Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

The next (and last for this conference) session is about to begin, titled simply 'resistance?' Still a good turnout for the session even though people are now starting to leave the University of Sussex to catch their various planes. Andrew Ó Baoill starts this session with a study of MoveOn.org, a political group which started in 1998 around the Clinton impeachment campaign and enables participation in political action by members of the public.

An Early Start...The last day of AoIR 2004 has dawned on us. I've had the bad luck to have been given the 8.30 a.m. timeslot for my own paper - standing in an empty theatre at the moment waiting for people to finish their breakfast and make their way here. The session I'm in - ostensibly on 'online news and journalism/Internet vs. traditional media' - contains a pretty eclectic bunch of papers, so we'll see how many will show up in the end… They have ten more minutes.

Back after lunch now, and we're in the next session on blogs and related media forms. Karen Gustafson makes the start, speaking on blogs and the creation of community, especially on political blog sites. She has selected four high-ranking political blogs to study, including Instapundit and others. They have a range of ideological positions and are themselves influential amongst blogs. However, this is of course a very narrow subset of all blogs.

Yay, I've run into a fellow blogger, Lilia Efimova (and we've commiserated about not being able to do live blogging of this conference, in the absence of direct Internet access). Interesting to discuss approaches to coping with this.

I attended a talk by Phil Graham from UQ Ipswich on Friday - mainly because of the intriguing title "Monopoly, Monopsony, and the Value of Culture in a Digital Age".

Early Start...We've now started the last day of the conference proper here in Helsinki - with a session on open source cultures that also contains my own paper. I'll blog most of this but of course not my paper itself - I'll upload this to this site soon. Not a bad turnout for a 9.30 start on a Saturday morning, either!

Mark Tribe has now made a start on his panel, beginning with a brief history of free and open source software (FOSS) and its ideology. But Mark's own interest is in open source as a broader cultural phenomenon, which also occurs in the domain of art (and he quotes Stravinsky as saying that "a good composer doesn't imitate, he steals"). This of course is a key development of the last century - the conscious building of new art on existing material, be it ideas or actual found material (as also in the emergence of collage as a new art form - take the dada movement for example).

Finally worked my way through the very useful report We Media by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis at the Media Center at the American Press Institute. A good overview of what they term participatory journalism, with many connections to my own research. From this report, several further references also need investigation:

A new Wired about the rise of blogging approaches to news reporting: The News, One Entry at a Time. Might be time to pull together all of these individual reports into a greater whole...