::fc-announce:: Georgina Born Seminar: Digitising Democracy: Digitisation, and Public Service Communications

[Transforming Cultures]

Trans/forming Cultures (TfC), presents a seminar on digitisation and  
public service broadcasting.

Thursday the 10th of August 2006 4pm

At the University of Technology Sydney (UTS)

Venue: Building 6, The Peter Johnson Building (where the Design  
Architecture and Building Faculty (DAB) is located).  Entry is via  
Harris street.

              Level 5

              Room 550

Digitising Democracy: Digitisation, Pluralism, and Public Service  
Communications

Georgina Born

University of Cambridge

There is a lamentable absence, in debates over the future of public  
service broadcasting in Britain, of due attention to the challenges  
posed by cultural pluralism and by social and economic inequalities.  
This paper critically outlines and assesses the prevailing policy  
discourses in the UK concerning the social and political potential of  
digital media – notably the internet and digital television – and  
their relation to public service communications (PSC). It then  
compares the policy debates with current academic discussions of  
digital media in relation to PSC, and finds that there are common  
limitations to both academic and policy discourses, limitations that  
are highlighted particularly when held up against the BBC’s actual  
interventions in digital media, a significant proportion of which are  
subtly conceived and inventive in their design.

Turning to post-Habermasian social philosophers – including Seyla  
Benhabib, Anne Phillips, James Tully, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser  
and Bikhu Parekh - who have been engaged in reframing democratic  
theory in relation to the politics of difference, the paper suggests  
that key principles can be derived from them which provide a means to  
rethink PSC in conditions of pluralism and inequality. Finally, on  
the basis of these normative ideas, a sketch is provided of a  
typology of the several communicative vectors that might be required  
by a pluralist communicative democracy in light of the expanding  
range of possibilities offered by digital media. It is argued that  
new normative thinking of this kind is urgently needed to  
reinvigorate the ‘institutional design’ of public service  
communications systems suited to the present.

GEORGINA BORN is Reader and will be (from October 2006) Professor of  
Sociology, Anthropology and Music in the Faculty of Social and  
Political Sciences, Cambridge University. She is also a Fellow of  
Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She trained in Anthropology at  
University College London and uses ethnography, in combination with  
genealogical histories, political economy and textual analysis, to  
study cultural production, particularly television, music, IT and  
contemporary knowledge systems. Her books are Uncertain Vision: Birt,  
Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (Vintage 2005), a study of the  
transformation of the BBC and of public service broadcasting in  
Britain over the past decade; Western Music and Its Others:  
Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music (California  
2000, with David Hesmondhalgh) and Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM,  
Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde  
(California 1995), a combined ethnography and cultural history of the  
musical avant-garde and of music-science collaborations at IRCAM in  
Paris.  Articles have appeared in journals including Screen, New  
Formations, Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, American  
Anthropologist, The Modern Law Review, Cultural Values, Javnost/The  
Public, Twentieth-Century Music and Political Quarterly.

Professor Born is also active in media policy work on the BBC and PSB  
in Britain and Europe, as well as advising public arts organisations  
in the UK on cultural policy and their relations with the PSBs. Her  
work is highly interdisciplinary, operating in dialogue with  
musicology, art history and science and technology studies, and  
combining perspectives from anthropology, sociology and the humanities.

Born’s current research examines the transformation of public service  
communications with digitization, with reference to the BBC and  
Britain’s Channel 4, and theorises the affinity between pluralistic  
accounts of democracy and digital media, and what this implies for  
new conceptions of public service communications.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/announce_fibreculture.org/attachments/20060801/ca614c77/attachment-0001.html