The Rise,Fall,and Rise Again of Communication as a Disciplinary Signifier in Australia: After the “Cultural Turn” and the “Digital Turn”

Abstract

Communication as a discipline has a curious double life, being both disavowed in favor of something else, yet remains as a conceptual anchor point for a diverse range of intellectual projects. This argument focuses upon four challenges, or “turns,” that communication as a field has experienced: the “cultural turn” associated with cultural studies; the global turn; the “creative turn”; and the “digital turn” associated with the Internet and social media. It is observed that these have been collectively incorporated into a broadened communication field, and that concepts associated with communication remain relevant to other disciplines and fields.

Introduction: Communication and the “Cultural Turn”

In reviewing the history of communication research in Australia, Steven Maras has observed that the 1980s were a period of considerable contestation around the meaning of “communication” in the Australian context, and the theories and fields that would inform its development in the Australian context (Maras, 2004, 2018). That decade is bookended by the first Australian Communication Association (ACA) conference held in Sydney in 1980, and the incorporation of Media and Communication Studies as a distinct Field of Research category in the Australian Research Standards Classification in 1990.

Prior to the formation of the ACA, there was only a limited sense of communication as an academic discipline or as a disciplinary field. ¹ Programs tended to be largely practice-oriented, with a focus upon speech communication, professional writing, and technical communication, and offered in what were then Institutes of Technology and Colleges of Advanced Education. Journalism courses have been a staple of higher education from as early as 1921, when the first Diploma in Journalism was developed at The University of Queensland (Darian-Smith & Dickinson, 2021). There were strong courses in media and politics elsewhere, most notably at The University of Sydney under Henry Mayer and, later, Rod Tiffin (1985). But the work of bringing these strands together as a discipline largely took place in the 1980s.

In his synoptic history, Maras observed that three debates were recurring in Australian communication studies in the 1980s. First, and perhaps most significantly, there was the “two paradigms” debate, between what was perceived as a North American mass communication model—most clearly represented by work coming from the International Communication Association (ICA) and the Journal of Communication—and what was variously termed a “European” and “British cultural studies” approach, strongly informed by Marxism, feminism, structuralism, and semiotics (Putnis, 1986). Second, there was the question of whether a distinctively Australian approach to communication studies should be cultivated, or whether this represented an atavistic nationalism at odds with reaching out to the leading work in global scholarship. Finally, there was the debate about whether communication was indeed a discipline in its own right. Critiquing the notion that communication could constitute a “science,” Bill Bonney observed that “there is no such ahistorical, asocial object as the human communication process and hence no such possibility as communication theory” (2001, p. 20).

From its inception, communication studies in Australia was an unstable formation. As Helen Wilson observed, many of the “rising stars” of the field at the time identified more strongly with the emergent project that was cultural studies than with what was seen as an empiricist and ahistorical approach to communication grounded in social psychology and behavioral science (2001). The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies was first published in 1983, as a publication of the ACA, before becoming the international journal Cultural Studies published by Routledge in 1987. In 1992, the Cultural Studies Association of Australia (CSAA) was formed, as an alternative academic association to the ACA (which in 1994 became ANZCA—the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association). Yet a lot of media studies and cultural studies teaching and research continued to happen within communication degrees and communication schools. John Frow's account of the early history of Australian cultural studies identifies that in three of the four major programs in which cultural studies was being developed in the 1980s—Curtin University (formerly WAIT), Murdoch University, and University of Technology Sydney (formerly NSWIT)—it was happening within communication schools and degrees, while Griffith University has a Communication program sitting alongside other elements of its cultural studies-informed Humanities degrees (2005).

By the 1990s, it was apparent that the cultural turn had not displaced communication as a field. Cultural Studies and Communication have existed in a sometimes complementary, sometimes uneasy relationship to one another, with media studies at times forming a point of convergence between the two. Complicating the picture further, as Helen Wilson noted, was the boom in enrolments in professional fields such as public relations, journalism, and advertising, which were commonly found in communication schools, and which could be both “uncomfortable for academics committed to the critique of ideology,” but also “attracting very bright students … [with] a higher entry level … required for such vocational courses than traditional Arts degrees” (Wilson, 2001, p. 13). ²

Another development from the 1990s was that communications courses were increasingly taught in Business Schools. With oral and written communication being identified as core generical skills, and fields such as advertising and public relations being closely connected to marketing and organizational communication to management, there was significant growth in such offerings in commerce, management, and marketing programs. The implications of this shift are considerably less well-documented than those associated with the relationship between journalism and media studies, or communication and cultural studies. McKenna has observed that, with the “cultural turn” in communications research in Arts faculties, and the increased focus on MBA programs in Business Schools, there was a decline in scholarship and courses in organizational communication, health communication, and scientific and technical communication in both Australia and New Zealand, as these were subsumed within more generic management, marketing, and human relations management courses (McKenna, 2007).

The 1990s and 2000s saw consolidation and growth in communication programs in Australia, as they began to be both very successful in attracting research funding from the Australian Research Council and from government and industry, and experienced significant enrolment growth, driven in part by their considerable appeal to fee-paying international students. Reflective of such trends, the early 2000s saw Media and Communication and similar (Communication, Media Studies, etc.) degrees established at the University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, University of Melbourne, University of Adelaide, and University of Western Australia, which joined the long-established programs at Monash University and University of Queensland. This meant that by 2003 all of Australia's elite “Group of Eight” universities offered a Communication degree other than the Australian National University. Surveying the landscape of the period, I observed in 2004 that:

From its origins in the newer universities Media and Communication courses have increasingly presented themselves to cash-strapped Arts Deans as a relatively low-cost way to tap into the interests and media literacy of young people, present the cachet of vocational orientation, and provide practical skills development and job opportunities at the end of the degree. If academic degrees were traded on some form of stock exchange Media and Communication courses would certainly constitute what market commentators term a “growth stock”. (Flew, 2004b, p. 111)

Further evidence of the co-existence of communication and cultural studies in the Australian context can be derived from the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) national research audit. In the 2018 ERA, 20 of Australia's 41 universities submitted work in the FoR 2001 Communication and Media Studies Field of Research code, while 19 universities submitted in the FoR 2002 Cultural Studies code, with 14 universities submitting in both codes. The net effect of three decades of the cultural turn has been that the two disciplinary fields continue to coexist with varying degrees of complementarity and divergence.

The Global Turn

The rise of communication degrees in the 2000s and 2010s was connected to two developments in Australian higher education policy that promoted globalization. In terms of taught programs, steady reductions in funding for both domestic students (Commonwealth Supported Places—CSPs) and research created a funding “gap” that was increasingly met by large-scale enrolment of international full-fee paying students. At the same time, research evaluation exercises such as the ERA, along with the proliferation of international university ranking systems such as QS World Universities Ranking, Times Higher Education, Academic Ranking of World Universities, and others gave a renewed focus upon the international standing of universities as primarily derived from their research, as distinct from other “public good” measures of value such as contribution to local communities or graduate employment outcomes (Marginson, 2016).

The combined impact of student enrolment trends and ranking regimes that promoted the globalization of Australian higher education shifted the terms of debate around communication and cultural studies in Australia. In particular, the focus of Australian universities was increasingly on recruitment of students from the Asia-Pacific region. In earlier debates about “European” critical and cultural studies versus “American” mass communication, neither region was a significant source of students to Australian universities. By contrast, the East Asian region, and particularly China, became a central source of student demand for the sector. The number of international students in Australian universities went from 113,000 in 1997 to 270,500 in 2010, to 440,667 in 2019 before the COVID-19-related downturn (Ferguson & Spinks, 2021; Spinks, 2016).

The largest numbers of these students have enrolled in business, management and commerce, information technology, and engineering. Insofar as they are enrolled in what in Australia are labeled Society and Culture programs, the largest enrolments are in communication and media studies, and variants of such courses (digital media, digital communication, etc.). Some of these enrolments are in business courses—Public Relations and Organisational Communication are taught in Business Schools in a number of Australian and New Zealand universities—but the most common pattern is that they exist in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences programs, particularly in the elite “Group of Eight” universities. In the postgraduate space in particular, universities such as Sydney, Melbourne, and Monash chose to specifically brand their programs as Digital Communication and Culture (Sydney), Global Media and Communications (Melbourne), and Communication and Media Studies (Monash) in order to maximize international student enrolments, and this strategy proved to be very successful.

This was in part related to a perception that communication was more vocationally oriented than a generalist arts degree or humanities fields such as cultural studies. It is also reflective of the rapid growth in communication courses in many parts of the world. In China, the number of universities Journalism and/or Communication courses grew from 20 in 1990 to over 700 by 2019, with a notable turn from the mid-2000s toward Internet communication and related fields (Hu & Chen, 2021; Huang, 2010). Communication programs have grown rapidly throughout East Asia in particular, and many of the world's most highly ranked communication programs are now in Asia, particularly in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and, increasingly, China. In this respect, communication as a field has established a sufficient degree of common global understanding to be one of the leading areas of research and teaching internationally, and one where both students and scholars can be internationally mobile.

The “Creative Turn”

The third major turn is what we can term the “creative turn.” From the 2000s, there was a growing interest in many parts of the world in developing “creative industries” courses that combined media, the creative and performing arts, and design fields, in ways that had an explicitly vocational orientation and what Hasan Bakhshi and Stuart Cunningham termed an “enterprise approach to culture” (2016), associated with the commercial creative sectors. Underpinning this was the rise of digital technologies and the rise of what Potts et al. (2008) termed “social network markets,” or products and services whose economic and symbolic value is strongly bound up with questions of culture and identity. John Hartley, one of the key global thinkers about creative industries, has observed that “the creative industries are the cultural-economic zone that deals with uncertainty” (2021, p. 4). Noting the difficulties in identifying which industries are or are not “creative,” there has been a turn toward the creative economy, defined by Bakhshi et. al. as “those economic activities which involve the use of creative talent for commercial purposes” (2013, p. 34). This definition is relatively agnostic about which industries and sectors are “in” the creative industries, focused instead upon the significance of creativity as an input across the wider economy.

The rise of creative industries both as an academic field and as an influential policy discourse intersected with identifiable trends in communication. One was the extent to which digital technologies enabled a much wider range of people to be cultural creators, distributing their media and other forms of content across the Internet and digital platforms, and challenging the proposition that media and cultural production was the exclusive preserve of elite trained professionals (Hartley, 2012). A related phenomenon was the extent to which digital technologies enabled students to be creators and not simply critical readers of media and culture, thus challenging a longstanding divide in media and communication programs between programs involved with making (film and television, journalism, digital design, etc.) and those involved with reading and interpreting culture (Flew, 2004a, 2019; Kress, 1997). Finally, the rise of social media and “Web 2.0” gave renewed impetus to these developments, as it enabled social sharing on a global scale, through easy-to-use digital and social media platforms (Deuze, 2012; Hartley, 2012; Jenkins, 2006).

There are clear connections between creativity and communication, particularly with regard to the need for creative ideas to be effectively received by others in order to have broader social impact (Negus & Pickering, 2009). At the same time, the creative industries as a concept did not substantially change communication courses. Part of the reason was that, in practice, it proved to be difficult to identify the arts and media sectors as being on a common trajectory, in spite of their many points of intersection. In particular, the media industries were radically impacted by digital disruption and the challenge of powerful digital platforms (Lotz, 2021), whereas many of the issues facing the arts in Australia arose from “culture wars” and unsupportive conservative government policies, as well as the harsh impacts of COVID-19 on music and live performance (Pennington & Eltham, 2021). It was arguably the case that creative industries in higher education had its greatest impact upon cultural studies, as a number of universities in Australia and the UK rebranded their cultural studies programs as creative industries, which was seen as having stronger vocational cachet and international brand recognition (Flew, 2019).

The Digital Turn

In many respects, the digital turn has been the most challenging of the four forces facing communication as a discipline in recent years. While cultural studies certainly challenged dominant traditions of communication research grounded in empirical and quantitative methods, there has nonetheless always been a position within communication scholarship that has seen its underpinnings as essentially cultural, and its affinities as being with humanities disciplines such as history, literature, and philosophy as much as with the social sciences. The philosopher John Dewey observed that “society exists not only by … communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in … communication” (1916, p. 5), while Raymond Williams argued that “society is a form of communication, through which experience is described, shared, modified, and preserved” (1976, p. 10). James Carey described communication as “the process whereby a culture is brought into existence” (1989, p. 111), and was one of many scholars who have sought a rapprochement between communication and cultural studies. Kent Ono has discussed the development of the journal Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies as an intervention in the US-based National Communications Association (NCA) to enable critical cultural studies work to be presented and published within the field of communications, and for “a new critical cultural approach to communication to emerge” (2020, p. 61).

Digital technologies and the Internet challenged underlying assumptions in communication studies not just at a methodological but at an epistemological level. In particular, it challenged a dualism, articulated by the communication theorist Everett Rogers (1999, 2003), that the communication field could be differentiated between two subdisciplines—mass media and interpersonal communication—based upon whether the primary communication channel was technologically mediated or not. As Silvio Waisbord observed:

Digital communication has integrated an array of activities that had been distinct and compartmentalized in the past. Digital platforms are sites for a host of activities. Boundaries between activities gradually disappear as we use the same platforms for various purposes … From novel forms of social recommendation and influence to original ways of individual and collective expression, digital life has launched new communication dynamics, whether communication is understood as information, persuasion, dialogue, or collective sense making. (2019, p. 78)

Among the many implications of digitization for communication, we can identify three as being critical. First, communication through digital technologies becomes central to every form of social interaction, meaning that “virtually everything can be understood, defined, and studied as a communication phenomenon” (Waisbord, 2019, p. 79). This is at the core of Manuel Castells’ notion of a “network society,” where digital networks become “the social structure characteristic of the Information Age” (2000, p. 5), and where all forms of power—and resistance to such power—are enacted in and through digital communication networks (2009). Second, it extends processes of mediation—and mediatization—to the point where we now experience what Sonia Livingstone termed the “mediation of everything” (2008). Third, the “mediation of everything,” where “it has become increasingly difficult to disentangle social life from mediated life [when] digital mediation has transformed every corner of social life” (Waisbord, 2019, p. 79), has also transformed what we mean by “the media.” For much of the 20th century, “the media” meant the mass media, or the industries, institutions, technologies, and professions associated with mass communications and reaching audiences at scale through one-way communication. By enabling multiple modalities of communication (interpersonal, group, mass, etc.) on multiple scales, and enabling all parties to become senders as well as receivers of messages across common digital networks and platforms, digital technologies fundamentally challenged the hegemony of media organizations as being at the center of mass communication processes.

The implications of these developments for the study of media and communication have been extensively debated (see e.g., Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Deuze, 2012; Hartley, 2012). New academic associations have emerged such as the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), while there has been a proliferation of sub-fields including social media, digital media, digital cultures, Internet studies, computer-mediated communication, network science, platform studies, mobile media, etc. At one level, this suggests that we are leaving the age of (mass) communication and have moved—or are at least moving—in the direction of something else.

From the perspective of the 2020s, I would argue that there are reasons to step back from this perspective. At the core of this proposition is the extent to which the Internet came to be platformized. This has meant that what we refer to as “the Internet” is increasingly mediated through a small number of digital technology corporations, whose business models differ from those of traditional media companies, but whose underlying logic is less radically different from traditional media than has often been assumed (Flew, 2021a). Both seek to aggregate audiences at scale as the basis for drawing advertisers to their platform, albeit on the basis of highly differentiated and largely user-created content for digital platforms, as compared to professionally produced media content aimed at mass audiences, as is discussed below.

Other reasons for seeing digital media as part of a larger media continuum are empirical. There has, for instance, been a surprising lack of transformation we have seen in what constitutes the primary sources of news. While the 2010s saw a major crisis in the sustainability of news media business models, it has not for the most part translated into the displacement of established news media mastheads for newer “born digital” offerings. Concerns about misinformation and “fake news,” from the election of Donald Trump in 2016 to the COVID pandemic, have seen growing attention being given to the trustworthiness of news sources, which has benefited established news media brands (Fletcher et al., 2020; Flew, 2021b). Both media businesses and journalists operate under the continuous scrutiny of social media platforms—particularly Twitter—but the vast amount of the content of “political Twitter” remains the mainstream news media, and the politicians and other opinion leaders who operate through it, even if it is for the purposes of critique. Online citizen journalism as an alternative to traditional news media has for the most part failed to become economically sustainable.

With regards to entertainment media, the rise of streaming services such as Netflix can be seen as consolidating rather than undermining traditional approaches to television, while transforming content delivery strategies and industry business models. As Amanda Lotz has argued (2021), the “streaming wars” can be seen less as the end of television, and more as the evolution of different types of television, from real-time live broadcasts to digital catalogs. The decision by Netflix in 2021 to develop a lower-cost advertising-funded service tier is entirely consistent with this understanding of the relationship of streamed media to broadcast television.

Another factor is normative. One of the early promises of the Internet and digital communication was that it offered the promise of a more curated and personalized experience of access to media content (Gillmor, 2004; Negroponte, 1995). This could be accompanied by greater transparency of information sources and individual or group-based fact-checking of mainstream media sources. Two problems have become apparent. One is that an increasingly individualized approach to media consumption runs against the extent to which communication at scale is a shared cultural practice, or what James Carey termed “communication as ritual” (1989). While there is convincing empirical evidence to suggest that concerns about “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” are overstated (Bruns, 2019), the point remains that media that operate at scale continue to be the focal point of debates and conversations on social media. The second issue is that fact-checking for “fake news” has itself become highly politicized, with competing political interests able to identify “facts” that align with pre-existing ideas, suggesting that the social forces underpinning political polarization are too deeply rooted to enable the elimination of misinformation by supply-side approaches that aim to filter out misinformation (Flew, 2022). We, therefore, find that questions of trust, and the normative ideals of a public sphere as articulated in Habermas’ philosophy of communication (Habermas, 1974, 1984; Strecker, 2018) remain relevant in an era of digital communication and media fragmentation.

Finally, there is the degree to which digital platforms have themselves become a form of mass media. At first glance, this seems counter-intuitive: as Dwayne Winseck has argued (2020), the algorithmic sorting and content moderation practices of large social media platforms bear little resemblance to the editorial decision-making processes associated with traditional print and broadcast media. However, as has been observed by several authors (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; McQuail & Deuze, 2020; Turow & Couldry, 2018), digital platforms are in the business of aggregating audiences at scale so as to deliver particular demographics to prospective advertisers, even if approaches to this are premised upon behavioral targeting and predictive data analytics rather than the production and distribution of media content. It is therefore not surprising that a series of social, policy, and regulatory concerns that were associated with mass media have resurfaced around digital platforms, including social media influence, economic power associated with market concentration, harmful online content, digital media literacy (particularly of children), the accuracy of online news and information, and the impact of advertising on social behavior. A range of “mass” media concepts and concerns have thus returned as the Internet has become increasingly platformized, and online interactions increasingly mediated through a relatively small number of powerful platform companies (Flew, 2021a; McQuail & Deuze, 2020).

Conclusion

In this paper, I have reviewed the impact of four “turns” on the communication discipline: the cultural, the global, the creative, and the digital. Drawing upon Australian case studies as well as international trends, it was found that the most significant disciplinary challenges arose from cultural studies in the 1980s, and from the impact of digital technologies from the 2000s onwards. Notably, they were different challenges, with the challenge of cultural studies being primarily methodological, with a focus upon the textual, the qualitative, and the intersubjective, whereas the challenge of digital technologies has been to the essential components of communication as a social practice. I have argued that communication and cultural studies have come to coexist as partly overlapping and partly competing academic disciplines. I argue that the evolution over time of digital technologies has arguably brought key issues closer to mainstream concerns of communication research, particularly around the future of news, trust, and the public sphere, and the regulation of media and communication technologies, industries, and practices.

At the same time, this is reflective of the porosity of communication as a disciplinary signifier. In particular, it supports Silvio Waisbord's argument that communication as an academic brand arises in part because of its “lack of an ontological center,” meaning that it can be “approached pragmatically as the inevitable outcome of an unwieldy collection of scholarly interests” (2019, pp. 8, 9). As a result, it is frequently critiqued from within. Communication as a field is frequently found wanting by scholars sitting within communication schools, departments, and Faculties, as well as within its professional and scholarly associations. It stands accused of being overly quantitative and insufficiently attentive to the cultural and the textual, of being complicit in colonial endeavors and in need of “de-Westernization,” of being merely a stepping-stone to a more comprehensive analytic surrounding the creative industries, and—most notably—of being a product of the age of mass media and not fully grasping the transformative impacts of the internet and digital technologies.

Such critiques have not affected the popularity of communication programs, as we have explored in the Australian case. Whether it is due to their appeal in global higher education markets, their links to the professions, the nature of communication as both an academic field and a generic capability that all students should possess, or the underlying pragmatism associated with post-disciplinarity, it continues to be prominent in terms of student enrolments, association memberships, and scholarly research. At the same time, communication experiences a double life, as a field that can bring together a diverse array of scholars, among whom are those that are deeply critical of it. With communication being a globally prominent field that attracts students and researchers from around the world, this double life of communication can be expected to continue for some time.