Internet Technologies

Brisbane.


The next presenter at ANZCA 2009 is Toija Cinque, who continues the discussion especially of public broadcasting in the online environment. The Net increases the diversity of information available to inform the citizenry, of course - but public broadcasters continue to be bound also by their charters and need to adddress their obligations.

Journalism is now becoming more a process than a product, and this provides journalists with less and less time to ascertain what is true and significant. This may mean that the public now gets more pure opinion than factual detail - and crowdsourcing information from users only adds more problems with fact-checking to this process. This also pertains to the use of hyperlinks on news Websites, of course - one reason why still so few mainstream news Websites link to information outside of their own sites (in addition to the desire not to provide easy avenues for users to leave the news organisation's own site).

Brisbane.


The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with Matt Allen, reflecting on the concept of Web presence, not least in the context of teaching and learning. (I'm afraid I missed out on Jack Qiu's keynote as I was talking to colleagues from the ABC's Pool project.) Web presence is operating as an organising device for Matt's students in Internet Studies at Curtin University, and he has an Australian Learning and Teaching Council project on authentic assessment using Internet tools. Finally, learning is a form of knowledge work, and the more knowledge becomes networked, so must learning - so, knowledge networkers must ensure they have a Web presence that is both centred and decentred.

Brisbane.


The next speaker at ANZCA 2009 is Orit Ben-Harush, whose interest is in communication in social networks, and she begins by introducing the idea of 'friendworks': that is, a specific group of people (considered as friends) within one's entire social network. Her study traced such networks in a small Australian seachange community in New South Wales, and also especially focussed on the use of mobile phones by this community.

Social network as a term is too broad for this sort of analysis - and while friends and friendship are rather vague terms in this context, they are nonetheless highly productive. Social networks overall include family, friendworks, work-related networks, location-based connections, and online relationships, and there are overlaps between these network components, of course.

Brisbane.


The third speaker in this ANZCA 2009 session is Rowan Wilken, whose interest is in the metaphors applied to mobile telephony. The power of metaphor lies in the fact that it enables one well-know domain to provide an interpretive framework for another, less known domain. Metaphor proliferates, therefore, especially also in descriptions of new technologies, and has been studied in some detail in relation to the Internet, but less so for mobile technologies.

Common metaphors include navigation - cyber, for example, comes from the Greek kybernetes, or steersman, and the information superhighway is a more recent metaphor in the same vein. Such metaphors also point to the need to regulate and control these spaces, and are also related to a common group of transportation metaphors. Another common metaphor is linked to pioneer myths - as in Howard Rheingold's book Virtual Communities, at one point subtitled Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. These perpetuate western colonial metaphors and a private property model, some have argued - again highlighting possible regulatory frameworks for these new technologies.

Hamburg.


The final speaker for Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Gabriele Siegert from the University of Zürich, who summarises the conference. She begins by noting the unwillingness of citizens to continue to pay for media, and suggests that changed orientation in media organisations will necessarily also change the content of the media - product placement, for example, will necessarily affect the content within which products are placed.

There are two key areas here: the structural changes in advertising, for which product placement is one phenomenon - it is a sign of a new logic which is present well beyond television entertainment. However, this new model will not replace more conventional advertising; not least, it has yet to be researched in full.

Hamburg.


The next speaker at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Volker Agüeras Gäng from Politik-Digital.de , a new online platform which has recently focussed especially on a Dutch policy programme to support digital pioneers. He begins with a statement by Ariana Huffington, saying that journalism will not only survive, but flourish: users surf and use search engines to identify, and collate quality content which is updated on an ongoing basis. This new model is based on the networking and interlinkage of content.

Hamburg.


We move on now to the economic perspective on quality content at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009, and begin with Klaus Goldhammer from Goldmedia. He notes the current financial crisis; Germany's economy is expected to shrink by 6%, for example, and this has led not least also to the demise of a number of major magazine publications in the country. There has been a 20% decline in the circulation of German newspapers over the past ten years (leading some to increase their sales price); there was a 82% decrease in the stock price of leading commercial television company ProSiebenSat.1; while at the same time proceeds from television licences to the public broadcasters have increased substantially.

Hamburg.


For the last conference of my European odyssey, I've made my way to the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg, which plays host to a one-day conference of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation for Communications Research on the theme of "Finanzierung von Qualitätscontent", or "Financing Quality Content". I'm in Hamburg as a Fellow of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation, and will be speaking later today, on motivations for the creation of quality user-generated content.

Leuven.


And we're in the final session of EuroITV 2009 already, which starts with Emmanuel Tsekleves. He begins by noting the range of media, platforms, and devices now available in the home, which increases usage potentials, but also complexity. The TV remains predominantly situated in a shared social space - such as the living room - and is reasonably simple to use. It offers a high-quality audiovisual experience, and still remains the common denominator of entertainment and information access in the home.

But the emergence of other media in the home is changing this, and Emmanuel's team tested the impact of such changes by examining how the introduction of an experimental new convergent media device would change users' practices. This teased out information on the core experience of television, the role of TV as a shared resource, and its role in multitasking, multimedia experiences.

Leuven.


The next session here at EuroITV 2009 starts with another presenter from Alcatel-Lucent, Danny de Vleeschauwer. He notes the growth in catch-up television (CuTV), through initiatives such as the BBC's iPlayer or the ABC's iView - so that content is no longer consumed at exactly the same time (though still concentrated in a key period of time). This changes the requirements for IPTV: it can no longer operate under a broadcast or multicast model, but must now employ a unicast model which delivers a unique stream to each tuned-in viewer.