[ecrea] published: Communication, Politics and Culture Vol 49, Issue 2 (2016)

I am pleased to announce the publication of the latest issue of 
Communication, Politics & Culture:

Volume 49,  Issue 2 (2016)

It can be accessed at:

http://tinyurl.com/hkuezso

+++

Editorial – Technology, politics and identity (PDF 19 KB)
Chris Hudson

I need not remind readers that the revolution in communications 
technology has radically altered the scope of approaches to 
communication in its intersection with politics and culture. A glance at 
a wide range of academic publications tells us that contemporary 
research now seeks to answer questions about the role of technology in 
structuring human relations and about their political manifestations, 
amongst other issues. Profound social changes of the last decades, 
including the proliferating use of social media accompanied by the rise 
of the mediated self, globalisation, and the increasing power of 
neo-liberal ideology, have precipitated changes and transformed studies 
of communication. One significant shift in focus that would be wholly 
expected in a journal dealing with contemporary issues in communication, 
politics and culture has been the number of submissions dealing with 
digital communication technologies. The articles in Volume 49, Issue 2 
are all generally located in the context of technology, politics and 
identity.

Vale Dr Peter Williams (PDF 30 KB)
Michael Dutton

Peter Williams was an Editorial Board member (and later Advisory Board 
member) of Southern Review, which became Communication, Politics & Culture.
Despite blindness from the late 1990s, Peter continued to teach until 
November 2014, and was an active researcher until his death, co-writing 
a book on media and the government of populations (Palgrave, forthcoming).

Caught in the web: Male Goths using online ICTs to transcend rural 
reality (PDF 108 KB)
Angela Ragusa and Olivia Ward

This empirical qualitative study explores male Goths’ lived experiences 
in rural Australia. Offline, participants felt rural communities’ 
‘conservatism’ and hegemonic masculinity norms restricted their Goth 
identity expression and subcultural participation. Further, their 
commonly perceived homosexuality, irrespective of self-identified 
sexuality, was believed responsible for much assault, ostracism, and 
‘othering’ experienced in rural, but not urban, environments. To escape 
rural realities and engage in ‘authentic’ identity expression, 
participants vociferously interacted in online communities which, more 
than augmenting offline reality, created opportunities systemically 
impossible due to rurality and permitted subcultural participation and 
self-identity expression they believed reduced isolation and positively 
affected their mental health.

A straight gay wedding? News images of same-sex marriage in the 
mainstream and alternative New Zealand press (PDF 269 KB)
Linda-Jean Kenix

New Zealand was the first country in Oceania and the fifteenth in the 
world to allow same-sex marriage. This research explores whether the 
visual re-presentations of same-sex marriage in newspaper coverage 
surrounding the Parliamentary vote coalesced to form a heteronormative 
or homonormative ‘image’ of gay marriage through an examination of 654 
articles about gay marriage in the mainstream, New Zealand Herald, and 
the alternative publication, GayNZ. This research asks whether there was 
a difference in that re-presentation across ‘alternative’ and 
‘mainstream’news media outlets given that visual codes of reference have 
been suggested to shift within an alternative communicative space.

Understanding the Indonesian mediapolis: The role of social media during 
the 2014 Indonesian presidential election (PDF 298 KB)
David Holmes and Sulistyanto

This article examines the role of social media during the 2014 
Indonesian presidential election. It analyses how candidates used 
Facebook and Twitter and how celebrities were enlisted to promote 
candidates to their fans. The coinciding development of rapid internet 
literacy, together with the introduction of a direct election system 
that appeals to identity- and celebrity-driven politics, came together 
to make social media a central part of Indonesian elections. This 
confluence has radically altered the conduct of campaigns. In order to 
explain this transformation, it is necessary to understand the nature of 
the Indonesian mediated public sphere, characterised by strong 
inter-media connections between social media and broadcast forms.

To censor or not to censor: Roots, current trends and the long-term 
consequences of the Chinese Communist Party’s fear of the internet (PDF 
251 KB)
Giovanni Navarria

This article explores the reasons behind the Chinese Communist Party’s 
fear of digital media and outlines its effects on the Party’s approach 
to the internet. By closely examining the heavily-contested field of 
digital networked media, we see that the control of the internet in 
China is not only based on censorship but that the Party has been 
experimenting for some time with a variety of unusual quasi- democratic 
strategies, each of them designed to go beyond the need for censorship; 
each of them a new Party strategy to learn from its critics and win 
public consent for its rule.

The July 20 plot: Reading news as myth in the imagining of the British 
nation (PDF 111 KB)
Eloise Florence

This paper analyses foreign news articles that appeared in three London 
newspapers during the Second World War, covering ‘The July 20 Plot’, an 
assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in 1944.

The analysis is supported by reading the news articles as an ‘other 
world’ myth, through which characteristics of their own nation, imagined 
by Britons, was observed as existing in opposition to that of the 
Germany portrayed. International news is thus solidified as a source of 
historical enquiry, as well as a site of discourse that can be examined 
as the expression of mythological knowledge that typifies an imagined 
national community.
Book reviews

Post-Yugoslav cinema: Towards a cosmopolitan imagining, by Dino Murtic, 
(2015) (PDF 53 KB)
Reviewed by Hariz Halilovich

The Australian Greens: From activism to Australia’s third party, by 
Stewart Jackson, (2016) (PDF 20 KB)
Reviewed by Geoff Robinson
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