Blog

Gießen.
We're in the afternoon session of the Gießen conference now (and I will need to run out a little early from here, in order to catch my train back to Hannover in the evening). The keynote speaker is Adam Arvidsson, whose interest is in what he calls the ethical economy (an online book of the same title is being released next week). Session chair Jörn Lamla introduces the session by referring to the German Website Ciao.de, a consumer-driven product discussion and rating Website (perhaps similar to sites like Epinions the English-speaking world) which is operated by a PR company - a kind of commercialisation of culture and a culturisation of commerce at the same time.

Gießen.
My own keynote at this Web 2.0 and politics conference here in Gießen is next, in a session which discusses the possible impact of blogs, citizen journalism, and other forms of online political participation on wider political processes. My own thoughts as presented here build to some extent on the article I published in Information Polity earlier this year, and also draw on recent Australian examples (the role of Possums Pollytics in the Australian election campaign of 2007, and the new GetUp! project Project Democracy). I've posted the slides below, and will add the audio when I can the audio is now online, too.

Gießen.
I've made the trip to a very cold and foggy Gießen in central Germany for a conference on what could be loosely described as the political dimensions of Web 2.0: "Das Internet zwischen egalitärer Teilhabe und ökonomischer Vermachtung". I'll be speaking later this morning, but we begin with a keynote by Karl-Heinz Ladeur. All of this will be in German, so blogging it in English will make for an interesting experience...

He begns by pointing out that new media are understood first through the paradigms of the old - TV dramas were filmed theatre, TV news were a reading-out of print news. The same is true for media law; it tends to transfer and tinker with old approaches in order to deal with new media, more or less successfully. This also foregrounds the individual, and places the medium as a means for the individual to communicate - which is not necessarily inappropriate, but takes focus away from the development of independent, indigenous principles in new media forms. (Another example is how long it has taken for arts publics to be treated differently - e.g. in terms of decency and pornography - from other publics. The juridical treatment of political publics is a further example here, as is the treatment of the private matters of celebrities.)

Hannover.
After the excitement of AoIR 2008 in Copenhagen, I've travelled south to Germany for a few more events, and to catch up with my family here in Hannover. Before getting to Hannover, though, I've spent a couple of fabulous days as a guest of the Hans-Bredow-Institut for media research at the University of Hamburg. My host there, Jan Schmidt, invited me to speak at the university as the first talk in a lecture series on Web 2.0, and I think this won't be the last collaboration between us. I'll add audio for the talk later, but for now, here are the slides: Here are slides and audio recording (slightly noisy, sorry):

Copenhagen.
It's the final session here at AoIR 2008. I've come in a little late for Lisa McLaughlin's presentation; she's been working in Malaysia to examine the Multimedia Super Corridor project which incorporates the Cyberjaya (technology) and Putrajaya (administration) districts.

The project was initiated in 1996 with much fanfare, but met with limited success as companies approached to develop representations there were initially reluctant to do so as the availability of a highly skilled technology workforce was doubtful. There was also strong skepticism about the project from the local community, not least because the building of the MSC required the displacement of existing communities of Tamil plantation workers. If knowledge societies require 'fast subjects', then these existing communities were now pushed into a position of 'slow subjects' providing menial services to those working and living in the MSC.

Copenhagen.
As it turns out, I have two papers in this post-lunch session on the last day of AoIR 2008 - in competing sessions. Luckily, Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai are on hand to present one of them (I'll post the slides for this as soon as I get them from the two) - and I'm here to present my paper with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders on hyperlocal citizen journalism (understood here in a relatively broad sense).

The first speaker here is William Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose aim is to move beyond terms such as Netizen and citizen journalism and towards an understanding of various political uses of the Net as forming a fifth estate, in addition to the press as a fourth estate in society. Such uses promote social accountability in business, industry, government, politics, and other sectors.

Copenhagen.
The final keynote at AoIR 2008 is by Steve Graham. His interest is in the politics of urban space in the context of ubiquitous computing. He begins by noting utopian projections of the future, where everything is mediated profoundly through digital technologies - what Dana Cuff has called 'enacted environments'.

This includes visions of augmented reality (involving the delivery of location-specific information), and builds on ideas such as the 'Internet of Things', the use of RFIDs, biometrics, tracking systems, computerised surveillance, security discourses about e-borders, geolocation, GPS tracking, etc. This relies also on machine-readable entities, with sensors linked to databases that recognise and track individual objects of interest.

Copenhagen.
We're starting the last day of this very enjoyable AoIR 2008 conference already. This one is going to busy for me, as three of my papers are scheduled for today - two of them, in fact, in competing sessions (but luckily my colleagues Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai, who are the lead authors, are able to present one of them). This morning, we're starting with a session on the online dimensions of national elections across a number of countries.

The first presenter is Yeon-Ok Lee, whose focus is on last December's presidential election in South Korea. The previous election to this, of course, was won by a small margin by the liberal underdog Rooh Moo-Hyun, due in good part to the activism of Korea's Netizens and to coverage by citizen journalism site OhmyNews. This made the 2007 election a particularly interesting case for further research.

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).

Copenhagen.
The post-lunch session here at AoIR 2008 begins with a paper by Ronda Hauben. She notes that 2008 is the fifteenth anniversary of the publication of Michael Hauben's seminar article on the 'Netizen' concept - a concept emerging from Michael's research that spread rapidly and widely, and (especially in Asia) still has a great deal of currency. The concept had a great deal to do with the fight against commercialisation of the Net which was prominent then; today, for the same reason the concept has been suppressed to some extent by those interested in a more commercial Internet.