(12) search.informit.com.au

http://search.informit.com.au/
Informit Database – Home Invasion: Television, Identity and Belonging in Sydney’s Western Suburbs
http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=081973108368977;res=IELHSS

Similar to SAGE, informit is an online publishing and database service, with its focus on Australasia. It also automatically recognizes the Griffith University network; and therefore, access to the online journals, working papers and textbooks is mostly free.

In the online journal Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, published quarterly, there is another essay about national television and Australian identity, called Home Invasion: Television, Identity and Belonging in Sydney’s Western Suburbs and written by Tanja Dreher in 2000.

Though the article is quite specific in its topic, it presents a general approach to television that could be rather useful in any analysis of TV and national identity, especially the chapter Insecure Belongings: TV Talk and the National ‘Home’: Focusing more on reception and consumption of TV rather than the production and the actual content, Dreher draws the attention to “TV talk”. People talking about things they saw on TV provides a discursive site where meanings are constructed and discussed, and where identity and a sense of belonging to a home, a community, and a wider sense of ‘home’ (a nation) is negotiated and contested.

This ‘active’ approach, where the audience is an agent rather than a passive consumer, should definitely be considered when writing a research paper about national identity and the media.

(11) tvn.sagepub.com

http://tvn.sagepub.com
Television & New Media: Cultural Identity, Soap Narrative, and Reality TV
http://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/4/415

Just like the online journal I wrote about in link number 10, Television & New Media is a journal published on the SAGE platform since 2000, and it is committed to recent developments in Television and New Media studies.

In 2005, there was an article published in Television & New Media called Cultural Identity, Soap Narrative, and Reality TV, written by Graeme Turner, available for download as pdf. Turner is an internationally prominent academic figure in cultural and media studies (amongst others) concerning Australian nationalism, television and film.

In the article, he focuses on two television formats: The Australian soap opera and Australian reality TV shows, particularly Big Brother. He links the distinctive Australian elements of the soap Neighbours to its great success, domestic as well as overseas, and he explains how even a ‘global’ format like Big Brother was indigenized and therefore functioned as a discursive space for cultural and national identification: Instead of a competitive fight between the individuals, like it happened in other national versions of Big Brother, the participants became a family, a house full of ‘mates’.

Turner shows how patterns of cultural identification are not only found in TV formats that are distinctly labeled ‘Australian’, but surprisingly they are very visible in ‘gobal’ formats (the soap opera or reality TV), where one would least expect them.