Snurb's blog

No, the book isn't getting a re-release (yet). There's a lot of other activity going on around the fields of citizen journalism, news blogging, and online opinion writing, so Barry, Jason, and I thought it would be a good idea to set up a group blog dedicated to tracking these developments - and I'm pleased to announce that our new blog at Gatewatching.org is now open for business. This doesn't mean that I'll stop blogging here, of course - but my citizen journalism-related thoughts, and the outcomes of our collaboration on Youdecide2007 and beyond, are going to be collected there (as well as cross-posted here where appropriate). Come join us as we try to make sense of it all.

This launch also coincides neatly with the start of a series of posts we'll do for the ABC Online opinion section over the coming weeks (and throughout the Australian election campaign) - we've been asked to report from the political blogosphere in an effort to highlight the best ideas emerging from outside the mainstream media. It seems appropriate in this context that our first post to the ABC site is a rumination on the interrelationship (and increasing interweaving) between industrial and citizen journalism, touching on the 12 July meltdown at The Australian as well as the crategate story we managed to uncover through Youdecide2007.

I would have liked to mention this here some time ago, but with one thing and another (such as my trip to PerthDAC) I just didn't get around to it. Anyway, for those of you within two days' travel of Brisbane: Peter Black from QUT's Law Faculty is organising Australia's first blogging conference this coming Friday (28 September 2007), at the Creative Industries Precinct. True to the theme, the conference won't be a broadcast-style 'shut up and listen to my paper' affair, but a discussion-based unconference (similar perhaps to the Fibreculture conference I organised with Geert Lovink and Molly Hankwitz in 2003).

Unlike other conferences, I won't be blogging this one, though - both because of the paperless setup itself, and because I've been roped in to facilitate sessions throughout the day. In the morning, I'll co-chair the "Researching Blogging and Blogging Research" session with Jean Burgess and Mel Gregg (and I'll contribute a focus especially on crawling and mapping the blogosphere, an area which has been of increasing interest to me recently); in the afternoon I'm helping to run the citizen journalism session with Graham Young and Rachel Cobcroft (and no doubt we'll talk quite a bit about the 12 July incident, crategate, Youdecide2007, and other pre-election fun).

Sometimes things just come together. We've only done a soft launch of the Youdecide2007 site which will provide hyperlocal citizen journalism coverage of the upcoming federal election in Australia, with a number of electorate profiles, interviews with local citizen and MPs, news releases, and opinion pieces now available on the site - but that hasn't stopped the site from attracting a good number of visitors, some press coverage, and now even a mention in parliamentary question time. A little while ago, Jason Wilson did a phone interview with Liberal Party member for Herbert, Peter Lindsay (available on the site as a nice YouTube clip overlaid with images from the electorate). In the interview, the MP rather appears to digress from his prepared talking points (about half-way through the clip), and makes the somewhat general claim that "young people today are financially illiterate", thereby causing themselves unnecessary mortgage stress. The federal opposition was quick to pick up on the story, and the Honorable Kevin07 engaged in some opportunistic political point-scoring on the basis of the statement.

Perth.
The second session on this last day of PerthDAC starts with a paper by Larissa Hjorth, who examines camera phone practices in Seoul and Melbourne (the paper is presented by Christy Dena, though). Mobile media is positioned here as a prosumer machine through which we experience media and art in everyday life; mobile phones have become an integral part of everyday life- no longer a symbol of business or a class status symbol, they are now part of almost all social practices, and their uses have grown well beyond voice telephony and SMSing. Mobile phones remain connected to locality in a process of mobility and mobilism; they inform and locate co-present communication. Forms of mobile media are ongoing personal ethnographies, and are frequently banal and implicated in the politics of banality, which requires further analysis.

Perth.
The last day of PerthDAC has started now. Jill Walker Rettberg compares the developments around the Web with phenomena around the introduction of the printing press. We're now heading out of the parenthesis of the print age, and this requires the development of new network literacies (enabling users to create, share, and navigate social media) beyond the read and write literacies of the print age. Print and its literacies had introduced a private/public divide where the private self is distinct and separate from what takes place in the mediated public sphere; in the network age, private and public collapse into one another as the self is connected to the network. With the rise of print literacy, reading created a solitary and private relationship between the reader and their book, as Roger Chartier has put it; this is a privatisation of reading, and the library becomes a place from which the world can be seen but where the reader remains invisible. This is a unidirectional relationship, though - as Plato put it, if you ask a written text a question, it will not respond; and similarly, writing is a solipsistic engagement, as Walter Ong has said. But what about blogging, then - is it social or solitary? William Gibson described blogging as boiling water without a lid - a less focussed, dissipating activity -, but is this also true for those who are natives of the blogosphere?

Perth.
The post-lunch session on this third day of PerthDAC is upon us, and Ragnhild Tronstad is the first presenter. Her interest is in the uncanny in new media art, which builds on Sigmund Freud's idea of the uncanny, and explores intellectual uncertainty (in particular about whether objects are inanimate or alive), the double (or Doppelgänger, which acts as a forecast of our own extinction), and surveillance and control (related to the idea of power and autonomy as embodied in an individual's gaze) in encounters with new media art. These three concepts overlap, of course: intellectual uncertainty can manifest as a lack of control, and in the sense of a controlling gaze directed at the individual which may not even be present. A further concept is Masahiro Mori's concept of the 'uncanny valley' - our affection towards human-like figures grows gradually the more human-like they are, but this growth falls briefly into a deep valley where figures are uncannily like humans (e.g. corpses, zombies) before resuming an upward path beyond that valley. Some individuals will be more sensitive to such factors than others, of course, and whether a figure is moving or still may also amplify the depth of affection or repulsion.

Perth.
We're on to the second Monday session at PerthDAC. Jim Bizzocchi is the first speaker, and he began by showing us an example of ambient video during the set-up period - here consisting of an assemblage of nature shots of mountains and streams blended into a slow video collage which has landscapes change subtly before our eyes. Ambient video is an emergent form of video expression made possible by current and new video technologies; it should change, but not quickly, and the details of changes should not be critical. Jim focusses here on cinematic versions of such ambient video - made for larger screens (including home theatre); the philosophy behind such video echoes Brian Eno's views of ambient music: 'as ignorable as it is interesting'. Ambient video captures our glance much as a painting might, revealing rich imagery at a time of our choosing.

Perth.
The third day here at PerthDAC has started, and kicks off with a paper by Jean Bridge. She's involved with the interactive arts and science undergraduate programme at Brock University in Canada, and in this programme encourages thinking with and thinking about interactive technologies, which are situated in a wider social and cultural context. It is a humanities-based programme which concerns itself with the content and analysis of the products of human creativity, by following four core principles: capitalising the fact of computing as central to contemporary life, identifying the need for constant evaluation of the role of content and form, accepting the necessity for new and innovative methodologies, and achieving a centrality of interdisciplinarity and praxis. Students in this programme are largely digital natives who are content creators, aggregators, and intertextualisers, who think though codes, strategies, and roles, and who are willing to probe, manipulate, set goals, and construct their own pathways. The programme, then, aims to prepare them as people who can bridge theoretical and practical aspects of working creatively in new media - as creators, writers, directors, designers, managers, scholars, critics, and policy makers.

Perth.
I'm the last presenter in this post-lunch session on the second day of PerthDAC - so I'll blog the first two papers and will try to record mine; the full paper is also available here, and the Powerpoint here. We start, though, with a paper by Kenneth Knoespel and Jichen Zhu which Jichen will present. She posits this paper as a critique of the Cartesian dualism; the overly simplified mind/body split really isn't sufficient any more to discuss materiality and the relationship between natural language, computer code, and the material world. Computer codes are often given a role that transcends the material world - cyberspace is placed as an opportunity for escape from the material world, and this conforms with the Cartesian mind/body dualism. This is visible for example in William Gibson's work, or in The Matrix, but is also at the root of the field of artificial intelligence, Saussurean linguistics, informatics, and other areas. The same is true also often for the aesthetics of computer art, which are rooted in a romantic notion of immateriality where the concept is more important than the physical artefact.

Perth.
The second PerthDAC session for today starts with Adrienne Shaw, who focusses especially on the in-game representation of gay, lesbian, and transgender communities in online games. There is already a complicated history of the presence of such communities in games, which are often ignored, ostracised, or poorly represented. Adrienne has engaged in a programme of research working with such communities to develop a greater understanding of their interests and needs. Such research also links back to questions of representation in other media forms - the discussion of such representation in those forms is repeated here, similarly shifting from invisibility through stereotyping to more intelligent representations.