Tag Archive for 'digital futures'

Future of public broadcasting

It’s a bit of a hard ask to keep up with all the policy reviews the Rudd government has initiated. And they appear to be in the habit of releasing the results or closing deadlines for submissions well into the Christmas blah season – though whether that’s deliberate or not is another kettle of fish. Anyway, the response to the review of public broadcasting was by all accounts quite overwhelming. Some colleagues and friends of mine at QUT put in a submission – which you can read about here at Terry Flew’s blog.

The points made in Terry’s post might be enough to riff off, but I’d be interested in any case in opening a discussion on where public broadcasting should go. Continue reading ‘Future of public broadcasting’

Let’s ban postmodernism!

I think it was klaus k who once suggested on this blog that we should completely eschew the word “postmodernism”, so vacuous and meaningless has it become. That seems a proposal worth reviving when you read an astonishing take on the ABC’s decision to reallocate resources away from specialist Radio National programs, particularly the Religion Report.

The questions facing mankind are, essentially, the same as they have always been: the age-old questions about what is good, true and beautiful. How do we identify those characteristics in our own and others’ behaviour? How do we achieve them in our lives?

Inevitably, we will never answer them validly if – confusing the medium with the message, to put it in Marshall McLuhan’s discredited formula – we confuse the garments for the person, the cover for the book.

Apparently, the ABC’s remit is to pose (or answer?) eternal questions, and any management decision about Radio National demonstrates “relativism” and that “they hate religion”.

I’m actually not a huge fan of Stephen Crittenden’s, but there can be no doubt that discussing programming decisions in this fashion is, well, just demented. Continue reading ‘Let’s ban postmodernism!’