Going Somewhere

Heathrow.
Well, the last couple of months have been pretty much write-offs as far as blogging was concerned - let's see if we can't change this. All going well, there will be a few things to report over the course of 2007, too - in addition to the house Ann and I have just bought and moved into, there are also any number of research and teaching projects lined up for the coming months.

Right now, I find myself sitting in a departure lounge somewhere in the bowels of London Heathrow airport, having just spent the past 28 hours on flights from Brisbane via Singapore. I'm waiting to begin the last leg of my journey to Leeds, where I'll spend the next couple of months with Professor Stephen Coleman at the Institute of Communications Studies. Stephen is an expert in the area of e-democracy, and I'm interested to connect his work with those aspects of my research into produsage which play into citizen engagement and democratic participation.

My stay in Leeds, and the two months I'm spending at MIT in Boston between April and June, are part of a half-year sabbatical during which I'm aiming to complete the bulk of my next book, From Production to Produsage. After the exertions of the past months, from organising AoIR 2006 to moving house, it's great to finally be able to focus again on my research work, which I fear has been sidelined somewhat by other commitments; in addition to the book itself, I'm also hoping to complete a few other papers which have long been held up, and I've also lined up a number of conference presentations, including at Ideas, Cyberspace, Education 3, Media in Transition 5, and hopefully also Creativity & Cognition. More on these and a number of others as they develop and as I find the time to post up the papers and presentations.

Travelling today (and I use 'today' in the loosest of senses here), one of my most surprising observations was of the elderly Irish couple next to me at the free laptop docks at Changi airport in Singapore, who plugged in their tiny little laptop and immediately proceeded to place Skype calls to a succession of their nearest and dearest at home. You know that a technology is reaching its tipping point when even such relatively unlikely adopters are using it - and with Skype-enabled WiFi mobiles there's a great deal of further change yet to come. How poor and stingy by comparison is the Internet connectivity at Heathrow - where Changi offers a multitude of free Internet terminals in addition to the laptop docks which enable anyone with an Ethernet cable or wireless card to go online for free, here at Heathrow there is merely a choice between three for-pay wireless providers. It's time that airport operators realise that not every airport service that can be commercialised necessarily must be. And it's no surprise that Changi is one of the most popular, and most pleasant, airports around right now.

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