Snurb's blog

Canberra,
The next session at ANZCA 2010 starts with Sally Burford, whose focus is on Web information architecture - the process and outcome of defining the online information environment so it enables people to find the information they seek. This is informed by prior practices of information organisation (in libraries and archives, for example), but certainly still has a long way to go - while there is a good theoretical basis for such Web information architecture now, it is not yet being applied consistently in practice so far.

Canberra.
The final speaker in this session at ANZCA 2010 is Georgie McClean from SBS, whose focus is on cultural participation in a multicultural context. SBS has a brief to enhance cultural exchange and understanding, and with the move from public service broadcasting to public service media there are new opportunities for this through the use of new participatory media platforms. However, while some barriers to access are lowered, many constituencies can still be left out of the process - those already engaged may be those most likely to profit from new forms of engagement, too.

Canberra.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2010 is my QUT colleague (and current ANZCA president) Terry Flew, whose focus is on Australian and New Zealand communication research. ANZCA began in 1980 as the Australian Communication Association, and there have been a few overviews of the history of communication research in Australia and the region since; but what is interesting about this is that there is mainly a focus on a historical, temporal perspective, rather than including a spatial aspect as well: how do communications systems differ from one another across countries and regions, and more importantly, why?

Canberra.
The first paper session at ANZCA 2010 starts with a presentation by Tim Marjoribanks, whose interest is in media representations of Sudanese people in Australia. He begins by pointing to the societal context of debates over discrimination against African Australians; the Australian Human Rights Commission reported on this recently and found evidence of discrimination and resultant social exclusion across many aspects of their lives. Negative representations in the mainstream media were partly blamed for this, too. The experiences of Sudanese people living in Australia have been especially highlighted in this context, especially also as they are the largest groups of humanitarian arrivals from Africa into Australia.

Canberra.
After yesterday's CCI Symposium, I've made the trip down to frosty Canberra for this year's ANZCA conference. We start this morning with the first conference keynote, by John Durham Peters, who begins by considering democracy as a political category - for a very long time, it has been seen as an impossible and preposterous, so for it to be seen as a sine qua non is remarkable.

There are various obstacles to democracy, of course: chiefly, scale and human nature. For the ancient Greeks, democracy had to be small - even Athens was seen as too large, and democracy was thought to be able to be workable only if all participants were able to get to know one another personally. For Plato, the ideal number of citizens for a functioning democracy was precisely 5040, in fact. At the same time, small size was also seen as making democracy unsustainable. So, democracy was seen as most workable where citizens could meet one another in political assemblies.

With the Internet Turning 40 and International Communication Association conferences completed, I'm briefly back in Brisbane, before setting off for the Australia/New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) conference in Canberra next week (hopefully with a recharged audio recorder!).

In the meantime, here's a quick update on some new publications I've been involved in - a number of my recent book chapters on a range of topics have now been published:

First, with a chapter on "News Blogs and Citizen Journalism" in e-Journalism: New Media and News Media I'm introducing my work on gatewatching and citizen journalism to an Indian readership - the book was edited by Kiran Prasad, who was my office mate at the University of Leeds while I was there in 2007 to do some research for the produsage book, and was published by B.R. Publishing in Delhi. I don't think the publisher actually has a Website - but there's a good overview of the collection at Cyberjournalist, and it also includes contact details for BR Publishing.

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 closing plenary is Josephine Ho, who suggests that there is a developing new social sensibility, a low tolerance sensibility, that aims to create a morally induced responsiveness towards devious content. This goes beyond religious use, but generally turns censorship into a justfied and desired action.

Online, anonymity can release hostility and repression, Josephine suggests, and the ease of photo and video sharing makes a greater range of images shareable. The split between private and public behaviour has been blurred, and more and more private moments are being shared; these originate from private desired and distinctive tastes and tap into the immense diversity of feelings and values that lie beyond state-sanctioned content.

Singapore.
The next speaker in this closing plenary at ICA 2010 is Joseph Chan, who focusses on the China and Hong Kong perspective. He notes that freedom of speech, press freedom, and freedom of assembly are guaranteed by many national constitutions around the world - but they are often only partically practiced; especially so in China and Hong Kong. China censors traditional media as well as new media: it persists and remain very effective.

For new media, the censorship system is based on that for traditional media, and orchestrated through state directives as well as direct intervention (mainly through phone calls to avoid leaving a paper trail). China has a government department for social stability which oversees these efforts, addressing any potentially damaging accusations against the central government; local governments make their own efforts as well. Online, there is more room for deviance or dissent, and this is significant.

Singapore.
And we're in the closing plenary of ICA 2010, which (appropriately for a conference in Singapore, perhaps) deals with the impact of new media on censorship. Censorship approaches and technologies in the Asia-Pacific region vary widely, of course, as plenary chair Cherian George notes (from brute force to sophisticated social sanctioning).

Ang Peng Hwa is the first of the plenary speakers, and he begins by stating that the rise of Internet censorship in Asia was inevitable. Contrary to previous claims, the Internet can be censored - for example, by blocking particular IP addresses; further, the control of authoritative root services online is in the hands of ICANN, and ICANN itself is far from independent from government influence, but instead is subject to substantial US government control. As one example, Peng Hwa notes the arrest of the then holders of the .iq country-code top-level domain in December 2002, some months before the US operation Iraqi Freedom, leading to a change of control over .iq - hence, there is an urgent need to look more closely at Internet governance.

Singapore.
The final presenter in this session at ICA 2010 is Homero Gil de Zúñiga, whose interest is in civic engagement. How is this related to interpersonal and computer-mediated networks, and how does this play out differently for weak and strong ties in the networks? Is the effect of interpersonal and computer-mediated networks mediated by access to weak ties? Which setting is more predictive of civic engagement?

Past research in this area has shown connections between demographics and civic engagement; social orientations and civic engagement; and media use and civic engagement; the presence of citizen communication networks also has a positive effect. Finally, there are differences between strong and weak ties: being exposed to a wider range of connections through weak ties can variously have positive and negative effects - providing a greater diversity of information that may spark civic action, for example.