Snurb's blog

Singapore.
The next speaker in this session at ICA 2010 is Se Jung Park, whose focus is on the use of the Korean social networking site Cyworld by politicians. South Korea is a leading country for Internet access, of course, but sites like Facebook and Twitter are not very popular; YouTube, in fact, is partially censored. So, Cyworld is the main space for social networking - including for politicians.

The present study examined the comments left on the Cyworld 'mini-hompys' of Korean politicians during April 2008 and June 2009; from the total number, some 200 comments from each politician's space were randomly selected, and a semantic sentiment analysis was then conducted. There were obvious spikes in commenting during the recent mass protests against the reintroduction of US beef imports.

Singapore.
The post-lunch session at ICA 2010 this Friday starts with our own presentation on our large network mapping project, and I'm posting the Powerpoint below. No luck recording the audio this time, unfortunately - looks like my recorder is out of juice!

Singapore.
The final presentation in this ICA 2010 session is by James Katz, who describes the various theories outlined here as lenses for understanding reality; he adds to this the contribution of cognitive sciences as a useful set of tools. He also notes the Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and developed (WEIRD) nations focus of much research - which does not translate well to the study of the use of mobile telephony in developing nations, for example. There is also a mentalist and positivist orientation here which attempts to work out what takes place in people's brains, and to find a 'scientific' statistical breakdown of factors influencing people's behaviours.

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Emil Bakke, whose interest is especially in the mobile uses of Facebook in a post-convergence environment. What drives convergence, presumably, are the users, not just the techological possibilities, but what are the processes here? Emil notes that people operate in clusters of technology, and this depends also on the context of use.

Technology clusters, especially, really matter: users and non-users operate in a multiple media environment (accessing services through various devices, but not necessarily with great awareness of the features of the various technologies and media features available to them); any single communication technology will have diminished importance because of a user-driven environment; and technological affordances and user preferences intersect in various ways.

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Roger Cooper, who introduces the distinction between uses and gratifications (audiences are active and goal-directed, motivated to satisfy needs via media; analysis is on an individual level) and stuctural theories (audiences are passive and constrained, bound by availability, access, scheduling, and awareness of media - mainly TV - content; analysis is on the macro level).

There is a need to integrate both approaches, but how? First, nobody is simply active or passive - everyone is both, to varying degrees in various situations. Also, convergence weakens the influence of structure in the way it's been traditionally thought of; there is an abundance of media choices, and more control over them - media users increasingly employ search, ratings, links, and other ways of accessing content; they continue to function within constraints of time, cost, and access.

Singapore.
The next session panel at ICA 2010, on post-convergence, starts with Zizi Papacharissi, whose focus is on sociability on social network sites. She begins by noting questions over whether social networking makes people more or less social; in reality, however, social media are simply integrated into media habits overall. Also, there is a question over whether these new media are more or less social than others - again, in reality, all media are social. Finally, are these online places more or less social? Perhaps the real answer is that online spaces and achitectures have specific social affordances.

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is James Danowski, who zooms in on online networking patterns across Arab countries especially. One suggestion here is that Internet network development is a precursor to the development of civil societies - and from 2004 to 2010 there's been a tenfold increase in the number of Internet hosts in Arab countries (with a doubling in the last two years alone). So has the lag between network and civil society development remained the same; is it different between English and Arabic spaces online; can we compare this to the development patterns in telephony networks? Can this be tracked through appearances of key Islamic terms like 'sharia' or 'jihad'?

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Han Woo Park, who shifts our focus beyond blogs, and towards the Web more generally. He begins by highlighting the importance of diachronic studies, and his project undertakes such a study against the backdrop of a growing globalisation of communication networks, balanced by an increasing diversification of communication flows.

The project examined this by taking a longitudinal approach that examines changes in network patterns over time - applied here to global cyberspace overall through a comparison of observations in 2003 and 2009. It used search engines AltaVista (2003) and Yahoo! (2009; it had acquired AltaVista in the meantime) to identify levels of incoming and outgoing links between country-code top-level domains. (For the US, .edu, .gov., .mil, and .us were counted as its ccTLDs, given that .com, .org, and .net are far from US-specific.)

Singapore.
The next presenter at ICA 2010 is Jonathan Zhu, and his focus is on the dynamics of blog participation. The big change of Web 2.0 is that it threatens the traditional division of labour in publishing, and that more people can become active participants in online publishing - and many have, but how sustainable is such activity? What predicts whether people who start blogs continue their blogging activities?

In other words, how long do bloggers stay active before quitting? How do we define 'active', how do we measure the duration of their activities? Jonathan conducted a survival rate analysis which took both these questions into account - examining two time windows: a stringent criterion which required blogs to be active at least once per month, and a more lenient one which required a post at least once in six months, to be counted as still operational.

Singapore.
The Friday at ICA 2010 starts with the first of two panels on online network mapping (I'll be presenting in the second one, later today). My brilliant PhD student Tim Highfield is the first presenter. His interest is in topical discussion networks in the French political blogosphere: such topical networks comprise sites commenting on specific events or issues, and the links between them. This observation comes out of a larger dataset collected over a longer period of time.