Snurb's blog

Canberra.
I'll admit that I've skipped the ANZCA AGM to check out the (excellent) Museum of Australian Democracy in the front wing of Old Parliament House - well worth a visit, and I can now say that I've crossed the floor in both houses of parliament. The next session at ANZCA 2010, then, starts with a paper by Anna Daniel, whose focus is on computational journalism: a response to the changes in news consumption and production through the greater use of software and technologies that support journalistic work. The belief is that this approach can benefit the quality of journalistm, and in doing so set apart papers which use it from their competitors.

Canberra.
The final presenter in this session at ANZCA 2010 is Michael Galvin, whose focus is on Singaporean politics - and he begins by pointing to Manuel Castells's discussion of power and counterpower in the network society during his 2006 ICA keynote. Castells's proposition is that the development of interactive horizontal communication has contributed to the rise of 'mass self-communication', shifting the public sphere from the institutional realm to the new communications space.

Michael's study applies this thesis to the online site for citizen journalism of the Straits Times newspaper in Singapore, STOMP. While the Times is essentially an organ of the Singaporean government, which has long openly promoted self-censorship in the media, this site for horizontal interactive communication - according to Castells - should provide a space for the operation of counterpower; for Castells, this is a given and indeed a result of a 'natural law' of society.

Canberra.
The next speaker in this ANZCA 2010 session is Sora Park, whose focus is on online participation behaviour in South Korea. As part of a larger study, she conducted a content analysis of online discussion boards - which are a major site for political discussion and organisation in the country. How is information exchanged, diffused, and consumed online through such spaces?

Korea has one of the highest levels of broadband penetration in the world; some 90% of the population use the Net daily, and some 29% participate in online discussions. During the political riots in 2008, online discussion boards were important for organising activities, but there are also concerns about the lack of balance in political discussion - a spiral of silence may be present here, reducing the presence of alternative voices.

Canberra.
My own paper with Jean Burgess on our Discovery project mapping Australian blogs (and online publics more generally) is next at ANZCA 2010. I'm including the Powerpoint below, and this time I think the audio recording worked as well, so I'll add this as soon as possible, too. with audio recording!

Technorati : ANZCA 2010, Australia, blogosphere, blogs, network mapping, politics
Del.icio.us : ANZCA 2010, Australia, blogosphere, blogs, network mapping, politics

Canberra.
We're now about to start the second day at ANZCA 2010, in a still very chilly Canberra. First up is the second conference keynote, by Robyn Archer. She begins with the question of what drives change - such as individual aims and ambitions; collective needs gathered in democratic processes or popular revolutions. Conservative powers will resist such change - and the mechanisms of mass communication will provide a stage for such struggles to be conducted. The matter of change still depends on how we act on the information we receive, and the technology at our disposal. This is as true for arts and culture as it is for politics.

Canberra.
The final speaker at ANZCA 2010 for this session is Myra Gurney, whose interest is also in Australian political debate; she notes the increasing intensity of judgment of politicians' public utterances and the fast dissemination of any soundbite. Speaking plainly, spontaneously, and unambiguously has become a risk for professional politicians, and is increasingly kept in check by their media minders.

Kevin Rudd has been pilloried for his sometimes overly verbose and prolix expression - and this hints at the perceived need for a vigorous control of political statements, as well as at the perception that politicians cannot be trusted and speak with forked tongues. This is not confined to Australia, nor to politics, but certainly highly noticeable here, too. Democracy is drowning in distrust, as John Faulkner has said. The politics of ideology and philosophy have been replaced by the politics of pragmatism and personality.

Canberra.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2010 is Geoffrey Craig, whose focus is on the public image of (now former) Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Rudd has been widely criticised for an often somewhat stilted public persona. This ties into Bourdieu's concept of habitus, the permanent manners of being, seeing, acting and thinking, and the schemes of perception, conception, and action. These are also situated in fields of action which bestow individuals with authority and power once they understand and negotiate the norms and rules of the specific game.

Canberra.
The final session at ANZCA 2010 today starts with Libby Lester, whose focus is on online media in the 2010 Tasmanian state elections. She begins by describing the election tally room, at the Hobart casino (!); there tends to be little cross-traffic between the tally room and the rest of the casino. Tallying is still a very traditional process, with updates being made physically on boards, and state and local journalists going about their business, with a few national journalists thrown in. The general public is allowed in to observe the process, but without simultaneous access to broadcast media it is difficult to understand what is happening.

Canberra.
The final speaker in this session at ANZCA 2010 is Kerry Green, who presents on the Northern Adelaide Research Archive, an archive which aims to connect a range of previously isolated information on Northern Adelaide. Northern Adelaide has tended to be represented as backward and crime-ridden in the media, and this has been a cause of some concern; prominent people from the area, including singer Jimmy Barnes, have spoken out against this and pushed for a change in media attitudes.

In part, this was facilitated through the organisation of the Northern Summit, developing a number of ideas for change - for example, mapping and coordinating the positive activities happening in the area; developing life transition programmes based on these maps, linked with TAFEs and universities; and improving publicity and access to information for those who can benefit from it. Web 2.0 technology is seen as an important element in this.

Canberra.
The second speaker in this session at ANZCA 2010 is Marilyn Mitchell, whose interest is in visual communication; here, she focusses especially on the design of information 'dashboards' providing key performance indicators to managers in a visual format (one example Marilyn shows is for schools administrators, showing e.g. the percentage of buses running on time and a gauge of ethnic diversity in the student population).

Are such dashboards actually appropriate for providing an overview of such information? Are they cluttered with 'junk' information graphs? Some critics (e.g. Tufte) have suggested that the entire 'dashboard' metaphor is 'lame', others are actively promoting the idea, and at any rate these dashboards have become something of an industry standard, with many managers demanding them and an industry of dashboard providers now emerging.