Larvatus Prodeo

Image of the State Library of Victoria from avlxyz at flickr reproduced under a creative commons licence.

One thing I used to notice when I used to buy newspapers was that around this time of year “culture” steps out of the weekend review pages and takes pride of place as “holiday reading”. Short stories are serialised, the state of art forms and cultural genres worried about, and reviews abound. And not just on Saturday and Sunday.

2008 saw, in my view, a number of tipping points in the mediascape (and I’ll have more to say about this in a later post). For instance, according to the Pew Centre, the net overtook papers for the first time in the United States as a source of news. The current counter to the “death of the newspaper” narrative from some of the editorial and journo crew is a claim that everyone suffers if folks don’t have a comprehensive perspective on what’s going on, limiting themselves to following fields of niche interest. Margaret Simons has something to say about this theme at Content Makers, riffing off a piece by Sally Young at Inside Story. Now, I strongly doubt that there were ever people who read the paper cover to cover as a matter of civic duty. [Young doesn’t make that claim, but it’s implied in some of the less nuanced arguments from folks in the news biz.] Indeed, the division of newspapers into sections, and the usual relegation of matters cultural to the weekend in itself exemplifies the fact that judgements - highly normative (and often gendered) ones - are being made about what people should read. We’re to assume that serious stuff - politics and crime - occupies the minds of serious people, until they get to take a Christmas/New Year timeout. I’m actually not sure these people exist, and the ideal type of the reader imagined in the mind of the all knowing editor and publisher is one of the big problems with print media.

Anyway, all this is a bit of an introduction to a feature that New Matilda has been running over the last little while - a focus on Australian culture. There’s all sorts of interesting reading - Jason Wilson and Melissa Gregg on why we can thank John Howard for Underbelly, Judith White on museums and galleries, Robert Miller on the state of the film industry, Sue Turnbull on the state of Australian television, David Musgrave on Australian’s relationship to poets and poetry, John Hunter on small presses and independent publishers and Lynden Barber with the obligatory Baz Luhrmann review. All are well worth a read.

Returning to my theme, though, as part of the “State of the Cultural Nation” series, Barry Saunders writes on new media and a “surge” in democracy and citizen journalism:

Continue reading ‘The summer of Australian culture, New Matilda (and new media) style’