diverse technologies, politics, people and economies, with the aim of understanding how these hybrid arrangements work and their consequences for the organisation of public media. The articles offer particular examples of hybrid arrangements at work in public service media institutions, and explore a range of questions relating to such arrangements. They also examine diverse examples of hybridity that arise when public service media strive to retain their heritage brand values while responding to new regulatory and economic environments.

Science as an extra dividend: Frontiers of Science

Frontiers of Science, an Australian science newspaper comic strip that was published in the Sydney Morning Herald every weekday from September 1961 until 1979, retains the record of being the longest-running newspaper science comic strip in the world. It was syndicated internationally to over 200 newspapers, and was translated into 14 languages. Its educational aspirations, its ‘omnipotent’ (read white, English-speaking) perspective, and its existence at the edge of comics and on the border between science fact and science fiction offer an invaluable record of the ways that science was imagined and popularized (in Australia and in several other countries) in the second half of the 20th century. In this piece we argue that Frontiers of Science bears witness to the intimate relations between the popularization of science and the broader political and social contexts of science, and that Frontiers of Science demonstrates the specificity of Australia and its place in the world during the 1960s and 1970s.

A short wave to globalism: Radio Australia online

Abstract This article details the emergence of Radio Australia Online as a subsite of ABC Online in the late 1990s. In doing so it examines the altered understandings of ‘national’, ‘international’ and ‘global’ accompanying the emergence of World Wide Web services, and teases out the relationships between rhetoric surrounding Public Service Broadcasting, and rhetoric surrounding the Internet. It highlights the significance of molecular, local forces (such as the working circumstances of an individual) to the implementation of a global service, and it discusses ways that relations between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media are implicated in particular governing rationales both within the ABC and in the broader media economy. The Internet idea – that the Internet would globalise and democratise, that the Internet was intrinsically dynamic and interactive – is challenged in this instance. The public service broadcasting idea – that it is staid, monolithic and confined to outdated national technologies – is also challenged at the point where the Internet and public service broadcasting intersect.

Public Service Broadcasting meets the Internet at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1995–2000)

When online services emerged at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in the late 1990s, imaginings of the Internet collided with imaginings of Public Service Broadcasting. Often when we thought about Public Service Broadcasting we thought of organizations that were very separate from their outsides – that is to say with clearly defined boundaries. We thought that the parts of such an organization were connected according to a principle of unity (whether the national identity or the nation). By contrast, when we thought about the Internet we were more likely to think of a global network structure with multiple entry and exit points. Of course, each way of thinking will contain elements of the other. In particular instances, one set of forces (stability and unity, say) is dominant over the other (fluidity and multiplicity). To use Deleuzian terms, in what follows I am discussing the Public Service Broadcasting idea as a primarily arboreal (stable and unified) image of thought, and the Internet idea as primarily rhizomic (fluid and multiple) image of thought. These formulations offer a useful shorthand for understanding the dominant ideas that were circulating when online services emerged, and the ways in which the intersections between how we thought about Public Service Broadcasting and how we thought about the Internet were productive. The first part of this paper gives a brief account of ABC Online. The second concentrates on the Public Service Broadcasting idea, and its implications for disciplinary and governmental strategies as these have been described by Michel Foucault (1994). The third part of the article offers a brief description of the Internet idea, and the fourth describes the collisions between both ideas at ABC Online. The article contrasts the differing idealisms of the two ideas and notes the importance of their intersection both for the emergence of ABC Online and for rethinking the ABC.

Political implications of science popularisation strategies: Frontiers of S cience

This examination of the mediation strategies of a very popular factual science comic strip series from the 1960s and 1970s illustrates, in this case by highlighting the ways in which women were targeted as an audience, that science popularisations are always political. For that reason, they should not be evaluated merely in terms of scientific accuracy. I demonstrate tensions between the dissemination model of communication used in the distribution of science popularisations, on the one hand, with the advocacy of a dialogue model in their content, on the other.

A brief history of science communication in Australia

Early science reporting in Australia – up to and including the 1940s – was often sourced from overseas. During and after World War II, attention turned to applied science, at first for the war effort and afterwards to rebuild the nation. From the late 1950s to the late 1970s, entrepreneurs in science and media in Sydney worked together to provide science material in commercial outlets as well as for the ABC. In the context of the space race, the Cold War and atomic energy, science communication flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s. Since then, science content has been widespread in the television schedules of commercial networks in forms such as childrens television, lifestyle programs and news items, and is also apparent in community radio schedules as well as on ABC television and radio. Claims that Australia has little science communication may be based on too narrow a view of what constitutes science content.