Caldwell, Nick
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Contributions
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ArticlesThe Australian Broadcasting Corporation is in the midst of significant change as a result of budgetary pressures from the government and the challenge of the oncoming digital age. Lack of funding and dwindling resources have forced the...Read more
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ArticlesA curious sense of the past, the present, and the future is evoked when I consider the sweeping curves and gleaming surfaces of the rocketships, rayguns and UFOs beloved of 1950s SF illustrators and filmmakers. A sense of the past, of course, because they are things of history, designed and conceived at the pre-dawn of the space age, and representing an old...Read more
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ArticlesIt is difficult to imagine, in this age of generic, impersonal computers and corporations, a time when individually-branded computer hardware attracted phenomenal and fanatical loyalty and devotion from their users. Sure, today you might see the occasional Windows95-vs-Linux flame war on theRead more
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ArticlesPostmodern theory, quite rightly I think, warns us against the grand narratives of modernism; the stories that purport to show history as a progression to a present or future enlightened state. Such narratives are problematic because they produce the idea that history is somehow inevitable and fixed and perfectly knowable. I want to apply this...Read more
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EditorialThe use of storytelling to explain, educate and entertain is a central façet of all human cultures. It allows specific, non-biological knowledge to be woven into complex meme-shapes and transmitted down the generations along with our genes. Almost every aspect of our identities and interactions with others are produced through mediation and the...Read more
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ArticlesNarratives of invasion have been stock in trade for science fiction in film and on TV for many years now. It's not hard to see how this began; at least at the conceptual level, visual SF tends not to be greatly innovative, drawing much of its iconography and subject matter from written SF produced in the 30s and 40s -- and in that time period, invasion and...Read more
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ArticlesThere are certain discourses operating in contemporary western culture that are granted tremendous power and authority to speak about those issues that cut across the racial, class, and gender boundaries of a culture. Life, death and politics are all central and legitimate categories for the discourses generated by media institutions. As we slide from the...Read more
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EditorialBriareos: If it's so quiet, then why do they need machines like that? I thought it was supposed to be peacetime. I'll tell you why-eighty per cent of the people here are artificial. Genetic engineering's out of control! -- Shirow, Appleseed 1.5: 37. Welcome to the 'machine' issue of...Read more
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ArticlesRosebud is the sleigh. Consumers of popular culture texts -- films, popular fiction, games -- have an enormous emotional investment in the narrative details of the texts they consume. Particularly, readers invest strongly in the accumulation of plot and development of narrative that produces the end of a text. In other words, that...Read more
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ArticlesThe computer game is perhaps the fastest growing and most quickly evolving cultural leisure technology in the western world. Invented as a form just under 40 years ago with the creation of Space War at MIT, computer and video games collectively account for hundreds of billions of dollars in sales across the world. And yet...Read more
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ArticlesThis paper has been constructed in a variety of working environments; some physical, some virtual, some merely perceptual. At an ever increasing rate, both work and leisure for the informationally-overexposed in contemporary, "post-modern" western cultures are taking place in a heterogeneous assemblage of working and living environments. At this point, I want...Read more
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EditorialThe keyword for this issue, "Sick," has produced a broad range of critical conceptualisations. The articles that appear in this Sick issue present a variety of different interpretations of sickness and the sick, and address a number of different "sick" elements of both past and contemporary society, of...Read more
