Internet Technologies

Singapore.
The next ICA 2010 speaker is Mihye Seo, whose interest is in political consumerism. She notes the threatened collapse of participatory democracy through declining political engagement - but perhaps our definition of political engagement is too narrow. Political consumerism, for example, may be a new trend especially amongst younger people, who don't believe that institutional power will address the issues they care about; rather, they become more involved in other types of political engagement.

Singapore.
The next ICA 2010 speaker is Seungahn Nah, who highlights how community structures constrain individuals' communications and participatory behaviours. We need to develop an integrated theoretical model of civic engagement at the micro-macro linkage.

The degree of specialisation and differentiation in the community has been described as community structural pluralism - indicators for this are population, education, income, and employment, for example. Additionally, communication mediates between demographic and community contexts and civic engagement. At the community level, community structural pluralism is connected to civic engagement, political discussion, and media use; at the individual level, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics connect with the individual's media use to determine levels of political discussion and civic engagement. How do the community and individual levels intersect, though?

Singapore.
Finally in this ICA 2010 session we move to Yvette Wohn, talking about how people tweet about TV. When TV was first introduced, it was seen as a social medium, as families gathered around it to watch; later, it was seen as creating a social gap, as enabling people to disengage from reality, as increasing individualism, and (when multiple TVs in the same home became more commonplace) as fragmenting families.

Today, people watch more TV than ever - now also online, on mobiles, and on timeshift devices. At the same time, TV use may be becoming more social again - echoing some of the early commercial attempts to introduce greater immediate social dimensions for television by adding a (telephone, online, ...) social backchannel to the television set or media device: today, it is social media that are adding that backchannel.

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Chih-Hui Lai, whose focus is on the Facebook newsfeed, the Twitter feed, and similar feeds as social awareness streams (SAS) - consisting of messages which are public or semi-public, short and consumed in streams, and transmitted through articulated networks that structure communication. Twitter is a typical example for this, and his is what the study focussed on.

Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds are quite similar in style, in fact - both offer a kind of phatic communion, a communicative means of opening communication and maintaining relationships. This is also shown in the inclusion of emoticons and other elements. At the same time, the strength of SAS also lies in their use for quick information sharing - and while most research focusses on the use of such SAS for special events (crises, political developments, etc.), the phatic elements are just as important.

Singapore.
The final presentation in this ICA 2010 session is by James Katz, who describes the various theories outlined here as lenses for understanding reality; he adds to this the contribution of cognitive sciences as a useful set of tools. He also notes the Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and developed (WEIRD) nations focus of much research - which does not translate well to the study of the use of mobile telephony in developing nations, for example. There is also a mentalist and positivist orientation here which attempts to work out what takes place in people's brains, and to find a 'scientific' statistical breakdown of factors influencing people's behaviours.

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Emil Bakke, whose interest is especially in the mobile uses of Facebook in a post-convergence environment. What drives convergence, presumably, are the users, not just the techological possibilities, but what are the processes here? Emil notes that people operate in clusters of technology, and this depends also on the context of use.

Technology clusters, especially, really matter: users and non-users operate in a multiple media environment (accessing services through various devices, but not necessarily with great awareness of the features of the various technologies and media features available to them); any single communication technology will have diminished importance because of a user-driven environment; and technological affordances and user preferences intersect in various ways.

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is James Danowski, who zooms in on online networking patterns across Arab countries especially. One suggestion here is that Internet network development is a precursor to the development of civil societies - and from 2004 to 2010 there's been a tenfold increase in the number of Internet hosts in Arab countries (with a doubling in the last two years alone). So has the lag between network and civil society development remained the same; is it different between English and Arabic spaces online; can we compare this to the development patterns in telephony networks? Can this be tracked through appearances of key Islamic terms like 'sharia' or 'jihad'?

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Han Woo Park, who shifts our focus beyond blogs, and towards the Web more generally. He begins by highlighting the importance of diachronic studies, and his project undertakes such a study against the backdrop of a growing globalisation of communication networks, balanced by an increasing diversification of communication flows.

The project examined this by taking a longitudinal approach that examines changes in network patterns over time - applied here to global cyberspace overall through a comparison of observations in 2003 and 2009. It used search engines AltaVista (2003) and Yahoo! (2009; it had acquired AltaVista in the meantime) to identify levels of incoming and outgoing links between country-code top-level domains. (For the US, .edu, .gov., .mil, and .us were counted as its ccTLDs, given that .com, .org, and .net are far from US-specific.)

Singapore.
The final presenters in this session at ICA 2010 are Mark Deuze and Peter Blank, introducing the idea of media life - a way of living through the media; a point of view. Mark begins by showing images from weekly protests in Bil'in, a Palestinian town against the wall being built in Israel - in February this year, protesters dressed as the Na'vi from Avatar, for example, recently, they dressed as the Palestinian football team; and during protest marches, on their banners they carry photos of previous protest marches. (Avatar director Jim Cameron has become involved in a few other protest actions, in fact.)

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Espen Ytreberg, whose interest is in active audiences; does convergence and digitalisation empower users and make them more active and independent? The term itself certainly has spread far beyond academia, although interpretations may vary between different users of it. Espen's focus is on the attitudes at the management level in Norwegian media.

One working notion is characterised by statements such as 'the audience want to be active', and if it is held by media workers it has consequences for the future shape of media products regardless of whether it is true. It has become an institutional discourse - it is language doing work and creating new media models. Espen explored these processes through 45 interviews with managers in Norwegian TV, radio, and press who were decisionmakers on media products.