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"Information technology, and all that it now offers, has crossed the technical rubicon into the realm of consciousness, to the realm of culture. Multi-media today gives us instruments which allow us to shape information in so many forms that they can become an integral part of our life's experience." Presented under the heading of Cultural Production in an Information Age, this statement in Creative Nation combines insight about the likely impacts of digital media and communications on culture with a dash of fashionable cyber-utopianism. Reading it over twenty years later, it is both prescient and cause for disappointment. At one level, there is a welcome privileging of culture in relation to digital media and communications. The pervasiveness of networked software and hardware and mobile computing technologies can, for instance, be witnessed in Australian museums and art galleries, the experience of television and reading, and attendance at live sport and music events. At another level, the crucial connection between cultural policy and information technology evident in Creative Nation has since been forgotten by national governments. Culture is now largely treated as a by-product STEM-dominated national innovation agendas, economic productivity concerns, and Prime Ministerial dreams of Silicon Valley style entrepreneurialism taking root in the antipodes. The case presented in this chapter begins by outlining why 'fields of the digital' is a useful concept in thinking through the relationship between cultural production and digital media. In its support for a nationally focussed set of cultural industries, Creative Nation is positioned as an example of why an evolving sense of national culture and identity needs to be maintained in the face of globalizing media and commercial forces, and the effects of failing to do so. Actively supported and/or encouraged by government, these effects have resulted in the subjugation of culture by economic interests under a market framework, resulting in a wholesale capture of ...

The increased popularity of mobile smartphones and tablet computers in developed economies is transforming how and where sports footage, highlights and information are accessed. These developments are contributing to new commercial arrangements in the media sport sector, as well as legal conflicts over sought-after content that is transferable and reproduced across broadcast (pay-for-view and free-to-air television), online (desktop and laptop computers), and mobile platforms (smartphone and tablets). In particular, mobile and wireless communications highlight that the media sport content economy is now "on the move" from technology, commercial, regulatory, and legal perspectives. This article outlines factors that are determining how this economy functions in relation to mobile media, with an emphasis on the complex and sometimes unpredictable relationship between content production, distribution, platforms, and access.

Media, communication and information flows now define the logic and structure of social relations, a situation that affects almost every dimension of cultural life and activity. This article analyses the transformation of the relationship between computer gaming, media and sport in the global age of 'second modernity'. This analysis is undertaken through a critical case study of the World Cyber Games (WCG). This popular event and the 'cyber-athletes' that compete in it cannot be explained fully by reference to existing studies of computer and video gaming, media and sport, media events or organized sporting competition. It is not possible to think in terms of sport and the media when considering the WCG and organized competitive gaming. This is sport as media or e-sport, a term that signifies the seamless interpenetration of media content, sport and networked information and communications technologies.

This article presents an in-depth case study of large-scale conflict in a small town, and reveals the complex ways that community groups and activism, hyperlocal news media, and political power intersect through rural environmental disputes. An important but under-recognized feature of such conflicts is the unique role performed by notions of rurality in the construction of environmental protests, discourses, and decisions; that is, the ways in which rural communities' conservation efforts can be unfairly characterized as "backwards" and "anti-development". Through a series of interviews and focus groups with protestors and residents, our case study examines a controversial boat ramp development that had a marked environmental impact on the isolated coastal town of Mallacoota (population 1,000) in the state of Victoria, Australia. We show that the environmental activism of protesters lifted the issue's visibility to the level of regional, state, and national news and politics. But the community consultation processes that occurred in response to protests raise significant concerns about government decision making that fails to acknowledge and negotiate the diverse understandings of place and rurality that exist within a community. The outcomes of struggles for power in this small town are lamentable and lasting, damaging the hyperlocal news environment and undermining the community newspaper's reputation among citizens.

This chapter explores the emergence, role and function, and characteristics of media management in the Paralympics. It combines a critical disability studies perspective with approaches to sport drawn from sociology, media, communications, and cultural studies. By sketching a reconstruction of the development of media in the Paralympics since its inception, and supported by in-depth interviews with leading disability sport media practitioners and administrators, we offer a characterization of the "full service" media management that has evolved in the lead up to 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympics. We argue that Paralympics possess a history that is indivisible from the political voices, everyday experiences and wellbeing of disabled citizens and communities. This history needs to be respected and acknowledged both in media and through its management in future Paralympics.

Over two decades ago, Barbie Zelizer argued that journalists should be approached as an "interpretive community" in order to understand the processes through which journalists generate shared meanings around major political events. This article refocuses Zelizer's concept in order to analyse the consequences of rapid technological transformation, fraught industry conditions, and disparate audience formations in the context of contemporary news media and journalism. Focusing on the challenges faced by professional sport journalists, we invoke the concept of "community of practice" to make sense of this fluid and commercially volatile context, using it to analyse empirically the experiences of journalists in Australia and Scotland. Informed by the interrelationship that exists between formats of news and the practices that produce it, this paper presents evidence drawn from in-depth semi-structured interviews with journalists, editors, news presenters and commentators who specialise in and/or work across newspapers, radio, television, online and mobile media. Understood as a community of practice, sport journalists are shown to be under pressure because of mutually reinforcing changes in mobile and digital media technologies, journalistic routines and institutional relations.

This article critically revisits the operation of 'mediated visibility' in the context of environmental conflict. Challenger groups have long gained access to news media and influenced political decision-makers by staging highly visible protest events that draw public attention to environmental threats and destruction. The advent of the world-wide web and digital media tools has since added to the tactical arsenal available to groups wanting to infiltrate and disrupt government and corporate networks of power. In turn, governments and corporations deploy these same tools to maintain their reputation and check opponents who oppose their activities. These developments have, we argue, produced a significant flow-on effect. The function of invisibility – or the coordinated avoidance of media communication, attention and respresentation in order to achieve political and/or social ends – is an under-examined feature of contemporary environmental politics. The case study and evidence presented here are drawn from fieldwork conducted in the Australian island state of Tasmania, and extensive content analysis of news media, social networking platforms and websites.

This article examines a pioneering intervention by government in the control and ownership of media sport under prevailing networked digital media conditions. The 2009 Australian Senate Inquiry into "Sports News and the Emergence of Digital Media" provided a political forum for debate among 44 participants, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Association of Newspapers. The participation of these and other international organizations demonstrated that this national inquiry was of global significance in regulatory and commercial debates over how the "media sport content economy" might operate in the digital age. Our analysis focuses on the causes of the disagreements that prompted the Inquiry, which demonstrated that emerging media sport markets are characterized by complex interaction, tense competition, and awkward overlaps between broadcast media and networked digital communications. This situation has disturbed the established media sport order and destabilized pivotal organizing categories, including the definition of "sports news."

Environmental politics and values gain legitimacy through their constant presence in the media. This article outlines and critiques a theoretical approach that can increase understanding of the relationship between environmental protest and news media representation. Manuel Castells, pre-eminent theorist of the information age and 'the network society', is useful in this regard. He describes the relationship between media organizations and environmentalists as 'tap-dancing'. His explanation of this dance and its choreography, however, is overly general, ignoring its specific features and workings in terms of representation. In order to detail some of these features, we have selected for study Australia's most famous environmental protest and a globally significant moment for green politics: the 1982 Franklin Dam blockade in Tasmania. We argue that it was during this blockade that an enduring pattern of media environmentalist relations was established in Australia, and substantiate this case by examining subsequent protests. The article concludes by critiquing current understandings of media environmentalist relations and explains the dynamics of the mediation process that determines the reporting of protests.

This article examines the political economy of one of Australia's prominent football codes: Rugby League. A Marxist-influenced political economy approach is used to emphasize processes of domination, subordination, and resistance in the production and reproduction of power relations within capitalist sporting relations and structures. Analysis, framed around the concepts of MediaSport and the media sport cultural complex, shows how Rugby League is bound up in both national and global media processes. Key areas under examination include the historical development of the commodification of Rugby League, the growth of the media sport cultural complex, the role of pay television and the control of Rugby League vested in the transnational company News Corporation, and the supporter resistance to corporate media control in the sport.

This study uses figurational theory to analyse the articulations between standards of violence control and commodification in Australian rugby league between 1970 and 1995. It is argued that the interdependent social processes of violence regulation and commodification cannot be reduced to a simple cause-and-effect mechanism. Instead, it is imperative to comprehend that myriad social processes interweave to produce fluctuating standards of violence. The major social processes that are addressed include TV, technization, surveillance technologies, judicial structures, negative and positive feedback cycles, marketing and tension-balance.

The growth of over-the-top (OTT) Internet and mobile video streaming services is a major development in the distribution, transmission and consumption of global media sport. Heavily capitalised services such as Tencent Video, DAZN and Amazon Prime Video are intervening in coverage rights markets and changing how live sport is experienced and shared across television, computer, game console, tablet and smartphone screens. This article identifies and analyses six defining characteristics of OTT live sport streaming, and outlines three services (Tencent Video, DAZN and Amazon Prime Video) that operate across Asia, the United Kingdom, Europe, the Americas and Australasia. Its argument is that, first, live sport streaming is a key means by which television content and practices are escaping the boundaries of broadcast media, while also continuing to perpetuate the logics of television coverage and viewing practices. Second, drawing on Amanda D. Lotz's conceptualisation of portals, it is proposed that these services are establishing new norms concerning how media sport is accessed and curated and, as such, their arrival signals a historic shift in the global marketplace for sport coverage rights and the media systems through which live content circulates.