Blogs

Gothenburg.
The next AoIR 2010 speaker is Irina Shklovski, whose interest is in transnationalism – defined as either migrant practices that establish or maintain links between the two countries or origin and destination, or as cosmopolitanism or a broadly defined non-culturally specific world identity. But what is the value and meaning of such long-distance ties as they are primarily maintained through online communication?

More specifically, what forms of transnational belonging may exist here: what does investing energy into maintaining such relationships mean for the people engaged in it, can such transnational contact open new horizons beyond the scope of daily existence, and can there be a kind of virtual transnationalism that is conducted purely through electronic media, without direct personal ties?

Gothenburg.
The final AoIR 2010 panel for today starts with Lisbeth Klastrup, who’s presenting on a study of how Danes participate in Facebook. While the overall Facebook community now numbers some 500 million users, how localised and fragmented is that community, for example along national and local lines? Examining the Danish Facebook community might provide some useful answers to this question. Some of this is also related to overall cultural patterns, of course – the importance of local and family ties to a national culture, for example; a ‘national intimacy’ which is relatively strong in Denmark. Contrasted with this is a ‘banal globalism’ – a general but relatively shallow interest in global events and issues.

Gothenburg.
And Mathieu Simonson is back for a second presentation in this AoIR 2010 session, examining how the editorial choices and sourcing practices of major French newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro compare with those of participatory political blogging / citizen journalism platforms Agora Vox and Rue 89. The case study here is their coverage of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (COP15). This involved some 214 articles across the four platforms.

Traditional platforms focussed on negotiations (35%), education and sensibilisation (22%), and demonstrations, protests and militants (14%); participatory platforms similarly focussed on negotiations (30%), climate science (22%), and ideology (12%). Sources that were used by both sides included press agencies (almost exclusively on traditional platforms); officials and government sources, especially for traditional platforms; and mass media coverage, especially for the participatory media platforms – however, such citations were not always uncritical, of course.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is my brilliant PhD student Tim Highfield, whose interest is in what contribution blogging (by a wide variety of bloggers concerned with politics, the news, current events, and the reflection of such topics in specific fields of interest) makes to the overall mediasphere. Such bloggers may have a variety of points of focus, and while the ‘informing’ role of blogs has been stressed in the literature, this may not be their only function.

There is also an underlying question of how bloggers and journalists interrelate with one another – whether they are complementary to one another, whether the wider blogosphere provides a broader background discussion to mainstream media coverage, whether bloggers can act as gatewatchers highlighting and critiquing specific themes in the media. This positions bloggers as a second tier of the media, in the way that Herbert Gans foresaw such a second tier that feeds on and reanalyses first-tier media coverage. Against this stands the sort of rhetoric around blogs as a mere echo chamber which Andrew Keen has built his career around. There is some indication that blogs link to mainstream media content more than to other blogs – as a source of information, to critique the content, or to refer to specific sections on the mainstream media page (such as comments), too.

Gothenburg.
Oops, got into the next AoIR 2010 session a little late (why are the coffee breaks so short?), and Mathieu Simonson is already in full flight. This is a paper on motivations for blogging, which engaged in interviews with journalist-bloggers to examine why they were blogging.

Gothenburg.
The next AoIR 2010 session I’m in is a panel on sustainable entertainment, which involves Wenche Nag from the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor, Mia Consalvo, Jean Burgess, Patrick Wikström, and Martin Thörnkvist. Patrick begins by noting the transformations in the music industry, for example, where the largest company now no longer is a record label but a live music company. iTunes and similar models are also making a significant impact, of course. Much of this is now based on artist/audience relationships that are based on passion and substantial emotional investment – which works for some entertainment industries, of course, but not for others.

Also, what are revenues linked to – where do payments come from (now perhaps from subscription fees, advertising, sponsorships, etc., rather than from content sales)? This has led to a rapid succession of various attempted business models – the latest, for example, is Spotify –, some of which have failed already. Spotify, for example, has been an attempt to draw users away from illegal filesharing models and towards legitimate systems.

Gothenburg.
The final speaker at AoIR 2010 is Sebastian Deterding, who is interested in reframing Web 2.0 as a public service right to communicate. One example of the debates around this is the French HADOPI three-strikes law around filesharing, which would remove Net access from offending users; others have framed Google or Facebook as universal public services, and describe broadband access as just as important as water or electricity.

The Internet is now a core communicative backbone for various communication networks, then – but how might we think about the Net as a public service in a more systematic, technology-neutral manner? First, public services are generally seen as services of general public interest that are subject to specific obligations or regulations. While usually the market provides, these are essential services where public needs may not be fully satisfied by markets alone. Indeed, the Net even serves as a backbone for some of the more conventional public services now.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Jakob Linaa Jensen, whose interest is in how citizenship is transforming in the online age – with a special focus on personal media, including social networking services, in Denmark. Denmark has a high Internet penetration, with a comparatively well-educated public, and the outcomes of this survey can be compared effectively with similar studies in the US and UK.

Citizenship has changed from civil through political to social citizenship over the past few centuries; we are now also seeing the emergence of cultural citizenship, where patterns of cultural activity, lifestyle, and consumption are also important – and digital citizenship is a potential next step: there are now possibilities for political participation through Web 2.0 platforms, for example.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is David Kurt Herold, who shifts our focus to China. ‘Online China’ represents a very large population now (at more than 400 million users), but is connected with the rest of the world through only 27 major connections. The Chinese Internet remains government-owned, too – China owns the network backbone, and government control over the Net is therefore the default setting. There is also substantially less content creation on the Chinese Net; Internet use is consumption-oriented, and operates largely through fairly old-fashioned major portals and BBSes. It is also a very violent place, with ‘human flesh search engines’ (RRSS) that enable users to search for and harass other users.

The Net has also been used for self-help purposes, though, through very similar mechanisms; the site 5-1-Zhao-Ren is a people search engine used to find long-lost friends and relatives, for example, or to otherwise highlight people who have performed positive actions in the past. Such sites have been used to highlight abuse and abductions – a group of 400 fathers whose kids had been abducted as child slaves for a factory posted an open letter about this, for example, and most of the kids were rescued in the end.

Gothenburg.
AoIR 2010 has started, and we’re beginning with Fabio Giglietto, on how networked publics are reconfiguring themselves these days. There is a shift in how we understand publics, as well as in how we understand civicness – from dutiful citizenship to self-actualising citizenship, where there is a lesser sense of obligation to government participation, and a more self-determined form of participation in civic matters. This is also wrapped up in participatory culture, and participatory politics as a subset of this.

Political engagement today exists at the intersection of political knowledge (information and communication based) and political participation, then. Fabio examined the anti-Berlusconi movement in Italy, looking in the first place at Google search patterns for the ‘No Berlusconi Day’ in late 2009 and ‘popolo viola’ (the purple people, referring to the colour adopted by the anti-Berlusconi movement). Some years before, too, there were two ‘Vaffanculo Days’ organised by Beppe Grillo, and these also generated significant search interest. Interestingly, at that time, there was substantially less mainstream media coverage of these events than there has been for more recent developments.