Esther Milne

Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Media & Communication, Faculty Member

Followers

126

Following

108

Co-authors

Public Views

PhD (University of Melbourne, 2004)

Associate Professor Esther Milne is interested in the everyday media that shapes our lives. From the banality of email to the curation of our public selves, media technologies interact with us in surprising and powerful ways. Looking at the different media practices and platforms that we inhabit, Esther’s research includes the production of celebrity across networked publics and the emerging trend of microcelebrity or self-branding. She is the author of Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence (Routledge, 2010). With co-authors Aneta Podkalicka and Jenny Kennedy, she is working on a book to be published by Palgrave Macmillan entitled Grand Designs: Consumption and Sustainability in Property TV.

Esther is also an investigator on the CRC Low Carbon Living project: ‘Media and Communication strategies to achieve carbon reduction through renovation of Australia’s existing housing’. http://www.lowcarbonlivingcrc.com.au/research/program-3-engaged-communities/rp3021-media-and-communication-strategies-achieve-carbon

She has just launched a major national survey about email use for the book she is researching called Email and the Everyday: Homes, Institutions, Markets to be published by MIT press.

less

Martha Nell Smith

University of Maryland

Erin Bell, PhD

University of Detroit Mercy

peter gilderdale

Auckland University of Technology

Julia Simon

University of California, Davis

Michał Kisiel

Jan Dlugosz University in Czestochowa

Jerome Bourdon

Tel Aviv University

Bronwen Louw

Peter Goodrich

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Kym Brindle

Edge Hill University

Sanae Tokizane

Chiba University

InterestsView All (23)

Uploads

Papers by Esther Milne

Public Privacy: Reciprocity and silence

In his 1958 poem 'Dedication to my Wife' TS Eliot proclaims "these are private words addressed to... more In his 1958 poem 'Dedication to my Wife' TS Eliot proclaims "these are private words addressed to you in public". Simultaneously written for his wife, Valerie Fletcher, and to the implied you of a discourse network, Eliot's poem helps to illustrate the narrative voices and silences that are constitutive of an intimate public sphere. This paper situates reciprocity as a condition of possibility for public privacy. It shows how reciprocity is enabled by systems of code operating through material and symbolic registers. Code promises to control communication, to produce neutral, systemic forms of meaning. Yet such automation is challenged by uneven and fragmented patterns of reciprocity. Moreover, examining the media of public privacy reveals historical trajectories important for understanding contemporary sociotechnical platforms of reciprocity. To explore the implicit requirement of reciprocity in publicly private practices, three sites of communication are investigated framed by a media archaeology perspective: postal networks, the mailart project PostSecret and the anonymous zine 'You'.

Esther Milne

Uploads

Papers by Esther Milne

Published Papers by Esther Milne

Talks by Esther Milne

Log In