Hong Kong.
My paper is the second in this session at The Internet Turning 40, and I'm posting the Powerpoint below - it presents a rather different story from José's. Unfortunately, the recording didn't work - you'll have to read the paper...

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Hong Kong.
We're starting the last day of The Internet Turning 40 with the session that I'm in as well - but the first speaker is José van Dijck, who introduces the idea of 'interpretive flexibility' - an approach for examining technologies that remain in flux. Why and how do technologies become dominant over time; how can we trace this process while it is happening; and why is it important to do so? She is applying this specifically to Twitter (and microblogging in general) here.

There are four factors here: technologies and services, mediated social practices, cultural form and content, and business models. All of these are important when examining emerging platforms, of course. Microblogging, José says, is both a tool and a service - and its versatility is crucial to its success. When it was launched, it was unclear what it would become; by 2007, it was adopted and integrated by a large number of other social media platform, and in the process adapted its interface and technological specificities to their needs (but this took place the other way around, too). Since then, there has been an 'appliancisation' of Twitter, turning it into a closed, applied platform, and reducing its versatility and openness.

Hong Kong.
The next speaker at The Internet Turning 40 is Yuqiong Zhou, whose interest is in how rumours are transmitted on the Internet - in this case, through the Chinese messaging service QQ. Rumour transmission is driven by personal anxiety and social disorder, and propelled by people's belief in the rumours; this transmission, in turn, further deepens their belief in rumours. Rumours are unverified but broadly circulated information items which yield from people's discussion and constitute a kind of abnormal public opinion.

Hong Kong.
The final speaker in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Jack Qiu, who highlights the impact of the current financial crisis (in a study focussing on China and South Korea) and begins by playing a melody originally created to commemorate the Kwangju massacre in Korea which has now been repurposed as a kind of pan-Asian "Internationale" (and was performed in this version by the New Labour Art Troupe, a migrant workers orchestra in China which has released three CDs so far and also published its music online under a Creative Commons licence).

Hong Kong.
The second day of The Internet Turning 40 at Chinese University Hong Kong is upon us, and we're starting with a paper by William Dutton. He begins by noting a current story of mobile phones and online communication being used to mobilise workers in China in protest against working conditions - and he says that this illustrates the potential of new media as a fifth estate. The original three estates (clergy, nobility, commoners) were a feudal concept, of course, with journalists added later as a fourth estate, tasked with keeping the other three honest.

Hong Kong.
The final presenter in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Louis Leung. He begins by pointing to previous study examining the impacts of preferences for online use for offline interaction, and in his own work focusses especially on adolescents - a time which is characterised as a time of transition, challenge,and turbulence, a developmental time of identity formation, increased independence, and of having to deal with the challenges connected to this.

Past studies show, for example, that over half of 9- to 18-year-olds have pretended to be someone else online; many have posted material about themselves online and thereby expressed and experimented with their identity; some may also have expressed otherwise suppressed elements of their own identity. Heavy Internet users also use the Net more strongly for identity formation and relationship formation, unsurprisingly. There is a difference here between the 'now self' and the 'possible self' in such activities, and an individual's identity combines the two.

Hong Kong.
The next presenter at The Internet Turning 40 is Charles Steinfield, whose focus is on social capital in social networking sites. Social networking sites now rival search engines as the most visited sites on the Web; Facebook now has close to half a billion users. The key features of such sites are user-constructed public or semi-public profiles, a set of connections to other users on the system, and the ability to view and follow one's own connections as well as the connections of others.

Research into social networking has examined impression management and friendship performance, networks and network structure, bridging and online networks, privacy, and how users derive benefits from social networking. Such benefit can be framed especially as social capital: the accumulated resources derived from relationships among people in a specific social context of network.

Hong Kong.
The afternoon session at The Internet Turning 40 starts with a paper by Zizi Papacharissi on identity performance in social networking. She begins by noting the common question of whether social networking makes its users more or less social, and suggests that ultimately social networking is simply integrated into the social lives of its users; a better question may be what media and what online spaces are more or less social, and what online sociability actually means.

Zizi and her colleagues conducted a number of studies to explore those questions, and found a different kind of sociability on Facebook, for example - characterised for some users by a somewhat more passive sociability conducted from the home, but also by a greater flexibility, mobility, and convergence of social behaviours which are linked across Facebook and other spaces. The public privacy of social ties was also notable - users recognised the privacy risks and showed a complex, reflexive understanding of privacy.

Krems.
The final speaker in this EDEM 2010 session is Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen, who examines the current status of e-participation in the European Union. All EU states have a relatively equal level of e-participation take-up, even in spite of their very different historical trajectories; that take-up is highly variable across local, national, and transnational levels, however.

The older European democracies are substantially more active at the local level, for example, while cross-border initiatives are generally limited (even in spite of European integration and strong cross-border ties in a number of regions). Indeed, the local level is generally best developed, with sophistication declining markedly towards the national and transnational levels. This is interesting also given that substantial public funding is coming from the EU and national levels, rather than from local public authorities.