The essays in this collection have critically reflected on the 20-year history of the Department of Media and Communications (MECO) at the University of Sydney. I commenced in MECO in 2021 but have followed the evolution of the program since its commencement in 2000. One of the major transformations in MECO over this 20-year history has been the incorporation of the Digital Cultures program (see Chapter 4), to the point where it is now close to providing the largest suite of programs in the department.

In undertaking this chapter, I note work that I have undertaken previously, reviewing Media and Communications courses in Australia, for a collection of essays dealing with innovation in Australian arts, media and design.1 In my own contribution to this collection, I observed that the early 2000s saw a rapid growth in media and communications courses, led by the Group of Eight or “sandstone” universities such as the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne.2 I described this phenomenon as follows:

A lot of that description still sounds valid to a description of the MECO programs at the University of Sydney today. Our student numbers are far in excess of most departments in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the courses have very high international students demand, graduates of the programs are highly sought after in the media and digital industries, and the majors remain highly popular in the generalist BA program as they tap into digital literacies and the preoccupations of young people.

Over a 20-year period, the principal animating changes have come under the banner of “the digital”. In some respects, this is old news. In the 1990s, scholars associated with the “multiliteracies” movement were observing that fields such as media and cultural studies needed to move from critique to a world where the tools and techniques of digital media production were becoming far more accessible, and to think in terms of design, as students increasingly became content creators.4 As the creative industries became more prominent worldwide, the divides between both theory and production, and between critical and vocational education, were being broken up by movements as varied as the maker movement, DIY online innovation, and creator cultures.5 Having authored a leading textbook on new media over four editions between 2002 and 2014, I myself had become very much aware by the fourth edition that the claims to being “new” were looking somewhat contentious.6

At the same time, the rise of the Digital Cultures major at undergraduate level and the success of the Master of Digital Communication and Culture at a postgraduate level have clearly been MECO success stories in recent years. Its history is accounted for elsewhere in the book, but its uptake after a near-death experience as Arts Informatics (see Chapter 4) has been nothing short of remarkable. Digital Cultures has tapped into the shift towards the digital creative economy, where the fastest growing occupations are in fields such as digital marketing, social media, data analytics and user experience design, while traditional communications professions such as journalism, public relations, and the print and publishing industries are static or declining.7 It has also tapped into the imaginations of international students, particularly those from China, as the Digital China and Internet Plus agendas drive the nation’s next phase of economic development.8

The programs offered by MECO at the University of Sydney are therefore flourishing, to a degree that exceeds expectations from when they were first established. But could the bubble burst?

There are some warning signs on the horizon. The federal government’s Job-Ready Graduates package, which places communications, humanities and social sciences courses in the highest HECS band, was a deliberate piece of social engineering to shift demand away from such courses. It was not backed by any substantive empirical evidence, but it furthers a perception that communication and the arts are not high priority areas in the eyes of policymakers.

International student demand is very much vulnerable to the vicissitudes of Australia–China diplomatic relations. It is not inconceivable that Chinese authorities could further discourage their citizens from enrolling in courses in Australian universities, and the need to diversify international student demand is very apparent. At the same time, MECO courses at the University seem to have benefitted from what Scott Galloway (New York University) has termed the “K-shaped recovery” from the COVID-19 pandemic, where elite programs are experiencing a sharp upturn in demand while many other programs are facing sharp declines in student demand.9

A third set of variables arise from the COVID-19 pandemic itself. The public health response to the COVID-19 emergency has changed many things around the world, from travel and tourism to entertainment and shopping. In higher education, it saw the end of a 25-year debate about the pros and cons of face-to-face versus online education, as 2020 saw every course in every university around the world have to develop a strategy for teaching online.

While this will not remain post-pandemic, there will also not be a return to the pre-2020 educational orthodoxy. Just as workers increasingly expect to be able to work outside of the office, students brought up on Netflix, YouTube and “content anywhere any time” will expect a mix of online and in-person course delivery, with the elements that need to be undertaken on-campus requiring close consideration (marking the end of the 500-seat lecture theatre, to take one example). The University of Sydney is not traditionally an online university, so there is considerable retooling to be done in order to be active in this space. Moreover, insofar as going online makes our courses available throughout the world, it also makes everyone else’s course available to prospective students. The University’s future competitors may be less UNSW, UTS and Macquarie University, and more the London School of Economics, Goldsmiths and the Annenberg Schools of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California.

There is the question of the future of research in MECO. This can be understood both in terms of emergent research fields and the wider research ecosystem. To take the second of these first, we can see that the 2000–20 period saw the emergence and growth of a particular research funding regime in Australia. Its characteristics included:

• The scaling up of arts and humanities research around Centres of Excellence and Cooperative Research Centres etc., alongside new strategies to tap into sources of funding outside of the Australian Research Council (ARC), such as the corporate sector and federal, state and local government agencies.
• A consistent reduction in the direct funding of research by the federal government, creating a research funding “gap”, accentuated by the need to have a standing reserve of research capacity through centres that could offer rolling contracts to researchers able to attract research income, particularly from non-ARC sources.10
• The development of research ranking systems such as Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) with elaborate performance metrics dashboards to rank universities as “world-class” or above across multiple disciplines.
• The massive recruitment of international fee-paying students, with the largest number coming from China, who enrolled in degrees such as business, engineering, information technology and, notably and perhaps surprisingly, media and communications.

The year 2020 saw this edifice shudder, if not completely collapse. The onset of COVID-19 saw international student enrolments stall at most universities, as travel to Australia was no longer possible. Even placing COVID-19 aside, deteriorating Australia–China diplomatic relations, combined with a backlash towards the Chinese government and economic dependency on China in Australia, mean that there is no going back to primarily funding research through international student enrolments.11

The commitment to scaling up research remains, as does the focus on research income from non-ARC sources. But the commitment to research-only staff funded through lavish research centres and institutes is being viewed very carefully, and most of those now employed in universities are expected to teach as well as research. Also, with no additional funding tied to ERA outcomes, the exercise has come to resemble a large and lavish beauty pageant, albeit one where the prizes resemble those awarded on ABC shows such as Hard Quiz rather than the bounteous funding once promised when the scheme was first announced in the late 2000s. There is no evidence that ERA outcomes influence student enrolment decisions in any tangible manner, other than possibly inducing greater confidence in staff in a well-ranked school or department (and fear in lower-ranked ones).12

MECO could be well placed in the emerging environment. The connections of academic staff to other parts of the University are well developed, ranging from law, economics and the social sciences, to architecture, design and planning, to information technology, agriculture and the health sciences. As new, large-scale multidisciplinary teams are developing, it can be expected that academics from MECO will be a pivotal part of this.

Through both the Digital Cultures program, and the “digital turn” within MECO, there is capacity to be at the forefront of the emergent trends in communications and media globally. From my experience in the International Communications Association (ICA) – of which I was the president from 2019 to 2020 – I would observe that these growth areas are:

• Human–machine (post-digital) communication and automated decision-making (machine–machine communication).
• Computational methods for social research drawing upon large-scale data analytics.
• Activism and social justice concerns in media representation, media and creative industries, and digital communication.
• The platformisation of cultural production, and how media industry studies is being both “platformised” and transformed by the growing reliance upon content distribution through digital platforms.
• The intersection between post-globalisation and the “techlash” around the power of digital platforms, leading to renewed focus on nation-state regulation of digital platforms and online content.13

MECO already has a strong base in all these areas. Going into the 2020s, the discipline is in a new School of Art, Communication and English more closely aligned to the Sydney College of the Arts, and to be branded as a school where our students and staff are “making culture”, particularly with digital technologies. This is where the Digital Cultures major, and much of MECO more generally, has been, but its previous home in a diffuse School of Literature, Art and Media (SLAM) lacked both internal logic and external profile. Mapping this innovative teaching profile to our leading-edge research in digital and post-digital media points to an exciting future for the department, its staff, its programs and its students.

​Works cited