Blogs

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Raquel Oliveira, whose focus is on citizen journalism. The very definition of that term remains disputed, of course, and discussions over what citizen journalists are able to contribute continue apace. Citizen journalism is a phenomenon rather than a fully defined concept. Individuals use journalistic – and especially online – tools to make contributions which are of journalist interest to other. A related question is whether the Net is able to advance democracy by making possible practices such as citizen journalism.

What such practices do is to change traditional news production models, shifting the balance of power further towards news users. Raquel’s work examines the use of two citizen journalism communities which do this – Viva Favela and Índios Online: the former of these was greated in July 2001 and focusses on issues of interest to poor communities; the latter started in 2004 as a project coordinated by an NGO, and is now run autonomously by native Indio communities.

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Bjarki Valtysson, whose focus is on an Icelandic comedian who established the Best Party to contest the mayoral elections in Reykjavík, and won. After the 2008 financial crash in Iceland, there was a widespread mistrust of the political establishment, enabling comedians to successfully make the argument that Icelanders might as well elect clowns to political positions – and the party received 35% of the vote by doing so.

The Best Party successfully used cross-media platforms for promoting its subversive, carnivalesque election campaign, and thereby to perform democracy. It promoted values of positivity, honesty, trust, love, and equality, but in a sarcastic way – honesty is planned to be achieved by lying openly, for example. The now elected mayor’s Facebook page has some 35,000 likes – that’s around 10% of the entire population of Iceland.

Seattle.
The next panel at AoIR 2011 starts with the excellent Luca Rossi, whose focus is on the Twitter coverage of the Chilean mining accident and the subsequent rescue of the miners. Luca begins, though, by pointing to the underlying theory of media events – from the royal wedding (as a kind of 2.0 version, now with added social media, of the Charles & Diana a few decades ago wedding) to crisis and disaster events.

Twitter coverage of the mine rescue in Chile was coordinated through the #rescatemineros hashtag. The miners were trapped underground for some three months, following the 5 August 2010 mine collapse; the event transformed from a crisis event to a more organised media event as it gradually unfolded. How did Twitter cover this; how did messages propagate through the network; and how did Twitter interleave with the wider mediasphere?

Seattle.
The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Susan Kretchmer, whose focus is on the continuing digital divide. The U.S. ranks surprisingly lowly on broadband Internet adoption; some 14 million Americans do not have access to broadband, and 100 million could have access but don’t use it because they can’t afford it or don’t realise the advantages. Rates are especially low amongst the most disadvantaged groups.

This is being addressed through the development of a National Broadband Plan by the FCC, under instructions by the Obama administration. This envisages the U.S. as a 21st century information society, realising the social and economic benefits of broadband access. This builds on the language of a social contract for the development of greater access. Susan argues that this project must serve the public interest, and needs a clear nuanced understanding of the shifting demographics of diversity, and the ability to harness the lessons of past attempts and failures to achieve universal access.

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Ericka Menchen-Trevino, whose focus is on media selection practices online. She begins by noting the concerns that people don’t necessarily gain a full understanding of current political trends online, if they flock only to those Websites which already speak to their political preferences; this may give them a fundamentally skewed perspective on politics. Additionally, of course, people may also avoid exposure to political news altogether – so there’s a two-dimensional framework here, from low to high political partisanship and from low to high interest in the news.

There is also selective exposure, selective perception, and selective retention. In the first place, people may seek or avoid content which challenges their political views; indeed, the two don’t necessarily go together: just seeking out content even without avoiding other content already generates a selective exposure.

Seattle.
Well, the final day or AoIR 2011 is upon us, and I’m starting it in a panel on politics. We begin with Fa Martin-Niemi, whose interest is in knowledge-sharing in virtual spaces. Such spaces are filled with social networks, and people act differently as they participate in different social networks – sometimes deviantly to a lesser or greater extent. What are the implications for organisational knowledge spaces in this?

Extreme deviance, of course, is damaging to online social networks; there is also positive deviance, however, which can be beneficial (whistleblowing is one example – such deviance is honourable and voluntary, and oriented to greater norms than just those of the immediate social space).

Fa pursued a three-month virtual ethnographic study of online software developers’ fora; she identified different levels of participation, and different roles played by individual participants. Each level of participation had associated deviances: interpersonal deviance, for example, where people acted ‘lawfully stupid’ by grandstanding, philosophising, acting rudely, or making grandiosely absolute statements; or in-crowd enforcement, where self-appointed group guardians try to enforce perceived group norms. (And these two forms of group deviants are also often picking fights with one another.)

Seattle.
Finally, we move on to the fabulous Steve Jones and his colleague Rich Wolf to finish this session (and day) at AoIR 2011. Steve notes the degree to which the mobile phone has become a coterminal device in our presence. Through a student project, Steve and Rich led the development of an app for observing and understanding the scaffolding of privacy, security, surveillance and connectiveness. The app provided a location-based as well as social network service for students on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus.

Rich says that this was using a REST-based architecture, in which clients request representations of resources from Web servers; this may describe any meaningful resource that can be addressed. It plugged into the Foursquare API as the underlying REST service, in order not to reinvent the wheel, and used Apple’s Xcode development environment for iOS applications. (There’s more technical information here, but reporting on all of that correctly is asking a bit much of me at the end of a long day…)

Seattle.
The next speaker in this bumper session at AoIR 2011 is Andrea Guzman, who’s interested in the media framing of mobile phones. She has worked through a range of media texts from the New York Times and the Washington Post in the years 2006 and 2010 which discuss such issues, focussing especially on articles which mention mobile phones in their lead paragraphs.

Where mobile phone uses by adults are discussed in such articles, they are framed most of all as a necessary tool for coordinating work, coordinating life activities, and living in modern society. They are portrayed as especially important for more powerful people as well as for parents. A second key frame is convenience – this emerges in 2010, and sees phones as convenient tools for commerce as well as for making charitable donations (given that the Haiti earthquake had just happened then).

Seattle.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2011 session is Miao Feng, who asks about the privacy consequences of a site like Foursquare? Location-based services are nothing new, and address a local mass audience; what needs to be examined is how technology is diffused, what social change it promotes, and how it is culturally and socially negotiated.

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Adriane Stoner, whose focus is on the historical trajectory of mobile media development. There are three ideological themes which can be observed in the rise of all new media, as James Carey argued: capitalism, popular imagery, and universalism.

New media were often accompanied by the rise of a powerful capitalism – new media is economically powerful, and existing economic systems usually need to be reconstructed as a result of their emergency, as powerful new monopolies are naturalised. Popular imagery associated with new media points to the notion of the electronic sublime – the rise of a more intelligent society. Finally, universalism embodies the idea of a great brotherhood of humanity – new media as holding the potential for a global network connecting us all.