[csaa-forum] Georgina Born Seminar: Digitising Democracy: Digitisation, and Public Service Communications

[Jonathan Marshall]

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

Thursday the 10th of August 2006 4pm, at the University of Technology- Sydney (UTS) 
Venue: Building 6, The Peter Johnson Building (where the Design Architecture and Building Faculty (DAB) is located).  Entry is via Harris street. 

             Level 5 
             Room 550 

Digitising Democracy: Digitisation, Pluralism, and Public Service Communications 

Georgina Born 
University of Cambridge 

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

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



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

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

Born’s current research examines the transformation of public service communications with digitization, with reference to the BBC and Britain’s Channel 4, and theorises the affinity between pluralistic accounts of democracy and digital media, and what this implies for new conceptions of public service communications. 
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