Blogs

Copenhagen.
As it turns out, I have two papers in this post-lunch session on the last day of AoIR 2008 - in competing sessions. Luckily, Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai are on hand to present one of them (I'll post the slides for this as soon as I get them from the two) - and I'm here to present my paper with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders on hyperlocal citizen journalism (understood here in a relatively broad sense).

The first speaker here is William Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose aim is to move beyond terms such as Netizen and citizen journalism and towards an understanding of various political uses of the Net as forming a fifth estate, in addition to the press as a fourth estate in society. Such uses promote social accountability in business, industry, government, politics, and other sectors.

Copenhagen.
The final keynote at AoIR 2008 is by Steve Graham. His interest is in the politics of urban space in the context of ubiquitous computing. He begins by noting utopian projections of the future, where everything is mediated profoundly through digital technologies - what Dana Cuff has called 'enacted environments'.

This includes visions of augmented reality (involving the delivery of location-specific information), and builds on ideas such as the 'Internet of Things', the use of RFIDs, biometrics, tracking systems, computerised surveillance, security discourses about e-borders, geolocation, GPS tracking, etc. This relies also on machine-readable entities, with sensors linked to databases that recognise and track individual objects of interest.

Copenhagen.
We're starting the last day of this very enjoyable AoIR 2008 conference already. This one is going to busy for me, as three of my papers are scheduled for today - two of them, in fact, in competing sessions (but luckily my colleagues Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai, who are the lead authors, are able to present one of them). This morning, we're starting with a session on the online dimensions of national elections across a number of countries.

The first presenter is Yeon-Ok Lee, whose focus is on last December's presidential election in South Korea. The previous election to this, of course, was won by a small margin by the liberal underdog Rooh Moo-Hyun, due in good part to the activism of Korea's Netizens and to coverage by citizen journalism site OhmyNews. This made the 2007 election a particularly interesting case for further research.

Copenhagen.
We're now starting the second keynote here at the AoIR 2008 conference in Copenhagen, by Rich Ling. He begins by asking how technology has become part of the 'social woodwork', how it is being domesticated. The Internet, he suggests, is actually a quasi-broadcast medium, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary - a one-to-many metaphor holds sway for many of its services (excepting email, of course, but certainly this applies for many Websites).

Mobiles, by contrast, are a point-to-point form of communication - SMS and mobile voice communications account for the vast majority of usage, and the mobile telephone enables individual (rather than geographically fixed) addressability. Mobile phone communication is also a relatively intimate form of communication - and while new phones and new services may change this, most people use relatively old and limited phones which do not cope with such services particularly well (the most popular phone in Norway, for example, belongs to a now discontinued and comparatively ancient line of phones).

Copenhagen.
The post-lunch session here at AoIR 2008 begins with a paper by Ronda Hauben. She notes that 2008 is the fifteenth anniversary of the publication of Michael Hauben's seminar article on the 'Netizen' concept - a concept emerging from Michael's research that spread rapidly and widely, and (especially in Asia) still has a great deal of currency. The concept had a great deal to do with the fight against commercialisation of the Net which was prominent then; today, for the same reason the concept has been suppressed to some extent by those interested in a more commercial Internet.

Copenhagen.
I spent the first session of this second day at AoIR 2008 as a member of a panel on academic publishing - I didn't blog this, for obvious reasons. This second session starts with a paper on "Transcoding Place" by Vicki Moulder, in the overall area of social design and media convergence. How do communities enact agency in this space, especially given that digital social architecture is a fluid system, unlike conventional physical architecture?

Designers and creative professionals have a responsibility and are able to cause real change in design; this is especially important in the context of the changes brought about by media convergence. Can meaningful online agency (e.g. tagging and uploading content to YouTube and other social media sites) compare in any real sense with activism on the streets? Vicki and her colleague Jim Bizzocchi examined this question in the context of the Crude Awakening event at Burning Man, comparing the semantic structure of a face-to-face event in the Nevada desert (attended by some 45,000 spectators) with its video documentation (which was uploaded to YouTube by numerous users within hours of the event).

Copenhagen.
The final session of this first day of AoIR 2008 begins with James Owens, whose focus is on online news and democratic communities. Interactive technology enables the production of new social formations, but can also reproduce existing social formations; this can be related especially also to local community formations. James is interested in three Chicago-based Websites (of the Tribune, a citizen journalism site supported by the Tribune, and the local Indymedia site), and is interested here especially on whether such sites promote or prevent social fragmentation.

Copenhagen.
The next session at AoIR 2008 is on the civil society. Paul Nixon and Antje Greber are the first presenters, and begin by addressing the question of how to define civil society in the first place. This is related to traditional conceptions of the public sphere, of course. One definition is of civil society as aggregated interest formulation, accumulated in a community of associations.

In a democratic society, civil society and its organisations form the third sector (in addition to government and public administration, and for-profit businesses and corporations). This third sector also contrasts with the private sphere. There are also views by which in a corporative state, civil society organisations are providers of social services; additionally, civil society organisations allow for more particpation in the policy-making process, protest and monitoring, advocacy, community building and democratisaton, etc.

Copenhagen.
The post-lunch session here at AoIR 2008 starts with Paul Emerson Teusner, presenting on the presence of emerging religious movements in the blogosphere. How do authority rankings in the blogosphere affect the standing of such religious bloggers? Paul focusses here on a sample of 30 blogs in the Australian blogosphere, examined between July and October 2006.

This is backgrounded by the rise of Web 2.0 and its growth in user-led content production, of course, as well as by the merging of public and private spheres through social networking technologies. However, the effects of these phenomena are not so strongly felt in the religious blogosphere as yet - traditional religious authorities have not yet been replaced by any form of user-led religiosity, in other words. What is common to the blogs studied is an understanding that any culture war between Christianity and secularism has been lost, so the focus is not on missionary efforts but simply on developing a sustainable arrangement with the secular mainstream.

Copenhagen.
The first keynote speaker at AoIR 2008 is Mimi Ito, well-known from her work on mobile media. Today, she presents early results from a different research project, however, on youth participation in networked publics. This ethnographic research involved a significant number of interviews, group meetings, diary studies, and surveys, as well as observations of activities and outcomes. This, then, investigates activities as embedded in a broader network ecology.

Mimi points out the growing availability of tools for creating and modifying creative content, and to publish, share, and distribute such material, and how in the process professional and amateur media content creation are being 'munged' together. In the middle of scales from consumer to producer, from personal communication to mass media, and from gift, barter, and dialogue to commodity exchange there are plenty of interesting things happening - but how are youth learning, socialising, and communicating in such networked publics?