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The next plenary session at AoIR 2012 starts with Daniel Miller, who describes enthnography as often grand in its ambitions, but sometimes a little parochial in its work – how do you go about developing some of the wider theory about technology and what it means to be human, for example? What needs to happen here is a move between the broad and the specific.

Anthropologists see the substance of being human in social relations; how can technology, as an external factor, be related to this? Work on the use of communication technologies by disabled people points towards possible directions …

The post-lunch keynote at AoIR 2012 is by Liesbet van Zoonen, who begins with a recap of cultural theories of identity. These assume both individual and collective identities to be multiple rather than single, dynamic rather than static. Identity is something we do, not something we are. Research has been informed by these ideas, and we have a good understanding of how different groups use media to perform their identities. This has also been reflected in an understanding of diversity as a desirable goal for social policy.

There has been less attention on recent forces that work against the multiplicity …

The final plenary speaker in this opening session at AoIR 2012 is Susanna Paasonen, who highlights the question of what the object of Internet research really is. This has often been described in terms of loss – loss of material aspects of research objects – as well as gain – the benefits of disembodiment.

Materiality in Internet studies involves the materials of Internet technology, but also the material conditions of global labour, money, commodity, and resource flows. Here, a focus can be on the conflicting aims of different actors. Second, much recent research has been focussed on the practices of …

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Larissa Hjorth, whose focus is on how smartphones are shaping and shaped by women's roles and labour. They highlight the unbounded nature of the domestic, and the struggles of boundary making: smartphones are both empowering and exploiting gendered labour: they empower and constrain women's experiences.

Larissa interviewed some 40 smartphone users in their post-honeymoon phase (when the device was no longer new), finding that smartphones highlight how notions of home, domesticity, and everyday life are changing. Smartphones contain users as much as they are contained by them, they embody work as well as …

The first AoIR 2012 plenary begins with Mary L. Gray, whose interest is in moving past technology-centric work in Internet studies. Rather, life is entangled with Internet technologies: the study of media should be used to draw out larger questions, and Internet research needs to be an interdiscipline concerned with boundary work.

Early on, cultivation theory dominated media studies, but domestication theory finally provided a more sophisticated view of the adoption and adaptation of media technologies; but this also overlooked the reinscription of normative users to the exclusion of other user groups, who were considered to be outsiders and always …

And I've arrived at the 2012 Association of Internet Researchers conference – my annual pilgrimage to catch up with the family. We start with a quick burst of Ignite talks, which itself begins with John Carter McKnight. He notes the two fundamental axioms of video games studies: games teach, and games don't teach. The Red Cross has posed the question: Is there a way for first-person shooter games to include a more accuracy representation of international humanitarian law? Such laws are not especially firm, of course - much different from the rules in video games, which are more like gravity …

The final speaker (that went fast) at the CCC Symposium is Annette Markham, who begins by posing the question "What counts as data?" An answer to that question might provide an opportunity to bridge 'big data' and qualitative research - because what counts as data also defines what is considered to be viable, credible, or interesting findings.

The focus on 'data' results in a focus on the process of data collection, which minimises the other phases of inquiry that are vital to the production of knowledge and understanding. What's missing here are the other aspects of research which are also …

We continue at the CCC Symposium with the great Alex Halavais, who is interested in the first place in the hidden patterns in data, and the learning - the evolution of ideas - which might result from them. But how do we detect such learning, such change? One indicator could be the popularity of content or users - success may be measured in the amount of attention received, for example. But all of this also happens at multiple scales, in multiple contexts - search engines cannot simply produce one result, for example, but must produce the right results for a …

The next speaker at the CCC Symposium is Christina Lioma, whose focus is on search engines. These, too, are repositories of data, but contain unstructured, heterogeneous, and noisy data - we're using them to find needles in haystacks (using various search logics, in fact: known needles in known haystacks, unknown needles in unknown haystacks, etc.). The discipline of information retrieval aims to develop theoretical principles for modifying and quantifying information and topical relevance.

Search engine algorithms retrieve, store, and match data to user needs; in doing so, they draw on query logs and user logs to improve the functioning of …