Blogs

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Jonathan Morgan, who shifts our focus to Wikipedia. His interest is in how communal values are expressed by participants on the site – for example around specific controversies on the site. His project examined the debates around the Jyllands Posten / Muhammad cartoons controversy; here, the editors who created the Wikipedia entry covering this issue decided to include the offending cartoon in the entry at first, which generated substantial debate.

The site’s professed aim is to empower and engage people around the world, and founder Jimmy Wales has echoed these sentiments in his own statements. Surveys of Wikipedians in the English-language Wikipedia also refer to altruism, reciprocity, sense of community, as well as fun and a sense of mission.

Gothenburg.
It’s the last day of AoIR 2010, and the first session I’m attending starts with Jan Nolin, whose interest is in filesharing. He describes this as Internet-based cultural consumption (IBCC), in order to move away from terms like filesharing, peer-to-peer networks, and other more limited concepts. IBCC is a broad and inclusive term, then (though excluding user-led content creation) – it includes societal contexts, technological and economical choices, social relationships, and political and legislative contexts.

IBCC has been important in shaping the Net – it has been in a tug of war pattern between legislation and technology: increased legislation leads to advances in circumvention technology, etc. There was a tech push from filesharers at first, then a legal response, then further evasive technology like Napster, then counter-evasive practices from the industty, and more recently a differentiation between white, black, and grey practices. Most recently there has been a specialisation and commercialisation of grey markets – an emergence of a copygrey business model.

Gothenburg.
The final speaker in our social media mapping session at AoIR 2010 is my excellent PhD student Tim Highfield, whose focus is on comparing the French and Australian political blogospheres. Here, he’s examining blog network mapping, which enables an investigation of links, affiliations, friendships, clusters, references, and oppositions between blogs; this can also easily lead to simply pretty visualisations which ultimately don’t tell us much, however.

Strengths are that larger and longer-term datasets can be created, and dominant groups can be identified over time – however, many studies still focus on all links on a page, rather than only on the discursive links in blog posts and/or the static affiliations in blogrolls. for example. Additionally, it would also be used to distinguish supportive and oppositional links, and to weight repeated links more strongly than less frequent interlinkage.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in our social media mapping panel at AoIR 2010 is Christian Nuernbergk, whose interest is in tracking and mapping political interaction in online social networks. This is driven by the ‘concentration of attention’ debate: people like Yochai Benkler suggest that new online platforms provide a greater space for people to engage in discussion and conversation, while someone like Matthew Hindman claims that the Web exhibits a ‘rich get richer’ phenomenon where audiences end up concentrated around a handful of sites.

So, in Germany, which Websites benefit the most from the emerging network; how centralised is the link structure? This study worked with a dataset from Linkfluence Germany, which had already mapped the German political Web for the last election and now repeated its Web crawl to determine the overall link network. Various attributes of network actors were automatically generated, and reviewed by researchers at the University of Münster.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in our social media mapping panel at AoIR 2010 is Hallvard Moe, whose focus is on Twitter as an arena for public debate in Norway, around the data retention policy debate in that country. Norway is traditionally a social-democratic state with relatively advanced use of ICTs, apparently including some 160,000 Twitter users; this also meant that there was substantial debate about the adoption of the EU data retention directive (for regularly archiving phone and network data).

Hallvard archived tweets on the #dld hashtag using Twapperkeeper, between April and early August 2010, resulting in some 12,000 tweets (though not all relevant tweets in Norway may have used the #dld hashtag, of course). Activity on the topic was spread across the entire time period, at relatively low but persistent levels. There are a number of key peaks, especially around 9 May (the conservative party’s congress); tweets around that day anticipated party decisions as well as commenting on the day’s events.

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.