In a series of entertaining essays, this wide-ranging book looks at the impact of the media on Australian life and politics, and anlyses key images and stories that shape our perceptions at century's end. Topics include Americanisation, feminism, pop, pay TV, the Internet, political correctness, Mabo, and the republican convention.

The areas of publicity, public relations and promotions have been considered to be on the periphery of the media. Yet this revealing new book demonstrates that they form a fundamental component of the media industries, with the decline of hard news being accompanied by the rise of gossip and celebrity. In addition to making a substantial contribution to our understanding of the cultural function of celebrity, Fame Games outlines how the promotion industry has developed and how celebrity is produced, promoted, and traded within the Australian media. While their analysis will inform academic debates on media practice internationally, the authors have taken the unique step of investigating the workings of the Australian promotion industry from within. Interviews with over 20 publicists, promoters, agents, managers, and magazine editors have provided a wealth of information about the processes through which celebrity in Australia is produced.

The Tabloid Culture Reader provides an accessible and useful introduction to the field.

A collection of essays by various Australian and European authors on a wide range of Australian cultural topics, this is a story of struggle and achievement and occasional failure. Departures deals with innovation and transgression in Australian literature and history and brings out the vitality of Australian culture as it meets new challenges.

The first comprehensive survey of celebrity in the contemporary media.

Nick Cave is now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer. From the band, The Boys Next Door (1976-1980), to the spoken-word recording, The Secret Life of the Love Song (1998), to the recently acclaimed screenplay of The Proposition (2005) and the Grinderman project (2008), Cave's career spans thirty years and has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes controversial) body of work that has shaped contemporary alternative culture. Despite intense media interest in Cave, there have been remarkably few comprehensive appraisals of his work, its significance and its impact on understandings of popular culture. In addressing this absence, the present volume is both timely and necessary. Cultural Seeds brings together an international range of scholars and practitioners, each of whom is uniquely placed to comment on an aspect of Cave's career. The essays collected here not only generate new ways of seeing and understanding Cave's contributions to contemporary culture, but set up a dialogue between fields all-too-often separated in the academy and in the media. Topics include Cave and the Presley myth; the aberrant masculinity projected by The Birthday Party; the postcolonial Australian-ness of his humour; his interventions in film and his erotics of the sacred. These essays offer compelling insights and provocative arguments about the fluidity of contemporary artistic practice.

This study examines the dynamics of critical Internet culture after the medium opened to a broader audience in the mid 1990s. It is Geert Lovink's PhD thesis, submitted late 2002, written in between his two books on the same topic: Dark Fiber (2002) and My First Recession (2003). The core of the research consists of four case studies of non-profit networks: the Amsterdam community provider, The Digital City (DDS); the early years of the nettime mailinglist community; a history of the European new media arts network Syndicate; and an analysis of the streaming media network Xchange. The research describes the search for sustainable community network models in a climate of hyper growth and increased tensions and conflict concerning moderation and ownership of online communities.