Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop.

I was also interested to note that Derek Barry has written a post at Woolly Days on the submission from my QUT Creative Industries Faculty colleagues Terry Flew, Stuart Cunningham, Axel Bruns and Jason Wilson (now at Wollongong Uni). Drawing on some lessons from an ARC Linkage Project on citizen journalism (and folks might recall the YouDecide2007 site which was a centrepiece of the research), they argue that public broadcasting needs to be reframed as public service media.

Derek Barry sums up the submission in more depth, but the key idea is that social innovation is now more likely to arise at the margins than from centralised planning. Flew et al contend that the ABC and SBS could enhance the performance of their Charter goals through leveraging user-generated content. This direction would involve reconceptualising the traditional educational and citizenship functions of public broadcasting universality as an opportunity for citizens to negotiate that civic capacity with others via a universally accessible platform.

Most of the submission goes to the news and current affairs roles of the ABC and SBS, but there may also be implications for other areas of the corporations’ activities.

Disclosure: I was also involved in working on the ARC Project which has fed into this submission.

Update: Terry Flew posts about the submission on his blog.

Update: Margaret Simons has a long article on the review at Inside Story.

Image courtesy of Funkadelic at deviantart. Click through and click on full view for a higher res version.

Regular LP readers might recall that I’ve been emphasising for some time now research evidence which suggests that the “apathetic youth” narrative is nonsense. Just because no one’s marching in the street, doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening. Further evidence for that case comes from a literature review prepared for the Whitlam Institute by Philippa Colin – Young People Imagining a New Democracy [link to pdf]. Colin finds that engagement is migrating online, and that it’s much more likely to be issues or cause based than the “citizen oriented repertoires” of involvement in political parties. The review also suggests significant disengagement with the formal practices of citizenship coincides with idealism and engagement around issues and networks.

This report was discussed in the most stereotypical possible way on last week’s Q&A (where most of the panel wanted to diss blogging and those intertubes). Doing it justice might force us to answer the question of what’s wrong with our democracy, rather than squeeze it into the most tedious and condescending media frame of what’s wrong with teh yoof… In many ways, one could argue that disengagement from an unresponsive and elitist “democracy” is an eminently rational choice. That might be something the professionally cynical pundits and pollies might wish to ponder.