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Edited by: Susan Bye

Book REviEwS

in this issueBolt, Neville , The Violent Image:

Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries ___________________ 158

Boyle, Raymond and Kelly, Lisa W., The Television Entrepreneurs: Social Change and the Public Understanding of Business _______________________ 158

Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era ________ 159

Cunningham, Stuart and Iordanova, Dina (eds), Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line ____________________ 160

Curran, James, Fenton, Natalie and Freedman, Des, Misunderstanding the Internet ______________________ 161

Driscoll, Catherine, Teen Film: A Critical Introduction _____________ 161

Flynn, Michael and Salek, Fabiola F. (eds), Screening Torture: Media Representations of State Torture and Political Domination ___________ 162

Forman, Murray, One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television ____ 163

Formica, Serena, Peter Weir – A Creative Journey from Australia to Hollywood` ____________________ 164

Fuller, Matthew and Goffey, Andrew, Evil Media _______________________ 164

Gajjala, Radhika and Oh, Yeon J. (eds), Cyberfeminism 2.0 _________________ 165

Gardner, Jared, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture ____ 166

Hains, Rebecca C., Growing Up With Girlpower: Girlhood on Screen and in Everyday Life __________________ 167

Halberstam, Judith, The Queer Art of Failure ________________________ 167

Harper, Richard H.R., Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload __________ 168

Jones, Paul and Holmes, David, Key Concepts in Media and Communications __________________ 169

Kraus, Jerelle, All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside ‘The New York Times’ Op-Ed Page ____ 169

McAnany, Emile G., Saving the World: A Brief History of Communication for Development and Social Change _____ 170

Myer, Clive (ed.), Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice _______ 171

Navasky, Victor C. and Cornog, Evan (eds), The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry __________________ 172

Sbardellati, John, J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War ____ 172

Sinclair, John, Advertising, the Media, and Globalisation: A World in Motion __________________________ 173

Snickars, Pelle and Vonderau, Patrick, Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media ___________________ 174

Sterne, Jonathan, MP3: The Meaning of a Format ______________________ 175

Taylor, T.D., Katz, M. and Grajeda, T., Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio ___________________________ 175

Van Dijk, Jan, The Network Society, 3rd edn __________________________ 176

Wark, McKenzie, Telesthesia: Communication, Culture & Class _____ 177

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Bolt, Neville, The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, ISBN 9 7802 3170 3161, 429 pp., A$41.95.

Events such as 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ have too often been discussed as traumas for Western media audiences. Less attention has been given to the purpose of terrorist attacks and the way media images serve the interests of those who conceive them and support them. Bolt presents an important new perspective on these issues. He argues that the digital revolution has transformed the relation between political struggles and media viewers. Images of violence now have a new strategic value for insurgents and insurrectionists. The nation-state has lost control of the violent image.

Bolt shows how the new media terrorism has its origins in nineteenth-century anarchism and the Propaganda of the Deed (POTD): acts of political violence that were used to goad the state into using excessive force and thus losing legitimacy in the eyes of the public. In the 1970s, the IRA and PLO exploited the possibilities of television coverage for drawing international attention to their political struggles. After 9/11, the game changed. The new objective is to create ‘a media event capable of energising populations to bring about a state revolution or social transformation’ (p. 2). The new mode of communication is social media, with its networks connecting populations dispersed and displaced by economic globalisation. Images of violence can crystallise collective grievance and become nodal points of collective memory. Insurgents can use new information technologies to bypass the censorship imposed by corporate media, and thereby subvert their hegemony over the violent image.

Today, argues Bolt, POTD ‘has become a sales tool’ (p. 36), applying techniques similar to advertising. The increased use of branding and image by mainstream political parties since the late 1970s has formed part of the redefinition of citizens as consumers. But insurgent groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Taliban also use such techniques. Insurgents construct heroic narratives of collective identity and images of violent struggle that function as icons or logos in the global media market. These narratives and images challenge the official histories propagated by the state. But only certain moments of crisis offer the necessary

opportunity to mount these challenges. The insurgent uses ‘shock and awe’ in an attempt to break through the consensus maintained by mass media. The speed of today’s information technologies has transformed the duration of such moments by multiplying and dispersing violent images.

Bolt’s approach to this topic is pluralist, incorporating a range of theories of communication, marketing, memory, narrative and semiotics. The author often chooses to explicate and synthesise theories when he might have developed a more sustained analysis of specific case studies. Some of the later chapters counteract this tendency, such as Chapter 7, which discusses the Arab Spring, where the politics of mass spontaneity confront the controlling regimes of the state. This reader would also have been interested in reading Bolt’s assessment of anti-globalisation struggles or the Occupy movement.

— Allen Meek, Massey University

Boyle, Raymond and Kelly, Lisa W., The Television Entrepreneurs: Social Change and the Public Understanding of Business, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2012, ISBN 9 7814 0940 3227, 184 pp., A$90.00.

The title of Boyle and Kelly’s book was, for a few moments, misleading. Having once worked at just two degrees of separation from the late Kerry Packer, the builder of the Australian Nine television network, I made a presumption about the subject, based only on the title. However, Boyle and Kelly’s entrepreneurs are not behind the cameras but very firmly in front of them. You’ll see the up-and-coming among them fronting Master Chef or My Kitchen Rules. The more established may have an entire series, as Heston Blumnethal does, or masquerade as workers in Undercover Boss. Others preside over their protégés on The Apprentices, or engage in Country House Rescues. Indeed, just reading the introduction to The Television Entrepreneurs will introduce you to programs that have never made it to Australia, a fact that may be a very good thing.

The list of a bare score of titles, however, is testament to the degree to which ‘the entrepreneur has moved into the mainstream of British culture while also highlighting that business and entrepreneurship can provide material for entertainment-led factual

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productions that move beyond the arenas of news and current affairs’ (p. 1).

While the documentary has been the subject of scholarly investigations for nearly a century, studies of factual television have tended to concentrate on news and current affairs. The study of ‘reality’ television – the first example being perhaps MTV’s The Real World of 1992 – is little more than a decade old. The sub-genre of entrepreneur-centred reality programs has risen to prominence in just half a decade, so scholarship in the field is particularly sparse, hence the value of this offering from Boyle and Kelly.

The book is organised in two large parts. Part 1 attends ‘Industry, Texts and Media Discourses’, while Part 2 is concerned with ‘Audiences, Television and the Entrepreneur’. Boyle and Kelly’s research, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom, reports widely on the business of television too. For example, the authors confirm a trend noted by Michael Darlow in 2004 that ‘by 1993, most independent producers … saw themselves as business that made programs, not as they had a decade before, as program makers who also ran businesses’ (p. 25). Anecdotally, the same has happened in Australia, with the increasing professionalisation of program-makers.

Doyle and Kelly conclude that ‘business entertainment formats do offer role models but not in some universal one size fits all mode’. Like experience of the world as much as television ‘the broader social context … helps shape what they take away from them’ (p. 132). And they find – not surprisingly – that ‘entertainment remains a central element in the audience engagement process, however much this is viewed by business people as creating a distorted image of business and entrepreneurship’ (p. 133).

While it is easy to say ‘yes, I could have guessed that’, Boyle and Kelly’s The Television Entrepreneurs: Social Change and the Public Understanding of Business offers a thorough and widely researched snapshot of a sub-genre of television that is close to ubiquitous today, and that directly shapes the lives of some of its viewers.

— Vincent O’Donnell, RMIT University and the University of Melbourne

Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2012, ISBN 9 7808 2234 8542, 364 pp., US$26.95.

This is a profound and disturbing reading of the media portrayal of America’s Vietnam from 1968 through to the 1980s. Chong’s title and choice of the term ‘Oriental Obscene’ is based on Saidian notions of Orientalism; this strategy ensures the focus on the colonising discourses of America and Hollywood as enacted through grotesque representations of Asian bodies and geographies. Chong utilises Laplanche’s idea of the phantasmatic to present a reading of the ‘oriental phantasmatic’. This reading focuses upon imagined relations and transferences between projected racialised subjects, drawing strong parallels between the Asian body and the African American body in opposition to the white American body – this reading captures the difficult, shifting and delicate racial tensions of the period of the study with surprising lucidity. Chong complements her reading of Laplanche with Deleuze’s phenomenological approach to film, as well as his work with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.

Chapter 1 offers a detailed look at the early representations of Vietnam in the United States. This chapter draws strong correlations between the war and civil rights violence, implicating authority and media in its choice of representation by drawing attention to the parallels between African American violent protest and Vietnamese insurgents. Chapter 2 focuses on still images. Chong utilises film theory to examine three iconic images of the trauma of Vietnam. By focusing on these images, she is able to present a coherent argument about how Asian bodies were presented by embedded and non-embedded journalists, and what ramifications this had for American perceptions of ‘Orientals’ and the subsequent racism that was visited upon Asian-Americans as a consequence. Chapter 3 is concerned with post-war representations and restagings of the Vietnam conflict. Different approaches are used to focus on different aspects of the way in which these films ‘bring home’ Vietnam to America, thereby reinscribing the Asian as the ‘Oriental Obscene’ in the popular consciousness. Of specific interest to Chong is how narrative strategies try to ‘other’ the characters within these texts by

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conflating them with the enemy, or Viet Cong. Chapter 4 examines the rise of the Kung Fu film as a vehicle for specialised insider knowledge as a result of a veteran’s experiences, as a process of post-traumatic catharsis or as a phantasmatic for physical triumph adopted by African American communities. Chapter 5 capitalises on this by focusing on Bruce Lee and his oeuvre. Chong considers Lee’s success to be connected to the Vietnam War, in that the physical prowess of his Asian body in motion becomes an acceptable substitute for the Asian bodies that humbled the US military. Chapter 6 examines Hollywood’s return to Vietnam with films such as Rambo (and its sequels) and Missing in Action, and their depictions of Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone as ‘white Orientals’, complicating previous versions of the ‘Oriental obscene’ and ultimately creating the myth of good Asian/bad Oriental.

Chong has written a detailed and well-argued study of the portrayal of Asians in American media and society as a response to the Vietnam War. She takes the time to explain her use of sometimes difficult literary and psychoanalytical theory, making this text accessible to enthusiasts as well as academics.

— Patrick Condiffe, the University of Sydney

Cunningham, Stuart and Iordanova, Dina (eds), Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line, Lightning Source, Milton Keynes, 2012, ISBN 9 7809 5637 3076, viii+ 223 pp., AU$22.50. Distributor: University of St Andrews.

Fundamental changes to cinema distribution and exhibition – an impending digital explosion/revolution – have been the subject of popular and academic discourse for the past two decades. This collection of essays offers not only an in-depth study not of where modes of reception are situated within the contemporary context, but also a detailed trajectory of the digital innovation that has already taken place – an aspect often sidelined by theoretical projection. In removing futuristic speculation from the discussion and replacing it with an interrogation predicated on empirical research to date, Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line provides the global context and situational thinking that has, until now, largely been

absent in broader debates surrounding audience viewing practices and dominant or progressive modes of cinema reception. In highlighting a cyclical chain of supply and demand, Digital Disruption examines the relationship between conglomerates and individuals, revealing a fluidity between the two that dispels myths of tension.

This collection of essays is divided into two distinct parts. The first deconstructs the term ‘digital disruption’ with reference to perceptions of a global cinematic crisis of distribution. Rather than presenting this ‘crisis’ as a pivotal ‘moment’, the essays in this section describe it as a continual process. The second part, ‘Cinema Moves On-Line’, consists of specific case studies in exhibition, including significant players such as Jaman, IMDb and MUBI, as well as focusing on the film festival as a clear example of new modes of programming.

Where early chapters explaining ‘digital disruption’ from Stuart Cunningham, Jon Silver and Michael Gubbins are filled with occasionally dense statistics, Michael Franklin’s explanation of the film value chain provides a fluid connection between the two parts of the discussion. His exploration of the ‘management of uncertainty’ (p. 112) within cinema distribution leads nicely into the more reader-friendly exhibition case studies that contemplate practical issues such as lack of global online distributors, consequent unexplored territories and the ‘active audience’ as a body of ‘prosumers’ that already suffer ‘choice fatigue’ (pp. 122–23). Engaging with both popular terminology and theoretical inquiry, the pivotal chapters bridging Parts I and II provide an accessible account of practical and theoretical elements at play.

Marijke De Valck’s essay ‘Convergence, Digitisation and the Future of Film Festivals’ offers a sound piece of writing, which astutely notes that theatrical distribution is no longer the most profitable element in the commercial life cycle of a film’ (p. 119). Acknowledging, too, the ‘larger cultural systems of education, criticism, programming and public debate’ (p. 120), Valck pinpoints the consistent central argument in Digital Disruptions that cinema distribution and exhibition are undergoing a major revolution.

— Tara Judah

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Curran, James, Fenton, Natalie and Freedman, Des, Misunderstanding the Internet, Routledge, London, 2012, ISBN 9 7804 1557 9582, 194 pp., A$55.00. Distributor: Palgrave Macmillan.

Misunderstanding the Internet examines the history of the internet and the fascination society has with it. Focusing on general history, economics and regulation, and power and politics, the authors offer an engaging critique of the literature surrounding internet culture studies. The text highlights the benefits and shortcomings of the internet, as well as critically engaging with how the internet, in becoming just a part of life, has neither met nor failed to meet expectations.

Amidst an array of sensationalist literature and media, Misunderstanding the Internet is a valuable resource. The authors set out to engage with some of the more prominent historical ‘beliefs’ about the impact of the internet on society, examining them against what has actually happened. In doing so, they provide a rich history of academic perspectives, at the same time highlighting a number of recent key developments. In the context of a body of literature that has tended to regard the internet as inherently transformative and liberating, or dangerous and corrosive, it can be difficult to highlight the impact of the internet socially, politically and economically without becoming enmeshed in either school of thought. The authors themselves acknowledge this difficulty, and the shortcomings that can be caused by avoiding this ‘trap’. In particular, they acknowledge that the context of internet studies is vitally important to the views generated from the study, but that contextualising enough to create a neutral position is almost impossible.

A key criticism of the text comes from this acknowledged shortcoming. While the authors raise a clear and valid concern that the internet as it exists in contemporary society is neither free nor revolutionary, there is something that seems to have been missed through the selection of particular cases. While there has not been the major transformation predicted in some of the earliest studies of internet use and culture, the impact of the instant, seemingly private and widely available communication and contact offered by the internet must not be downplayed – particularly in the context of marginalised communities, health outreach and, to an extent, education. At times, the authors

lose sight of the real and tangible benefits of online spaces within certain contexts in their attempt to demonstrate the fact that the internet has had less than the predicted effect.

The approach to the issues of the role and impact of the internet globally is a key strength of the text. The approach to ‘reality-checking’ expectations taken throughout the book highlights the ‘below the surface’ regulation of the internet in contemporary society, and the effect that this has had, without dampening the belief that change has been achieved or is possible.

This book has broad appeal. The text challenges researchers to maintain a level of groundedness, while at the same time recognising the value of the internet and the impact it has had on many aspects of society. The text encourages a new way of looking at understanding the internet. The historical, social and political focus of its content, the use of contemporary and historical events and texts, and the comprehensive overview given by the authors to internet studies more broadly make the text a valuable tool for educators.

— Vikki M. Fraser, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of

New South Wales –Canberra

Driscoll, Catherine, Teen Film: A Critical Introduction, Berg, Oxford, 2011, ISBN 9 7818 4788 6866, 192 pp., £17.99.

Whether they are condemning, laughing at, laughing with or being nostalgic about young people, teen films have much to tell us about the discourses on adolescence that have developed in modern Western society. In this in-depth examination of the genre, Catherine Driscoll has taken what she calls a more ‘sociological’ rather than aesthetic approach to understanding teen films, and attempts to draw out the way ‘films and modern adolescence emerged at the same time and have consistently influenced each other’ (p. 5).

The book is divided into three sections, ‘Histories’, ‘Film Teens’ and ‘Liminal Teen Films’. In ‘Histories’, Driscoll traces the development of portrayals of youth in the early days of cinema, and the beginnings of what are more commonly defined as teen films in the 1950s, as teenagers themselves were being defined as a group, before presenting a consideration of more recent additions to the

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genre. In Part II on ‘Film Teens’, Driscoll maps out some of the conventions and stereotypes of the teen genre, while also exploring areas where these are subverted, to examine ‘how the conventions of teen film signify adolescence’ (p. 65).

The third section of the book on ‘Liminal Teen Films’ asks what else could or should be considered when trying to understand what teen film is. The first chapter of this section, ‘Classification’, makes some of the book’s most interesting claims regarding the connections between teen film and the institutions defining and controlling teenagers. In this chapter, Driscoll asks whether ‘teen film was primarily a product of film censorship and classification’ (p. 121), and traces controversies and changes in film classifications to show how this may be the case. She makes the point that film classification is centred on guiding young people in their exposure to the adult world or reducing potentially harmful influences, and in this way defines who teenagers are and how they are thought about.

One of the main strengths of the book is in the way Driscoll pushes the obvious boundaries of what might be considered ‘teen’ films in order to illuminate aspects of how teenagers are constructed as a group. While incorporating classics of the teen genre such as Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, the John Hughes oeuvre and more recent examples such as Mean Girls and Juno, Driscoll also considers teen horror films, teen comedies, the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises, films such as Kids and Clockwork Orange that invite moral panic-style readings of the activities of young people, and what she calls ‘teen films for grown-ups’, such as Almost Famous. Across these categories, she demonstrates reoccurring themes that hold this otherwise diverse group of films together, including youth as a transition to maturity and youth as a social problem – themes that will also be familiar to anyone working in any area of youth studies. The unexpected places that the book goes make the work an important new contribution to the field, as well as being the introductory text it claims to be.

— Catherine Strong, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University

Flynn, Michael and Salek, Fabiola F. (eds), Screening Torture: Media Representations of State Torture and Political Domination, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, ISBN 9 7803 1153 591, 315 pp., US$29.95. Distributor: Footprint.

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the practice of torture has seen a marked increase in occurrence, reflected by an explosion in screen mediations of torture in both film and television. In Screening Torture, editors Michael Flynn and Fabiola F. Salek seek to examine this seemingly global trend, and have assembled a collection of chapters that question these screen images and seek to interrogate the underlying discourses that shape torture’s onscreen mediation.

The manuscript is divided into four sections, each loosely grouping a collection of contributions around a common theme. Part One explores the relationship between the direct practice of torture and performed masculinity across a variety of screen texts produced within the United States, including 24, The Passion of the Christ and Man on Fire. Part Two considers acts of torture through an analogous approach, examining past and contemporary horror films – including the recently popularised ‘torture porn’ genre – with a focus on the link between the practice of violence and sexual fetish. Part Three moves the focus to international cinema, demonstrating dominant torture discourse in productions from South Africa and Israel, comparing such imagery to that observed in US cinema. Part Four returns to US cinema, in particular recent documentaries such as Standard Operating Procedure and Taxi to the Dark Side, both of which examine the Abu Ghraib scandal, and demonstrates common misconceptions and shortcomings that arise from such productions alongside wider action film offerings.

As acknowledged in the Introduction, many of the contributors are from outside the media and communication studies field. While this helps to broaden the book’s scope and provide alternative viewpoints not often considered in the field, the grouping of some authors does at times feel strained. On occasion, the book digresses from its intended thesis; authors step aside from their analysis of media texts to detail, in great depth, their own personal experiences as anti-torture advocates in criminal trials and television consultation. While providing

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contextual framework for the researcher’s background, these tangents can become lengthy and detract from the representative medium they are addressing.

Looking beyond this, Screening Torture covers a wide range of screen forms, incl uding television, Hollywood and B-grade cinema, across a vast range of genres such as horror, action-adventure and documentary. This breath of coverage is not without depth: authors drill down into their chosen subject-matter and tease out underlying trends and discourses that shape depictions of terrorism in screen media from across the globe. The book makes a valuable contribution to the field of torture studies, and could easily be applied to wider fields, including those related to depictions of terrorism and post-9/11 cinema.

— Jay Reid, Media, University of Adelaide

Forman, Murray, One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 9 7808 2235 0118, 405 pp., US$27.95.

This book is an expansion of Murray Forman’s 2002 article of the same name, which similarly analysed the importance of music to the character and success of television and the ways in which it was viewed by various sectors of the music industry. Now, ten years later, Forman has delivered a much deeper exploration of the confluent histories of US television and popular music during the early era of broadcast TV. Drawing on rich archival research, Forman presents an impressive historical analysis of the period from the late 1930s through to 1955.

Forman’s examination debunks the popular misconception that the distinct sectors of music and television were fused when Elvis Presley made his television debut on The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show on 28 January 1956. Over the first two chapters, Forman charts the evolution of television music by exploring its pre-1948 use during experimental early performances on in-house closed-circuit systems (rather than broadcasts) right through to the consolidation of television’s role as major player in the entertainment sector by 1955. As TV’s influence increased, argues Forman, so too did the music industry’s understanding of its usefulness.

He then looks into the development of music programming and content as it moved away from its earliest Vaudeville/Tin Pan Alley manifestation through to distinctly televisual styles and conventions. Forman illuminates how tensions over authenticity and artistic integrity hampered many musicians’ transition to television screens, particularly in the late-1940s, when several performers began compromising their image to maximise their on-screen exposure by incorporating ‘funny hats routines’ and cartoonishly exaggerated gestures. He reveals how visually enhanced performances became entrenched as performers were increasingly pressured by network executives to participate in often humiliating novelty acts, comedy skits and other onscreen ‘shtick’.

In his final two chapters, Forman investigates the ways in which the musical expertise of many African Americans and Latinos allowed them to penetrate the otherwise ‘white’ face of television, despite the fact that only very few were given their own programs. Here he offers a valuable insight into the extent to which racial and ethnic flavours were implicitly fused to the foundational conventions of television music.

In his conclusion, Forman advances his themes regarding media convergences and those cultural and industrial forces that brought music and television together with a marathon summary of the history of music television post-1955 right through to American Idol and Glee, and screen-based technologies such as YouTube and Guitar Hero. Forman shows how the foundations laid down from 1948 to 1955 continue to influence the dynamic interactions of contemporary intersections of television and popular music.

To be sure, Forman’s tight focus on television music leaves the reader wondering how this fits in contextually with the trends in television programming, and his US-centric angle does not account for parallel developments in the British television industry. These small gripes aside, this book provides a valuable insight into the first eight years of television as the cultural, political and industrial forces which brought musical performance to the small screen.

— Paul Oldham, Communication, International Studies and Languages,

University of South Australia

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Formica, Serena, Peter Weir – A Creative Journey from Australia to Hollywood, Intellect, Bristol, 2012, ISBN 9781841504773, 202 pp., A$36.95.

Peter Weir is a highly respected director of Australian background, working often in Hollywood and renowned around the world. There simply can’t be enough publications about him, and it is particularly gratifying to find a non-Australian grappling with the pen on his behalf. Formica chose this director as the subject of her first book, which looks at Weir within a framework of trans-nationalism (and migration), and the application of the auteur theory. Her approach is direct and has to be lauded for its clarity of argument and language, particularly as she knows her theory. But unfortunately, that is almost as much praise as I can award her efforts. This review is not the place to discuss theoretical issues at length, but one would expect more substantial enlightenment than Formica’s concluding statement: ‘Weir does not have total and unconditional control over all the different aspects of the films that he directs, and that he therefore is not the sole auteur of his film.’ (p. 166) After all, creating a feature film is always a team effort, never a one-man show.

In the second strand of her argument, Formica’s conclusion that a transnational director is ‘a director that has managed to work successfully within two production contexts’ (p. 167) admits the sometimes overlooked fact – at least in academic discourse – that there are production contexts. But it does not add to understanding Weir’s work as it surely applies to the whole Aussie bunch working in Hollywood – Armstrong, Beresford, Noyce, Schepisi.

Chapter 3 of the publication considers the Australian production situation during the Revival and 10BA periods, but does not add much that is new for the reasonably informed reader. For me, Formica’s Chapter 4 was the most enjoyable. Here she analyses four of Weir’s major films – Picnic, Living Dangerously, Witness, The Truman Show – in depth, drawing from her extensive interviews with Weir.

In general terms, the book’s scope is far too much focused on older primary and secondary sources. This may be due to the long gestation period of the publication and the availability

(or not) of source materials. The appendices are unnecessary and rather confusing. The text desperately needs further editing – there are misspellings, grammatical errors and missing sentences (or parts of sentences) scattered through the text.

Most of my criticism may be attributed to this being the first major publication of a young researcher, so the gaps in the writer’s knowledge and argument could be excused. However, in the era of readily available internet sources, factual errors cannot. Knowing a little about Noyce’s work, I noted in the twelve lines given over to him in this publication that each fact mentioned is incorrect. He never directed a film in Germany. Dead Calm was not a co-production with the United States. Morgan Freeman was not featured in The Bone Collector and Geoffrey Simpson never worked as DOP for Noyce – let alone on Dead Calm and The Bone Collector as stated. I worry that a closer look at other facts in this publication may reveal even more hair-raising errors.

— Ingo Petzke, Creative Arts, James Cook University

Fuller, Matthew and Goffey, Andrew, Evil Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012, ISBN 9 7802 6201 7855, 248 pp., A$45.95. Distributor: Footprint.

Although the term is not a common point of reference in most iterations of media studies, it nonetheless remains a bold move to declare oneself and one’s subject to be on the side of ‘evil’. The caveat in the case of Evil Media, though, is that there are many kinds of evil in the world and not all operate in a melodramatic manner. Indeed, the evil considered by Fuller and Goffey could be summarised through an inversion of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase: this is not the ‘banality of evil’, but the ‘evil of banality’.

Perhaps a more apt title, then, would have been Grey Media, as greyness is as central as evil to Fuller and Goffey’s examination of the interstitial media – datasets, algorithms, sorting functions, social media, workflow models, project plans, user interfaces – that underpin and round out the forms of digital and corporate culture. Greyness here refers to the unobtrusive immanence of those digital media forms that compose the vague and indeterminate background texture of contemporary Western

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society and which, Fuller and Goffey argue, subtly shape the political and social texture of our everyday lives. Thus, if there is an evil at work, it can be found in ‘a troubling opacity and thickness’ (p. 5) of those media forms, rather than an explicit political or moral calculation.

It is difficult to describe any over-arching argument that structures Evil Media, which proceeds through an exploration of broad terms, such as togetherness, structures and productivity, that function as metaphors as much as descriptions. Each engages with a particular aspect of grey media, but does so in a freewheeling manner characterised by abrupt subject shifts between sub-chapters and a cavalier attitude towards traditional argumentation. On the positive side, this allows for a broad constellation of points and examples to be drawn together. Unfortunately, it also exhibits an approach that emphasises performance over communication, often appearing to favour capricious over careful thinking. Accordingly, there are moments of fantastic insight, on a range of topics from sociobiology to machine systems to the Schmittian decision, but also long over-written passages that read like Teflon: they do not draw one in, but seem designed so that one slips off. There is a joy to this, but also a deep frustration, as a surplus of lists, declarative statements, rhetorical questions, redefinitions (for example, ‘social engineering’ comes to mean something along the lines of de Certeau’s tactics) and word play constantly threaten to overwhelm the authors’ insights regarding these important and under-studied media forms.

Evil Media tackles timely and woefully over looked centra l quest ions of the contemporary mediascape, but doesn’t always seem particularly interested in explaining itself or its answers. It is a volume that holds out the promise of intellectual rewards, especially upon sustained study, but that also seems reluctant to offer a clear reason for doing so: an exasperating and occasionally infuriating volume, but also potentially important and oddly inspiring in its focus if not its form.

— Nick Holm, English and Media Studies, Massey University

Gajjala, Radhika and Oh, Yeon J. (eds), Cyberfeminism 2.0, Peter Lang, New York, 2012, ISBN 9 7814 3311 3581, vii+314 pp., A$37.95.

After more than a decade, Cyberfeminism 2.0 presents a rebooted, critical exploration of the 1990s promise of the internet to liberate and empower women. Feminists of the 1990s, such as Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles, identified the utopian potential of the internet to subvert existing gender boundaries and begin the demand for social intervention. Now, in Cyberfeminism 2.0, Gajjala and Oh have put together an impressive collection of essays from scholars worldwide to explore the important question: where have all the cyberfeminists gone?

Split into three parts, the collection provides a detailed analysis of the role of feminists in online cultures, including an examination of the intersection of online and offline environments. To achieve this, the authors have explored the role of digital technologies in many facets of female existence, including body politics, subjectivity and the social and cultural divide.

Part One of the book explores online spaces with the potential to empower women, including the emerging Health 2.0 movement, mommy-bloggers and user-generated content. A trend here is that while all of these spaces suggest huge emancipatory potential for women, and while they provide this for some, for others they problematise and reinscribe traditional issues of privilege and gender roles. This trend is again seen in Part Two, which explores issues of masculinity and technology. As the authors exploring women in gaming culture discuss, women’s experiences in these environments continue to be bound and influenced in many aspects by hegemonic views of women’s roles. The final section of the book complements the preceding two by focusing on negotiation of identity in online spaces through examination of the ways in which women communicate online. Again, the discussions move between the contrasting themes of the potential emancipation from and perpetuation of the continued adherence to hegemonic views of women’s bodies, roles and identities through these online spaces.

In summary, this collection incorporates detailed analysis of a range of cyberfeminist issues, online spaces, and social and cultural

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contexts. It pays homage to the groundbreaking cyberfeminist authors of the 1990s while continuing to highlight the importance of gender in consideration of technology, digital spaces and identity formation in parallel with the rapidly changing social and cultural landscape of the internet over the last decade. With chapters written by academics as well as doctoral students, Cyberfeminism 2.0 not only makes an important contribution to current cyberfeminist research, but is also a valuable resource for students in digital media, technology studies and feminist and gender studies, as well as established researchers in those fields.

— Sarah Champion, Human Centred Technology Design,

University of Technology, Sydney

Gardner, Jared, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 2012, ISBN 9 7802 52036705, xi+203 pp., A$68.00. Distributor: Footprint.

Jared Gardner’s ambitious monograph seeks to understand the intellectual, emotional and political investments of American magazine culture between 1790 and 1820. Gardner asserts that there is an ‘unanswered challenge’ to a critical reading of early American literature – that is, how one might account for the ambiguity, contradiction and ambivalence of the period beyond addressing the critical dichotomy of a dominant ideology and its subversive marginal response. Privileging a reading of the magazine form – multivocal and discordant, ideologically amorphous and often fragmentary – over the monological novel offers Gardner a tentative solution, and an opportunity to redress the ‘pointed critical neglect’ of the early American magazine and its place in American literary history.

Before detailing several case studies of magazines, writers and editors, Gardner traces the development of the American magazine from the London periodicals of Addison and Steele, through the prolonged trans-Atlantic attempts to foster a ‘periodical citizenship’ in America. He convincingly links the Tatler and the Spectator to the attempted reformation of British coffee house society and the uneasy transplantation of both periodical and coffee

house to America. The periodical, he asserts, acted for both colonials and republicans as a ‘virtual coffeehouse’ in a nation lacking the institutional structures to support an equivalent homosocial coffee house culture.

Gardner’s critical strengths lie in his detailed renditions of the frequently cacophonous content upon which he draws. In doing so, he does not seek to categorise or create a typology of periodical culture; rather, by demonstrating explicit and implicit links between editors, contributors, readers and the development of American nationhood, he calls attention to a fertile area of cross-disciplinary scholarship.

The book contains, to my reading, two dissonant structural elements: a productively counter-intuitive introduction and a summative coda that is all too brief and far-reaching. Gardner’s chapter-length introduction addresses the ‘unsettling’ of the early American novel in favour of the magazine form, as advanced by Charles Brockden Brown. He depicts a counter-balanced tension between the popularity of the magazine and the novel, to such a degree that his book might well have addressed the fall and rise of the early American novel. Further, the book’s forward-looking coda anticipates a pleasurable recognition that the rise of early internet culture and new media will, Gardner contends, allow a republic of letters to be reimagined, if not collectively inscribed. The connection between early nineteenth-century periodicals and present-day web publishing is not without relevance, but it inelegantly elides significant technological and social shifts in the production and consumption of periodicals, magazines and self-produced zines in the intervening years.

This book will be of particular interest to literary and cultural studies scholars with interests in the editorial and publishing cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Further, scholars and critics of trans-Atlantic studies will appreciate Gardner’s determined focus on the influence of magazine culture on both the form of the American novel and of American nationhood at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

— David Large, English, University of Sydney

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Hains, Rebecca C. Growing Up with Girlpower: Girlhood on Screen and in Everyday Life, Peter Lang, New York, 2012, ISBN 9 7814 3311 1389, x+315 pp., US$36.95.

This book attempts to contribute to the literature on ‘girl studies’, which is a field with which I thought I was unfamiliar before reading her text. However, I was quick to find out within the first few pages that girl studies as she defines it engages with feminist theory and cultural studies scholarship.

The book opens with a survey of the literature in the ‘girl studies’ area, and includes an intriguing description of US-based feminist researchers engaging mainstream media to spread key messages of their findings. This is useful in setting a context for the study, and successfully demonstrates how activist-based research and media interest perhaps helped lead to a shift in gender role representations in children’s television hero characters in the 1990s and 2000s. Hains also describes the impact of the huge success of the UK-based musical group The Spice Girls and their message of ‘girl power’ on children in the United States. The ‘marketing strategy’ of the Spice Girls is critiqued, and the earlier activity of the less commercially focused US-based Riot Grrrls (female punk bands who originally used the term ‘girl power’) is also described.

Where I think Hains’ book is most successful is in its demonstration of the importance of committed engagement with the researched group through methodical and ongoing qualitative data collections. Hains spent years collecting data at set time periods, returning at various stages to find out how these girls’ views had changed.

She worked with targeted age groups about their taste in popular culture, seeking their opinions and trying to understand how that related to their sense of self. Although two main cohorts were interviewed, Hains acknowledges that the most successful interactions – and certainly from my perspective the most stimulating section of the book – were with girls in the eight to eleven age range, discussing their current taste in television programs. In her excellent methodology section on ‘Researching Girl Power with Girls’ (Chapter 5) she explains the limitations and advantages of this approach clearly. In the following chapters, she describes her observations in the playground, the audio recorded discussions she has with the girls and

the video recordings they make with their dolls. This section is particularly eye-opening as one group of girls spontaneously tell a complex story of the underground railway and slavery with their Bratz dolls.

Hains claims that the importance of feminist parenting emerged from the study (p. 263), but I disagree, having only seen a few clear examples of girls who had described their parents’ feminist beliefs and the subsequent influence on their own thinking. However, I support her other claims, which include effectively demonstrating a need for curriculum- driven pre-teen programming, the usefulness of engaging with children themselves in any study on children’s taste and interactions, and her finding that ‘girl power’ failed in many instances to empower individual girls in their embodied realities. Hains’ emphasis on the difference (race, socio-economic background, neighbourhood) between girls was useful, supporting feminist theorists such as bell hooks who have reminded feminists for many years of our divergent realities as well as our (sometimes) united aims. Ultimately, this text is a useful contribution to the fields of methodology in qualitative data collection, and cultural, feminist and gender studies – and, I am now convinced, ‘girl studies’ itself.

— Emma Jean Kelly, Auckland University of Technology

Halberstam, Judith, The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2011, ISBN 9 7808 2235 0453, 211 pp., US$22.99.

I don’t know how The Queer Art of Failure will seem to the pathologically successful, culturally normative reader. Almost two-thirds of the way through this sylph-thin volume (p. 116 of 187 pages), Halberstam quotes Naylan Blake writing on Julie Bamber’s seascapes: ‘From a place of completion we gaze into a haze of potential that arrests our gaze but offers nothing back that could orient us.’

Halberstam can be disorienting in this way, and that is sometimes true of this book too – more or less depending on your acquaintance with the unexpected and your willingness to embrace not only failure but what she concludes is its queered doppelganger ‘the hopelessly goofy’ (p. 189). Some of the texts (a term I use in the broadest sense) interrogated and

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explored here are Toy Story, Chicken Run, Finding Nemo, SpongeBob SquarePants, the art of Tracey Moffatt and Cecil Beaton, and fascism. The contrasting silliness and depth of scholarship make this a book for postgraduates and up. It is not one for beginners.

In many ways, this work is a self-help guide for those of us caught up in our own way of seeing, our own way of life. Arguably it’s a self-help guide for Halberstam’s country. It is at moments camp, childish and confronting. For example, she investigates Pixar’s operational collective philosophy, echoed thematically in its productions. Success is not a product of individuality here. This runs entirely counter to mainstream individualistic, consumer capitalist American culture.

There are, of course, many accompanying texts for this volume. Halberstam is not camera shy – or any brand of shy. You can search YouTube for her presentations. You can easily find reviews and commentary on those presentations. I’m going to go ahead and recommend it. Like the adversity-prone, hopelessly goofy, queer, one-legged, paediatric surgeon Dr Arizona Robbins on the series Grey’s Anatomy, I’m going to suggest you embrace the joy.

— Carol Wical, English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland

Harper, Richard H.R., Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010, ISBN 9 7802 6208 7344, x+303 pp., A$27.95. Distributor: Footprint.

Harper aims to clarify how communications technologies both shape and enliven the human experience, even as we complain about the outcome. His book is a distillation of material that has appeared in previous publications and conferences, organised loosely into seven extensively referenced chapters. The style is conversational, the tone authoritative, but Harper often repeats himself. He argues that innovations such as email, text, blogs and Facebook highlight existing nuances in human interactions; this is evidenced in the way we prioritise various modes of contact. In his current role as a Microsoft researcher, Harper’s bias might be towards unfettered technological innovation. However, perhaps from his early training as a sociologist, he

sees the shortcomings of Baudrillard’s (1970) ‘newness for newness[’s] sake’ (p. 259).

According to Harper, our collective hunger for communication – and resulting weariness from an excess of it – are the ‘paradox of our age’ (p. 45). This seems a hyperbolic assertion, but Harper is on firmer ground in arguing for qualitative measurements to assess the merits of new communications technologies. Harper blends a broad array of theories – from Bakhtin’s dialogic acts to Bourdieu’s habitus, Locke’s definition of a citizen and Wittgenstein’s opposition to Turing and Skinner’s dualism – to argue that the question of communications overload is best addressed by focusing on how new technologies might feed into existing social or personal needs. While he draws some convincing parallels, such as that between eighteenth-century published accounts of Grand Tours and modern blogs, and the dialogic nature of letters, he also makes some assumptions – paper letters are only able to strengthen existing ties, rather than create new ones – and generalisations, such as ‘many of the most lively historical commentaries seem to be American’ (p. 18).

In the main, though, Harper’s book is a balanced and in-depth review of communications technologies (from the first posted letters). Rather than crunching raw numbers of emails, texts, tweets or Facebook entries, Harper highlights contrasting uses for such innovations – such as teenagers using Facebook to prioritise contact with their friends, or gain privacy from their parents – and how they are used primarily to build upon existing physical social networks, rather than create entirely new ones in some disembodied virtual reality. He also challenges some basic stereotypes, such as that of the technophobic older person.

Although Harper sometimes digresses into lengthy anecdotes about questionable innovations (such as video badges, Glancephones and Whereabouts Clocks), his book is at most times an intriguing survey of how other technologies have been more successful through tapping into existing human needs. For example, Harper compares goodnight texts between teenagers to ‘ritual gifts’, where the sanctity of the relationship hinges on such reciprocal acts (p. 135). He emphasises that while mobile phones facilitate intimacy, they also enable its opposite, such as ignoring an unwanted call through caller ID. He adds that

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the effectiveness of communication now, as always, relies on context. Harper concludes that the modern communications challenge is not one of surviving an overload, but of navigating a variety of technologies to ‘create a texture of human identity and connection’ (p. 267).

— Pablo Muslera, Communication, International Studies and Languages,

University of South Australia

Jones, Paul and Holmes, David, Key Concepts in Media and Communications, Sage, London, 2011, ISBN 9 7814 1292 8229, x+256 pp., A$42.95.

Knowledge in the field of media and communications requires updating and reinterpretation for the contemporary context. Everyday terms adopted into the academic lexicon need to be given precise definition to avoid ambiguity and to be placed in the specific context of media and communications research and discourse.

This process of definition is undertaken in Key Concepts in Media and Communications. The organisation of the book and its fundamental perspectives are derived from Raymond Williams’ insights in Key Words (1976). Williams’ critical perception in defining the key terms in cultural studies supports the deeper descriptions of the terms elaborated in this book. Specifically, this book – based on the influence of Williams’ insights – attempts to interpret key concepts that have generated debates within the field of media and communications. This is particularly the case with a number of terms central to cultural studies, such as culture, cultural form, hegemony and ideology.

The definitions of the key words are accompanied by explanations of their origin, role and influence. In addition, affiliated concepts are provided under each keyword’s umbrella. For instance, in the section on the term ‘broadcasting’, related concepts listed below the title include: audience, culture industry, image, mass, modern, popular and public sphere. This layout guides readers in developing an association between a single term and a group of related ideas, which then contributes to an understanding of the entire field.

Each term has a ‘further reading’ subsection at its conclusion, providing a guide to other perspectives. Therefore, while the book

illustrates key concepts in the field of media and communications from the critical, theoretical and social perspective of the Frankfurt School, readers are also invited to explore other critical perspectives.

This book is particularly useful in the connections it makes between vital terms in the field, so that readers can gain an insight into past, present and future trends in the sphere of media and communications.

— Hsin-PeyPeng, Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University

Kraus, Jerelle, All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, ISBN 9 7802 3113 8253, 280 pp., A$47.95. Distributor: Footprint.

Jerelle Kraus is an art director, artist and writer who spent 33 years at The New York Times, of which 30 years was spent at op-ed. This book was first published in 2009 and is now available in paperback. It is a book born from Kraus’s time within the media machine and the relationships that grew during this period. From her unique perspective, Kraus has produced an informative, funny and perceptive showcase of The New York Times op-ed artists, art and stories from the op-ed’s conception in the 1970s to the 2000s.

The foreword of All the Art is written by Ralph Steadman. The reader later discovers that Kurt Vonnegut was originally intended to write this piece, but he passed away before he was able to do so. Such behind-the-scenes anecdotes save Kraus’s text from being a dry sequence of artist bios and chronological world events. Kraus satisfies the readers’ guilty pleasure of listening in on the office gossip, as well as enjoying her smattering of name-dropping that comes with the job – her meeting with Richard Nixon and the rejection of Andy Warhol sketches are highlights.

Kraus also expresses her impassioned belief in, and persistent defence of, the artist and the artist’s vision. The book consistently insists on the importance of the image in shaping a reader’s world-view and understanding of an issue. The op-ed image, Kraus argues, connects with the reader in a way that text cannot.

The provocative nature of the image is often demonstrated by its absence. Kraus’s

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unearthing of censored art, including the reasons for its lack of publication, shows not only the editorial process, but shifting social and political contexts and opinions over the decades. From essays on the Nixon administration to marathon running, editors feared the real or imagined severity, liberalism or sexuality in op-ed artwork often more than in the op-ed text. What was allowed to be said was not necessarily allowed to be seen. Kraus’s explanation of how artists – especially from Eastern Europe – used visual metaphor and symbolism to side-step restrictions is just one of the compelling narratives that excite the revolutionary spirit that permeates the book. With great humour, Kraus also discloses The New York Times’ sexual conservatism that led to artworks being omitted or altered due to paranoia about the phallus – editors were seeing penises in images of men vomiting in the street and spurs on cowboy boots.

The catalogue of images from such artists as Ralph Steadman, Maurice Sendak, Art Spiegelman, David Suter, Brad Holland, Jean-Jacques Sempé, Günter Grass, Tomi Ungerer and Keith Haring leave a lasting impression on the reader. Their work still provokes, and their vision is perhaps even more profound in hindsight. Like the op-ed, All the Art is a thoughtful balance of text and image. When Kraus’s explanations of certain illustrations seem sparing, it is a pointed reminder to the reader of the significance and brilliance of the stand-alone artwork; it can speak for itself.

— Natalie Quinlivan, University of Sydney

McAnany, Emile G., Saving the World: A Brief History of Communication for Development and Social Change, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 2012, IBSN 9 7802 5207 8446, x+181pp., A$35.95. Distributor: Footprint.

The genesis of Communication for Development (or C4D) will be quite familiar to those with an interest in the role of media and communications in developing contexts. C4D is a contested term with no fixed agreement on its definition. Most texts on the topic, however, will include the almost obligatory reference to the modernisation paradigm and the field’s ‘founding fathers’: Daniel Learner and Wilbur Schramm. These theories are typified

by an optimistic focus on mass communication technologies to act as a vehicle to transmit modern messages to the world’s poor as a solution to developmental problems.

From the opening chapters, this book sets out to reposition the cliché narratives about the evolution of the C4D field, adding complexity to an often over-simplified narrative. As a former student of those oft-cited ‘founding fathers’, McAnany is able to inject context and nuance to the portraits of these men. McAnany also calls to attention the constant play between theory and practice, pointing to UNESCO as a key driver of early modernisation paradigms and practice. In this way, he asserts that the key modernisation ideas were in fact instigated by donor development practice rather than being driven by academia. Early chapters describe the ways in which changes in paradigms are almost never absolute or immediate, instead occurring in waves of negation and integration of the old and the new – a theme that recurs throughout the book.

Following his counter-narrative of the origins of technology-focused C4D approaches, ensuing chapters trace a basic chronology of the critiques that were to follow from the debates of the dependency paradigm, and into the participatory paradigm. Several others have detailed the evolution of C4D theories and approaches, including Waisbord and Servaes, but McAnany is able to weave his own professional experiences into the theoretical domain to offer some unique insights. The book critiques a vast array of C4D programs across the spectrum, both through the lens of McAnany’s own experience and through academic observation. McAnany’s contribution therefore complements these earlier works.

In the final chapters of the book, McAnany begins searching for new answers from within the social enterprise movement. It remains unclear exactly how the principles behind innovations such as microfinance would be integrated into C4D – beyond the obvious early examples of the cell phone ladies in Bangladesh (p. 113) – but finishing with a prediction of another paradigmatic shift is an apt way to end a historiography of a field that has continually evolved since the very beginnings of its self-consciousness as a ‘field’.

McAnany concludes by presenting several salient points about the factors of success gleaned from each of the defining moments

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in C4D history that he considers important in future C4D innovations.

This book is accessible and will appeal to C4D students, academics and practitioners who seek a different perspective of the historical contestations and amalgamations of ideas in addition to definitions and critiques. Saving the World is less about new theories and more about repositioning and reinterrogating the old. For this reason, it is unlikely to stand alone as a canonical text, but rather adds to the depth of literature now available to the field.

— Jessica Noske-Turner, Queensland University of Technology

Myer, Clive (ed.), Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice, Wallflower Press, London, 2011, ISBN 9 7819 0666 0369, 224 pp., A$35.95. Distributor: Footprint.

‘Yes but you know, what’s your bug? What are you trying to say? What do you want? What are you visioning about? What are you prosthelytising?’ In a devastating exchange that lasts some 30 pages, Peter Greenaway throws the questions back at his conversationalist Clive Myer, the editor of Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice. Myer insists that ‘cinema is a different experience to watching a film at home or in an art gallery’ (p. 231), one of many small claims that augment the larger polemic of the collection: that an understanding of cinema demands critical and philosophical ideas separate from media studies or pop culture analysis, and that students (in particular, future directors and screenplay writers) require filmmaking methods distinct from those of television, advertising, music videos, video art or other screen cultures.

The foregrounding of cinema qua cinema has its merits: while differing greatly in choice of examples and clarity of expression, contributions from Noel Burch, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, Patrick Fuery, Nico Baumbach, Coral Houtman and Myer collectively refuse the clichés of genre hybridity and national allegory that still pervade much of Hollywood film studies, instead exploring critical questions around diagesis, montage, the facticity of fiction, temporality, mediation and, most often, the relation between theory and practice. Unfortunately, the reworking of ideas from Lacanian and post-Althusserian film criticism is not often extended to include discussion

of how cinema ‘theory’ may be useful to readers who do not make films (in a liberal arts education, for example), while ‘practice’ is rarely expanded to include overlaps between filmmaking and other audio-visual or theatrical competencies. Highly readable commentaries on screenplay writing (Ian Macdonald) and teaching environments (Brian Winston) do provide welcome counter-balances, and Baumbach’s incisive survey of contemporary film theory is the most sober, concise and pedagogical of the collection.

Less convincing are the persistently ‘political’ justifications for cinema qua cinema, found in Myer and Burch especially. With the exception of Aparna Sharma’s dynamic study of documentary aesthetics in India, the ‘political’ is employed as a second-order signifier, not signalling any particular set of social concerns but rather an (allegedly) evacuated space of oppositionality that cinema should be cultivating through experimental methods. Yet fleeting references to Marxism or to feminism (often treated in the singular, as if ‘feminism’ could be reduced to its presence in late 1970s cinema journals) are absorbed like vaccines, immunising the numerous laments for the lost heroism of cinema against potential accusations of middle-class elitism. In conversation, Myer and Burch target the ‘absolutely ghastly’ study of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and ‘popular television’ as clear evidence of where cinema studies is going wrong (p. 258), making the authors’ subsequent opinions about de Beauvoir, Kristeva and Irigaray (in the 1970s, of course) feel out of touch with what feminist media studies is currently doing and why.

Greenaway is the first to express discomfort with cinephilia as a rarefied aesthetic enterprise, and asks the question that Critical Cinema elsewhere is careful not to answer: ‘Are you sufficiently happy with cinema as a thinking medium if you are only talking to one person?’ The broad attachment to cinema as a special object for cinemagoers by cinema-makers precludes exactly the sorts of criticism that Critical Cinema promises, but only ever delivers by accident. For these accidents, at least, the editor must be given due credit: Greenaway’s outbursts really are fantastic.

— Timothy Laurie, Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

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Navasky, Victor C. and Cornog, Evan (eds), The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, ISBN 9 7802 3113 1377, 200 pp., A$31.95. Distributor: Footprint.

The Art of Making Magazines is as intriguing for its personal anecdotes about writers, editors and the world of magazines as it is for its sound advice and insights into an industry and the professions that serve it. Although each chapter reflects the experiences and opinions of its respective author, and each of these authors has honed a career within the industry, collectively they provide historical insights into the impacts and changes that the magazine industry has undergone from the use of the humble typewriter through to the challenges that all print media face with the advent of the digital age. This collection is also a commentary about the role that the online environment now plays in directing and reshaping the magazine industry as a whole.

Each self-contained chapter was delivered as a series of lectures forming the George Delacorte lecture series at the Columbia School of Journalism between 2002 and 2009, and essentially the reader is provided with a rich and honest ethnographic account of the experiences, conflicts and challenges of magazine production and distribution. From Gourmet and iconic fashion magazines Vogue, Elle and Harpers Bazaar, to the political and cultural coverage contained within The Times, The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, the magazine is presented as cultural icon in a constantly changing world, and the text describes how the industry has had to change and adapt in order to survive and flourish. This book also lays bare the intricate and often symbiotic relationships that exist between writer, journalist, editor, copy-editor and fact-checker in bringing together publications that have meaning to their reading audiences, while satisfying myriad other influences – advertisers, owners, management and an often fickle public. John R. Macarthur (p. 143) explains the difficulties in publishing stories that inadvertently offend advertisers and the fine balancing act required to manage relationships while ensuring journalistic integrity and the ongoing financial viability of the publisher. Michael Kelly (p. 64) talks about the differences that set magazines apart from

mainstream newspapers and other forms of media, and describes it as that of taking chaos and diffusing it and sieving it until the writing comes out as the essential artifice, narrow and implicit in focus. It is this process that is at the core of the making of a successful magazine. Roberta Myers (p. 47), of Elle, says that, despite the images, artistic direction, culture and pop culture connections, and the supposed glamour associated with magazine production, one should never forget that it is about the reader – that content should be edited and written for the reader. Overall, this book is a journey and an insight into the bohemian days of journalism and celebrity, from Hunter S. Thompson, Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe and Andy Warhol to Will Smith and McDonald’s. It is as fascinating in its social commentary as it is in providing meaningful advice for writers, editors, journalists and those interested in the revelations and machinations of an era.

— Bridget Ransome, University of South Australia

Sbardellati, John, J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War, ISBN 9 7808 0145 0082, 264 pp., A$39.95. Distributor: Footprint.

J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies is John Sbardellati’s first book, and is derived from his PhD dissertation. It explores his interest in how the FBI escalated the cultural and ideological struggles of early Hollywood into national security threats during the Cold War. It presents solid and detailed evidence from declassified FBI files that illustrate Hoover’s intense fears regarding the vulnerability of Hollywood to the so-called communist threat. Sbardellati explores the FBI’s partnership with the industry’s own pressure groups and notable anti-communists, and later with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to which it provided vital intelligence.

World War II’s Grand Alliance had particularly aroused Hoover’s suspicions that unsuspecting Americans could be vulnerable to films secretly injected with communist propaganda. Thus the book’s contribution to this broad field is Sbardellati’s well-evidenced case that, contrary to the popular view, the FBI’s investigation of Hollywood began prior to the Cold War years.

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The belief in cinema’s unprecedented public influence induced great apprehension in the FBI, and Sbardellati shows that Hoover’s ‘hypodermic theory’ of how communism might spread in America like a virus fuelled his mission to thwart subversion via this mass-communication tool. The book spotlights Hoover’s anti-progressive agenda, which was opposed to the rise of the ‘social issue’ film and its supposed ability to directly influence the population. Sbardellati also shows how Hoover’s desire to preserve the FBI’s secrecy lead it to cooperate with organisations that could openly take up the charges and make a public case for the subversion that was allegedly rife within Hollywood.

The book’s goals are achieved through reconstruction of a narrative around the chronology of FBI documents, police reports, private letters and more. Therefore, for those wishing to delve into the work of the FBI to undermine Hollywood’s creative freedom and ability to commentate on social issues, this volume contains plenty of detail on specific films and incidents that would be illuminating. It also provides a fresh resource on Hoover’s view of the impact of the Grand Alliance on American cinema, and explores the process of how the intelligence gathered on Hollywood during World War II was eventually fed into the subsequent HUAC hearings.

While there is at times a little too much restatement (sometimes verbatim) of the book’s straightforward central claims, they are based on solid and detailed evidence that Sbardellati has diligently unearthed from a sea of mostly primary sources. As such, this is a useful resource for anyone wanting detail about the FBI’s machinations within the film industry, and its role in HUAC’s volatile hearings during the Cold War. The book is less concerned with theoretically based analysis of the many issues that are raised and more devoted to bringing to light the story of the FBI’s principal role in Hollywood’s Red Scare. Sbardellati’s attention to detail and clear style mean that J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies is also a helpful introduction for students new to the area of Hollywood’s cultural battles and their impact on the expression of American cinema.

— Kate Hogan, Flinders University

Sinclair, John, Advertising, the Media and Globalisation: A World in Motion. Routledge, London, 2012, ISBN 9 7804 1566 8835, x+168 pp., A$39.95.

This book presents a clear and concise outline of the global transformation of the advertising industry today. In a systematic order, Sinclair provides five theoretical positions in this book. First, he examines the importance of advertising during the ‘golden age’ of mass media – the last quarter of the twentieth century. At the same time, he places advertising within a broad conceptual landscape of ‘consumer culture’, and examines advertising not only as a commercial practice, but also a broad cultural and social phenomena. He does this skilfully by drawing on a range of sources ranging from Marxist critiques of commodity fetishism to branding paradigms that can be seen in popular culture today.

In his second position, Sinclair examines the globalisation trend through a historical overview. Here, he discusses the role that US-based advertising agencies and media organisations played in facilitating this process, including their reorganisation into global corporations in their own right.

The third position examines the current destabilisation of the industry brought by the rise of the internet, gaming, mobile phones and the associated new technologies that have swiftly transformed into new advertising media. Sinclair is clear that this destabilisation is not because technological novelties have replaced the ‘old’ models, but because these developments were too fast for some traditional business models to keep up with the progress.

The fourth position is social in nature. It examines the quest for individualisation and authenticity in consumption, social media marketing, behavioural targeting, nation branding, environmentalism and socially responsible advertising. According to Sinclair, when it comes to some of these issues, the advertising industry is often on the defensive, standing against governments, communities, advocacy and professional groups, as well as critics of consumption.

The fifth and final position in this book provides a predominantly empirical and comparative account of recent industry data. The data present an overview of the major advertisers, the most significant agencies, and the relationship between advertising and the

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media in the main world regions, including the emerging new markets of the ‘BRICS’ nations.

Sinclair summarises that, even in the era of intense techno-commercial innovation and institutional transformation, the nature of the media and the advertising still remains the same. New media have not replaced the old, but simply opened alternative avenues for advertisers. Television is still popular with the large corporations and, given its ability to amass broad audiences, it continues to hold its dominant position. Online advertising, on the other hand, has provided an opportunity for small and emerging businesses to find their niche markets, with search advertising being the most profitable advertising medium on the internet. Nevertheless, as Sinclair notes, the public remains reflexive and resistant, and advertisers and agencies are in a constant process of searching for new ways to attract and engage their prospective consumers.

The book is topical, and it covers a vast amount of information, yet this is presented in a refreshingly succinct manner and the book is well written, which makes it relevant and accessible to a broad range of audiences, such as both students and researchers from the fields of advertising, marketing, communication design and media studies.

— Gjoko Muratovski, Swinburne University of Technology

Snickars, Pelle and Vonderau, Patrick, Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, ISBN 9 7802 3115 7391, 352 pp., A$41.95. Distributor: Footprint.

The subtitle of this book and the image on its cover (of an iPhone glammed up in candy-coloured apps) may lead the reader to expect an iPhone love-in. That reader will be disappointed. Although most contributors to this book appear to agree that the world changed inexorably in 2007 with the release of the iPhone, and that Apple has been the more adept marketer of the smartphone product as well as the more aggressive corporate deal-maker, Moving Data looks carefully at the broader world of smartphones and related technology, with regular nods to, rather than a fixation on, the iPhone. Within this context, Apple, the iPhone and Steve Jobs are not untouchable.

Moving Data is organised into four sections and a brief coda. The chapters in ‘Data

Archaeologies’ map the iPhone experience across the terrain of cinema, art exhibitions and navigating the screen. These chapters take us into the somewhat unexpected realms of E.T. and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Interestingly, Raoul Eshelman’s ideas on post-postmodernism (which he has dubbed performatism) are apparent in these chapters: if Moving Data is anything to go by (and I would suggest it is), performatism would appear to be gaining traction.

The chapters in ‘The Politics of Distribution’ look at issues of personal versus mass media, the tightly controlled world of Apple products and associated apps and the regulatory crisis that is a hangover of ancient laws governing achingly new technologies.

‘The App Revolution’ looks at the nature of apps, the normalisation of play through mobile gaming, the evolution of e-books, political citizenship and the protest movement, as well as rethinking journalism and mojos (mobile journalists, both amateur and professional).

‘Mobile Lives’ considers the iPhone as a prosthetic extension of self, and the implications of that on education and the consolidation of power. It investigates the ‘iceberg’ problem – how so much of our (technological) life happens beneath the surface in a space we can’t see or understand. This section also looks at interfaces, mobile music-making and the increasingly haptic and kinetic nature of technology.

This is a broad study, which seeks to understand the cultural implications of the iPhone moment that began in 2007 and continues to the present day. It is problematic to identify recurring themes in such a wide-ranging collection of essays; however, one message comes across loud and clear: the iPhone and Apple have created an intimately closed and infinitely controlled world, for better or for worse. This theme might be characterised as ‘the iPhone giveth and the iPhone taketh away’.

In Moving Data’s coda, Dalton Conley muses on the need to disconnect in order to create, grow and form personal identity. Given the deep integration of the iPhone and related technologies in our lives, it is possible to see this act of disconnecting as the most revolutionary act of all. And that’s to say nothing of its near and nascent impossibility.

— Lynette Washington, English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide

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Sterne, Jonathan, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2012, ISBN 9 7808 2235 2877, xv+ 341 pp., US$24.95.

Jonathan Sterne’s new book is a comprehensive investigation into the historical and technological conditions behind the development of the MP3. Its strength is to track the audio research that went on in universities and corporations alike, to develop strategies for the compression and coding of digital playback and recording. This has not, as Sterne argues, been a linear development, but rather a history full of dead-ends and insoluble problems. Neither was the goal of much of the research to produce the MP3 as we know it today; instead, it was focused on all kinds of other technologies, most notably the telephone.

Rather than thinking of the MP3 developing on from vinyl records and CDs, Sterne argues that they are best historicised within communications media. As such, complaints that the MP3 is not of the same sound quality as vinyl or the CD are misapplied, as the context in which music is listened to and exchanged is a completely different one. This context is better assessed in terms of the quantity of the exchange – in terms of the number of recordings that are a part of the internet environment rather than their integrity.

Only a small part of Sterne’s book addresses another common debate around MP3s, which is unauthorised copying, a practice that he argues is symptomatic of a complete change in the means by which music culture happens. His technological history repositions the actual significance of this debate, and the MP3 more generally, connecting it to the infrastructure that supports file-sharing. Rather than record and telephone companies, hardware manufacturers and search engines are empowered by the new regime of musical recording.

Also implied in Sterne’s argument are the consequences for human hearing more generally. Music’s materiality is no longer attached to a physical recording, but is instead located in an iPod or its equivalent. The consequences for a more general history of hearing are profound, as the assemblage of the technological histories that configure these devices alters the human relationship to music as a cultural form. These portable devices limit and frame the way in which music is heard, and the politics of listening. Again, the telephone

is the real precedent here, and remains the technological equivalent of the iPod, rather than the CD or record player.

Sterne may be our leading music scholar. He is meticulous in digging up obscure histories of corporate and state-sponsored research, which he uses to reposition more familiar debates around music, so-called piracy and listening. As he tells it, history is not as smooth as it may sometimes appear to be, but comes out of happy accidents and corporate fantasies that are then turned on their head by computer hackers and a mass culture of users. Behind the continuity of music history lies a complex and discontinuous material history of technological development.

— Darren Jorgensen, Architecture, Landscape and Visual Art,

University of Western Australia

Taylor, T.D., Katz, M. and Grajeda, T., Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2012, ISBN 9 7808 2234 9464, 432 pp., A$26.45.

Music, Sound, and Technology in America is a thought-provoking collection of more than 120 primary documents that chronicle the development and subsequent uses of three technologies that profoundly reshaped people’s relationship to sound and music in the period between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the phonograph, film sound and radio. The collection, which includes everything from magazine, newspaper and academic journal articles to song lyrics, training manual extracts and government meeting minutes, captures a range of professional and governmental perspectives, as well as the attitudes of everyday people to the emergent technologies.

The collection illustrates how these new technologies came to be integrated into the daily lives of Americans, and the reader is prompted in the book’s introduction to interrogate the readings by considering how people found uses for them; the match between those uses and those envisaged by their inventors and distributors; the ways in which the technologies were championed and opposed; and the manner in which attitudes towards, and demands of, the technologies shifted from those based on novelty to those of utility and reliability. The

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collection’s earliest pieces date from the 1870s, and include Edison’s own speculations about the probable uses of the phonograph, while the latest primary pieces were authored in the mid-1940s, when the authors argue that the three technologies had reached maturity.

Taylor’s excellent introduction points to the broader social and economic context in which the new sound and music commodities emerged, and that shaped responses to them. He argues that this was a time during which Americans were ‘entering a world of mass culture, in which goods, including cultural goods … were produced and consumed on a scale previously unknown’, and during which the plethora of new technologies, including the phonograph, cinema and radio, ‘contributed to a sense that modernity was exhilarating, frightening and wholly new’.

Given that the sound technologies examined in the book have remained fundamental to contemporary sound and music consumption (some slightly modified and others in principle), it would be difficult to find a better way to stimulate contemporary audiences to associate them with wonder and worry than through a compilation of primary, historically situated documents. For instance, in the opening piece of the collection Edison artfully describes the fundamental nature of his phonograph as enabling the ‘gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive, and their reproduction at will’, moving us to consider a time when sound was untamed. Likewise, a collection of this sort encourages the contemporary reader to contemplate the adaptations and discontinuities in the technical and social trajectories of what we appreciate as recorded music, film and radio. In doing so, it also prompts us to think about the possible trajectories of emerging digital communication technologies.

This is a fascinating collection, thoughtfully produced with excellent section introductions that clearly identify and situate the issues around which the primary documents are thematically arranged. It would make a worthy addition to the bookshelves of anyone interested in music, film and radio, and to the reading list of a broad range of media and communications courses.

— C.K. Wilson, RMIT University

Van Dijk, Jan, The Network Society, 3rd edn, Sage, London, 2012, ISBN 9 7814 4624 8966, 336 pp., A$57.95. Distributor: Footprint.

Jan Van Dijk’s new edition of The Network Society has been published nearly seven years after the last one and thirteen years since it was first published in the English language. The original Dutch came out in 1991. The number of editions of this book alone is a demonstration of its validity in the field.

A network society is described as one in which individuals are enabled and expected to participate in work, civil society and government using the internet and forms of digital communication technologies, and increasingly are organising their social relationships via these networks. Van Dijk was the first author to really consider this idea back in the 1990s, when he believed that electronic media were taking over from traditional communication and organisation methods, and the world was in the process of forming different types of community. Although some of the most definitive writing on this subject comes from Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells, these followed on from Van Dijk’s early work. In Van Dijk’s writings, he regards social and media networks as being important tools in society but he does not give them the prime position that Castells does.

In structure, this edition differs from the previous one, with its beginning- and end-of-chapter bullet point summaries and the absence of the useful glossary of terms. Otherwise, it follows the chapter and headings as before in a comprehensive explanation of the major social aspects of new media. Van Dijk explains in his opening chapter that the increase of new media into society over the years during which he has been writing in the area means that he feels it is no longer possible to capture all the discussions in one book and that this publication is in no way an ‘encyclopaedia’ (p. 19).

He may be doing himself a disservice here as, while there are many more texts available on the subject, this one covers not only the impact of new media on culture and social communication but also deals with aspects that influence law, politics and the economy. The audience for which this book is most suited would be unlikely to need something more comprehensive as an introduction to the ideas. Van Dijk’s revision of the text includes references and discussion of contemporary

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examples such as the growth of Facebook, RFID chips and the Global Financial Crisis to illustrate his arguments, as well as the historical and academic literature. This gives the text a degree of accessibility that is likely to appeal to students.

Scholars of the network society concept, and those who have an earlier edition of this book, may consider that there is nothing significantly different here to warrant the purchase, but for those who are new to the subject-matter and students looking for a classic text, this book is invaluable, and Van Dijk’s updates make it fresh and relevant to a new audience.

— Kirsten McGregor, Media and Communication, University of Sydney

Wark, McKenzie, Telesthesia: Communication, Culture & Class, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2012, ISBN 9 7807 4565 3990, viii+241 pp., A$32.95. Distributor: John Wiley.

Telesthesia is perception at a distance, produced by information moving faster than material objects. According to McKenzie Wark, this condition defines the grounds for political struggle today. Wark’s new book of the same name, Telesthesia: Communication, Culture & Class, continues his almost two decades-long project of theorising capitalism, power and resistance, updating his previous writings for contemporary conflicts where the local and global intersect in often new and strange ways.

Wark’s focus on class struggle injects a necessary perspective on how informational capitalism produces asymmetrical power relations based on the control of global flows of information and capital. For Wark, class under informational capitalism is framed through conflicts between the ‘vectoral class’, who secure power through control of intellectual property and information transmission, and the ‘hacker class’, who produce new informational and creative possibilities eventually captured by those of the vectoral class.

Telesthesia is written as a work of ‘low theory’, the term Wark uses for the experimental, interventionist style of authors like Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. Wark is more interested

in the speculative possibilities enabled by theory than a straightforward diagnosis of contemporary capitalism’s ills. Telesthesia revels in the creation of concepts and the revolutionary potential of thought. But theory is never an end-point for Wark, as concepts must be crafted in the service of political praxis. Consequently, Telesthesia looks at real struggles happening around the world today, and attempts to open up possibilities for intervention and change. The Occupy protests of New York’s Zuccotti Park reappear throughout Telesthesia as an example of resistance under vectoral capitalism. Wark’s use of theory permits him to embrace, in a way, the very spirit of the Occupy movement he invokes. There is an anarchic feel to his experimentation, as the book moves from essays on ‘high’ philosophy and cultural theory to the ‘lowest’ popular culture, looking for spaces of resistance and change wherever possible.

Telesthesia’s experimental approach and style, however, result in an occasional uneven quality. One essay, ‘The Little Sisters are Watching You’, relies heavily on the theory of ‘The Girl’, an abstract caricature of post-feminist vacuity developed by the anonymous collective Tiqqun. While not inherently female, ‘The Girl’ evokes the worst of post-feminist ‘empowerment’: shallow, image-obsessed and hyper-sexualised. While ‘The Girl’ may not be an actual woman, ‘she’ is nonetheless gendered and infantilised. Telesthesia’s low theoretical style here works against Wark, as he ends up making claims that sound sexist and appear to ignore the gendering of consumer culture throughout modern thought.

This should not take away from the overall strengths of Telesthesia. Wark’s essayistic style, along with the way he uses theory as a political tool, provides an accessible, provocative vision of class politics for a world where the speed of information seems more important than solidity of material objects. While theory seems to have lost some lustre in recent years, Wark demonstrates why we need to keep theorising through new vectors and new concepts.

— Grant David Bollmer, English and Media Studies, Massey University