consumers

In the Vernacular brings together important works, written over a twenty-year period by Stuart Cunningham, one of Australia's leading scholars of media, culture and policy.

How is media convergence impacting on established, ‘broadcast-era’ community media? In this paper Ellie Rennie takes SYN (a community radio licensee in Melbourne) as a case study and employs media ethnography and policy analysis to identify contemporary challenges facing community media.

This paper suggests that the forgotten domain of the complex and vigorous debates about the future of higher speed broadband in Australia is the experience and expectations of users and consumers with broadband. Research to date about such user experiences, especially in Australia, has essentially concentrated on Internet services and mainly with narrowband users. Yet Internet is not broadband. We, in Australia, have much to learn from recent European experiences with broadband.

Considerable attention has been given in recent months to the complexity of issues surrounding broadband policy for Australia. While there appears to be widespread support that Australia needs to move from what might presently be called `rudimentary' or possibly `adequate' broadband, and largely only for urban dwellers, there are many calls for the urgent availability of `enabling' broadband. The unravelling of these terms depends upon what users expect from broadband, what speeds they require, and how much they are prepared to pay for the service.