Internet Technologies

Hong Kong.


It's Thursday, so this must be Hong Kong - and I'm at the "Internet Turning 40" conference celebrating the 45th anniversary of the School of Journalism and Communication at Chinese University Hong Kong, and maping out future directions for new media research. We start with Ronald Rice, who maps out the development of social science approaches to studying the Internet over the past decade.

Some 20 years ago, the term 'Internet' appeared in social science-based communications research articles - especially also from libary and information research fields; the 'World Wide Web' as a distinct theme appeared around ten years ago. Areas like privacy, sharing research information, social isolation, work uses, citizen networks, and country-specific research appeared around that time. Occurrences in abstracts almost tripled between 2001 and 2004, in particular. More recently, such terms may have been replaced by more specific terms - 'blogs', 'wikis', and now 'Facebook' and 'Twitter' are becoming more prominent instead.

Milwaukee.


The final speaker of this final session at AoIR 2009 is Raquel Recuero, who shifts our focus to Brazil and its adoption of Twitter and Plurk (another micromessaging tool, but one which has a horizontal rather than vertical logic and enables replies within the message - Google Wave-style, it seems). How is the appropriation of these different social network sites influenced by the conversations that these platforms enable; how do the conversations reveal different types of social networks?

Raquel's study examined the conversational structures in these sites using social network analysis, but also engaged in content analysis and ethnographic research. Of the two sites, Plurk makes it easier to track continuing conversations, but there is less multimodality; there are often more participants to conversations and more recurrent participants (at an average of nine), conversations are more coherent and synchronous, and extend over more conversational turns (at an average of 15). On Twitter, the process is more disruptive - it is difficult to keep track of conversations, and they are less synchronous; conversations have an average of only two turns, and indeed there are fewer conversations in the first place, with fewer participants (at an average of two).

Milwaukee.


The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Briana Fox, whose interest is in how gender and race shape family email networks. Are there perceivable differences in how families email amongst themselves that can be explained through such factors, and in the perception of such networks by families from different backgrounds? There is a perception that email in general serves to distance families, that there are no good social relationships which can be conducted through it, or that by contrast the multiple media now available for communication strengthen family ties. Further, gender-based studies show that women email more and rekindle old friendships and relationships; they are also more responsible in general for managing family relationships. Finally, there is very little information on the impact of race on online communication patterns, beyond observations of a general digital divide (at least still in the early 2000s) which makes white users more likely to be online.

Milwaukee.


The first speaker in this final session at AoIR 2009 is Taina Bucher. She argues for an understanding of Twitter as a technology of immediacy - in this case, of immediacy in time, enabling users to cease the time and take action. Our being in time is characterised by the scarcity of time in the 24h society; Twitter reacts to that by encouraging short messages and resourceful communication that give shape to concise messaging.

What does such a communication tool indicate about the society of which it is a part? It claims to be a service that enables users to share and discover what is happening anywhere in the world; this is a technology of immediacy for mediating the momentary and immediate. This can be explored in the context of the status update box: a box for writing, for filling in and creating moments.

Milwaukee.


The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Kylie Jarrett, who moves on to problematising Google and its 'don't be evil' motto. There is a sense of disquiet about the absolute symbolic power enjoyed by the company at this point, but there are also many defensive responses as so many people are very attached to it. What is the source of this belief in Google?

Symbolic power needs to be legitimated, and Google attempts this by outlining its core principles on its site: focus on the user and all else will follow, do one thing really well, fast is better than slow, democracy on the Web works, people don't need to be at their desk to need an answer, it's possible to make money without being evil, there's always more information out there, great isn't good enough, etc.

Milwaukee.


The next session at AoIR 2009 starts with Andrew Herman, who introduces the idea of 'Blackberry capitalism'. He notes the shift towards wireless Internet use in recent years; most US Internet users now access the Net wirelessly, for example, and trends are similar in many other countries. There is no distinction in much of the data between wireless and mobile uses, however; mobile Internet use entails some very different practices from mere wifi access. Mobile communication has similarly changed away from mere mobile telephony, of course; the possibilities of mobile communication have extended well beyond talking and texting, but don't simply converge with wireless Internet usage practices.

Milwaukee.


The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Karine Barzilai-Nahon, who shifts our interest to network gatekeeping theory. Online, users can become gatekeepers, and are no longer simply being gatekept for - so gatekeeping power has shifted to some extent; additionally, gatekeeping is no longer a solid state, but is becoming a much more dynamic phenomenon where we're sometimes gatekeeping ourselves, sometimes receiving the results of gatekeeping processes.

Gatekeeping theory was developed by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s, observing food habits in families (and seeing housewives as gatekeepers at that time); this was later applied in a major way to the editors in news publications, who control what information is selected for publication from all the daily events. Other applications are the management of technology (what new technologies reach a larger range of users) and information science (already starting to look at the role of communities as gatekeepers).

Milwaukee.


The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is László Ropolyi. He begins by conceptualising the idea of crisis: this is a kind of transformation in which an established system loses its integrity and gets disorganised, from which a new system emerges - a process of disorganisation followed by reorganisation. In a society without crisis, in other words, there is a usual order of events, a universal and dominant organising principle expressed in a commonly held ideology, style, or paradigm. In case of crisis, these usual organising principles lose their power and are invalidated.