Blogs

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.

Hamburg.
The final keynote speaker at ECREA 2010 is Beata Klimkiewicz, whose interest is in media system change in central and eastern Europe (CEE), focussing especially on structural processes. That said, the boundaries that define CEE are highly elusive – national boundaries in this area have shifted more than elsewhere in Europe, not least in recent decades, which means that there are various overlapping and conflicting criteria for defining geographic, regional, ethnic, and other boundaries. Additionally, the boundary changes which happened in 1989 provided a distinguishing generational experience for scholars in this field, which is not necessarily shared with the generations preceding or following them.

This can be examined from a number of perspectives. Much CEE research underlines the fall of communism as a unique and isolated moment in history; CEE societies are said to have been overtaken by processes of change that are of unprecedented magnitude and complexity in modern history – but this claim of uniqueness derives from a fairly self-centred preoccupation specifically with CEE history: many similar processes in other global regions have been overlooked. Changes in South Africa or South America during the 1990s can be usefully compared with developments in CEE, for example – they, too, aimed for media pluralism and diversity and for guarantees of freedom of expression, of course.

Hamburg.
We’re now in the final plenary session at ECREA 2010, which starts with a keynote by Ruth Wodak. Her interest is in a multi-level, qualitative, and longitudinal analysis of the European public sphere (EPS), which necessitates a multidisciplinary approach. She begins by taking us back to the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which started the process of European unification – at a virtually all-male, all-elderly meeting of (western) European heads of state.

Compare this, for example, with the original Website of the European Union, as a very different public space – constructed at some great effort, but highly bureaucratic, and ultimately shut down for being ineffective in engaging with citizens – or with the at once transnational and local public spheres which formed for example around the mass demonstrations across Europe at the start of the Iraq war.

So, there are many genres of public spaces and public spheres in Europe, which can be approached from perspectives including the Europeanisation of the national, the formation of structures of resonance across Europe, the transnationalisation of (national) public spheres, the Europe of multiple publics and multiple public spheres, or the Europe of multiple vertical and horizontal flows of communication.

Hamburg.
The final speaker in this ECREA 2010 session is Ilija Tomanić, whose focus is on vernacular photography and digital flâneurism on Web 2.0. His specific interest is in photoblogs as a particular strand of amateur photography. There is traditionally a stratification of photography into ‘high’ and ‘low’, semi-professional and purely amateur uses, and each side comes with its own implicit and explicit rules and practices.

With digitalisation of photography and the move to Web 2.0, there has been a spread of higher-end photography know-how, and a shift away from the photographic auteur to a primacy of the image. The territory for photography has also been opened up; it has become more global in its reach, and amateur photography has migrated from the private to the public sphere. It is no longer only about the preservation of memories, but also about the construction of presence/the present, with a shift towards a more documentary style (fewer posed photographs).

Hamburg.
My own paper was next at ECREA 2010. Here’s the presentation – and I also recorded the audio for it, and will add it as soon as I can which is now attached to the slides. As it turned out, one of the other presenters in the session also broadcast the whole event to Justin.tv – so go there to see it all in action (my presentation starts around 52 minutes in, and you can also see the other papers on our panel)…