Copenhagen.
We're now starting the second keynote here at the AoIR 2008 conference in Copenhagen, by Rich Ling. He begins by asking how technology has become part of the 'social woodwork', how it is being domesticated. The Internet, he suggests, is actually a quasi-broadcast medium, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary - a one-to-many metaphor holds sway for many of its services (excepting email, of course, but certainly this applies for many Websites).

Mobiles, by contrast, are a point-to-point form of communication - SMS and mobile voice communications account for the vast majority of usage, and the mobile telephone enables individual (rather than geographically fixed) addressability. Mobile phone communication is also a relatively intimate form of communication - and while new phones and new services may change this, most people use relatively old and limited phones which do not cope with such services particularly well (the most popular phone in Norway, for example, belongs to a now discontinued and comparatively ancient line of phones).

This is weird.

But this? A hand-written letter from Uganda, basically containing the same standard text ("I warmly greet you in God's name", and all that), snail-mailed to my office address? Surely today, with the benefit of our added experience of spam scams, the hit/miss ratio just wouldn't make it worth the effort - spam emails are cheap and literally send themselves, but with handwritten letters you also have to cover the cost of manually writing and (air-) mailing them?

I'm glad there's finally an official statement about this: along with a number of other Australian universities, and with commercial and government partners, QUT is a participant in a high-profile new Cooperative Research Centre which will get started from mid-year. The Smart Services CRC follows on from the successful Smart Internet CRC which was based at Swinburne University (and which had already run a Smart Services forum recently). Along with a number of my colleagues from Creative Industries, I'll be involved in this in some capacity...

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The last presentation here at ICE 3 is a group act by Bruce Ingraham, Gráinne Conole, Chris Jones, and George Roberts, who have also set up a group blog in preparation for this talk, which some of us have already contributed to. Their focus is especially on scholarly communication through new media environments - and they begin by noting that unfortunately few ICErs did respond to their original blog-based challenge, which in itself provides some insight on the extent to which scholarly discourses have changed so far. Why is this so - are the topics available too dull; is there too little time available to participate in such environments; or are emerging new media not suited to scholarly discourse (which could also mean that scholarly discourse is unsuited to the modern world, however). If we are not professing our disciplines to one another using such new media environments, however, how can we enocurage our students to do so? If we do not do so, then who will - the people formerly known as students?

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Up next here at ICE 3 are Debbie Holley and Martin Oliver. They begin by highlighting the notion of the digital divide, which appears to be based on a notion that media access is inherently a good thing: if the digital divide problem is solved by providing access for all, then society will be better off. This question of access is positioned as the basic issue, but is ultimately only a superficial one - behond this, there are also divides in relation to people's skills and literacies, to their levels of motivation to exercise their skills (they may have skills, but choose not to use tem), and further, there is a divide between what are seen as 'normal' high technology uses on the one hand, and disruptive effects of complex technologies on the other.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Cate Thomas is the next presenter here at ICE 3. She begins by describing the online world as an uncanny space where there is a ghost in the machine; the academy as it moves further online then also becomes a haunted university where radical uncertainty persists. How are academic staff constituted in this digital university, then?

Cate suggests that academics are already in crisis today; their traditional authority has been undermined, much as the crisis of the author in the postmodern environment has also undermined authorship. Additionally, there is a tendency towards disembodiment of the academic subject, which means that their electronic self increasingly begins to constitute the day-to-day presence of the contemporary academic. Their real-life presence, in turn, comes to be reconstituted by the electronic persona; the online world rewrites real life in that sense.

Leeds.
The past few days have been nothing but productive, even if I've taken some time off my research for the book. Instead, I've completed and/or revised a number of conference papers and other articles that are due over the next few months - clearing the decks, or indeed the desk, before I fully descend into book mode.

2007 is going to be a very productive year for me, as far as papers, articles, and other publications are concerned. I've managed to combine my stays here at Leeds University and later on at MIT in Boston with a few conferences in the UK and the U.S., respectively, and there are a number of further conferences in Australia and elsewhere as well. There's also a couple of book chapters and at least another journal article, but most those I can't say that much about yet. I have now posted some of the completed conference papers on this Website, though, so please feel free to have a look (and to comment, of course!).

I've been meaning to post this for a while - a call for papers for the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy that's related to the Association of Internet Researchers conference I organised in September. For those who weren't able to make it to AoIR 2006, there's still some time to submit additional articles...

The International Journal of Communications Law and Policy and the Association of Internet Researchers is pleased to announce a call for further papers for a special issue on Internet regulation linked to the IR7 Conference ('Internet Convergences'). The selection committee - composed of the editorial board of the IJCLP and Matthew Allen (Curtin University of Technology), Fay Sudweeks (Murdoch University) and Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology) - will review and consider all submissions for publication. We have already received several papers from the conference, which are in the process of being reviewed, and would now encourage experts from all disciplines and nationalities to submit further papers for publication by 1 December 2006. Acceptance will be notified by the end of the year for publication in 2007 following strict double-blind peer review.

The last keynote at ATOM2006 is by Andrew Urban, editor of Urban Cinefile, and previously the creator and host of SBS's Front Up programme. He begins by noting the importance of media teachers for the future development of society; further, he also notes the increasing question of information accuracy in an ever more highly mediatised environment - in Jerry Bruckheimer's words, 'the media are a mile wide and an inch deep'.

Journalism is today still posited as a noble profession, standing for honesty, objectivity, and truth - and Andrew shows an excerpt from Edward R. Murrow's famous 1958 speech (as seen recently in Good Night, and Good Luck) accusing the television industry of its failings - deluding, amusing, and insulating us. Broadcasting - and the media more broadly - today are as crucial as then, but their basis has shifted, now taking in also a broad range of new participants, all the way through to individual produsers.