Blogs

Gothenburg.
My own paper (with Jean Burgess, Thomas Nicolai, and Lars Kirchhoff) starts the final session of this second day at AoIR 2010. Below is the Powerpoint, and I’ll try to add the audio some time soon the audio is online now, too.

Gothenburg.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2010 is Zizi Papacharissi, whose interest is in civic habits emerging around online media. She begins by noting the mythology of the new, which suggests that newer media can revive old democracy, the idea that technology can reconfigure public space, and the continuing public/private debate.

Contemporary democracies are characterised by a nostalgia for older forms of civic engagement, by a realisation of the limitations of representative models of democracy, by an overreliance on aggregate forms of public opinion (polls which transform nuanced opinion into yes/no responses), declining public participation and increasing cynicism about democracy. Against this, a new civic vernacular is emerging that suggests new modes of citizenship which reform older metaphors and increasingly take place in the private sphere.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2010 are Yana Breindl and Nils Gustafsson, whose interest is in networked digital activism. Such activism is not necessarily more or less inclusive or democratic than conventional activism. In democratic theory, there are the three strands of competitive, participatory, and deliberative democracy, and activism is often perceived through the lens of the latter two; online activism is seen as encouraging participatory or deliberative features in the democratic system.

Reality is perhaps more on the competitive side, where most people are seen as passive participants in a political system that is otherwise run by a small ruling elite that is legitimised and made accountable in elections, but left to its own devices between them. Factors which do influence the political process are other elites (business, political, social, and otherwise) – and in the Internet age, new elites (which are seen as less hierarchically organised) are emerging.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2010 session is Bianca Reisdorf, whose interest is in the non-adoption of the Internet in the UK and Sweden, building on longitudinal data from the Oxford Internet Surveys and the World Internet Institute. The two countries developed quite differently: Britain is now at around 70% Internet access, while Sweden is ahead at some 84% of citizens with access.

This means there are some 30% of non-users in Britain, and 16% in Sweden. Who are they, why have they remained offline, and what are the (economic, social, political) effects for them? Does it disadvantage them in their work life, too, as it may keep them from developing important skills or professional networks? There may be disadvantages, Bianca says, but these need to be further researched.

Gothenburg.
The next session at AoIR 2010 starts with Rachel McLean, whose interest is how technology configures the home, especially in relationship to the placement of shared entertainment technology. How is the family living room set up, and who controls the technology there, for example? This was examined for families in the northwest of England.

Social practices around the television have changed over the decades. Once, families would gather around the television in the corner of the living room like they did around the hearth; with digital technology, this gradually fragmented, though something of a digital hearth perhaps still exists in some cases. The UK family room in the year 2010 now accesses a wide variety of channels – where children’s TV was once shut down at 7 p.m., for example, some children’s channel will now be available at any time, as is a large number of other channels, as well as video games and other entertainment on demand.

Gothenburg.
Today’s keynote at AoIR 2010 looks like it’s actually taking place, after the withdrawal of Jon Bing due to illness yesterday. Peter Arnfalk is the speaker, and his topic is ‘green IT’: a significant buzzword at the moment, which is nonetheless poorly defined so far. There is a substantial potential for CO2 emission reductions through IT – for greening through IT: it has been calculated that the EU’s CO2 emissions could be reduced by some 15% through IT by 2020, for example. This could be done through reductions in the transport sector, the electricity grid, and in building emissions which It solutions can provide.

Much of what drives this are economic factors: greening through IT reduces costs as well as emissions, as it turns out (as well as having further social benefits: a win-win-win situation, Peter says). However, ICTs also generate emissions: they account for some 2% of global CO2 emissions world-wide (roughly the same amount as generated by aviation), and 8% of EU electricity consumption stems from ICT use (projected to rise to 10% by 2020).

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Theo Plothe, whose interest is in the use of Twitter by NFL players in the US. The NFL is the most popular league in the US, and players are increasingly participating in it – presumably also encouraged by their employers. NBA player Charlie Villanueva, in fact, was reprimanded for tweeting during a basketball game. NFL players have also been fined, suspended, and fired for tweeting inappropriate comments – and in fact, player Ocho Cinco even orchestrated a post-touchdown celebration with fans via Twitter.

Gothenburg.
The next AoIR 2010 speaker is David Houghton, whose interest is also in Twitter. He starts by pointing to a range of tweets of varying degrees of mundaneness and secrecy, and is interested in examining linguistic differences in them. What threats to personal privacy result from the spread of gossip? How can levels of self-disclosure be measured – in breadth or depth, for example – in order to alert users to when they might be compromising themselves by oversharing?

How do we enable users to go about sharing while protecting their concerns and informing them about potential harms? David collected 250 random tweets from both Twitter and Secret Tweet (which collects tweets with sensitive information, it seems).

Gothenburg.
I must admit I missed the 8.20 a.m. sessions this morning – just couldn’t cope with the cold. So, we’re jumping right into the next session at AoIR 2010, which starts with Axel Maireder. He begins by noting the function of Twitter as a medium for public discourse; tweets can reach large audiences especially if retweeted widely (an average of 1000 users for each retweet).

Twitter is used for debate on public issues, of course – and Axel’s study has identified a number of typical themes (education and professional, spare time, everyday life, social relations, mottos and aphorisms, politics and world affairs, media and culture, products and services). Twitter debate is also connected heavily with mainstream news media sources – URLs to mainstream content are widely distributed (and make up some 40% of distributed URLs). This means that Twitter users who distribute such content act as intermediaries between mass media content and their fellow users. Of those URLs, some 60% link to sources which advocate specific points of view.

Gothenburg.
The final speaker in this AoIR 2010 session is Bjarki Valtysson, whose interest is in the politics of access to exchange-oriented processes of mass self-communication – which build on a different arrangement of production, distribution, and consumption processes than we used to have. This is a clash between the politics of access (read/write) and the politics of permission (read-only culture), and there’s a question about how this plays out in digital public spheres.

This can be examined in the context of a number of projects. The Europeana content archive has been hampered by complex polemics regarding online accessibility, the digitisation of collections, preservation, and the storage of content; the same is true for the BBC’s Digital Archives project, for example. Against this, the Wikimedia Commons contains some 7.5 million freely available files which are available under Creative Commons or public domain licences.