Abstract
This article analyses developments in Australian communications policy since the March 1996 change of national government. It considers Artsinfo, a new Australian government-sponsored Internet and telephone-based information service, as a product of this conjunction. It argues that Artsinfo is emblematic of the ways in which Internetworking developments are altering social space on local, national and global scales. This article also explores temporal dimensions of these themes. It reviews the Artsinfo launch event as an exercise in nation-building which is suggestive of a paradoxical limit faced by peripheral economies seeking to locate ‘the nation’ in the global ‘information economy’, where that development is contingent upon the privatisation of communications infrastructure. Specifically, what kinds of national public culture can be sustained on the basis of wholly and partly privatised communications infrastructures?
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