Andrew Jakubowicz takes a stab at what the media and diversity landscape will look like in 2021.

It is now almost 10 years since the first minority government of the decade’s Convergence Inquiry reported its findings. The report recognised that with the National Broadband Network fibre-optic system likely to be overwhelmed and renewed with new technologies within a decade, the local access nodes established under Culture Minister Simon Crean’s national cultural policy little more than burnt-out stumps, and privatisation of the internet creating a new ‘Digital Divide’, there would be a vast infrastructure full of masses of low quality mind pap.

For the Creative Nation dreamed of by a previous ambitious generation in the 1990s, the internet had yet to produce a huge quantum of ”value add”.

One of the key tensions that had become obvious during the 2010s could be seen in the three-way tug between government, corporate and community media. The unified National Broad and Online Caster OzPop (formed out of the ABC, SBS and a number of community broadcasters after the agglomeration of corporate ownership in 2015) saw the new OzTenSky win Australia’s global satellite contract. Moreover with its access to the vaults of Fox Cinema and the Alan Jones “morgue” of popular opinions, OzTenSky has come to dominate the small remaining free-to-air business, as well as holding a big chunk of the holocable. Its national interactive holographic service serves up instantaneous holograms on the super broad band; they now captivate us as we sit on the football/netball/soccer/AFL/NRL field and the players swoop around us.

What does it mean to be a national broadcaster when the nation’s boundaries have been permeated by global infosystems, the nation state has been fragmenting into its composite regions or global diasporas after a decade of weak and compromised national rule, and audience dispersal/prosumer growth means the old one-to-many model no longer holds true almost anywhere?

In a recent speech, the cross-bench Minister for Human Rights and Digital Equity Haji Graham “Freckles” Ibn Mahmoud pointed to the challenges for older Australians of the new post-NBN world. “Just as they had worked out how to plug their LCD panels into the NBN hub, a service provided to all pensioners by their caring government, they are having to grasp the intricacies of framing their Holoskype signatures to allow them to access their local libraries. For people who don’t have English as a first language, or Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi or Korean, the provision of Government information needs to be fine-tuned for their cultural and linguistic preferences”, he said.

“We are also trying to ensure that the default position for holographic communication does not mean people with dark skin disappear into the ether. With voting and referendum choices, interaction with local members of parliament, information accessing at the local Council and so many more of the e-government preferences now programmed into the unique citizen chip (UCC) embedded in people’s fore-arms, missing the chip can mean social exclusion, marginalisation and even cessation of private-public provided services such as education, transport, health and recreation.”

The global FruitMedia, the conglomerate successor to News Corporation, Apple Computers and Orange Communication, now offers over 1000 different news channels, in over 200 languages, instantaneously translated from whatever the original language of production. Its iGloTrans chip now permits anyone anywhere to speak to anyone anywhere, projecting a mini-hologram of the speakers in the language of the listener. It is as though we have been flung back into the golden age of the Silent Era in Hollywood on Cinecitta or Berlin, where actors voiced unheard words in their own languages, which then became “sound” through the subtitle insert screens. Now they say what they will and we hear what we can.

With the print newspaper now effectively gone, the last hard-copy edition of the Sydney Morning Herald had been produced in 2017 for that year’s double dissolution Federal election, tablet-based multimedia communication units now carry instantaneous news updates tailored to individual pro-sumer profiles.

For the poor and unemployed, (the latter now over nine per cent of the urban population) Ibn Mahmoud’s reference to the Digital Divide comes especially close to home. While basic communits and core access costs are provided as part of monthly welfare parcels sourced on the basis of weekly Lotto numbers through CoolLink (the Coles Woolworths CentreLink coalescence that took over the non-cash provision of social support), nutritious food and access to high value online content are not commonly available to them. So loss of job or income, social exclusion, or mandated ostracism from their religious group can and is diabolically destructive.

Without access to the services, information and the means of communication (not the short range monitored Government hand-out communits) that comes to free and funded citizens, marginalised individuals gravitate towards the information underground for the very scared unregistered people, the unlawful and unobserved. There they buy short-burn under cards on the black market, and use them to trick autovenders into admitting them for a session into the local libraries, where they can plug away in the galleries of Googlebooks. Under the freeways they can also be found rummaging through skips full of pages from hard copy books, spines shredded and dumped there by universities cleansing their information vaults of paper texts.

But the Convergence and Finkelstein inquiries would be far more optimistic, no?

Andrew Jakubowicz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Technology Sydney and Co-director of the UTS Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Key Research Strength (Research Centre). He is a chair of the NGO Institute for Cultural Diversity. He has published widely in the fields of cultural diversity, social policy, refugees, Jewish cultural studies, media sociology, and new media. The website that he co-ordinates Making Multicultural Australia in the 21st Century is designed for teachers and students interested in cross-curriculum diversity perspectives, and is produced in conjunction with state education and arts bodies around Australia.