Snurb's blog

Brisbane.
Bugger: the ANZCA 2009 programme incorrectly listed Brian McNair's keynote for 10 a.m. rather than 9 a.m., so I missed almost all of it - very, very frustrating. Hope someone else blogged it...

So, I'm now in the first panel session of this last conference day, and the first speaker in this session is Nazanin Ghanavizi, whose interest is in blogging in Iran - a very timely topic at this point, of course. She begins by noting that one of the most important factors of social life is being able to give voice to one's ideas. Iranian society is already highly active online, especially by blogging - Persian is a major blog language, with some one million blogs in Persian, even in spite of the comparatively small population of Persian-speakers worldwide.

Brisbane.
The final speakers for this ANZCA 2009 session are Sherre Delys and Marius Foley fromthe ABC Pool project. Sherre, its Executive Producer, comes from ABC Radio Arts, and one of the motivations for starting the site was in maintaining a space for radio arts as well as providing one for other forms of (especially collaborative) multimedia work. The overall idea was to open up public media as a conversation, to address the people formerly known as the audience. Part of this was also to partner with Creative Commons Australia and to use open source technology (Drupal is used as the platform for Pool).

Brisbane.
The next ANZCA 2009 presentation is a group affair which starts off with Nicole Matthews. This paper focusses on the use of Facebook by Deaf young people (some of whom jokingly use the term 'Facehook' for the site). There are possibilities as well as threats in young Deaf people using such rich social media sites - often, such users have been early adopters of such sites, but there also remain barriers to their use, not least because of the significance of sign language for such communities (especially for politically oriented Deaf communities).

Brisbane.
The last ANZCA 2009 session for today begins with a paper by Fiona Martin (and my laptop seems to be dying, so I'm not sure whether I'll capture all three papers successfully...). She notes the role which identity definition plays especially for teenagers, and is part of a Prix Jeunesse research project investigating how young people are using research tools to represent themselves visually, how this can be understood in terms of diversity, and how this can be related to educational television.

This has been prompted to some extent by TV producers' interest in social media, partly because they are concerned that social media will steal their audiences (even though there is no clear evidence for this). TV producers also need more information on what users are doing in social media in order to develop effective cross-media strategies, especially for educational television.

Brisbane.
The final speaker for this ANZCA 2009 session is Alison Henderson, who focusses on the organisational use of social networking sites. Such sites (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace) provide a space for the communication of 'friendship' through the creation of online profiles and friendship networks, as well as for the sharing of information, audiovisual materials, and other personal material. They provide a space for networking and for creating connections. (There is a slight difference here between social network - representing and maintaining friendship - and social networking - making new friends - in some of the literature, too.)

Brisbane.
The next speaker here at ANZCA 2009 is Sal Humphreys, presenting on the knitting Website Ravelry as a social network market. Discussions of intellectual property, distributed participation, and user-generated content have struggled to keep up with these developments: social economy is intertwined and interconnected with commercial economy, and there are serious questions about when participation becomes exploitation.

Social network markets characterise these ideas as emergent, and provide a useful basis for their theorisation. Mass media theory also fails to align effectively with these new interactive environments. HOw is power distributed, who has agency, what is the role and impact of institutions in relation to these environments?

Brisbane.
The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with Matt Allen, reflecting on the concept of Web presence, not least in the context of teaching and learning. (I'm afraid I missed out on Jack Qiu's keynote as I was talking to colleagues from the ABC's Pool project.) Web presence is operating as an organising device for Matt's students in Internet Studies at Curtin University, and he has an Australian Learning and Teaching Council project on authentic assessment using Internet tools. Finally, learning is a form of knowledge work, and the more knowledge becomes networked, so must learning - so, knowledge networkers must ensure they have a Web presence that is both centred and decentred.

Brisbane.
The third speaker in this session at ANZCA 2009 is Tim Highfield, who works on a comparative study of political blogs in Australia and France (and is one of my PhD students). He focusses here on the Australian side and its reaction to the inauguration of Barack Obama. The project tracks some 245 blogs and news Websites in Australia, and extracts from these each post (and its links) as they become available online. These data are then quantitatively analysed for keyword and link patterns.

The Obama inauguration was a major political event, of course, and provided a useful case study for this work; other such samples could be the swine flu epidemic or the 'utegate' controversy storm in a teacup. Interestingly, only about 50 blogs in the population published a post or more during the two weeks surrounding the inauguration (possibly due to the fact that January is a major holiday month in Australia). There was no major spike on inauguration day itself, either.

Brisbane.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2009 is Orit Ben-Harush, whose interest is in communication in social networks, and she begins by introducing the idea of 'friendworks': that is, a specific group of people (considered as friends) within one's entire social network. Her study traced such networks in a small Australian seachange community in New South Wales, and also especially focussed on the use of mobile phones by this community.

Social network as a term is too broad for this sort of analysis - and while friends and friendship are rather vague terms in this context, they are nonetheless highly productive. Social networks overall include family, friendworks, work-related networks, location-based connections, and online relationships, and there are overlaps between these network components, of course.

Brisbane.
The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with Lelia Green, presenting on the practices of a small affinity group (a LAN clan) of year 11-12 students in suburban Perth. None of these young men could quantify what amount of time they spent online each day; they used the Net extensively during their non-school time, at any rate. The study focussed especially on the use of Bittorrent, which was invented in 2002 and has been especially used for sharing movie and television content. Bittorrent use becomes more effective the more users are sharing the same file, of course, and there were some 4 million users online at any one point by 2006. By February 2009, some 160 million users had downloaded Bittorrent softwares.