Blog

Gothenburg.
I must admit I missed the 8.20 a.m. sessions this morning – just couldn’t cope with the cold. So, we’re jumping right into the next session at AoIR 2010, which starts with Axel Maireder. He begins by noting the function of Twitter as a medium for public discourse; tweets can reach large audiences especially if retweeted widely (an average of 1000 users for each retweet).

Twitter is used for debate on public issues, of course – and Axel’s study has identified a number of typical themes (education and professional, spare time, everyday life, social relations, mottos and aphorisms …

Gothenburg.
The final speaker in this AoIR 2010 session is Bjarki Valtysson, whose interest is in the politics of access to exchange-oriented processes of mass self-communication – which build on a different arrangement of production, distribution, and consumption processes than we used to have. This is a clash between the politics of access (read/write) and the politics of permission (read-only culture), and there’s a question about how this plays out in digital public spheres.

This can be examined in the context of a number of projects. The Europeana content archive has been hampered by complex polemics regarding online accessibility, the …

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is TL Taylor, whose interest is in game culture – an area where transnational connections are now also prevalent. Where games consoles used to be strongly region-controlled, this has loosened considerably – games bought abroad will now often also play in a different geographical region, even if the same is not necessarily true yet for DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. But in accessing and downloading games, for example, users are often still required to identify their location (or geolocated by their IP address).

Games companies themselves are also reinscribing regional specificity into the gameplay …

Gothenburg.
The next AoIR 2010 speaker is Irina Shklovski, whose interest is in transnationalism – defined as either migrant practices that establish or maintain links between the two countries or origin and destination, or as cosmopolitanism or a broadly defined non-culturally specific world identity. But what is the value and meaning of such long-distance ties as they are primarily maintained through online communication?

More specifically, what forms of transnational belonging may exist here: what does investing energy into maintaining such relationships mean for the people engaged in it, can such transnational contact open new horizons beyond the scope of daily …

Gothenburg.
The final AoIR 2010 panel for today starts with Lisbeth Klastrup, who’s presenting on a study of how Danes participate in Facebook. While the overall Facebook community now numbers some 500 million users, how localised and fragmented is that community, for example along national and local lines? Examining the Danish Facebook community might provide some useful answers to this question. Some of this is also related to overall cultural patterns, of course – the importance of local and family ties to a national culture, for example; a ‘national intimacy’ which is relatively strong in Denmark. Contrasted with this …

Gothenburg.
And Mathieu Simonson is back for a second presentation in this AoIR 2010 session, examining how the editorial choices and sourcing practices of major French newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro compare with those of participatory political blogging / citizen journalism platforms Agora Vox and Rue 89. The case study here is their coverage of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (COP15). This involved some 214 articles across the four platforms.

Traditional platforms focussed on negotiations (35%), education and sensibilisation (22%), and demonstrations, protests and militants (14%); participatory platforms similarly focussed on negotiations (30%), climate science (22%), and …

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is my brilliant PhD student Tim Highfield, whose interest is in what contribution blogging (by a wide variety of bloggers concerned with politics, the news, current events, and the reflection of such topics in specific fields of interest) makes to the overall mediasphere. Such bloggers may have a variety of points of focus, and while the ‘informing’ role of blogs has been stressed in the literature, this may not be their only function.

There is also an underlying question of how bloggers and journalists interrelate with one another – whether they are …

Gothenburg.
Oops, got into the next AoIR 2010 session a little late (why are the coffee breaks so short?), and Mathieu Simonson is already in full flight. This is a paper on motivations for blogging, which engaged in interviews with journalist-bloggers to examine why they were blogging.

Key motivations identified here were personal autonomy: escaping professional routines and professional limitations, e.g. by publishing niche journalism or posting more politically biased commentary; self-development: learning and innovation – though notably not engaging in first-hand field research; self-promotion: personal branding, differentiation, and marketing, which also draws on the next activity; community interaction: discussion …

Gothenburg.
The next AoIR 2010 session I’m in is a panel on sustainable entertainment, which involves Wenche Nag from the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor, Mia Consalvo, Jean Burgess, Patrick Wikström, and Martin Thörnkvist. Patrick begins by noting the transformations in the music industry, for example, where the largest company now no longer is a record label but a live music company. iTunes and similar models are also making a significant impact, of course. Much of this is now based on artist/audience relationships that are based on passion and substantial emotional investment – which works for some entertainment industries, of course …

Gothenburg.
The final speaker at AoIR 2010 is Sebastian Deterding, who is interested in reframing Web 2.0 as a public service right to communicate. One example of the debates around this is the French HADOPI three-strikes law around filesharing, which would remove Net access from offending users; others have framed Google or Facebook as universal public services, and describe broadband access as just as important as water or electricity.

The Internet is now a core communicative backbone for various communication networks, then – but how might we think about the Net as a public service in a more systematic, technology-neutral …